I want to direct you to EPI's Jared Bernstein in the comments of the think tank discussion. I noticed a lot of folks casually claiming that EPI is a "tool" of the unions or deriding it as some sort of biased -- and thus untrustworthy -- organization. There's no doubt that EPI has a slant. But they are meticulous, serious, empirical, and careful. Jared is right when he says:
The commenters above who disparage our work are wrong. In the last 15 years, I've co-written eight versions of State of Working American, each one about 500 pages of tables, figures and analysis. My colleagues and I have written tons of other books and papers, all a mouseclick away. It's a friggin' huge paper trail.
DRR et al, show me one table, one figure in all that output, that's 'loopy' or wrong or cooked in such a way to carry water for some group. One table or figure, out of literally 1000s!!! If you can't find one that fits that description, find one wherein you even disagree with the methods, one where you think we crunched the numbers in a less than rigorous way, or tilted the data in a biased manner to make our case.
And this goes beyond EPI. It's true for folks at Cato, at CEPR, at New America, and even at AEI. The media has spent so long delegitimizing anyone with an opinion and stickering every nonpartisan or bipartisan endeavor with big labels reading "TRUTH" that we've begun to believe them. That's how you get odd spectacles like in the comments section, where various outlets are simply dismissed, their research understood, a priori, to be unmeritorious and tainted by ideology.
Good research is good research, and the impulse for caution and establishment acceptance and broad political appeal is as pernicious and distorting as any opinion -- all the more so because it's layered atop whatever beliefs already exist. At least with EPI and others, the assumptions and premises underlying all economic analysis are rendered transparent. Too often, they remain opaque, even as they color the conclusions. If you've a serious methodological case against an institution, that's worth exploring and taking seriously. But simply buying into the bullshit glorification of nonpartisanship is indefensible.
