Jump to full article: Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2007-04-15
Author: VIN SUPRYNOWICZ
Intro: Readers of the Review-Journal commentary page may have noticed an essay by George Mason University economist Walter Williams on Friday. Williams noted it's now common to claim scientific validity for political edicts which remove the property right of a restaurant or tavern owner to decide whether to allow smoking on his premises, based on the assertion that "everyone knows" secondhand smoke kills people.
In fact, Williams recalls for us how our politically financed and motivated "scientists" reached that conclusion.
In their 1993 study, the EPA claimed that 3,000 Americans die annually from secondhand smoke. "But there was a problem," Williams recalls. "They couldn't come up with that conclusion using the standard statistical 95 percent confidence interval. They lowered their study's confidence interval to 90 percent. That has the effect of doubling the margin of error and doubling the probability that mere chance explains those 3,000 deaths."
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) said at the time, "Admittedly, it is unusual to return to a study after the fact, lower the required significance level, and declare its results to be supportive rather than unsupportive of the effect one's theory suggests should be present."
What's the real science?
In 1998, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer released the largest ever and best formulated study on environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), Williams reports. "The research project ran for 10 years and in seven European countries. The study, not widely publicized, concluded that no statistically significant risk existed for nonsmokers who either lived or worked with smokers." . . .
"The public policy debate on smoking has been settled through bogus science," Williams concluded, Friday. "My question is, how willing are we to allow bogus science to be used in the pursuit of other public policy agendas, such as restrictions on economic growth, in the name of fighting global warming?"
Jump to full article » |