Conflicts of interest are a serious problem in scholarship. Transparency and discounting, while necessary, are insufficient to protect the marketplace of ideas. Why? Founder effects and dilution of expertise, explain Maurice E. Stucke and R. Alexander Bentley. To protect the integrity of academia, we must also encourage the injection and consideration of new and contradictory unconflicted ideas.
The first effect of Michael Bloomberg’s campaign and of his conflicts of interest is to reduce the 2020 candidates’ accountability: one of the world's...