Quid pro quo is a red herring. Conflicts of interest rarely work that way. They are more subtle than that, so we can keep our self-image of being neutral when in fact our actions have been corrupted. There is much experimental work being done on this. Here is a (long, but relevant) quote from a recent post by Dan Ariely on the topic:
The real issue here is that people don’t understand how profound the
problem of conflicts of interest really is, and how easy it is to buy
people. Doctors on Pfizer’s payroll may think they’re not being
influenced by the drug maker — “I can still be objective!” they’ll say
— but in reality, it’s very hard for us not to be swayed by
money. Even minor amounts of it. Or gifts. Studies have found that
doctors who receive free lunches or samples from pharmaceutical reps
end up prescribing more of the company’s drugs afterwards. It’s just
a fact of human life: we are compelled to reciprocate favors, and an
ingrained inability to disregard what’s in our financial interest. As
author Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to
understand something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it.”http://danariely.com/2012/07/09/disclosure-not-good-enough/
As I understand it, the experimental evidence is clear that measures like self-regulation, intuitive judgement, and disclosure are nowhere near sufficient to prevent the corrupting effects of conflicts of interest. What we need are new, simple rules grounded in the empirical findings. We're a long way from that, and it seems that such rules are likely to seem pretty extreme by today's standards, but as long as the science continues to pile up this way it seems like we will eventually have a shot at cleaning things up.
I see where you're coming from, but I worry about the standard of evidence being thrown around. Is anyone who says something that aligns with a corporate interest a "shill"? It seems to be easy to allege and impossible to disprove.
Surely there is a gradation at some point along which a word like "shill" becomes applicable. I don't know where that line is. Is anyone who says something that aligns with a corporate interest plus takes a million dollars from said interest a "shill"?
I like a good muckraking as much as the next guy but in the end, judging individual actors as "shills" or whatever obscures the important issues, which are systemic. It may even be that tarring a few people as shills and frauds is a big mistake insofar as the rest of us then take that as a license to let ourselves off the hook.
In my opinion academia, medicine, and journalism (to pick three pretty important institutions) are all corrupt in this systemic way, a way that has little to do with individual choice (apart from a few ethically gifted souls whom we can all admire but mostly won't imitate) and much to do with human nature. And this is a big, big deal because it deeply affects what those institutions are producing. Think of all the work done on how big pharma gets doctors to push their product into people who don't need it, or about how journalists are mollified by "access" (friendly personal contact) with powerful people they're covering.
The really great thing about what researchers like Ariely are doing is that it could lead to an objective basis for preventing the conditions for corruption from arising in the first place. Can you imagine what a difference that would make to society?
The real issue here is that people don’t understand how profound the problem of conflicts of interest really is, and how easy it is to buy people. Doctors on Pfizer’s payroll may think they’re not being influenced by the drug maker — “I can still be objective!” they’ll say — but in reality, it’s very hard for us not to be swayed by money. Even minor amounts of it. Or gifts. Studies have found that doctors who receive free lunches or samples from pharmaceutical reps end up prescribing more of the company’s drugs afterwards. It’s just a fact of human life: we are compelled to reciprocate favors, and an ingrained inability to disregard what’s in our financial interest. As author Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” http://danariely.com/2012/07/09/disclosure-not-good-enough/
As I understand it, the experimental evidence is clear that measures like self-regulation, intuitive judgement, and disclosure are nowhere near sufficient to prevent the corrupting effects of conflicts of interest. What we need are new, simple rules grounded in the empirical findings. We're a long way from that, and it seems that such rules are likely to seem pretty extreme by today's standards, but as long as the science continues to pile up this way it seems like we will eventually have a shot at cleaning things up.