But we are talking about economics, and republican groups like fox news eat it up.
My favorite example is the 2011 chart distorting the display of the unemployment rate:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-f...
Wherever the line is drawn, the dishonesty of some random Fox News chart is not related to the honesty or dishonesty of actual scientific research.
The much bigger problem in science is error.
Econ and Psych really do lie in a gray area, and by avoid the demarcation debate you completely miss the relevance of the issue at hand.
If policy makers weren't using this study to justify more austerity, then we probably wouldn't have such a prolonged discussion.
True, but I haven't seen a liberal think tank manipulate charts in that specific manner.