You have to be willing to entertain evidence from biased sources when you’re considering politically charged questions. By all means, consult evidence from various ideologies, but don’t hold out for unbiased scholarship that will never exist.

“Does welfare make people less productive” is not a political question. We can measure welfare and we can measure many aspects of productivity and activity. We can make a quantitative answer to that question. Opinion and ideology is not evidence.

Saying that we need to consider opinions on the same level as actual observations because “political” is fundamentally wrong.

What is political, and must be, is how we act on those findings, the answer to the question “considering those facts, what do we do?” There are many possibilities that are worth discussion, from doing away with welfare entirely to UBI. But this must be based on facts, not ideology. Think tank opinion pieces belong here, in the political discussion.

No one without some sort of ideological bias is going to do a serious study to address the question. That’s my point.

> And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks

If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?

For either, if the papers don't stand up to peer review and meta-analysis then yes, we should ignore them. Don't often see papers from think tanks engaging in actual science though....

We should ignore fact-free white paper from left-leaning think tanks, as well. We should accept scientific studies with a clear protocol, regardless of the institution. That is the bare minimum and then, those studies can be refuted or not depending on several factors.

If your point is that no academic study can be trusted because academics are raging socialists, then I don’t know what to tell you. We clearly do not live in the same reality.