The aftermath of the 2012 election is a good vantage point for viewing Peter Fisher’s new study “Selling Snake Oil to the States.”

On election night, Republican guru Karl Rove was incredulous at President Obama’s reelection after his own calculations had predicted a solid win for Romney.

A different version of self-fulfilling, pseudo math is the subject of Fisher’s new study which was released last week by The Iowa Policy Project in Iowa City and Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Fisher is research director of the non-partisan Iowa City group and a former chairman of the University of Iowa’s Urban and Regional Planning Department.

The study is a follow-up to his 2005 study, which showed that most “business climate” studies have the scientific value of flubber. In that study he concluded that lobbying groups seeking lower taxes and less government regulation used skewed measurements based on the prejudices of the groups that finance them to achieve results favorable to their point of view.

Using scientific methods and academic tools, Fisher comes to the same conclusion about studies that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been producing since 2007 to show that states that follow its low-tax, low-wage, anti-regulation prescriptions do better economically than states that don’t.

As Fisher notes, ALEC has employed conservative economist Arthur Laffer for the past five years to produce annual reports that it calls the “Rich States, Poor States: ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitive Index” based on 15 fiscal and regulatory policy variables.

ALEC claims that the index shows that states that adhere most closely to its principles do better economically.

But Fisher’s study showed that states that ranked high on the ALEC-Laffer index “have actually been doing worse economically in the years since, while the less a state conformed with ALEC policies the better off it was.”

Fisher told me that what surprised him most about the ALEC study was how sloppy the research was. Among other problems, he said, articles which ALEC claims support its policies, actually support a contrary view.

“The lead author, Arthur Laffer, is a PhD economist from Stanford,” Fisher said. “He obviously knows his economics or he would not have graduated from Stanford.” But, he added, Laffer “has to know better than some of the things that he did.”

The “Selling Snake Oil” study said that the ALEC-Laffer report “repeatedly engages in methodologically primitive analysis that any college student taking Statistics 101 would be taught to avoid.”

Fisher assessed the validity of the ALEC-Laffer index by matching states’ use of its 15 policy components with seven real-world economic performance measures.

For two measures – state Gross Domestic Product and non-farm employment – Fisher found no statistically significant correlation.

For four measures – changes in per capita income, state and local government revenue, median family income and poverty – the correlation was negative, meaning ALEC’s prescribed policies had the opposite effect.

Only population growth showed a positive correlation, and Fisher argued that population growth is not a measure of economic performance.

ELBERT NOTES:

Author update – Des Moines labor lawyer Lee Shearer, whom I wrote about in a Nov. 2 column, will be signing copies of his mystery novel “Hiding in Des Moines” from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Sticks store in West Des Moines’ West Glen shopping district. Sticks owner Sarah Grant has a cameo appearance in Shearer’s tale of aging vigilantes who frequent locations in central and western Iowa, including Pisgah’s Old Home Fill-er Up An’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe.