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That question at the very least reduces our confidence in the resulting claims of safety. Like a mom deciding to drive her kid to school rather than let him ride the school bus, that lack of confidence could also change how we behave. Again, not because we’ve necessarily concluded that something is unsafe, but because we now have reason to doubt whether something we thought safe actually is. That reason is the presence of an interested party, suggesting that it might have been interest, not science, that explains the difference in the result.

Put most simply: the mere presence of money with a certain relationship to the results makes us less confident about those results.

What follows from this put-most-simply fact, however, is not itself simple. The concern about conflicts must be “reasonable,” as I’ve described, and there are many contexts in which we can’t simply wish away the money that weakens our confidence. Sixty-three percent of drug trials are funded by the pharmaceutical industry.27 We can’t just pretend that’s a small number, or wish the government would step in to fund trials on its own. Likewise with chemicals such as BPA or devices such as cell phones: It’s a free country. The government should have no power to ban industry from studying its own chemicals or devices, and publishing to the world those results, at least barring fraud.

Instead, our response to this conflict, or potential conflict, is always going to be more complicated. We need to ask whether there is a feasible or reasonable way to win back the confidence that the presence of money takes away. Are there procedures that would remove the doubt of the reasonable person? Are there other ways to earn back that confidence?

5.

Many private institutions get this. Many structure themselves in light of it, taking the risk of this apparent corruption into account and pushing it off the table.

If you’re old enough to remember the Internet circa 1998, you may remember thinking, as I did then, “This is a disaster. There’s no good way to search this network without drowning in advertising muck.” Then came Google, committed to the idea, and convincing in their commitment, that at least the core search results (not the “sponsored links” but the core bottom-left frame of a search screen) were true, that they reflected relevance as judged by some disinterested soul (maybe the Nets), not as bought by the advertisers. As the founders wrote at the time,

We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers…. [T]he better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want…. [W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.28

That commitment gave us confidence. It lets us trust the system, and trust Google.

The same with Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn’t accept advertising. As it is the fifth most visited site on the Internet, that means it leaves about $150 million on the table every year.29 As a believer in Wikipedia, and the values of Wikipedians, this is a hard fact for me to swallow. The good (at least from my perspective) that could be done with $150 million a year is not trivial. So what is the good that the world gets in exchange for Wikipedia’s abstemiousness?

As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, described it to me, “[W]e do care that… the general public looks to Wikipedia in all of its glories and all of its flaws, which are numerous of course. But the one thing they don’t say is, ‘Well, I don’t trust Wikipedia because it’s all basically advertising fluff.’ ”30

So the Wikipedia community spends $150 million each year to secure the site’s independence from apparent commercial bias. Wow.

Or again, think about the Lonely Planet series. Among the most popular travel books in the world (with 13 percent of the market share),31 Lonely Planet has earned the trust of many.