I wouldn't know how you would be able to present evidence of this, but the economic realities of liberals arts and niche fields of research is a pretty well kno

I wouldn't know how you would be able to present evidence of this, but the economic realities of liberals arts and niche fields of research is a pretty well known circumstance. Funding arctic expeditions and research tends to be easier if you find some man-eating killer penguins that were frozen in the ice and now resurface due to climate change. Getting funding is politics and politics needs to make headlines. Since headlines do get more sensationalist due to the attention economy, it could be concluded that scientific claims have to follow the trend. The example given about the iron inventions was likewise asserted without evidence and purely from conjecture (at least that is how it is described). This is no empirical evidence to prove a systemic effect, but nevertheless interesting.