Post-truth Politics,Bullshit and Bad Ideas: ‘Deficit Fetishism’ in the UK

Debates about economic policy in Britain have been dominated by claims that sovereign debt problems are due to loose fiscal policy and excessive spending rather than volatile capital flows and flawed monetary policy. There are strong grounds for believing that these stories are largely nonsense, yet they inform policy and are widely believed among mass publics, and have proved almost impossible to refute in everyday political discourse. The answer to this puzzle, we suggest, is that such claims are better thought of as bullshit (as conceptualised by Harry Frankfurt 2005) rather than outright falsehoods: in other words, as speech acts that are indifferent to the truth and proceed without effective concern for the veracity of the claim in question. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of political bullshit applied to economic policy debates since the financial crisis, and seek to explain its hold on the popular imagination. We assess what makes some particular brands of bullshit more successful than others, and argue that in a world of competing realities as well as competing theories, the power of rhetoric is more likely to settle an argument than evidence and logic.     

Benford's Law and Fraud Detection: Facts and Legends

Abstract. Is Benford's law a good instrument to detect fraud in reports of statistical and scientific data? For a valid test, the probability of ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’ has to be low. However, it is very doubtful whether the Benford distribution is an appropriate tool to discriminate between manipulated and non‐manipulated estimates. Further research should focus more on the validity of the test and test results should be interpreted more carefully.     

Introduction to judgment aggregation

This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment aggregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected propositions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this introduction is to show how ideas from the familiar theory of preference aggregation can be extended to this more general case. We first translate a proof of Arrow's impossibility theorem into the new setting, so as to motivate some of the central concepts and conditions leading to analogous impossibilities, as discussed in the symposium. We then consider each of four possible escape-routes explored in the symposium.     

当前我国企业资本结构优化中的问题分析

一直以来，由干我国企业大箩是国有企业，企业资金都由国家统一管理，因此企业的财务部门更多的时候只是纯粹的会计计账。然而随着现代企业制度的建立，企业实行“自主经营、自负盈亏”，企业原有的资本结构中的问题逐渐在市场经济中凸现，成为了影响企业发展的一个重要因素。因此，对于我国企业来说，优化资本结构，合理筹措资金，使各种资金来源和资本配比保持合理的比例，是企业提升核心竞争力，提高经营绩效的必要条件，也是企业财务战略管理的核心。     

Possible explanations of no-synergy mergers and small firm effect by the Generalized Capital Asset Pricing Model

The Sharpe-Lintner Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the General Capital Asset Pricing Model (GCAPM) suggested by Levy (1978), Merton (1987), and Markowitz (1989) are compared and analyzed. Under the GCAPM we obtain the following main results: 1) the value additivity principle breaks down, which explains mergers and acquisitions; 2) beyond a certain limit, the profit from additional merger is negative; and 3) in a GCAPM equilibrium, small firms earn an abnormal profit in comparison to what is predicted by the CAPM. These results, which are indeed observed in the market, are fully consistent with the GCAPM, but are in contradiction to the CAPM.     

Group selection and the evolution of altruism

‘Group selection’ is an oft-cited but controversialexplanation for the survival of altruism. Rather than enterthis debate, this paper asks whether a group structure alonecan provide a reasonable explanation for the survival of altruisticbehaviour in an evolving population. If altruism (defined astaking a cooperative action in a standard Prisoners' Dilemma)is to flourish, either groups need to be isolated from one anotherfor multiple generations, or groups need to be constructed ina positively-assortative manner. Concentrating on the formercase the paper shows that the size of the group, the relativebenefit to cost of altruism and the number of generations inisolation all play a critical role. The smaller the group size,or the larger the benefit-to-cost ratio, the higher the survivalchances of altruism. Additionally, for altruism to survive,the number of generations spent in isolated groups must be neithertoo big nor too small.