Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

James T. Hamilton: All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms: " Whether a story appears in print, on television, or on the Internet depends on who is interested, its value to advertisers, the costs of assembling the details, and competitors' products.... James Hamilton shows just how this happens. Furthermore, many complaints about journalism... arise from the impact of this economic logic on news judgments.... Hamilton concludes by calling for lower costs of access to government information, a greater role for nonprofits in funding journalism, the development of norms that stress hard news reporting, and the defining of digital and Internet property rights to encourage the flow of news. Ultimately, this book shows that by more fully understanding the economics behind the news, we will be better positioned to ensure that the news serves the public good...

Daniel Drezner The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas: "a new kind of thinker... the thought leader. Equipped with one big idea, thought leaders focus their energies on TED talks.... Three equally important factors that have reshaped the world of ideas have been waning trust in expertise, increasing political polarization and plutocracy. The erosion of trust has lowered the barriers to entry in the marketplace of ideas.... Today's intellectuals are more likely to enjoy the support of ideologically friendly private funders and be housed in ideologically-driven think tanks. Increasing inequality as a key driver... more than ever before, contemporary plutocrats fund intellectuals and idea factories that generate arguments that align with their own...

Sergei M. Guriev and Daniel Treisman: Informational Autocrats: "In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, "informational autocrats" artificially boost their popularity by convincing the public they are competent. To do so, they use propaganda and silence informed members of the elite by co-optation or censorship. Using several sources - including a newly created dataset of authoritarian control techniques - we document a range of trends in recent autocracies that fit the theory: a decline in violence, efforts to conceal state repression, rejection of official ideologies, imitation of democracy, a perceptions gap between masses and elite, and the adoption by leaders of a rhetoric of performance rather than one aimed at inspiring fear...

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier: Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy: "New 'soft cyber' attacks... involve the manipulation of expectations and common understandings. We argue that scaling up computer security arguments to the level of the state, so that the entire polity is treated as an information system with associated attack surfaces and threat models, provides the best immediate way to understand these attacks and how to mitigate them.... Systematic differences between how autocracies and democracies work as information systems... Stable autocracies will have common knowledge over who is in charge and their associated ideological or policy goals, but will generate contested knowledge over who the various political actors in society are, and how they might form coalitions... so as to make it more difficult for coalitions to displace the regime. Stable democracies will have contested knowledge over who is in charge, but common knowledge over who the political actors are, and how they may form coalitions and gain public support.... Democracies are vulnerable to measures that 'flood' public debate and disrupt shared decentralized understandings of actors and coalitions, in ways that autocracies are not...

Oscar Barrera Rodriguez, Sergei M. Guriev, Emeric Henry, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Fact Checking in Times of Post-Truth Politics: "How effective is fact checking in countervailing "alternative facts," i.e., misleading statements by politicians? In a randomized online experiment during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, we subjected subgroups of 2480 French voters to alternative facts by the extreme-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, and/or corresponding facts about the European refugee crisis from official sources. We find that: (i) alternative facts are highly persuasive; (ii) fact checking improves factual knowledge of voters (iii) but it does not affect policy conclusions or support for the candidate; (iv) exposure to facts alone does not decrease support for the candidate, even though voters update their knowledge. We argue that the main channel is that fact checking increases the salience of the immigration issue...

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