An HIER paper by Glaeser and Sunstein suggests that people are

Credulous Bayesians, who insufficiently adjust for idiosyncratic features of particular environments and put excessive weight on the statements of others where there are 1) common sources of information; 2) highly unrepresentative group membership; 3) statements that are made to obtain approval; and 4) statements that are designed to manipulate. Credulous Bayesianism can produce extremism and significant blunders.

The paper “discusses the implications of Credulous Bayesianism for law and politics, including media policy and cognitive diversity on administrative agencies and courts”.

(Note that the PDF incorrectly describes the paper as a preliminary draft.)

According to this Government press release, the Government is going to launch a £10m venture capital fund for social enterprises in the autumn.

Sure, we could have posted a hundred examples of consultations that get hardly any responses, but this story from Manchester a few weeks back is interesting because it was to do with the Council’s budget - hardly a small issue, even if it is hard to present interestingly.

The Society has submitted this response to this UK Government consultation.

A new book on the US voting system, reviewed by Salon, looks at Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem - “There is no consistent method by which a democratic society can make a choice (when voting) that is always fair when that choice must be made from among 3 or more alternatives.” It considers alternative voting systems that could be used to improve the fairness of US election results.

(More on the book.)

An interesting new book is out, called Flat Earth News. It accuses journalists of sloppy research and poor fact-checking - essentially, of letting down the entire purpose of their profession. These are obviously serious allegations, for all the cynicism about journalism makes them seem everyday. They are all the more serious because they are based on academic research rather than a politically partisan viewpoint.

The author, Nick Davies, makes his case in this piece on Comment is Free. Roy Greenslade, in his blog at the Guardian, collates some of the reviews and reactions.

Chris Kelly, the former civil servant who heads the Parliamentary standards watchdog, has criticised Derek Conway for paying his son a sinecure salary out of public money. The Observer reports him as saying:

“I think that this episode will have damaged the reputation of MPs generally and that is more than unfortunate. … The incident has added to the general feeling that there is something wrong, when the great majority of MPs go about their work with diligence and integrity. Perceptions clearly have not improved. Ironically that may be because there is now more transparency than there has ever been.”

The question Kelly raises is a good one: have MPs made rods for their own backs by embracing more transparency in funding arrangements? Conway is perhaps an outlier, as his scandal is about misuse of public money rather than financial reporting arrangements, but there is a strong sense that ten years ago, many of the transactions that now make headlines would have happened under the table, without anyone knowing about them. In an intellectual sense, more openness in a democracy is naturally better than less - but what if the price is state funding of political parties or further erosion of trust in politicians?

OK, not the most exciting title for a post, but an interesting article in Le Monde (original here) discusses Jacques Attali’s proposal to abolish departments - the French level of local government roughly equivalent to an English county - and distribute powers to regions and groups of communes. It won’t surprise those who’ve watched English local government reform in action that there’s been a big negative reaction to the proposal from existing departmental councillors. The specifically French twist on this is that because of the custom of cumul des mandats, whereby MPs often have local government offices as well, large numbers of MPs and Senators are also serving departmental councillors, and are therefore unlikely to push forward any changes.