BC ECONOMY
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

We need to understand misinformation & disinformation as systems, not just individual actions. An economy of false information.

[this thread continues from what I posted last night, about some of the most prominent South African misinfo posters]

 When I started teaching courses on false information systems a few years ago at Wits, I made a point to look at it systemically: there are producers of information, distribution channels/platforms, and audiences (which can also distribute/reshare content).
To try and understand the types of false information, I also felt it was important to look at the intention/motivation of the producers of the false info. What motivated them? Money? Notoriety? Political agenda? (all of these types are in play)
It's NB to understand motive of the false info maker so you can effectively disrupt or correct their false and/or harmful information. A guy in it for clicks/fame requires different strategy to a paid actor or propagandist – although both messages/content may be the same
What we're seeing with Covid-19 misinfo is that the content created and shared by deniers is effectively the same as the conspiracy theories shared by lobbies that are anti-government, anti-media, or who blame Soros etc. This is not an accident, although original motives diverge
Re: my thread last night, my thought process was that it is possibly not productive to engage directly with peddlers of false info. We will not change their minds. So that means we have to look at engaging more robustly with platforms (distribution channels) and audiences
Having worked in fact-checking for several years, I believe that understanding why audiences buy in to false info is really complex, and not singular at all. Not to say we shouldn't engage, but it's a massive and intricate thing.
2020 was also a very solid example of what happens when mass audiences are presented with massive amounts of novel information that they are not yet skilled at filtering or interpreting (oh, and after years of being told not to trust experts, scientists, media etc)
Fact-checking should never be only the domain of fact-checkers. Like a vaccine, it works best when the most number of people are equipped with the 'mental immune system' response to dodgy claims. But this will also take time...
It's also not just about teaching or enabling people to become their own fact-checkers, it is also about learning (all of us included) how to use good quality sources, and how to check our inherent, inherited and learned biases that stop us from being able to assess information
People don't suddenly wake up one morning and believe the government is creating a global hoax relating to Covid deaths. To believe that, they have to already believe that governments are capable of mass-scale lies, that their government is trying to 'put one over' on them...
On top of all of that, there is a global phenomenon we are calling the infowar. It is a large scale propaganda effort, aimed at driving erosion of trust in governments, in science, in media. It is quite effective, and decentralised.
What Covid has done & shown, is how the infowar has weaponised social cracks caused by the pandemic + used it to lobby people from one cause to others. You start off disliking the government & railing against any lockdown, next thing you're sharing conspiracy theories about masks
Social media also encourages an actual bio-chemical response to info exchange that is more rapid than existed before. We get a literal kick from attention/engagement. This does not drive positive behaviour, it drives behaviour that generates a dopamine kick
Last night I highlighted that even fact-checkers (and I include my own behaviour here) fall prey to this, and sometimes we allow the search for gratification to drive our posts, rather than the actual desire to share correct information. We're human too.
No doubt I will discuss audience susceptibility more in future – but for now I am starting with trying to understand how I can do better in sharing corrections/refuting false claims. And also hoping @Twitter and FB etc can also step up to stop harmful information sharing.

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let's talk about the differences between income, wealth, and class

tl;dr: income is earned, wealth is bought, and class is inherited

also hi friends, while on the topic of income, this work is my only source of it! times are tough and folks are really struggling, but if you have a couple extra bucks please consider sending a tip my way

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INCOME is the amount of money a person makes from labor and investments

so if you work for 2,000 hours and are paid $40,000 in a year, that's income

OR if you have a $1,000,000 stock portfolio with a 5% return rate and cash out $40,000 of it, that's income too (fucked, right?)

WEALTH is the amount of capital you own

that could be owning a house and land worth $150,000

or owning a small business with $150,000 in assets

or owning $150,000 worth of stocks

wealth is the investments that are themselves accruing value

CLASS is about what you stand to inherit

in the united states we use a lot of weird doublespeak to avoid talking about the proletariat, the petit bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie directly

proletariat ~ working class
petit bourgeoisie ~ middle class
bourgeoisie ~ upper class
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Noahtogolpe \U0001f407
Noahtogolpe 🐇
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1/OK, let's take a little break from Coup Twitter, and think about an economic issue:

How can we build up the wealth of the middle class?

2/The typical American has surprisingly little wealth compared to the typical resident of many other developed countries.

This is a fact that is not widely known or appreciated.


3/Now, some people argue that stuff like Social Security or social insurance programs should be included in wealth. But I chose to focus on private wealth because I think having assets you can sell whenever you want is important to


4/For many decades after World War 2, middle-class wealth in America was on a smooth upward trajectory.

Then the housing crash came, and all that changed. Suddenly the rich were still doing well but everyone else was seeing the end of their American Dream.


5/Why the divergence?

Because the American middle class has its wealth in houses -- specifically, in the houses they live in.

It's the rich who own stocks.
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0/ A holiday economic theory reading list. Some of my favorite pieces on theory that can be read with minimal sweat, but with the maximal intellectual reward. In no particular order:

1/ Myerson 1999. "Nash equilibrium & history of economic theory." JEL. Written with characteristic Myersonian elegance. "how a few short papers by a young mathematician achieved one of the great watershed breakthroughs in the history of social

2/ Blackwell & DeGroot 1986. “A conversation with David Blackwell.” Stat Science. After his PhD at 21, "There were 105 black colleges at that time & I wrote 105 letters of application." Beautiful discussion on a gamut of ideas & his intellectual life.

3/ Geanakoplos 1992. “Common Knowledge.” JEP. Zuper piece, lucidly written. Lots of interesting puzzles, great for teaching. When Moriarty says "All I have to say has already crossed your mind," Holmes retorts "then possibly my answer has crossed yours."

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Priyamvada Gopal is part of a class of elite academics in the imperial core who teach the ruling class, and use woke radlib rhetoric to justify current Western imperial aggression.

She echoes propaganda against Syria, Iran, and China and is silent about Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc


Anti-anti-imperialist Cambridge University Professor @PriyamvadaGopal smears opponents of the Western neocolonial war on Syria as "Assadists"

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The CIA spent over a billion dollars per year arming and training "rebels" who massacred and ethnically cleansed Syrian civilians, especially religious minorities.

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I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.
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