Friendship Relations in the School Class and Adult Economic Attainment

We analyze the impact of adolescents' friendship relations in their final-year class of high school on subsequent labor market success. Based on a typology of network positions we locate each student within the social system of the school class as either: an isolate, a sycophant, a broker or a receiver. These positions identify individuals' social standing within the group of classmates and proxy for their interpersonal behavior and social competencies. We offer empirical evidence that differential social standing in adolescence predicts large and persistent earnings disparities over the entire life course. The estimated wage premia and penalties do not appear to be substantially confounded by measures of family and school resources, and materialize largely independent of differences in cognitive abilities, grade rank in class or friends' characteristics. A moderate share of the earnings inequalities is mediated by differential post-secondary human and social capital investment. From a conceptual point of view, we contribute an application of egocentered network methods within conventional labor economic survey research

Political Self-Deception Revisited

The article replies to the five comments to Political Self-Deception, from the more philosophical and epistemic remarks to the more political and historical ones. In the end, it summarizes the main points of the book as suggested by the discussion with the five comments

Is the demand of reasonableness unreasonable?

The paper starts with a consideration of Rawls’ ideal theory in the background of the criticisms that has received. Both the realist and the critical theory objections to ideal are analyzed, but the latter is the focus of the argument. While the author rescues ideal theory from the accusation of ideology, she remarks that a well-developed analysis of non-ideal theory is needed to account the persistent inequalities and injustices of present democracy. Then she tests her argument on the issue of reasonableness that is so important in Rawls’ Political Liberalism. Reconstructing reasonableness in the context of ideal theory and then moving to the non-ideal conditions, enables one to perceive a specific kind of injustice, namely epistemic injustice linked to the diminished epistemic authority attributed to citizens from oppressed groups. Once detected, we can turn back to ideal theory and see which resources can be made use of for uprooting this kind of injustice: fair equality of opportunity, and a focus on the primary good of the social basis of self-respect to remedy unequal epistemic standing – whatever the social basis of self-respect implies in terms of political action. Overcoming epistemic injustice would make the civic virtue of reasonableness attainabl

Glen Newey's critique of political toleration

In this paper, I would like to rescue political toleration from the corrosive force of Newey\u2019s reasoning, while honoring his memory by engaging in a thorough discussion on his challenging views. In the first section of this paper, I shall briefly rehearse Newey\u2019s view on toleration both as a moral virtue and as a political issue, focusing especially on the problems that toleration encounters in the political realm of liberal democracy. In the second section, I shall highlight what I take to be the critical aspects of his view, and in the third part of the article, I shall argue for my response to Newey\u2019s challenge. More specifically, Newey contends that political toleration is awkward and that its room is just in the interstices of democratic states\u2019 action. Though Newey is right in drawing a clear distinction between the circumstances of toleration in social intercourse and in political relations, I argue that, contrary to what he thinks, this difference should lead to different conceptions of toleration, according to whether it applies horizontally or vertically. He moreover contends that political decisions settling issues over toleration of a contested practice are never tolerant, but coercive. No one denies that state decision are coercive, and yet a clear distinction can be traced between decisions in favor of permitting the contested practice and decisions prohibiting the same very practice. Finally, he claims the accusations of intolerance are circular, and in fact both parties are intolerant. I have rebutted this claim with a conceptual analysis providing clear criteria for setting apart toleration from intolerance and intolerable

Two interpretations of the rule of law

Since antiquity, the rule of law has been juxtaposed to the rule of men. The ideal of isonom\ueca, of the equality of all citizens before the law, was promoted by the reform of Athens\u2019s constitution by Clisthenes, which represented the democratic turn of Athens\u2019s politics. The rule by men could grant neither impartiality nor stable expectations of government\u2019s actions, let alone equality of treatment: the rule of men depended on the character, the inclinations, the virtues and the vices of rulers engendering unpredictability in the life of the polis and discretionary power about which citizens had no control. Both Plato and Aristotle set apart the rule of law from the rule of men, arguing that only the former could provide a just and stable polis. The generality of law is a guarantee of impartiality, predictability and equal treatment of all citizens by the political institutions; by the same token, state coercive power is thus limited

Political Disinformation and Voting Behavior: Fake News and Motivated Reasoning

The paper intends to focus on the influence of the disinformation passed on via social media and the web on voters, that is, on the impact of fake news on elections. On the basis of a critical reflection on research in media studies and in cognitive science, meant to assess whether, and how far, fake news can switch voting behavior, I shall argue that the effect of fake news in this respect is much less than usually assumed. The danger of fake news for democratic politics that rather lies in the increase of political polarization and hostile attitudes in the public sphere as well as the blurring of truth and falsity in public discourse that has caused a widespread mistrust of politics and of experts in general. In the first section, I shall discuss the disinformation induced by fake news. I shall set apart political fake news from other kinds of fake news, for, in the first case, the influence of social media information seems to run along partisan affiliations, either reinforcing preexistent beliefs in the case of favorable content or being dismissed as fake in the case of adverse content. In the second section, I shall examine what I take to be the main source of distorted political information, namely motivated reasoning, and more specifically that form of motivated reasoning induced by ideological beliefs and partisan affiliations. In the third section, I shall consider the variations in the susceptibility to political fake news in partisans and non-partisans alike. I shall conclude by stating that, even if fake news does not especially affect electoral turnout, the pollution of the public sphere seems to be the most worrying effect of fake news and future research should focus on these aspects specifically

Stable and Efficient Structures for the Content Production and Consumption in Information Communities

Real-world information communities exhibit inherent structures that characterize a system that is stable and efficient for content production and consumption. In this paper, we study such structures through mathematical modelling and analysis. We formulate a generic model of a community in which each member decides how they allocate their time between content production and consumption with the objective of maximizing their individual reward. We define the community system as "stable and efficient" when a Nash equilibrium is reached while the social welfare of the community is maximized. We investigate the conditions for forming a stable and efficient community under two variations of the model representing different internal relational structures of the community. Our analysis results show that the structure with "a small core of celebrity producers" is the optimally stable and efficient for a community. These analysis results provide possible explanations to the sociological observations such as "the Law of the Few" and also provide insights into how to effectively build and maintain the structure of information communities.Comment: 21 page

BELIEVING FAKE NEWS

The proliferation of misinformation, inaccuracy in data processing, twisted scientific findings through the web and social media, in a word the proliferation of \u201cfake news\u201d have raised worries concerning their alleged impact on democratic processes. In this paper, I want to tackle this phenomenon by raising two questions. The first concerns what fake news is, or, to put it differently, whether it is a specific form compared to traditional public disinformation and deception. The second question addresses the issue of fake news from the viewpoint of the recipient or consumer, and asks on the basis of which cognitive traps and mechanisms cognizers end up believing fake news at a higher and faster rate than true news. In the first section of the paper I shall thus take up the discussion on what fake news is and see whether a specific account can be provided that mark it specifically off compared to traditional forms of public deception. In the second section of the paper, I shall try to map the cognitive and motivational traps making people victims of this form of disinformation and deception. Finally, in the third section, I shall take up the discussion about possible remedies, focusing on the ones directed at improving individual epistemic responses to fake news exposure. More precisely, I shall try to connect the literature on new media communications and the studies on the cognitive and motivational distortions in belief formation and see whether some hints for counteracting the effect of fake news can be found

Awareness as an Equilibrium Notion: Normal-Form Games

We study normal-form games where parts of the games may not be common knowledge. Agents may be aware only of some facts describing the game. An awareness architecture is given by agents' awareness, and an infinite regress of conjectures about other agents and their conjectures. The problem is specified by the true underlying normal-form game, and by the set of possible awareness architectures. Awareness equilibrium is given by a feasible awareness architecture for each agent, strategies that are played and these strategies have to be consistent with the awareness architectures and agents' rationality. We first study games with complete information, where each player may be aware of a subset of the set of possible actions. We then study games with incomplete information, where each player may be aware of a subset of the set of types and probability over types. Our results illustrate how a departure from the assumption of common knowledge alters equilibium predictions

Market Segmentation Through Information

Prodigious amounts of data are being collected by internet companies about their users' preferences. We consider the information design problem of how to share this information with traditional companies which, in turn, compete on price by offering personalised discounts to customers. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which the internet company is able to perfectly segment and monopolise all such markets. This condition is surprisingly mild, and suggests room for regulatory oversight