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I read a while back that local governments would significantly artificially inflate their manufacturing, construction, spending, and raw materials numbers. Ther
by propman 9y ago
I read a while back that local governments would significantly artificially inflate their manufacturing, construction, spending, and raw materials numbers. There were dozens that seemed so far fetched they were easily spotted as fake by a professor that did little research.
When you have govt officials who are forced to increase growth and you'll look bad/fired if you don't and no authority is safeguarding this, then these actions seem fairly logical.
Interesting to see how perception is sometimes as good as reality.
- beat 9y agoThis is, of course, completely different from the performance figures of departments in large corporations, because... um.
- colemannugent 9y agoThe parent never implies that it is. However, at the end of the day large corporations need to keep shareholders pleased to survive. They could lie all they want to themselves, but the shareholders would see through that and remove the bad administrators. China has no such mechanism to ensure accountability.
- beat 9y agoI'd argue there have been plenty of examples of large corporations delivering rosy figures, until they could no longer sustain the lie. Some years ago, I got an investment club to put some of our money in Harley-Davidson, based on numbers that hit our criteria perfectly. Too perfectly. A few months later, the CEO resigned, revised numbers came out, it became clear they'd been more or less cooking the books, and the stock tanked. This happens a lot. Worse, it happens with stock market darlings. Remember Enron?
- carapace 9y agoThe Mandate of Heaven? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
- ansible 9y agoAnd this is why we have (nominally independent) external auditors for corporations. Cooking the books is maladaptive in the long run, and needs to be discouraged at every level.
- beat 9y agoAbsolutely. All performance metrics incentivize cheating. External audits are a necessary trust mechanism.
- thisacctforreal 9y ago/s
- dang 9y agoCan you please not post snark or flamebait to HN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html