ELI5: The different schools of economics : explainlikeimfive. Blaming Capitalism for Corporatism - Edmund S. Phelps and Saifedean Ammous. ELI5 - Why is it bad for money to have a fixed value over time? : explainlikeimfive. Blaming Capitalism for Corporatism - The shift of power from owners and innovators to state officials is the antithesis of capitalism : Economics. ELI5: How does the stock market 'create' wealth? : explainlikeimfive. Democracy isn't all it is cracked up to be. “The people who cast the votes decide nothing,” Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said. “The people who count them decide everything.” A paper uploaded to a preprint server this month suggests that little has changed in Russia.
Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1. This is not a new accusation. Some, such as Russian physicist Sergey Shpilkin, have claimed that Russian voting statistics show suspicious peaks at multiples of 5% or 10%, as though ballot officials have simply assigned rounded proportions of votes to meet predetermined figures. Naturally, Putin denies this. The same is true for the Ugandan presidential election of February 2011. Ref. 1 But the smaller peaks suggest much cruder fraud.