Lang Xianping paid 220,000 yuan for 2 hours, and the appearance fee increased tenfold in three years.

How is high social status tempered?

Some experts Weibo marketing crazy brush "live powder".

The mixed global information and the tangled and confused public mentality have become a natural greenhouse for incubating high-priced economists. The reporter noticed that the appearance fee of economists is naturally proportional to their popularity. Although the fame of many experts matches their opinions and academic status, there are also many embarrassing "pure hype".

The reporter saw on Weibo, an economist surnamed Han, that although he had nearly 4 million fans, most of them were suspected of showing traces of false fans.

Judging from experience, at least half of them are brushed. According to a media person who has been following him for a long time, he has conducted sampling quality appraisal on these fans, and found that quite a few of them are upgraded versions of Weibo’s "zombie fans" with avatars and fans, which are updated regularly every day.

In mid-August 2010, the economist’s fan base suddenly and mysteriously exploded. According to the data given by Weibo at that time, he added more than 35,000 fans a day, which made him on the Weibo list that day.

At that time, I paid attention to him. Even if calculated on a 24-hour basis, he would add at least 26 fans per minute, but I waited for half an hour and didn’t add a single fan.

The trueness of this media person is also reflected in the horizontal comparison.

Weibo’s fans have soared, either becoming the central figure of a major event or being well-known. What puzzles him is that the number of fans of this economist is several times higher than that of Song Hongbing, who has a huge readership. The reporter noticed that the number of fans of ordinary economists who are generally slightly well-known is also less than 100,000.

At present, there are many companies registered in the name of online public relations companies, which use fans to do celebrity packaging and Weibo marketing. There are two ways to sign contracts. One is to sign every six months and every year, during which it will forward comments on every Weibo, and the other is to forward a certain Weibo in a single day to concoct so-called public events. Senior IT people explained.

Weibo, another financial host, seems to have 5.6 million fans. After clicking on it, the reporter noticed that more than 40 pages of the nearly 50-page fan list are standard zombie fans with no more than 10 fans. The same phenomenon happened in Weibo, an economist named Chen. Among the nearly 5 million fans, there are very few real fans.

Do you pay taxes on huge income?

At present, there is no special supervision system

According to industry estimates, Lang Xianping, the "king of social status", may earn tens of millions of dollars a year, and the appearance fees of other first-class economists are equally expensive. So, are these huge incomes taxed according to law?

In theory, the appearance fee of economists should be paid according to the income from personal services, which is withheld and remitted by the payment unit, and whoever invites experts will pay it. If the payment unit fails to fulfill the tax payment obligation, it will be paid by the economists themselves and declared by themselves.

Hu Yijian, director of the Department of Taxation of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and director of China Taxation Society, analyzed the reporter.

Wang Weiqing, head of the taxation teaching and research group of Shanghai Jiaotong University, added: According to the excessive progressive tax rate, if the labor income does not exceed 4,000 yuan each time, 800 yuan will be deducted; If it is more than 4000 yuan, 20% of the expenses will be deducted. If it is less than 20,000 yuan, the tax rate will be 20%, 30% for the part of 20,000-50,000 yuan, and 40% for the part above 50,000 yuan.

Although the provisions of the tax law are very clear, there is a lack of strength in actual management. It is worth mentioning that the State Administration of Taxation issued a series of documents in May 2010 and April 2011, demanding strict tax collection and payment for high-income people, including economists.

A tax veteran even admitted to reporters that at present, few economists really pay taxes according to law, and it is actually not difficult for tax authorities to check the "accounts" of economists. However, because the general tax bureaus always report taxes first, there are actually no victims in the course of economists’ lectures, so generally no one will report them. "He stressed to reporters that" economists who don’t pay taxes on appearance fees have actually constituted tax evasion, not just reasonable tax avoidance.

How many "sideline jobs" are still busy?

Part-time independent director speaks for interest groups

In addition to the enviable appearance fee, many economists are still opening up more profit-making space. The most striking thing in the near future is to be an independent director. According to the reporter’s comprehensive financial report, about 50 economists hold the position of independent director in more than 60 listed companies. Among them, it is not uncommon for an economist to be the independent director of 3-5 companies.

According to the data collected by the reporter, although many economists receive tens of thousands of yuan of independent director allowance from at least one listed company every year, a considerable proportion of the board meetings convened by the company are absent, and most of them attend by means of communication or entrust.

However, in the eight years since the implementation of the independent director system, more than 95% of the companies condemned by the exchange or put on record by the regulatory authorities have not raised any objections, but these economists should feel ashamed and embarrassed.

Xu Yi, vice president of Gobi Partners Co., Ltd., told reporters that the failure of economists as independent directors is mainly determined by the system itself.

Different from foreign countries, domestic companies actually don’t care how much help independent directors can bring to their operations. The significance of academic participation is to get rid of the negative impression of’ black-box operation’ and’ centralized’.

In foreign countries, ordinary enterprises will hire people with more resources and knowledge in the industry as independent directors, hoping to be helpful to actual operation. Xu Yi admits that the domestic face-engineering independent director system actually contains a worse logic: it will mislead investors, because these celebrities themselves attach public trust and will blind financial fraud.

In his view, the independent director system itself should put forward opinions, judgments and decisions on the information given by the board of directors, but because the whole board of directors is mostly a mere formality.

China listed companies are still the main controllers, such as the chairman and general manager, and the due diligence of independent directors depends on what is discussed at the board meeting first, and also depends on whether independent directors have professional management knowledge. Now many economists have come out of the ivory tower, which is far from the actual operation.

In addition, economists often get together as business consultants. The reporter saw from the resume of an energy expert who often preached that "the oil price has not risen to the designated position" and "the oil price in China is still low" that he was a member of the royal advisory group of "two barrels of oil".

What kind of report card does the "main business" hand over?

There is no shortage of academic achievements in Lei language.

According to the reporter’s understanding, Ideas&RePEc is recognized as a relatively authoritative statistic, and its statistics are based on the harmonic average of 36 indicators such as the number of academic papers, works and periodicals published by economists registered in REPEC (research papers in economics) and the number of times their academic works are cited, downloaded and browsed.

Regrettably, in this list, the best score of Chinese economists is only 146, and it is difficult for the collective to escape the question of the decline of academic achievements.

In China, the "main battlefield", although there are some real scholars, there are also many economists who are angry with each other. Still take the economist named Han mentioned above as an example. He tried to achieve the "artistic effect" of "never stopping talking", posing as a passionate "leader", and often led "believers" into the desert with his sensational economic forecast.

The teacher Han’s prediction of the situation is surprisingly different from the facts: from August to November 2007, he claimed that 5,000 points were healthier than 1,000 points, and advocated that the bull market in China stock market was unstoppable, and the stock index dropped from the highest point of 6,124 to 5,800 points; On August 29, 2008, he posted a blog post saying that it would fall to 1000, which proved that the previous day’s 1664 points became a historical bottom; In March 2009, he stressed that the second wave of the financial crisis was coming, but the strong market from 2000 to 3478 began that day; On July 5, 2010, Bowen said that the market would explore 1664 points, but on July 2, 2319 was finally confirmed as the lowest in the past two years. The reporter noted that such an economist has also been involved in various capital forums and seminars in recent years to earn extra money.

Before that, careful netizens assembled the speeches of 17 famous economists in China into a book, titled "The Complete Collection of Horrible Quotations of Institutions and Scientists in China". According to media verification, such as "rapid housing price rise is a good thing", "corruption is the cost of reform" and "economists are just serving interest groups", 30 shocking stories and strange theories are not fabricated, but are seen in public reports.

The logic in these Lei languages is incredible, including "The symbol of China’s modernization is that Professor Peking University owns cars and villas", "We might as well regard these public properties as ownerless things, and whoever sells them first will have the property right of this public property", and "The main contradiction of the current gap between the rich and the poor in China is not that the rich are too rich, but that the poor are too poor. Because there are poor people in the city, there is unfair income distribution, so there should be no hatred of the rich "and so on.

Misread public knowledge

About 2000 years ago, an Athenian sat on the foundation stone of the square every day, discussing with the citizens various propositions unrelated to physical survival. No one knows how this short and clumsy person can have such exuberant energy. Of course, he is Socrates, a philosophical prophet, and a man who is feared by many intellectuals. But in fact, none of his theories can compete with his knowledge, conscience, critical enthusiasm and desire for action. So he was later regarded as the originator of public intellectuals.

Modern Chinese people’s thirst for knowledge also seems to create an environment for economists to talk about it. Especially after the financial crisis swept through, some economists who are keen on shuttling under the spotlight quickly took off their poor clothes and walked out of the ivory tower, obsessed with building the altar of knowledge. It seems that from the perspective of marketization, this is also understandable. Knowledge, like other resources, is waiting for a price. And most economists who can pursue this "well-known" image have paid high investment costs with decades of cold benches.

However, some of them can make money at a speed comparable to that of the entertainment industry.

Weaving grandstanding cliches, commenting on various topics across borders, and then entering the room in various forums-has become a set of hype processes that can be imitated. Economists should not forget that compared with entertainers, their natural seriousness determines that even if they are built on their own.

It will also be shameful for people to "emotionally recruit" believers at the altar. Because on the public platform, their words may influence the process of thought at any time, from this perspective, it is more difficult for the economic forum to tolerate and make up the numbers than the entertainment circle.

Undeniably, this is an era that needs to be "known". But before "Known" is busy putting on an invisibility cloak and playing the role of a prophet with a crystal ball, please don’t forget that responsibility and conscience are the most basic.

Common sense spirit. And Socrates’ story before he died may be useful for self-examination. At that time, the sentence was near, and one day, Socrates, the death row prisoner, heard a new prisoner humming a new song that he had never heard before in the next cell. He hurriedly asked his singing cellmate to teach him to sing this song.

Don’t you know that you will be executed soon?

Of course I know.

Then why do you want to learn new songs?

So I’ll have one more song when I die.

I hope those "well-known" people who are really talented and practical can follow the footsteps of the sages and have the passion to learn to sing a "new song".