There are two very distinct schools of thought on how to value and fund public pension liabilities.  The long-established, dominant perspective among US public plans sponsors, pension actuaries, and government accounting standards setters derives primarily from the actuarial profession.  A newer perspective, deriving from the field of financial economics, asserts that traditional actuarial methods both obfuscate and underestimate the value of public pension liabilities, and calls for an overhaul of the conceptual framework actuaries, plan sponsors, and accountants use to understand and make decisions about benefits, costs, funded status and investment strategy.