Matt Bruenig has a post where he takes on the anti-monopolists, characterising them as a group whose views are arguably best suited to a 18th Century US context: [Thomas] Jefferson is the last guy whose ideas on this made some sense because Jefferson was talking about a yeoman farming freehold…

There is an understandable tendency among quantitative types to dismiss ‘anecdotes’: stories about one person which make unjustified generalisations about the world. Blogger Anonymous Mugwump characterised anecdotes as “n=1”, something I’ve seen a few times. On BBC News the historian David Starkey castigated Ash Sarkar for using an anecdote, suggesting…

A while ago Josh Mason asked on twitter whether we need to understand mechanisms to determine causation, which sparked an interesting debate. I’m of the view that mechanisms are an important and underrated way of thinking about causality in economics. Understanding mechanisms entails taking a granular approach to disentangling causality…

With the outbreak of covid-19, an event largely unrelated to economists and to which economists have produced sensible responses, it seems like a good time to rehash old criticisms of the discipline. I’ve wanted to write something like this post for a while but was prompted by a comment from…

Inspired by Beatrice Cherrier’s typically informative tweetstorm about Milton Friedman’s famous 1953 essay The Methodology of Positive Economics, I’d like explain my response that nobody believes in the essay. In short, the methodology it espouses is absurd, which is why Friedman didn’t really believe it and economists don’t either. The…

Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky is one of those books that has clarified my thinking on a lot of issues — some obvious, like biological determinism; others less obvious, like the role of science. At 700 pages it is one of the…

A little while ago on Twitter, Ben Harrell expressed exasperation at economics critics for a reason I’ve seen a few times: the critic first argues economists don’t include some important feature of the world — say, bounded rationality (which we were discussing) — but when faced with examples which purport…

Below is a collection of books, academic papers blog posts/newspaper articles which I consider to represent or have shaped my views in an important way. This grew as I assembled it, so now the topics range from economics (which I am well versed in) to sociology and psychology (which I…

This is the last post in my series critiquing the idea of ‘progress’ as depicted in statistical charts, so we must now ask the natural question: is it all part of a conspiracy to keep us in little boxes? As the observant among you might have guessed, the theme of…