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…

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…

Seeing Like a Neoliberal, Part 3: the Trend Bias “Am I getting better, Coach?” “Well, you’re sure as cuss not getting any worse.” “Really? You think I’d end up being as good as my dad if I keep practicing?” “Your dad? Your dad was probably the best whack-bat player we…