Scientists live and die by their scientific ‘impact’. For the uninitiated, ‘impact’ is a measure of a scientist’s contribution to their field. While there are many measures of scientific impact, almost all of them focus (in some way) on citations . So if more people cite your papers, you have more scientific ‘impact’. The idea behind counting citations is that they quantify other people’s engagement with your ideas.

In a recent blog post called “How Not to Measure Inequality”, the anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that economists measure inequality the wrong way. Hickel thinks that standard measures of inequality (such as the Gini index), underestimate global disparities. The problem, according to Hickel, is that economists measure relative inequality. Hickel thinks we should measure absolute inequality.

Karl Marx is probably the most important social scientist in history. But while his influence is beyond compare, Marx’s legacy is, in many ways, disastrous . Few thinkers have inspired so many people to commit crimes against humanity. Think of Stalinist gulags. Think of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, which may have killed as many people as the Holocaust.

Hello, my name is Blair Fix. I’m a recovering academic writer. Let me explain. I’m convinced that a major part of grad school is learning to decipher academic prose. Let’s face it — academic writing is usually bad. It’s dense. It’s jargon filled. It’s often monotonous. In short, academic writing begs the reader not to read it. So a big part of grad school is learning how to read prose that was designed not to be read.

I thought I would spark some controversy by reviewing Gregory Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms”. Clark offers a social Darwinist theory of why the industrial revolution occurred in England. Most social scientists will likely dismiss Clark’s arguments as absurd. I will say off the bat that I think Clark’s thesis is wrong. But it contains an uncomfortable grain of truth that we need to acknowledge.

In The Growth of Hierarchy and the Death of the Free Market, I argued that economic development involves killing the free market. What was the evidence? As energy use increases, so does the relative number of managers. This growth of managers, I argued, indicates that economic development involves the growth of hierarchy. I showed that a simple model of hierarchy could explain why the number of managers increases with energy use.

In The Growth of Hierarchy and the Death of the Free Market, I looked at how the number of managers grows with energy use. The growth of managers, I argued, signalled the death of the free market. As countries develop, they replace small-scale competition with large-scale hierarchy. My analysis culminated in the figure below, which compares the management share of employment to energy use per capita.

Let’s talk sustainability. Unless you’re an anti-science crank, you probably agree that we’ve got a problem with carbon emissions. We need to drastically cut emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. On this we should all agree. The question that’s open for debate is how to cut emissions. I think we actually know very little about how do to this.

Yesterday I was reminded of what got me interested in economics. I’ll preface this by saying that I make my living as a substitute teacher in Toronto. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills. It gives me time to do research from outside academia. When I’m in high school classrooms, I always browse the posters on the wall. It’s funny what you see. You find things (both good and bad) that you’d never see in institutions of ‘higher learning’.

Do you believe in free markets? Do you think that unfettered competition is the best way to organize society? If so, this post is intended to shake your faith. No, I’m not going to argue that free markets are bad. Instead, I’m going to show you some evidence that may disturb you. I’m going to show you that as societies develop, they kill off the free market and replace it with a command economy. Let me be clear about what I mean.

In this post, I’m going to return to the relation between energy and institution size. When we left off last time (in Groping in the Dark), I had described my struggle to understand how the size of firms and governments changes with energy use. It took me years of empirical muckraking to discover four stylized facts.