New ideas in economics and the social sciences

Well, another year of blogging is over. For me, it was a year of research themes. I spent the first half of 2023 debunking interest-rate orthodoxy. Then I spent the second half of the year studying the world’s billionaires. Here were the top 5 posts: Do High Interest Rates Reduce Inflation?

A Brief History of the Buy-to-Build Indicator

Around the world, rich countries are celebrating as their COVID numbers fall. Their success is no mystery — it’s because of a massive rollout of COVID vaccines. While we should celebrate the development of these vaccines, their

 deployment

highlights the tyrannies of capitalism. Most of the basic research for COVID vaccines was funded by the public. Yet their manufacture is controlled by Big Pharma.

The Quant Case for Open-Access COVID Vaccines

Today a rant about

 textbooks

. Every year governments spend billions of dollars on public education, teaching students knowledge that was itself created by publicly funded research. Yet each year, university students must pay anew for this information by purchasing high-priced textbooks. It needn’t be this way. Most university textbooks are written by tenured (or tenure-track) professors.

Why Are Most Textbooks Still Proprietary?

This post begins with a sigh. For the last month, I’ve been working on a project that analyzes word frequency in economics textbooks. I’d hoped to have the final write up done by now. But I don’t … for reasons explained here. I’m calling this post ‘Working with Google Ngrams’. But even if you’re not interested in ngrams (i.e. word frequency), there’s useful information here.

Working With Google Ngrams: A Data-Wrangling Tale

I’ve always been baffled why ‘modern monetary theory’ is called a

 theory

. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way. As far as theories of money go, I think modern monetary theory (MMT for short) is the correct one. But having a correct theory of money is a bit like having a correct theory of traffic lights. Traffic lights (like money) are a social convention.

Why Isn’t Modern Monetary Theory Common Knowledge?

Welcome to the first post of ‘Economics from the Top Down’. This will be a blog about new ideas in economics and the social sciences. I use the word ‘economics’ in a liberal sense. Few trained economists will recognize what I do as ‘economics’. Perhaps a better word would be ‘political economy’. Or even better, just ‘social science’.  But before diving into the content of this blog, I should introduce myself. My name is Blair Fix.

Economics from the Top Down

A few months ago, I went down a rabbit hole analyzing word frequency in economics textbooks. Henry Leveson-Gower, editor of

 The Mint Magazine

, thought the results were interesting and asked me to write up a short piece. The

 Mint

article is now up, and is called ‘Power: don’t mention it’. What follows is my original manuscript. If you’ve ever taken Economics 101, then you’re familiar with its jargon.

Power … and the Dialect of Economics

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 There is a tendency, among both scientists and non-scientists, to assume that our current scientific theories are correct in some fundamental sense … but the history of science suggests otherwise.

An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology

This week I had the good fortune to talk with Rok Kranjc and Michel Bauwens about my research on degrowth and hierarchy. The full discussion will be available in a month or so at the Seoul Platform for Initiating Discourses on an Equitable and Resilient Society (which supported this research).  For now, here is my presentation. I discuss ideas from the paper Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World: Investigating the Role of Hierarchy.

Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World — The Talk Version

Pity the billionaires. High in the towers on Billionaires’ Row, life is hard. The pencil-thin buildings groan as they sway in the wind, keeping penthouse dwellers up at night. Water pipes break, ruining posh décor. And elevators are unreliable, interrupting billionaires’ highly productive lives. So reads Stefanos Chen’s recent piece about the pitfalls of sky-high living.

Radically Progressive Degrowth: Reducing Resource Use by Eliminating Inequality

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Billionaires Are So Predictable

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO [R]esource productivity can — and should — grow fourfold. … Thus we can live twice as well — yet use half as much. —

 Factor Four

, 1997 When it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution.

A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires

I’m reposting here an article that Erald Kolasi and I wrote for Mint Magazine. The article discusses the problems with ‘real’ GDP and possible alternatives for measuring economic activity. The published version is under a paywall, so I’m posting our (unabridged) manuscript here.

Why We Should Abandon Real GDP As A Measure of Economic Activity

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.

Energy and the Size Distribution of Firms

In this post we’re going to take a journey into the world of power-law distributions. Power laws pop up again and again in my research. But I’ve never taken the time to discuss what makes them so weird. This post will be a little ‘power-law primer’ that I’ll reference in future blog posts. Let’s start by defining the word

 distribution

. A ‘distribution’ refers to how data is spread out. I’ll use human height as an example.

Visualizing Power-Law Distributions

Science is the quintessential public good. It’s an iterative process in which new knowledge builds on previous knowledge. For this process to work, science needs to be ‘open’. Both the results and methods of scientific research need to be freely available for all. The open science movement is trying to make this a reality. In this post, I share some tips for doing open science.

Ten Tips For Doing Open Science

This is the second in a series of two essays written for and supported by the Seoul Platform for Initiating Discourses on an Equitable and Resilient Society. These essays investigate the role that hierarchy plays in driving inequality and unsustainability. Summary   Humanity’s most pressing need is to learn how to live within our planet’s boundaries — something that likely means doing without economic growth.

Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World: Investigating the Role of Hierarchy (Part 2)

The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. I propose a corollary in economics:

 nothing in economics makes sense except in the light of human social evolution.

[1] I explore here how the evolution of human sociality can help us understand how we distribute resources. Although economists like to deny it, humans are social animals.

An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 1)

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’.

Where’s the Barefoot  Revolution in Economics?

It was a bet heard around the world. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. It was a bet heard mostly by academics and sustainability buffs. But still, it was a bet … and it was important. The year was 1980. The players were biologist Paul Ehrlich and business professor Julian Simon. The two had conflicting ideas about where humanity was headed.

As We Exhaust Our Oil, It Will Get Cheaper But Less Affordable

In the field of ecological economics, Frederick Soddy looms large. Born in 1877, Soddy became a chemist and eventually won a Nobel prize for work on radioactive decay. Then he turned his attention to

 economics

. Between 1921 and 1934, Soddy wrote four books that looked at how money relates to the physical economy. For his ground-breaking work, Soddy was rewarded with deafening silence.

Frederick Soddy’s Debt Dynamics

In the early 1970s, Geert Hofstede discovered something interesting. While analyzing a work-attitude survey that had been given to thousands of IBM employees around the world, Hofstede found that responses clustered by country. In some countries, for instance, employees tended to prefer an autocratic style of leadership. But in other countries, employees preferred a democratic approach.

The Paradox of Individualism and Hierarchy

As some of you may know, I recently became the editor of the

 Review of Capital as Power

(RECASP), a journal that publishes research on the power underpinnings of capitalism. Each year, RECASP hosts an essay competition. I’m proud to announce that the winner of this year’s prize is Jesús Suaste Cherizola.

 1

His prize-winning paper is called From Commodities to Assets: Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance.

Jesús Suaste Cherizola Wins the 2021 CASP Essay Prize

And just like that, another year is over. I’ll remember 2022 as the year I unwittingly stepped into the world of pop psychology. My post on the Dunning-Kruger effect was meant as a humorous aside from my main work in political economy. Instead, that piece became my most-read post ever — pretty much dwarfing everything else I wrote in 2022. It’s an interesting demonstration of what drives attention on the internet.

How To Be an Academic Hyper-Producer

The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket.

— Richard Feynman Like Richard Feynman’s game of science, evolution is stuck in a straitjacket. It is driven by chance. But evolution is not free to explore every path. Take, as an example, the evolution of organism size.

The Evolution of ‘Big’: How Sociality Made Life Larger

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.

Are We Measuring Inequality the Wrong Way?

Nothing says 1990s like an ‘internet forum’. Nothing says 2000s like a ‘blog’. And nothing says 2010s like ‘social media’. As we contemplate how social media is ruining our society, let’s hearken back to a simpler day. Yes, I’m writing this on a blog. But today I want to talk about internet forums — specifically the Capital as Power Forum, which has recently relaunched.

The Capital as Power Forum Lives Again!

Download: PDF | EPUB  There’s nothing like waking up to a boatload of Twitter scorn. It’s refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Some backstory. After most of my blog posts, I put the charts on Twitter, usually with a provocative caption.

Masochistic Fun with Plutocratic Murder

You can’t get the right answer when you ask the wrong question. This truism, I’ve come to believe, explains much of what is wrong with economics. When it comes to studying income, economists ask the wrong question. Economists, I argue, have mostly asked:

 is income fair

? The problem is that this is a

 moral

question, not a scientific one. It has no scientific answer.

Understanding Income: You Can’t Get There from Here

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 To manage inflation, governments have a simple tool


 at their disposal: raise wages as fast as possible.

— Milton Fryman For the last few months, I’ve been diving into the economics of inflation. In this post, I’m excited to review some forgotten history. Our journey starts with a basic question: what is the key policy tool for managing the rate of inflation?

The Key to Managing Inflation? Higher Wages

Download: PDF | EPUB  In November 2021, I wrote a post called ‘The Truth About Inflation’. At the time, inflation fears were heating up. And as usual, mainstream economists were missing the bus. Sure, economists pointed to the consumer price index and said, “Look, it’s going up!” But they didn’t look under the hood of this index to see the big picture. Despite what economists proclaim, inflation is not a uniform increase in prices.

Inflation: Everywhere and Always Differential

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog debunking economists’ claims about productivity. Usually, I come at the problem from a fairly technical angle, meaning I break down the contradictions involved in economists’ methods. Today, I want to try a more philosophical approach. I’m going to talk about dualism — the idea that something can be two things at once.

Dualism in Science, Theology, and Economics

Exciting news, readers! I’ve started a new section of this blog called Blair’s Science Desk. I’m going to use this section to post tips about doing data-driven science. In creating Science Desk, my goal is to separate two aspects of my writing. On the one hand, I like to write long pieces about original research. On the other hand, I also like to write short notes about doing science.

Check Out My Science Desk

James McMahon and Blair Fix


 The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not.

— Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler A key aspect of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’ is that it treats property not as a productive asset, but as a negative social relation.

In Search of Sabotage

An artist’s enemy is obscurity …  — Cory Doctorow  Like art, the dirty secret of science is that much of it remains painfully obscure. A scientist might spend years collecting and analyzing data, only to have their paper read by a handful of people. Such is the nature of highly specialized work.

Hierarchy, Zoom Bombed

As many of you know, the anthropologist David Graeber died recently at the age of 59. Many of us are still coming to grips with this loss. Graeber was a rare individual — both a tireless activist and a superb scholar. In this guest post, teacher and a financial analyst Christophe Petit pays tribute to Graeber, his friend and mentor.

A Tribute to David Graeber

In this two-part post, I’ve been reflecting on the challenges of doing revolutionary science. (See Part 1 here.) I’ve argued that revolutionary science — the practice of questioning the core principles of an accepted theory — is difficult for a simple reason. To do it, you must fight the instinct to

 conform

. Conformity is the glue that holds human groups together. It’s what underpins the rule of law and the norms of trade.

The Challenges of Doing Revolutionary Science (Part 2)

Exciting news, friends! I’ve joined Patreon! What’s Patreon, you ask? Patreon is a crowdfunding site that gives creators a way to earn money. Here’s how it works. If you think my research is worth supporting, you can become a ‘patron’ of Economics from the Top Down. As a patron, you’ll donate a small amount monthly.

I’ve Joined Patreon

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.

As it Dies, We Talk About the ‘Free Market’ More

There is an exciting side of blogging that I want to explore here. Blogging can tell the

 story

behind research. This is something you don’t get in journals. Most scientific articles obey a formula that goes like this: Here is the question I asked. Here is how I answered the question. Here is what I found. This formula makes the article easy to read, since we know what to expect.

Groping in the Dark: The Untold Side of Research

In my last post, I skewered human capital theory by comparing it to the pseudoscience of eugenics. Here’s a follow up — a presentation called

 The Trouble With Human Capital Theory

. It’s a talk I gave to the SEEFAR research center at the Kedge Business School. I thank Christophe Faugère for inviting me to speak. An error occurred. Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

The Trouble With Human Capital Theory

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 The U.S. has a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes.

— National Low Income Housing Coalition If mainstream economics teaches us one lesson, it’s that when something becomes unaffordable, it’s because of a shortage. And that brings me to the US housing crisis.

The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage

Download: PDF | EPUB In their book

 Manufacturing Consent

, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official narrative. Outside of war, media bias is typically less overt. But to the careful observer, it can still be discerned.

Massaging the Message: How Oilpatch Newspapers Censor the News

Download: PDF | EPUB  For the last few months, I’ve been studying the distributional effects of interest-rate hikes. There’s been no shortage of surprising results. In this post, I’ll discuss an effect that is surprising because it’s underwhelming. Many economist claim that when interest rates rise, unemployment will increase. The idea is that higher rates make businesses tighten their belts, leading to less hiring and greater unemployment.

Interest Rates and Unemployment: An Underwhelming Relation

Today is the one year anniversary of

 Economics from the Top Down

. To mark the occasion, I though I’d share with you the 5 most-viewed posts of the last year:

 Top 5 Posts

No, Productivity Does Not Explain Income Productivity Does Not Explain Wages Debunking the ‘Productivity-Pay Gap’ An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 1) Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics You’ll notice that

One Year of Blogging

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 What had come to an end was not history itself, but an empire, whose time had run out.

— Karl Schlögel in

 The Soviet Century

In my last post, ‘The Half Life of Empire’, I charted the rise and fall of the British and US empires, as measured by their share of world energy use.

The Soviet Experiment with Empire

I’ve been asked to create panels for the upcoming International Conference on Thermodynamics 2.0. The conference aims to bring natural and social sciences closer. It will take place at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, USA from June 22-24, 2020. I’m calling the panel(s)

 Energy, Institutions and Society

. I’m looking for research that connects energy to the structure of human society.

Call For Papers: Energy, Institutions and Society

Well readers, 2020 is finally done. In most respects, it was a terrible year. But it turns out that being stuck in the house is good for a few things … one of them being writing. I churned out 50 posts this year and typed about 150,000 words. Here are the top 5 posts by views: What Trait Affects Income the Most? Stocks Are Up. Wages Are Down. What Does it Mean?

Ideological Tunnel Vision

A few weeks ago, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson contacted me about an essay series he’s editing called

 Advice for an Aspiring Economist

. The series aims to give advice to students who are interested in learning ‘evonomics’ — economics from an evolutionary perspective. It will be published in

 This View of Life Magazine

and in

 Evonomics

. To my surprise, Wilson asked me to contribute an essay.

Advice for an Aspiring Economist

I’ve finally had the time, over the last few weeks, to formalize some of the ideas that I’ve been developing on this blog. This is the result — a new paper that studies how hierarchy grows with economic development. You can download the pdf here.

 The 100-word summary

. Neoclassical economists claim that the free market is the optimal form of social organization.

Economic Development and the Death of the Free Market

I recently read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. If you’re not familiar, David Graeber is the anthropologist who wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years, a seminal book on the history of money and credit. In

 Bullshit Jobs

, Graeber takes aim at pointless work. Graeber describes a bullshit job as:

 Bullshit Jobs

is based largely around testimonials from people who feel that they have bullshit jobs.

The Productivity of Bullshit Jobs

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 All models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

— George Box In science, there’s an inherent trade off between comprehensibility and realism. Realistic models tend to be intricate … even convoluted. But to be comprehensible, a model must be simple.

Insights from the Lotka-Volterra Model

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 To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

— George Orwell For decades, the word ‘fascist’ existed solely as a hyperbole — a term meant to insult rather than describe. But lately, politics have grown so hyperbolic that the label looks increasingly sincere.

The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought

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Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy

My how time flies. As of April 11th, 2024, I’ve been blogging for five years. To celebrate, I thought I’d engage in some obligatory navel gazing. Why blog? I started this blog on a whim. In the spring of 2019, I was one year post PhD and busy publishing pieces of my dissertation. It was about as much fun as licking sandpaper. The problem, I now realize, is that I hate academic writing.

Five Years of Economics from the Top Down

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 Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

— John Maynard Keynes, 1936 When it comes to rising house prices, nearly everyone has a theory about the cause.

From Commodity to Asset: The Truth Behind  Rising House Prices

Download:  PDF | EPUB  When it comes to Bitcoin, there’s one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the network sucks up a tremendous amount of energy. But from there, disagreement is the rule. For critics, Bitcoin’s thirst for energy is self-evidently bad — the equivalent of pouring gasoline in a hole and setting it on fire. But for Bitcoin advocates, the network’s energy gluttony is the necessary price of having a secure digital currency.

Is Bitcoin More Energy Intensive Than Mainstream Finance?

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How the Rich Get Richer

Download: PDF | EPUB Tech development is often portrayed as an open road — a smooth freeway of continuous progress. But the truth is that the road of technology is more like a suburban street, paved with numerous unmarked dead ends. To see one of these dead end, look at

 roads

themselves. As a method for moving people, roads work well … until you fill them with millions of cars.

Nixing Technological Lock In

Download: PDF | EPUB There’s an old joke that economics is too important to be left to economists. In the same vein, I think rich people are too important to be left to the self-help industry. Yes, the popular appeal of you-can-get-rich-too books is obvious. But what’s not obvious is why so few social scientists study wealth.

 1

Clearly, the public thirsts for serious inquiries about the rich.

Stocking Up on Wealth … Concentration

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When Stocks Go Up, Who Benefits?

Download: PDF | EPUB  In my last post, I discussed the underwhelming relation between interest rates and unemployment. In this post, I’ll look at a better way to connect unemployment to interest income. It turns out that if you take US net interest and divide it by corporate profit, you get a ratio that closely tracks unemployment.

Unemployment and the Maturity of Capitalism

Download: PDF | EPUB  I’ve been writing about inflation for the better part of three months. It’s been exhausting. Most of my time has been spent debunking misconceptions promoted by mainstream economists. Fortunately, I’m ready to move on.  What’s interesting about inflation is not the fact that prices rise.

Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers

Download: PDF | EPUB  Environmentalists often argue that if we accounted for the ‘true’ costs of the fossil-fuel business, the industry would go bankrupt. While I understand this sentiment, I think the idea of ‘true’ costs is dubious. Costs exist not because they are ‘true’, but because someone has the power to enforce them. (That’s why Apple can impose a 30% commission on everything in its app store.

How to Make the Oil Industry Go Bust

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The Great Gatsby Curve Among America’s Über Rich

Download: PDF | EPUB  In the last few months, there have been a string of open letters from tech leaders warning that artificial intelligence could lead to a ‘profound change in the history of life on Earth’. According to some insiders, AI poses an extinction risk, on the same level as pandemics and nuclear war. I think this scaremongering is nonsense. It plays into popular science fiction tropes about machines conquering humanity.

No, AI Does Not Pose an Existential Risk to Humanity

Download: PDF | EPUB

 Blair Fix and DT Cochrane

Every billionaire is … a factory for producing policy failures at scale. — Cory Doctorow The planet has a billionaire problem. According to Oxfam, the world’s billionaires have more combined wealth than the bottom 60% of humanity — some 4.6 billion people. Given this obscene situation, calls are growing to rid the world of the billionaire class. But how do we make that happen?

Mapping the Ownership Network of Canada’s Billionaire Families

And with that, my postdoc is done. Backing up a bit, for the last two years I’ve had a wonderful research position at York University supervised by political economist Jonathan Nitzan. It was the rare kind of postdoc that allowed me to work on my own research. (What I did with my time? Look at the last two years of writing on this blog!)  Anyway, the job’s been a blast, but the position is over at the end of the month. So what comes next?

A Blind Leap

Download: PDF | EPUB  I still remember when I first encountered Cory Doctorow’s writing. After an internet rabbit hole, I landed on his post ‘Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes’. Man, it made me laugh. Here was a sci-fi writer describing a (real) Ford patent that would monetize the right to change lanes. Is Ford paving the way to a plutocratic hell?

Red Team Blues: Cory Doctorow’s Anti-Finance Thriller

Download: PDF | EPUB [I]nterest rates are, first and foremost, a distributional variable that affects the income shares of various social groups. — Louis-Philippe Rochon &amp; Mark Setterfield (2007) When I read about monetary policy, I have a rule of thumb. Every time I see the phrase

 interest rate

, I replace it with the term

 wage rate

. Then I ask myself whether the discussion still makes sense. Often, it does not.

How Interest Rates Redistribute Income

Download: PDF | EPUB If you’re just tuning in, I’ve spent the last few months debunking some common misconceptions about inflation:

 Is inflation a uniform increase in prices?

No. Inflation is wildly differential.

 Is inflation driven by an ‘over-heated’ economy?

No. Inflation tends to come with economic stagnation.

Interest Rates and Inflation: Knives Out

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 They did not mind stating apparently opposed truths; they knew that they could give to men a higher truth, in which the contradictories became two sides of the same truth.

— Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, 1872 Whenever inflation rears its head, the call soon comes to raise interest rates. The rationale is simple. Higher interest rates put a damper on the supply of money. And this monetary clamp slows inflation.

Do High Interest Rates Reduce Inflation? A Test of Monetary Faith

Download: PDF | EPUB  In my last post, I looked at the relation between economic growth and inflation. As per usual, the evidence didn’t sit well with mainstream economics. According to standard theory, there is a trade off between low inflation and high economic growth. The idea is that you can have one or the other, but not both. So if you want to keep inflation low, you have to ‘cool off’ the economy by slowing economic growth.

The Cause of Stagflation

Download: PDF | EPUB  [I]nflation in the midst of stagnation is not an anomaly. If anything, it is the general rule. — Nitzan and Bichler, 2009  As much of the world grapples with post-Covid price gouging, it seems like a good time to revisit our understanding of inflation.

Is Stagflation the Norm?

Download: PDF | EPUB  If an unmarked package arrived at your door, how would you figure out what was inside? The catch is that you cannot open it.  As a social scientist, I deal with this ‘black-box’ problem all the time. I (metaphorically) watch people go to work at firms. And I see them come home with income. Then I try to picture the ‘machine’ that gave people money.

Firming Up Hierarchy

Download: PDF | EPUB Among leftists, predicting the end of capitalism is a favorite parlor game. For example, as a graduate student in the 2010s, I remember discovering the 1976 edition of Marx’s

 Capital

and being struck by the introduction. Written by the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, the foreword concluded that it was ‘most unlikely’ that capitalism would survive another half-century.

Have We Passed Peak Capitalism?

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 Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.


 — Karl Marx, 1852

A good way to think about human history is that it has two distinct scales. On the small scale we have the churn of daily events — the stuff of endless individual exploits.

The Half Life of Empire

Download: PDF | EPUB The anthropologist Joseph Henrich has written a book called

 The WEIRDest People in the World

. It offers a captivating look at the roots of Western psychology (and capitalism). Here is my in-depth review. * * * Edward O. Wilson, the famed evolutionary biologist and entomologist, argued that the goal of science should be to construct a single ‘consilient’ tree of knowledge.

Weird Consilience: A Review of Joseph Henrich’s ‘The WEIRDest People in the World’

Have you heard of the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’? It’s the (apparent) tendency for unskilled people to overestimate their competence. Discovered in 1999 by psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning, the effect has since become famous. And you can see why. It’s the kind of idea that is too juicy to

 not

be true. Everyone ‘knows’ that idiots tend to be unaware of their own idiocy.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation

A few days ago, I received the attached essay, sent to me in error by a Dr. Tom Riddle. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the elite worldview. (Cover image: Elodie Tihange, altered)

 There is no good and evil. There is only power and those too weak to seek it.

— Lord Voldemort For centuries, philosophers have sought to understand concepts such as ‘equity’, ‘fairness’, and ‘justice’. The result has been widespread confusion.

The Voldemort Index

As 2021 comes to a close, I’m having a distinct sense of déjà vu. A year ago, I wrote a post celebrating COVID vaccines as a triumph of science. And I noted that vaccine discovery is a

 collective

endeavour. The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks closely with the cumulative number of scientific papers, a bellwether for humanity’s collective knowledge.

COVID Déjà Vu

A few months ago I received an intriguing email from researcher and activist Regan Boychuk. For the past 15 years, Boychuk has been studying the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta (Canada) and he wanted to know if I would join his project. I immediately said yes. Some backstory. You can think of Alberta as the Texas of Canada. Alberta is endowed with a vast trove of oil that it has been exploiting for the past 75 years.

A Case Study of Fossil-Fuel Depletion

Well folks, another year has come to a close. Like 2020, I spent most of 2021 hunkered down in front of my computer doing research, trying to forget the craziness of the outside world. The result was over 150,000 words spilled on this blog. Before I get to the top posts of the year, I thought I’d briefly discuss my writing process. Since I started this blog, the trend has been for me to write more long-form content.

The Truth About Inflation

This week I’m sharing some tips for web scraping. The internet is overflowing with information. But it usually takes some work to get the data into a usable form. Here are some tricks for making that happen. Scraping starts with downloading   Every scrape job starts with a download. When you view a website on your computer, your browser is just displaying data that it downloaded from the website’s server.

Tips for  Web Scraping in R and Python

Download PDF Abstract   Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why is the outcome so simple?

Redistributing Income Through Hierarchy

Last week I had the pleasure to chat with Rachel Donald on her podcast ‘Platform’. The show features people who are ‘pissed off with capitalism’. Its goal is to give a platform for under-reported topics that deserve traction and attention. Rachel and I talked about a wide range of topics, but I particularly enjoyed discussing my research on hierarchy and income.

Talking Hierarchy With Rachel Donald

In a series of essays published in 2013 and 2014 on capitaspower.com, political economist Tim Di Muzio explored the concept of ‘sabotage’ as it applies to capitalist power. I recently rediscovered these essays and was so impressed by them that I have reposted them here as a single piece. About the author: Tim Di Muzio is a researcher at the University of Wollongong.

Di Muzio on ‘Sabotage’

Political economist Chris Mouré has a new paper out in the

 Review of Capital as Power

. It’s called ‘Soft-wars’, and it is a fascinating case study of the behavior of big tech. The story starts in 2011, when Microsoft led a $4.5 billion consortium purchase of Nortel and Novel. Later than year, Google responded by buying Motorola for $12.9 billion.

Soft-wars

One of the challenges of studying the past is that time has a maddening way of erasing evidence. Take the origin of life — the ultimate cold case. Had the first organisms been wise enough to fossilize themselves, we would know exactly how life began. Fortunately, the first organisms

 did

preserve themselves, at least in rough form. That’s because life is itself a kind of time capsule.

Institution Size as a Window into Cultural Evolution

For several years, people have been urging me to read Geoffrey West’s book

 Scale

, claiming that his work overlaps with my own. Having read the book, I largely agree (with some caveats below). Geoffrey West is a physicist who’s become famous for studying ‘scaling’ effects across life on Earth. What is ‘scaling’? It’s best explained through an example. Figure 1 (taken from West’s book) shows how animals’ metabolism varies with body mass.

A Review of Geoffrey West’s ‘Scale’

I recently had a lively Twitter debate with Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler and Cory Doctorow

 1

about the future of big corporations in the United States. The debate was prompted by Doctorow’s piece ‘End of the line for Reaganomics’, which I reposted on capitalaspower.com. Doctorow argues that we may be witnessing a sea change in the way governments treat big corporations.

How Dominant are Big US Corporations?

Yesterday, Canada had an election that was notable for its pointlessness. The Liberal party went into the election with a minority government. And it came out with the same thing. The election was, however, an interesting testament to the pragmatism of the powerful. Like Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is gifted at lofty rhetoric. But he’s ultimately a pragmatist, dedicated to holding on to power.

Power Over Principles

I have a new paper out in the

 Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review

. It’s called ‘Economic Development and the Death of the Free Market’. The paper explores a question that has long fascinated me: how do human societies change as they consume more energy? As you probably guessed, the paper’s title gives away the conclusion. Consuming more energy seems to involve less free market and more hierarchy.

The Long, Slow Death of the Free Market

Ryan Kyger
 
 1
 
 and Blair Fix


 Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

— attributed to Richard Feynman

 2

Most scientists don’t worry much about philosophy; they just get on with doing ‘science’. They run experiments, analyze data, and report results. And by so doing, they fall repeatedly into known philosophical pitfalls.

Essentialism and Traditionalism in Academic Research

They say that knowledge is power. Well, in capitalism, knowledge is also money … but only if you keep it under lock and key. Hence, researchers who study capitalism are often faced with a dilemma: the best data is kept behind a hefty paywall. The only way to get access is if your institution pays for a subscription. And if you’re not lucky enough to work for a university, you’re out of luck.

Tidyquant: An Open-Access Tool for Studying the Stock Market

Download: PDF | EPUB

 … the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it …

— Karl Marx In the 1860s, Karl Marx declared that all value stemmed from labor. A century-long firestorm ensued. On its own, Marx’s claim seems innocent enough. But what made it incendiary was how he used it. Starting from the idea that labor creates value, Marx built a seductive critique of capitalism.