If you’re good at something that isn’t valued by other people, you won’t be rewarded. This is the tyranny of meritocracy.

Has the digital revolution made wealth non-material?

The ideal of science is to respect the evidence — to take nobody’s word for it. But this cuts against our social instinct to pay deference to members of our tribe.

The social sciences, I’ve come to believe, don’t have a coherent concept of causation. To talk about ‘causation’ we need to have a boundary on cause and effect. I reflect on what this means for studying causation.

Citation counts are similar to social media “likes” — they are always positive. But what if we had negative citations?

Anthropologist Jason Hickel thinks we measure inequality incorrectly. He argues we should measure absolute inequality rather than relative inequality. I think this is a mistake.

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’.

Real GDP is key to macroeconomics. But is it a valid measure of economic scale?

In science, being wrong is call for a celebration. Now that you think I’m crazy, let me explain. Science is about the search for truth . Logically, this means we should celebrate when we are right . But here’s the catch. How do we know when we are right? We can’t. Science is about conditional truth. We have ideas that we think are right because they have not yet been proven wrong.