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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Download: PDF | EPUB Inflation is always and everywhere a phenomenon of structural change . — Jonathan Nitzan, 1992 Milton Friedman has been dead for more than a decade, but his ghost still haunts us. In the 1960s, Friedman declared that inflation is ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ — a problem of printing too much money.