Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler In 1989, we applied for a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant to investigate the funding of fascist and Neo-Nazi movements in Israel. The Foundation did not find the topic important enough, and the application was ceremonially rejected. Here is what we wanted to do. Research plan The emergence of ultra […]
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Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Over the last year, I’ve watched with horror and amusement as health agencies around the world flip-flopped their advice on how to deal with COVID. My horror comes from knowing this flip-flopping breeds mistrust in science. But I am (morbidly) amused because I know that […]
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Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow People who fret about the debt we’re taking on to deal with climate change are (half) right. Because there’s two ways of dealing with the climate emergency: either we can avert it, or we can seek high ground and erect high […]
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Jonathan Nitzan What is capital? Despite centuries of debate, there is no clear answer to this question – and for a good reason. Capital is a polemic term. The way we define it attests our theoretical biases, ideological disposition, view of politics, class consciousness, social position, and more. Is capital the same as machines, or […]
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Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Last week I ran a Twitter survey to see what software my fellow researchers use. It turns out they like R: As an avid R user myself, this result didn’t surprise me. But it did make me think about my own approach to coding. In […]
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Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Capital-as-power, a framework from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, holds that companies don’t seek to be as profitable as possible – but rather to accumulate as much power as possible. A company doesn’t seek to be as big as possible, but rather, as dominant. https://capitalaspower.com/ There are two strategies […]
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Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix According to behavioral economics, most human decisions are mired in ‘bias’. It muddles our actions from the mundane to the monumental. Human behavior, it seems, is hopelessly subpar.1 Or is it? You see, the way that behavioral economists define ‘bias’ is rather peculiar. It involves […]
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Regan Boychuk The bias of Alberta’s media in favour of our dominant industry is both pervasive and obvious to any careful observer. But how to prove it? Studies of media bias are notoriously difficult and significant media analysis can easily become a gargantuan and subjective task. This novel study uses a small sample size while […]
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Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the course of 1991-92. And the results of that coup are the single biggest threat to a liveable future. This three-part […]
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Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the course of 1991-92. And the results of that coup are the single biggest threat to a liveable future. This three-part […]
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Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the course of 1991-92. And the results of that coup are the single biggest threat to a liveable future. This three-part […]
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Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Neoclassical economics is a hell of a drug. It has no theory of prices, no account of inflation, and its models all presume the existence of a perfectly rational “homo economicus” who is a “utility maximizer” with perfect information. Even the Queen is wise to the scam, grilling Bank […]
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Originally published at Fresh Economic Thinking Cameron Murray Do you believe this headline? I don’t. The many problems with measuring a country’s wealth are on full display in this Credit Suisse report. But let’s start a little closer to home. When I married my wife I promised to look after her financial and material needs. […]
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Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Rotten Tomatoes (RT) found a way to get every last drop from the well of convenience. Film criticism is already pressured, tacitly by convention, or explicitly by editors and bosses, to give bite-size scores with thumbs (up or down), stars (out of 4 or 5), letter grades […]
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Chris Mouré Note: this is the manuscript version of an article now featured in The Mint Magazine. Few will argue with the claim that shortages are socially harmful. Shortages, by definition, imply a lack of something – not enough stuff to go around. A shortage of food implies hunger; a shortage of electricity implies darkness. […]
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Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Ryan Kyger1 and Blair Fix Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. — attributed to Richard Feynman2 Most scientists don’t worry much about philosophy; they just get on with doing ‘science’. They run experiments, analyze data, and report results. And […]
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Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow The starting gun on Big Tech trustbusting was fired in 2017, when Lina Khan, then a law student (now an FTC trustbuster!) published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” a law-review article showing how Amazon formed a monopoly without legal trouble. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox The key was a Reagan-era shift in antitrust policy, based […]
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Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. — Hunter S. Thompson meme1 Browse the internet long enough and you’ll eventually run across Hunter S. Thompson’s meme […]
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Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Like other streaming services, Netflix does not make its user data public. To date, there are two exceptions to this privacy. Netflix released a large dataset of anonymized user activity when it offered a one million dollar prize for the best AI model that could predict user […]
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Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Today I’m trying a different type of post — one that’s not a deep dive, but instead, a rapid-fire summary of an important topic. My inspiration comes from Cory Doctorow, a sci-fi author who runs an old-fashioned links blog that he syndicates across the internet. […]
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