Blog
2025-08-12
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon To most of us, the beating heart of Hollywood film and TV is where we imagine it is supposed to be, in the historical studio lots of …
2025-05-14
Regan Boychuk British, American, and Russian elites planned global domination through one great war a century ago, but it did not quite work out. Instead, today we approach a third world war to avoid democracy …
2025-05-02
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow You know how “realist” has become a synonym for “asshole?” As in, “I’m not a racist, I’m just a ‘race realist?'” …
2025-04-09
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon I will be presenting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference on Friday, April 4 at 6PM. Here is the chart book for the …
2024-08-20
Coda to the 6-part series Alberta’s Rockefeller Coups Regan Boychuk Since a small and relatively weak people living alongside a great and powerful people necessarily devotes much time to study and observation of its large …
2024-03-22
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager Reading in the latest FT Weekend about NovoNordisk’s recent moves to corner the market for weight loss drugs, I was reminded of an eye-opening article from Rana Foroohar …
2024-03-19
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon This paper investigates the timing of labour strikes in Hollywood. The occurrence of strikes, such as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, can make sense when …
2024-01-12
Regan Boychuk Author’s Note: John D. Rockefeller Sr. had the last laugh about American anti-trust law and the muck-raking media before descending to Dante’s 9th Circle in May 1937. The oil industry’s center of gravity had …
2023-11-24
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2023-11-18
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Around the time of this post, SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) produced a tentative agreement in their 2023 negotiations. The SAG-AFTRA …
2023-10-31
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow If you’ve never had a fight over the phrase “intellectual property,” count yourself lucky, you normie, you. In the land of …
2023-10-05
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Missed Part 1? You should start here. Author’s note: Around the time of this post, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) …
2023-09-26
Jerry Cayford Originally published here A conversation, eighty-some years ago, shaped our world today. The conversation was among three papers in economics. In 1939, Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks published papers that steered economics through …
2023-09-20
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix One of the challenges of studying the past is that time has a maddening way of erasing evidence. Take the origin of life — the …
2023-09-08
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow “Political economy” may sound like an obscure technical matter, but it’s a really very simple (and incredibly important) idea: That the …
2023-07-22
Regan Boychuk Green Party of Alberta energy critic Author’s note Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The suggestion that a semi-secret conspiracy of racists transferred imperial control of Canada from the British to the Americans on …
2023-07-17
Daniel Baryon Originally published at libcom.org Author’s Note The following is the script of the video I published on my channel Anark. If you would like to watch that video, it is here Minor edits …
2023-06-14
Originally published at Wealth Economics Steve Roth Following the community of Socks (?s) or “social democrats” out there on the interwebs (this is definitely my economic tribe), in articles, and in books, there’s a particular …
2023-06-03
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike after failing to reach an acceptable agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and …
2023-05-31
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Download: PDF | EPUB … the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it … — Karl Marx In …
2023-05-29
Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow When you hear that a billionaire has bought a horse or a newspaper or a sports team, you might think it’s …
2023-05-26
Originally published at Manchester Metropolitan University Adam Marshall In recent years, as governments and corporations have intensified their efforts to locate, extract and monetise oil, gas, and various other biophysical resources, the world has simultaneously …
2023-05-25
Originally published at Asimmetria Yuri Di Liberto What if I told you that they knew everything? And that they have known it for a very long time? On January 13 of this year, 2023, in …
2023-05-23
Regan Boychuk Green Party of Alberta energy critic & May 2023 candidate for Banff-Kananaskis Author’s note This article will prove the United States imposed its foreign policy doctrine of “Minimum Duty” on Alberta in November …
2023-05-19
Christopher Mouré and Shai Gorsky When it comes to social institutions, not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) allegedly strike a balance between the private and public realm. While privately owned and operated, not-for-profits are distinguished by their ostensibly …
2023-04-26
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 …
2023-04-24
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. …
2023-04-23
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 …
2023-03-26
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 …
2023-03-16
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 …
2023-03-09
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 …
2023-02-22
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, …
2023-01-10
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 …
2022-12-13
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 …
2022-12-04
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 …
2022-12-02
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 …
2022-11-24
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 …
2022-10-24
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 …
2022-10-21
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 …
2022-10-03
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 …
2022-09-19
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 …
2022-09-09
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 …
2022-09-06
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 …
2022-09-01
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 …
2022-07-21
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 …
2022-07-15
Tim Di Muzio Any student of capitalism knows it is a distinct economic system prone to periodic crises. These crises come in many forms and are typically studied after the fact, as the work of …
2022-07-13
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Two quotes to ponder as you read “Purdue’s Poison Pill,” Adam Levitin’s forthcoming Texas Law Review paper: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain …
2022-06-16
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix There’s something mysterious about finance. The symbols are arcane. The math is complex. The practitioners are impressively educated. And the stakes are high. All of …
2022-06-07
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow I was 12 years into my Locus Magazine column when I published the piece I’m most proud of, “IP,” from September 2020. It came after an epiphany, one that …
2022-05-13
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix They say that Americans love two things: freedom … and guns. The trouble with guns is obvious. The trouble with freedom is more subtle, and …
2022-05-10
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon On the question of who judges the quality of a film, it is easy to start with a notion that the ultimate judge of a film’s quality …
2022-05-04
Blair Fix The Review of Capital as Power is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Capital as Power Essay Prize: First Prize: ‘Costly Efficiencies: Healthcare Spending, COVID-19, and the Public/Private Healthcare Debate’, by …
2022-04-29
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Two of the most astute IP scholars I know also happen to be two of the best legal writers I know, and also happen to work at one of …
2022-04-05
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762 In his epic 18th-century treatise Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued …
2022-04-01
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow In my 2017 novel WALKAWAY, there’s a scene where the protagonists get into a self-driving car owned by a ruthless plutocrat, only to discover that it moves faster than …
2022-03-30
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2022-03-22
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow The quest to bring antitrust law to bear against tech companies is finally paying off, but it’s been a long, hard slog. At the vanguard have been two legal …
2022-03-10
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2022-03-09
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon We ended the last post with a scenario of someone dreaming of their film going all the way to the Academy Awards. But I also waved away …
2022-03-03
Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler Originally published on Twitter During the twilight of feudalism, wars, whose cost soared in tandem with their material scope and unit price, were the most financially demanding expenses. Changing military …
2022-03-02
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis In a new working paper I outline how slavery contributed to the development of the United States before the Civil War. The paper is called ‘King Cotton, the Munificent’ …
2022-02-28
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow If you visit Amazon’s Prime Video homepage, you’ll see that the title of that page is “Rent or Buy: Prime Video.” There’s a plain-language meaning of “buy” that most …
2022-02-24
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Let’s talk econophysics. If you’re not familiar, ‘econophysics’ is an attempt to understand economic phenomena (like the distribution of income) using the tools of statistical …
2022-02-23
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager Joseph Baines and I have a new briefing with Common Wealth examining the financial performance of UK oil and gas producers and energy suppliers. Some of the key …
2022-02-18
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis The dominant view among economic historians is that American slavery was an unnecessary evil: nothing good came of it for the development of the United States after independence. Even …
2022-02-16
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Don’t let the sweater-vests and the (dilettantish) “education reform” work fool you: Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law …
2022-02-15
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2022-02-14
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Sitting through the Academy Awards ceremony can be frustrating if you watch a lot of films. The breadth of your viewings has given you the perspective to …
2022-02-09
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Unless you are Mexican, it is easy to forget that California was not always in the United States, having been a part of Mexico until the Mexican-American War of …
2022-02-07
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Our societal narratives are invisible by dint of their ubiquity, but they are far more important in stabilizing the status quo that all the cops and jails and domestic …
2022-02-04
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix If there was an award for the most pernicious scientific idea ever, what theory should get first prize? I would vote for eugenics, a theory …
2022-02-02
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis One of my favourite graphs in recent writing on economic history might seem obscure. Reproduced below, it is found on page 28 of the working paper underlying the latest …
2022-01-28
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power is David Dayen’s new book about the concentration of industry in America and around the world; one interesting implication of monopolies …
2022-01-22
Originally published at dtcochrane.com DT Cochrane Commissioned and originally published by The Blackwood Art Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga. As I write this, disability justice advocates are rallying in opposition to Bill C-7, …
2022-01-19
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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, …
2022-01-15
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Following the Second World War, there was a worldwide dollar shortage due to the United States’ high level of self-sufficiency as an agro-industrial behemoth. Governments therefore imposed quantitative controls …
2022-01-10
Originally published at ownlynch.org Owen Lynch Part A: Overview 1. A Need for Better Theory If you are a well-educated person in the 21st century, you probably have conflicted views. On the one hand, the …
2022-01-07
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow In his 2019 book Dignity, Chris Arnade left his Wall Street job and traveled America, talking to poor, marginalized people, mostly at McDonald’s restaurants. Now, in a new essay …
2021-12-16
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon A survey of academic writing on the business of culture will show that authors seldomly restrain themselves from making predictions or giving recommendations to the hypothetical economic …
2021-12-13
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Do you remember peak oil? It was all the rage a decade ago. Now, almost no one is talking about it. The funny thing is, …
2021-12-08
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Giovanni Federico and Antonio Tena-Junguito (2016) have produced a data set of world trade that includes exports and imports, in both current and constant prices, going back to the …
2021-12-01
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager In a new briefing with Common Wealth, Miriam Brett, Joseph Baines and I examine ownership and financial data for the “Big Six” UK energy companies: Centrica (British Gas), …
2021-11-25
Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix It’s been 20 years, but I still remember the feeling. It was a mix of curiosity and unease. I was curious because I was learning …
2021-11-23
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis In a previous post I discussed a working paper in which I criticised Roberto Cortés Conde’s estimates of Argentina’s industrial output from 1875 to 1913. In a new version …
2021-11-22
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow The Internet Society (ISOC) is a nonprofit that is in the enviable position of receiving tens of millions of dollars every year merely for overseeing work that someone else …
2021-11-17
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2021-11-16
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon I have been fortunate enough to teach university classes on politics and film. I am certain few students in these classes could guess how stressful it was …
2021-11-12
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis When a prominent economic historian provides a new estimate of something, it is likely that the estimate will be taken at face value. Other economic historians will cite it, …
2021-11-08
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” advanced a simple, data-supported hypothesis: that markets left to their own will cause capital to grow faster than the economy as a …
2021-11-05
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix It was a Thursday in August when all hell broke loose. The place was Logan County, West Virginia. The year was 1921. Over the next …
2021-10-28
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Revising our assessment of the Spanish empire is in vogue among economic historians. Most notably, Regina Grafe and Alejandra Irigoin (2006; 2008) have sought to revise the nature of …
2021-10-27
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow The web is unusably beshitted and encrufted with popups, interstitials, rolldowns, nagware, paywalls, autoplaying video, ads that scroll with the page, and worse. I haven’t looked at the web …
2021-10-26
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager News of the immanent demise of companies responsible for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions might sound like a boon for efforts to avert climate breakdown. …
2021-10-22
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (AJR, 2002) famously argued that a ‘reversal of fortune’ had taken place among ex-European colonies. Generally speaking, they argued, those ex-colonies that …
2021-10-21
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow “Surprise billing” is when you go to the ER and discover that the doc, the specialist, or the test you got were performed by “independent contractors” who are not …
2021-10-20
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager Switching Things Up This year I am introducing a new second year undergraduate module on theories of international political economy. Modelled on the theory module I teach on …
2021-10-18
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2021-10-17
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Last year the eighth edition of the Penn World Table (PWT) was released to considerable fanfare – indeed, one commentator described it as ‘a special day for all researchers …
2021-10-15
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Comparing the government to a household or a business isn’t merely inapt (a government is a currency creator, while a household is a currency user – their budgeting constraints …
2021-10-14
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager Last month I had the pleasure of working on a new Common Wealth report entitled Commoning the Company with Mathew Lawrence, Adrienne Buller and Joseph Baines. In the …
2021-10-07
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Last fall, I wrote a short article for The Mint Magazine about how income relates to hierarchy. The Mint, if you’re not familiar, does great …
2021-10-02
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Jeffrey Williamson‘s (2011) book Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind is one of the most interesting attempts to explain the ‘great divergence’ between rich and poor countries. It is …
2021-10-01
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow One of the most exciting, eye-opening articles I’ve read in AGES. Showing how shareholder capitalism is a lie BY ITS PROPONENTS’ OWN TERMS…Genius. https://lpeblog.org/2020/02/18/privatizing-sovereignty-socializing-property-what-economics-doesnt-teach-you-about-the-corporation/ Marx thought individual property would …
2021-09-30
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager For four years now I’ve been teaching a postgraduate module called Global Political Economy: Contemporary Approaches. This is one of two core modules for our MA programme in …
2021-09-29
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2021-09-28
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Andre Gunder Frank’s Lumpenbourgeoisie, Lumpendevelopment was published in 1972, almost half a century ago. Reading it now, it is surprising how contemporary it seems. Most notably, in a few …
2021-09-27
Note from Blair Fix: 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 …
2021-09-26
Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Reagan turned the country upside-down, in a very bad way. The “Reagan revolution” was indeed revolutionary (or, rather, counter-revolutionary), reversing a half-century of progress on social safety nets, workers’ …
2021-09-24
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager Earlier this month in Berlin I participated in the third workshop of the “Doing Debt” research network. I received the invitation back in May and was asked by …
2021-09-22
Originally published at joefrancis.info Joe Francis Recently the Economist published a front-page feature on ‘The Tragedy of Argentina: A Century of Decline‘. By summarising the current scholarship on the ‘Argentine paradox’, the article demonstrates why the study of …
2021-09-21
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager The following piece is based on my State of the Art article in Socio-Economic Review. It was originally published for The Conversation and the World Economic Forum Global …
2021-09-20
Joe Francis discusses the problem of made-up data in historical statistics. …
2021-09-18
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Your movie turned out the be a flop? “Nobody knows anything”. You mistakenly believed consumers wanted to see a movie set in the 1920s? “Nobody knows anything”. …
2021-09-17
Originally published at dtcochrane.com DT Cochrane I recently saw a misleading presentation of COVID data pertaining to Israel. In this post I’m sharing several graphs that I made to counter this misleading image. Israel is …
2021-09-16
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager I put together Figure 1 for a paper I will be presenting at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in Lyon this summer. The …
2021-08-28
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Part 1 introduced Scorcese’s argument in his Harper’s essay, which was about much more than Fellini. The first part also explained how we can connect Scorcese’s essay …
2021-08-25
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager With the academic term winding down, I thought it would be useful to post some reflections on my teaching experiences this past year. In total, I taught three …
2021-08-20
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings is a telling example of Hollywood rationalizing its so-called inability to widen the boundaries of its creativity. In this case, the …
2021-08-19
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Brian Hager I’m spending some time during these summer months developing a new undergraduate course on wealth and income inequality. Branko Milanovic’s wonderful new book Global Inequality: A New Approach …
2021-08-16
Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon What is more pleasurable: reading Martin Scorcese on cinema or reading reactions to Scorcese on cinema? The reactions compete for our pleasure because they reveal how easy …
2021-08-13
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix If you listen carefully, you can hear Jeff Bezos getting richer. There’s the sound again. Another billion in Bezos’ coffers. Let’s put some numbers to …
2021-07-27
Originally published at dtcochrane.com DT Cochrane In Part 2, I looked at the shifts in U.S. household consumption that occurred during WWII. While aggregate consumption increased alongside massive government intervention, the qualitative mix of that …
2021-07-23
Originally published at dtcochrane.com DT Cochrane In Part 1, I explained the motivation for this series. I want to use the analogy of WWII, as invoked by economists JW Mason and Mike Konczal in an …
2021-07-22
Originally published at dtcochrane.com DT Cochrane Economist JW Mason recently tweeted the following: Bloomberg writer Peter Coy was motived to perform this research by an NYT op-ed from Mason and Mike Konczal. Mason and Konczal’s …
2021-07-20
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Donald Trump took an IQ test … you’ll never guess what he scored! Apologies. That was my attempt at clickbait.1 Now that I’ve hooked you, …
2021-07-09
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Prices are caused by supply and demand, right? So say neoclassical economists. If you’ve bought their fairy tale, I recommend you watch the video below. …
2021-06-26
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2021-06-18
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In science, the corollary is that a good chart is worth a whole article. Okay, …
2021-06-08
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix How can we live the ‘good life’ without killing the planet? My last post on energy and empire got me thinking about this question. We …
2021-05-24
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix They called him the ‘Little Emperor’. Romulus Augustus — better known as Romulus ‘Augustulus’ (‘Little Augustus’) — was the last Western Roman Emperor. He assumed …
2021-05-12
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2021-05-04
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2021-03-29
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle no “problem”. The world can, in effect, get …
2021-02-12
By Cassandra Jeffery1 and M. V. Ramana2 The “largest bribery, money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people and the state of Ohio” came to light during an unexpected press conference in July 2020 in Columbus. …
2021-02-05
Tim Di Muzio1 PDF version available here The phrase, ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ is typically attributed to the American showman, P.T. Barnum and was made infamous since the mid-19th century by gamblers, hucksters …
2021-02-02
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix I’ve written a lot on this blog about the absurdity of marginal productivity theory. But I haven’t said much about the other pillar of mainstream …
2021-01-05
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix If the history of science has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t trust our preconceptions about how the world works. All human societies have …
2020-12-17
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Today I’m going to revisit a topic that a month ago I committed to stop writing about — the productivity-income quagmire. Neoclassical economists argue that …
2020-11-09
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Have you heard of the ‘productivity-pay gap’? It’s the (apparently) growing gap between the productivity of US workers and their pay. Here’s what it looks …
2020-10-21
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix As social animals, humans live and die by the success of our groups. This raises a dilemma. What’s best for the group is often not …
2020-10-09
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2020-10-01
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Science is miraculously improbable. To work, it must fight against a deep human instinct — our desire to conform. As social animals, humans are built …
2020-09-25
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Governments are different than firms, right? Perhaps not. In Part 1 of this series, I argued that when it comes to size, governments behave like …
2020-09-17
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Originally published on Economics from the Top Down. I have a confession. I’m a political economist by trade, but I spend most of my time …
2020-09-05
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2020-08-19
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix I confess that I have a recurring nightmare. In it, I realize that everything I’ve ever written about economics is wrong. Neoclassical economics is not, …
2020-08-11
Originally published at sbhager.com Sandy Hager THINKING ABOUT DEATH I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently. No, it’s not something that came about because of the global pandemic and my new daily ritual of …
2020-08-11
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Income, I’ve come to believe, is shaped largely by rank within a hierarchy. If you’re at the top of a hierarchy, you’ll earn a handsome …
2020-07-25
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2020-07-19
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In How Hierarchy Can Mediate the Returns to Education I examined the pay structure of the US military. I found that hierarchical rank is (by …
2020-07-12
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In The Social Environment as a Cause in Economics I argued that human behavior has two parts: Individual variation An environment that acts on this …
2020-07-04
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Have you noticed that economists are missing a word in their vocabulary? In microeconomics you’ll see words like ‘individual’, ‘utility’ and ‘maximize’. But you won’t …
2020-06-23
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2020-06-14
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Does productivity explain income? I asked this question in a previous post. My answer was a bombastic no. In this post, I’ll dig deeper into …
2020-06-06
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Like many Canadians, I grew up with a faith in meritocracy. Do your best, I believed, and the world would reward you. In school, this …
2020-05-28
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix A revolution is underway around us and it’s called the digital. And it’s changing everything. More than 80% of wealth is now non-material. — Charles …
2020-03-01
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix When it comes to earning income in a hierarchy, it’s not what you know that matters. It’s who you control. This was the provocative idea …
2020-02-21
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix A 25% chance. That’s the likelihood that when I tell someone I’m searching for a job, they’ll say: Remember, Blair … to land a job, …
2020-02-15
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2020-02-10
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix If you ask the average person what ‘science’ is, they’ll probably answer something like ‘it’s what we know about the world’. To the lay person, …
2020-02-03
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Do you think that the discipline of economics is a sham — an ideology masquerading as science? If so, here is a reading list for …
2020-01-25
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In Problems With Measuring Inequality, I discussed how inequality is an ambiguous concept. The problem, in short, is that a single metric can never capture …
2020-01-17
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Did you hear the joke about the economists who tested their theory by defining it to be true? Oh, I forgot. It’s not a joke. …
2020-01-12
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix For the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about causation in the social sciences. As with many instances of reflection, this was prompted by rejection. …
2020-01-05
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Economists often talk about income inequality the same way a doctor would talk about a child’s height. Just as a doctor would say “Sylvia continues …
2019-12-24
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about Aaron Swartz. Swartz was an internet pioneer who, in his teens and early 20s, …
2019-12-16
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-12-09
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-11-26
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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. …
2019-11-18
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-11-12
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-11-06
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-10-29
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-10-20
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-10-15
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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. …
2019-10-07
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In the opening post of this blog, I described my ‘top-down’ approach to studying society. This means studying groups of people without trying to reduce …
2019-10-02
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix 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 …
2019-09-16
Elvire Thouvenot has produced an animated video that summarizes the key points of Bichler and Nitzan’s 2014 paper “Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? Three Views on Economic Policy in Times of Crisis.” This paper was first …
2019-05-01
Blair Fix, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler The study of economic growth is central to macroeconomics. More than anything else, macroeconomists are concerned with finding policies that encourage growth. And by ‘growth’, they mean the …
2019-04-19
Ken Zimmerman This piece was originally posted on the Real-World Economics Review Blog here and here. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan are Israeli political economists. Together they’ve created a thought-provoking power theory of capitalism and …
2019-01-08
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Originally published at Real World Economics Review Blog. A new, capitalism-denying book is on the shelves, and it makes a stunning discovery: ‘Capitalism without competition is not capitalism’! Distortions: Capitalism …
2018-09-06
Joe Francis The tendency toward buying other companies more than building new productive capacity continues in the United States In a past life I had access to expensive databases of corporate statistics, which I used …
2018-03-21
Tim Di Muzio This post originally appeared on the website for Review of African Political Economy. Despite the fact that the ‘capital as power’ approach to critical political economy has been around for some time …
2018-02-09
James McMahon Blair Fix, whose publications are available on this site, was interviewed by Post-Scarcity Anarchism. The interview covers his research on energy use and the relationship between hierarchy and personal income. Worth the listen! …
2017-12-12
Shimshom Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan The following research note first appeared on Real World Economics Review Blog. We have just updated the charts in our 2014 RWER paper ‘Still About Oil?’, and the picture they …
2017-05-12
The following commentary on Nitzan and Bichler’s piece ‘Can Capitalist Afford a Trumped Recovery?’ first appeared on the blog Pension Pulse, written by Leo Kolivakis. Earlier this week, I hooked up for a lunch with …
2017-04-19
DT Cochrane In the days following the wide-spread distribution of a video depicting Chicago transportation police officers violently removing Dr. David Dao from a United Airlines flight, there was celebration as the market pummelled the …
2017-01-02
DT Cochrane Deutsche Bank was a central figure of the 2008 global financial crisis. While some of its compatriots, such as Goldman Sachs, have re-ascended to the commanding heights of global capital, Deutsche remains a …
2016-12-16
Sandy Hager The following post is based loosely on my presentation at the first annual Thammasat University-Conference for Asia Pacific Studies in Phuket, Thailand (8-9 December 2016). What a difference a few months makes. This …
2016-09-01
DT Cochrane The presiding logic of capitalism is that of accumulation. CasP re-emphasizes and re-theorizes accumulation as ‘Moses & the Prophets’ of capitalism. However, Nitzan and Bichler’s theorization severs the link between accumulation and productivity …
2016-06-07
DT Cochrane In certain circles, Charlie Munger is a demi-god. He is the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company controlled by the god of markets himself, or rather, Warren Buffett. The words spoken and …
2016-05-04
Sandy Hager This is a (longer) draft version of an article that is under consideration for the newsletter of the Tax Justice Network: Tax Justice Focus. Taxation is all about power. We are constantly reminded …
2016-04-15
DT Cochrane Preface. I successfully defended my dissertation in December. This served as the introductory presentation for the defence. In it, I explain what I tried to do with the dissertation, the methods I used, …
2016-04-14
DT Cochrane The North Carolina legislature recently passed a law, widely known as the ‘Bathroom Bill,’ that bans anti-discrimination protections for gay and transgender people. The law has generated a lot of backlash from the …
2016-04-12
DT Cochrane The Globe & Mail is reporting that the average fuel efficiency of new vehicles sold in 2014 dropped for the first time since 2011. The coverage suggests this is a response to falling …
2016-04-05
DT Cochrane Reportage of the Panama Papers, leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, is getting intense attention. The papers reveal the use of shell companies to shelter wealth on behalf of many …
2016-04-04
DT Cochrane An op-ed on the advocacy website Oil Change International examines the high levels of debt within the oil business and the consequences of that debt for extraction. It postulates a dangerous positive feedback …
2015-12-24
Max Ajl A review of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bickler’s The Scientist and the Church. Originally published at Jadaliyya Howard Page, a director at what was then Exxon, was once asked, “What would have happened …
2015-12-01
DT Cochrane The IMF recently announced that China’s currency, the CYN (Chinese Yuan Renminbi), would be included in the IMF’s basket of currencies, known as the SRD (special drawing rights). The designation comes after China …
2015-11-30
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Repost from Real-World Economics Review Blog If we are to believe the conventional creed, Hollywood films are highly risky investments. According to De Vany, revenue forecasts have zero precision, which …
2015-07-11
Jonathan Nitzan Blair Fix, a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, points to some important limitations of income inequality data. In a recent posting on capitalaspower.com, Fix shows …
2015-05-11
DT Cochrane The Globe & Mail recently published a roundup of seven analyses of the Canadian housing sector. All of the analyses took some position on whether or not housing in Canada is “overvalued.” The …
2015-04-28
DT Cochrane The logic of accumulation is not the only logic that motivates capitalists. As fully actualized human beings, they remain complex in their desires. Rather, the logic of accumulation is dominant and, Nitzan and …
2015-04-01
Presentation at UQAM, Montreal, organized by Association des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques (AESE UQAM), March 31, 2015 There are many explanations for the recent global crisis, but most seem to agree that the origins of …
2015-02-21
Joe Francis New data on the profitability of Argentina’s largest corporations help explain the origins of its last military dictatorship. During Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983, up to 30,000 people were killed by the armed …
2015-02-14
Mladen Ostojic Recommended reading by the Transnational Institute (TNI) of Policy Studies: This paper demonstrates that the interests of American banking and government have converged since the early 1980s and relates this trend to modern …
2014-12-10
Joe Francis New data illustrate the extent to which economists have stopped discussing each other’s work. Once upon a time, economists regularly used to publicly criticise each other’s work in academic journals. But not any …
2014-12-10
Jonathan Nitzan In his November 29, 2013 piece, ‘Low Capex, High Market Cap: A New High for Corporate Sabotage?’, Edward Lam lends support to CasP’s sabotage thesis by showing how firms with relatively low ‘greenfield’ …
2014-11-27
Phil Leech According to some forecasters the price of oil might hit $75 a barrel soon. Goldman Sachs has even predicted a $70 barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in 2015. If the price does …
2014-11-18
DT Cochrane A systemic review [PDF] of systemic reviews of scientific literature on the relationship between sugar and obesity found, unsurprisingly, that there is bias in the reviews conducted on behalf of the sugar business. …
2014-11-17
Frederick H. Pitts Resonance and dissonance in the rhythms of freelance creative work In the last blog, I applied some of Nitzan and Bichler’s ideas to freelance work in the creative industries. I utilised their …
2014-10-31
Frederick H. Pitts Creativity, sabotage and the management of risk and responsibility in freelance creative work Nitzan and Bichler theorise a dissonant relation of sabotage between power and creativity, business and industry. What they show …
2014-10-17
Frederick H. Pitts Capital as Power, risk-aversion and the avoidance of uncertainty Mainstream critiques of contemporary capitalism conducted in the wake of the Great Recession tend to indict a number of factors. Perceived short-termism. The …
2014-10-08
Frederick H. Pitts Rhythms of Risk and Responsibility in Freelance Creative Work This series of blogs applies Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of capital as power to the empirical concern of freelance work in the creative …
2014-09-25
Joseph Baines How do we make sense of the role of different participants in futures markets? According to the conventional wisdom, market participants can be put into two different categories: hedgers and speculators. Hedgers, such …
2014-09-05
DT Cochrane Canadians take pride in Tim Hortons. It is an icon of contemporary Canadiana. When news emerged that Burger King (BKW) was planning a takeover, the media was filled with stories of people’s outrage. …
2014-08-20
Shai Gorsky This series of posts will explore some contemporary fields in “complexity science”. They summarize experiences from the Santa-Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School 2014, with the hope of suggesting to readers useful research …
2014-08-11
DT Cochrane The world of traders has largely been outside political economic analysis. With financial values treated as ‘fictitious’ representations of real values, trading is, at best, a distortion. The actual individuals who perform this …
2014-07-25
DT Cochrane Harvard Medical School researchers Michelle Holmes and Wendy Chen wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about research they published in 2010 that found aspirin may be an effective treatment for breast …
2014-07-16
Jeremy Green With the Bank of England signalling an impending interest rate rise, monetary policy has returned to centre stage. Since 2008 we have lived through a period of extremely unorthodox monetary policy characterised by …
2014-07-08
DT Cochrane The replacement of labour by machines has brought many improvements in social well-being. New machines have made a wide variety jobs safer and less physically debilitating. Yet, the process is far from decisively …
2014-06-26
Joseph Baines The corn-ethanol boom represents one of the most dramatic changes in the world food system in recent decades. The ethanol sector now absorbs around 40% of the corn produced in the US. Surging …
2014-06-15
James McMahon John Oliver, a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, now has his own HBO show. Like what he did on The Daily Show, Oliver’s Last Week Tonight brings irreverence and …
2014-06-12
DT Cochrane What is a tree worth? Is this a question you’ve ever pondered? Does it seem like an odd question? Perhaps it seems like an inappropriate question? How could someone possibly attach a financial …
2014-04-25
Tim Di Muzio The Privatization of Money: The Greatest Sabotage in Human History? Part II Last time we found out that modern money is created when commercial banks make loans to people and businesses. They …
2014-04-02
DT Cochrane Television personality Kevin O’Leary is best known as the ‘asshole’ on the investment reality shows Dragon’s Den, in Canada, and Shark Tank, in the United States. The shows have self-styled entrepreneurs bring forth …
2014-03-05
Tim Di Muzio The Capitalization of Money Creation: The Greatest Sabotage in Human History? Every year in my course on Political Economy in the New Millennium I ask my students to do an exercise. The …
2014-02-27
Ilirjan Shehu Speaking to students in Jakarta, Indonesia, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared a few days ago that climate change is the world’s “most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction. Likening climate change to …
2014-02-25
James McMahon Over at Heterodox Microeconomics Research Network they have a thorough list of academic publications that are relevant to heterodox theories of capitalism. The list covers the following subjects: History and Methodology of Heterodox …
2014-02-13
Eric George Since 2012, the U.S Department of Justice has launched a series of private negotiations with Wall Street banks relating to their involvement in the 2008 financial crisis. The DoJ made headlines this November …
2014-02-04
Sandy Hager In an interesting piece for the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell assesses Obama’s declaration to ‘go it alone’ in light of the ‘obstructionist Republican agenda’ in the US Congress. In a recent State of …
2014-02-03
Tim Di Muzio The Constitution of the United States of America It is by now fairly clear that the Congress of the United States is a ‘do-nothing’ Congress populated by 268 millionaires (out of 534 …
2014-01-14
DT Cochrane Toronto’s Pearson Airport was recently thrown into chaos when bad weather forced it to suspend ground operations. For eight hours, hundreds of flights scheduled to land and take-off were unable to do so. …
2014-01-12
Ilirjan Shehu Brussels Business is a documentary about the important role dominant capital has played in the shaping of the European Union from its early days. It explores the secretive activity of big business and …
2014-01-12
DT Cochrane The title of this piece might make readers think of capitalist power over the masses. However, in this case, I’m thinking of how capital serves to discipline the decision-makers of capitalism. A recent …
2014-01-05
Tim Di Muzio Royal Authority and Private Property Last week we considered the concept of ownership though the work of Veblen and Marx. We noted that the establishment and protection of private property involved the …
2013-12-28
DT Cochrane A recent episode of Planet Money describes a long running feud between two makers of hand bells. The story itself was interesting. However, two parts jumped out at me as relevant to CasP. …
2013-12-26
Jeremy Green The contested nature of the economic ‘recovery’ has become the central theme of British political debate. The next election, in 2015, will be fought on these terms, with the Coalition government trumpeting its …
2013-12-23
Tim Di Muzio Sabotage and Ownership Last week we considered how the capital as power framework seeks to conceptualize two different forms of sabotage: a general sabotage that limits the potential of humanity in which …
2013-12-22
The First Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power was sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. Talks were held at York University, Toronto, …
2013-12-19
James McMahon Found this video when browsing Boing Boing. Originally posted by NASA, this video is fascinating. It may also stand as a metaphor for the methodological problems in political economic theory. Consider part of …
2013-12-10
Tim Di Muzio Last week we looked briefly at the origin of the term ‘sabotage’ and found that it was more associated with the working class than it was with elite power – those who …
2013-12-09
DT Cochrane The EU has fined a selection of European and U.S. American banks €1.7 billion for rigging major interest-rate benchmarks. The article notes that the benchmarks – Libor, and the Tokyo and euro area …
2013-12-02
DT Cochrane This is an interesting NYT article about buying habits, market research and advertising. It describes how Target has been able to compile and analyze customer data in order to identify women who are …
2013-11-29
Edward Lam Found amongst some recent market commentary the chart above seems to be quite striking evidence in favour of the Capital as Power framework. The data series have been put together by the investment …
2013-11-29
Tim Di Muzio Welcome to a weekly investigation into the fascinating world of corporate sabotage where human creativity, cooperation, mutual aid and well-being are all held ransom for the profit and power of dominant owners. …
2013-11-20
DT Cochrane The market has spoken: it disapproves of Rob Ford. A Bloomberg article notes that Toronto’s borrowing costs have risen relative to those of other Canadian municipalities. The determinants of bond prices are complex. …
2013-10-24
DT Cochrane It is exciting to see this website grow. Content is being added here and there, and our Working Paper Series has its first paper. What already stands out on this website, in my …
2013-10-08
DT Cochrane The media is notoriously short sighted. Its reports on recent events are largely devoid of any historical consideration. This is equally true of market reports. Despite not putting market events into a historical …
2013-09-29
DT Cochrane Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. This seemingly universal gender dichotomy is actually a very recent invention, as this post on smithsonian.com makes clear. At the end of the 19th century, most boys …
2013-09-10
DT Cochrane Wired has published a series of maps that try to visualize racial segregation in many of America’s biggest cities. From Wired: “The [maps], created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper …
2013-08-29
DT Cochrane ‘Ask a Mortician‘ is a quirky and informative Youtube series with mortician Caitlin Doughty. The most recent video touches on the political economy of the funeral business. The question is based on an …
2013-08-21
DT Cochrane Sports writer Patrick Hruby offers a breakdown of recent turmoil over the possibility that Texas A&M football star Johnny Manziel broke college sports rules pertaining to the payment of athletes. The piece provides …
2013-08-20
DT Cochrane The media company 21st Century Fox has purchased a five percent share of the website Vice for $70 million. The website produces a wide range of content. However, much of what it currently …
2013-08-19
DT Cochrane The Brazilian government is due to spend R$200 billion (US$84 billion) on its ports, airports, railroads and roads over the next two years. This spending highlights the impossibility of separating ‘politics’ from the …
2013-08-16
DT Cochrane In the August 16 issue of The Financial Times, popularizing economics writer Tim Harford joined the chorus of voices raising the issue of income inequality. He asked whether or not we should care …
2013-08-16
DT Cochrane This American Life is a great public radio show based out of Chicago. They just hit their 500th episode and to celebrate, Ira Glass talked with his other producers about favourite past episodes. …
2013-08-14
DT Cochrane U.S. regulators have subpoenaed powerhouses of financial intermediation, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, as part of a probe into metal warehousing. Two companies identified with the supposedly ephemeral world of finance are being …
2013-06-13
DT Cochrane In a Guardian op-ed, Doreen Massey explains how neoliberalism has altered the way we think and talk about the economy. While the general point is correct, the issue is much more fundamental than …
2013-06-13
DT Cochrane The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that pieces of the human gene cannot be patented. The ruling invalidated two high profile cancer detection patents awarded to Myriad Genetics (MYGN). The ruling upheld the …
2013-06-03
DT Cochrane The second part of this episode of Radiolab talks about the importance of nanoseconds when it comes to profitably making trades. The importance of this small difference led to a land grab as …
2013-06-02
DT Cochrane Activists confronted Barrick Gold CEO Peter Monk and shareholders at the company’s annual meeting. A Globe & Mail article suggested: “The long term outlook for Barrick shares hinges on many factors: the gold …