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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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. …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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!
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …