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. In it, Jonathan Nitzan demolishes the neoclassical theory of prices. It’s a master lesson in how to deconstruct a theory. […]
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 world, Hofstede found that responses clustered by country. In some countries, for instance, employees tended to prefer an autocratic style […]
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, that’s probably an exaggeration … but only slightly. Millions of words are spilled each day communicating science. Yet people have […]
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 know that human welfare improves as we use more resources. But it’s suicidal for all of humanity to pursue this […]
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 the throne at the age of 16 during a period of unprecedented strife. There had been 8 emperors in the […]
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 money go, I think modern monetary theory (MMT for short) is the correct one. But having a correct theory of […]
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 the power underpinnings of capitalism. Each year, RECASP hosts an essay competition. I’m proud to announce that the winner of […]
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 along without natural resources. — Robert Solow, 1974 In the distant future, aliens come to Earth. They find a planet […]
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 economics: neoclassical growth theory. Today I’ll break that silence. Neoclassical growth theory is a textbook example of Murphy’s law. Everything […]
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 developed stories about their place in the cosmos. Almost without exception, these stories were wrong. True, we’ve killed many of […]
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 income is proportional to productivity. The problem is that they have no way of measuring productivity that is independent of […]
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 like: In this post, I debunk the ‘productivity-pay gap’ by showing that it has nothing to do with productivity. The […]
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 what’s best for individuals within the group. If you’re surrounded by a group of trusting individuals, it’s best for you […]
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 practice of questioning the core principles of an accepted theory — is difficult for a simple reason. To do it, […]
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 to do as others do. Why? Presumably because it’s advantageous. In our evolutionary past, conformist groups beat out non-conformist groups. […]
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 they’re ‘just another firm’. In this post, I’m going to extend the evidence. I’ll first show you that as economies […]
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 reading outside my discipline. I read about physics, cosmology, biology … the list goes on. Basically, if it’s not political […]
Essay Prize Winners Costly Efficiencies Healthcare Spending, COVID-19, and the Public/Private Healthcare Debate Chris Mouré 2022 Winner Hype The Capitalist Degree of Induced Participation Yuri Di Liberto 2022 Runner Up From Commodities to Assets Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance Jesús Suaste Cherizola 2021 Winner The Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Mastery Ulf Martin […]
Growing Through Sabotage Energizing Hierarchical Power SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN June 2020 Abstract According to the theory of capital as power, capitalism, like any other mode of power, is born through sabotage and lives in chains — and yet everywhere we look we see it grow and expand. What explains this apparent puzzle of […]
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 economics. When it comes to studying income, economists ask the wrong question. Economists, I argue, have mostly asked: is income […]
