From Lessons from the Covid War: The Covid war is a story of how our wondrous scientific knowledge has run far, far ahead of the organized human ability to apply that knowledge in practice… …Real strategy is a notion of how someone plans concretely to connect ends with means. It is a theory of the …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
On mergers
Over the last six years I have edited and written dozens of articles about industry concentration, declining competition, “superstar firms”, and antitrust policy. For a long while, I was trying to catalog all that I’d been reading on this topic here (I’ve since given up tracking). The confusing thing about this topic is that over …
Neoliberalism, again
There’s a new New York Times Opinion essay about the US turn away from neoliberalism. Twitter thread versions of the piece here and here. I don’t really have any big point here except maybe a frustration about all the arguments that get tangled up in a topic like this. Here’s a sampling of the ideas …
Political economy
I have a new essay on economic policy and political economy that I want to quote in a second. The piece is an attempt to write something in response to several questions that keep coming up for me. And those questions began for me, in part, from a few different sources that didn’t make it …
More on why data helps
I’ve written before about the puzzle of why data helps. Why do even really basic, descriptive analytics seem anecdotally to be so useful? First, just one more time evidence that data sure seems to help. From a paper in Nature about forecasting social change: We compared forecasting approaches relying on (1) no data modelling (but …
Forecasting on INFER
Last year I had the opportunity to be a “Pro” forecaster on INFER, the crowd forecasting tournament run by Cultivate Labs and the University of Maryland (formerly Foretell of Georgetown’s CSET). Basically you get a small stipend to participate each month. It was fun and I recommend it! Ultimately, I decided not to keep going …
Code is not law
I’m fond of Lessig’s saying that “code is law” and I often mention it on the blog. But there’s a deeply distorted version of this idea cropping up in crypto lately and it’s worth distinguishing it from the original meme. Lessig’s idea was that human behavior was affected by four types of “governance” including markets, …
On falsification
From Richard McElreath’s textbook Statistical Rethinking, via Data Elixir: …The above is a kind of folk Popperism, an informal philosophy of science common among scientists but not among philosophers of science. Science is not describe by the falsification standard, and Popper recognized that. In fact, deductive falsification is impossible in nearly every scientific context. In …
Notes on trade and globalization
I’ve been trying to revisit the arguments and evidence for global trade and trade liberalization recently. I want to post a few links so I don’t lose track of them. Overall, I came away suspecting that the pro-trade side, which I’ve been sympathetic toward, is a bit overconfident relative to the evidence. But also that …
Technology adoption
Derek Thompson has a piece at The Atlantic on why America “doesn’t build what it invents.” It covers a lot of good ground. Here I just want to link to a few other things that I think speak to one piece of this topic. Paul Romer testified in 2020 that the US was first a …
beyond the times 