I recently read Radical Uncertainty by the economists John Kay and Mervyn King. A few notes, then a bunch of block quotes that stood out to me… Notes I strongly disagree in practice with their argument against probabilistic reasoning. Only economists who’ve spent time in finance and business schools could possibly think that probability and …
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My writing for Quartz
I recently left Quartz after ~2.5 rewarding years as an editor there. The most gratifying editorial aspect of that work was editing hundreds of interesting features from nearly every reporter on staff. There are too many of those pieces to try and select favorites. But I wrote a bit, too. And I wanted to link …
A.O. Scott on pragmatism and art
…Among my principal guides are Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey. If there’s an implicit allegiance here, a school of thought in which I might claim membership, it’s some version of pragmatism. That is, I believe that our understanding of art emerges from our experience of it, and that our notions of beauty and value …
Edmund Wilson on journalism
“When I speak of myself as a journalist,” he wrote, “I do not of course mean that I have always dealt with current events or that I have not put into my books something more than can be found in my articles; I mean that I have made my living mainly by writing in periodicals. …
Corporate social responsibility
There’s a lot of buzz and debate about ESG and corporate social responsibility lately, so I wanted to post something I worked on recently on this topic. I helped Quartz put together a page describing its mission to “Make Business Better,” and most of that reflects group work bridging a range of perspectives within the …
How economics thinks about technology and labor
A recent David Autor review paper sums up the evolution: I began by asking what the role of technology—digital or otherwise—is in determining wages and shaping wage inequality. I presented four answers corresponding to four strands of thinking on this topic: the education race, the task-polarization model, the automation-reinstatement race, and the era of AI …
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Deference to experts
This is a good tweet: The value of deferring to experts depends on the alternative. If the alternative is deferring to a market or the consensus of smart generalists with good incentives or to a carefully calibrated statistical model, then deference to experts might not look so good–or at least is likely incomplete. But a …
Paul Romer on theory
In a great post defending economist Lisa Cook’s appointment to the Fed Board of Governors, Nobel-winner and famed theorist Paul Romer gets into the role of theory vs. empirics in social science: There is a role for the type of theory that John [Cochrane, another theorist to whom he is responding…] and I do. Theorists …
William James on certainty
From The Will to Believe in 1896: Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith …
Models of war
For the past few weeks, The Ezra Klein Show has been doing episodes about Russia and Ukraine from a variety of perspectives. In the most recent one, Ezra described his approach: I want to begin today by taking a moment and getting at the theory of how we’re covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the …
beyond the times 