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The Matthew Effect: Who Gets Rewards
Today I’ll talk about a classic article. Robert Merton’s “The Matthew Effect In Science”. This is an important and useful idea. You can tell it is has been successful as it has gained its own...
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GMOs Forget The Science
Scientists including biologists, medical doctors, and geneticists have many wonderful qualities. Yet, if the public policy response to Covid-19 taught us anything it was that some people who are great...
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Working In the Doughnut
Kate Raworth has a popular book on sustainability and economics. In it, she argues that economics needs an overhaul. It is an admirably ambitious book with some flaws but with excellent parts to more...
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Do People Vote With Their Wallets?
One of the classic problems in understanding voter behavior is whether people vote with their wallets. Bascially, do voters make choices that depend heavily upon their own economic self-interest? Like...
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The Environmental Impacts Of Foods
There are many things that can impact a person’s, and a community’s, impact upon the environment. Some things we might be able to stop doing. That is not the case with eating food. We have a large...
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Woke As A Magical Term
It is (nearly) always useful to read books that you don’t expect to agree with. Woke Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy is one of those. (Plus buying it means Amazon is now sending me lots of different...
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Must Firms Maximize Shareholder Value?
What is the purpose of a firm? Given we have so many firms and business schools are such a sizable chunk of many universities, you might think that we all agree what firms are for. You would be wrong....
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Population As A Disaster
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. I read a version printed in 1988 which had a 1978 update. It is a gloomy book that makes bold claims of famine and crises. There have certainly been...
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What If I’m Wrong?
The Population Bomb shared Paul Ehrlich’s predictions about the future. After his doom-laden warnings about mass starvation and the need for population control, by compulsion if necessary, Ehrlich...
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Sludges And Nudges
Cass Sunstein is a law professor who worked in the Obama White House. He dealt with matters of regulation, and has a keen interest in how (generally bad) program design and administration prevents...
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