The Curious Engineer

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Economics from the Top Down

economicsfromthetopdown.com

New ideas in economics and the social sciences.

Society / politics / economyScience

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
186 from 11 Apr 2019 to 3 Oct 2026
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monthly (7 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 7

  1. The Laws of Useful Automation
  2. The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism
  3. The Business of War and the Mismeasurement of Military Might
  4. Why Kids Are Getting Worse at Reading: The Case Against Whole-Language Teaching
  5. The Human Lifespan Probably has an Upper Limit … and Why That’s Good
  6. US Oil-and-Gas Production: Signs of an Impending Bust
  7. An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology

2025 6

  1. Roger Pielke Jr.’s Appallingly Bad Analysis of Billion Dollar Disasters
  2. Insights from the Lotka-Volterra Model
  3. The Soviet Experiment with Empire
  4. The Half Life of Empire
  5. The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought
  6. Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy

2024 6

  1. The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage
  2. From Commodity to Asset: The Truth Behind Rising House Prices
  3. A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires
  4. Five Years of Economics from the Top Down
  5. Is Bitcoin More Energy Intensive Than Mainstream Finance?
  6. Nixing Technological Lock In

2023 21

  1. Top Posts of 2023
  2. Massaging the Message: How Oilpatch Newspapers Censor the News
  3. Stocking Up on Wealth … Concentration
  4. When Stocks Go Up, Who Benefits?
  5. The Great Gatsby Curve Among America’s Über Rich
  6. How the Rich Get Richer
  7. Billionaires Are So Predictable
  8. Mapping the Ownership Network of Canada’s Billionaire Families
  9. A Blind Leap
  10. No, AI Does Not Pose an Existential Risk to Humanity
  11. Masochistic Fun with Plutocratic Murder
  12. Red Team Blues: Cory Doctorow’s Anti-Finance Thriller
  13. Unemployment and the Maturity of Capitalism
  14. Interest Rates and Unemployment: An Underwhelming Relation
  15. How Interest Rates Redistribute Income
  16. Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers
  17. The Key to Managing Inflation? Higher Wages
  18. Interest Rates and Inflation: Knives Out
  19. Do High Interest Rates Reduce Inflation? A Test of Monetary Faith
  20. The Cause of Stagflation
  21. Is Stagflation the Norm?

2022 13

  1. Top 5 Posts of 2022
  2. Inflation: Everywhere and Always Differential
  3. Firming Up Hierarchy
  4. How To Be an Academic Hyper-Producer
  5. How to Make the Oil Industry Go Bust
  6. Dualism in Science, Theology, and Economics
  7. Check Out My Science Desk
  8. Have We Passed Peak Capitalism?
  9. Weird Consilience: A Review of Joseph Henrich’s ‘The WEIRDest People in the World’
  10. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation
  11. The Voldemort Index
  12. In Search of Sabotage
  13. A Case Study of Fossil-Fuel Depletion

2021 42

  1. Top 10 Posts of 2021
  2. COVID Déjà Vu
  3. Hierarchy, Zoom Bombed
  4. The Truth About Inflation
  5. Tips for Web Scraping in R and Python
  6. Redistributing Income Through Hierarchy
  7. Talking Hierarchy With Rachel Donald
  8. Soft-wars
  9. Institution Size as a Window into Cultural Evolution
  10. A Review of Geoffrey West’s ‘Scale’
  11. How Dominant are Big US Corporations?
  12. Di Muzio on ‘Sabotage’
  13. Power Over Principles
  14. Tidyquant: An Open-Access Tool for Studying the Stock Market
  15. The Long, Slow Death of the Free Market
  16. How the Labor Theory of Value Emerges from Egalitarianism
  17. With Great Power Comes Great Fear
  18. The Evolution of ‘Big’: How Sociality Made Life Larger
  19. My Coding Mix
  20. Is Human Probability Intuition Actually ‘Biased’?
  21. Essentialism and Traditionalism in Academic Research
  22. The Half Life of a Spotify Hit
  23. The Quant Case for Open-Access COVID Vaccines
  24. The Ritual of Capitalization
  25. RECASP Back Catalogue Now in Full-Text HTML
  26. A Brief History of the Buy-to-Build Indicator
  27. Once More Into the Fire of Academia
  28. Free Speech For Me, Not You
  29. Jesús Suaste Cherizola Wins the 2021 CASP Essay Prize
  30. Energy and Economic Development: Understanding the Role of Hierarchy
  31. The Deep History of Human Inequality
  32. Power … and the Dialect of Economics
  33. Why Are Most Textbooks Still Proprietary?
  34. This Blog is Now ‘Free Culture’
  35. Energizing Exchange: Learning from Econophysics’ Mistakes
  36. A Review of Carey King’s ‘The Economic Superorganism’
  37. Radically Progressive Degrowth: Reducing Resource Use by Eliminating Inequality
  38. Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World — The Talk Version
  39. Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World: Investigating the Role of Hierarchy (Part 2)
  40. The Trouble With Human Capital Theory
  41. The Rise of Human Capital Theory
  42. Living the good life in a non-growth world: Investigating the role of hierarchy

2020 51

  1. Top 5 Posts of 2020
  2. As 2020 Ends, Let’s Celebrate Science
  3. Why and How I Write Scientific Documents in Plain Text
  4. As We Exhaust Our Oil, It Will Get Cheaper But Less Affordable
  5. Peak Oil Never Went Away
  6. The Deconstructing Econospeak App
  7. Ideological Tunnel Vision
  8. Deconstructing Econospeak
  9. The Capital as Power Forum Lives Again!
  10. Working With Google Ngrams: A Data-Wrangling Tale
  11. The Business of ‘Free’
  12. How the History of Class Struggle is Written on the Stock Market
  13. The Review of Capital as Power
  14. Advice for an Aspiring Economist
  15. A Tribute to David Graeber
  16. A Second Look at Hierarchy
  17. Frederick Soddy’s Debt Dynamics
  18. Stocks Are Up. Wages Are Down. What Does it Mean?
  19. Free Capital as Power Ebook
  20. Why ‘General Intelligence’ Doesn’t Exist
  21. Winning the Game of Life
  22. Supply and Demand Deconstructed
  23. The Paradox of Individualism and Hierarchy
  24. 10 Tips for Making Beautiful Charts
  25. Living the Good Life … Without Killing the Planet
  26. Why America Won’t Be ‘Great’ Again
  27. Why Isn’t Modern Monetary Theory Common Knowledge?
  28. A Blog Reading List
  29. Energy and Institution Size
  30. Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources?
  31. Economic Growth Theory … Bah Humbug!
  32. What Trait Affects Income the Most?
  33. In the Beginning … There Were Loops
  34. Productivity and Income … Again
  35. Guest on the Debunking Economics Podcast
  36. Economic Development and the Death of the Free Market
  37. The Free Market as a Double Lie
  38. No More Ads
  39. Biophysical Economics and the Coronavirus Pandemic
  40. One Year of Blogging
  41. The Challenges of Doing Revolutionary Science (Part 2)
  42. The Challenges of Doing Revolutionary Science (Part 1)
  43. I’ve Joined Patreon
  44. What if the Government is Just Another Firm? (Part 2)
  45. What if the Government is Just Another Firm? (Part 1)
  46. Understanding Income: You Can’t Get There from Here
  47. How Do You Spot a Crank?
  48. Some Sunshine on the Ontario Job Hierarchy
  49. Debunking the ‘Productivity-Pay Gap’
  50. The Productivity of Bullshit Jobs
  51. The Power Ethos in the US Military

2019 40

  1. How Hierarchy Can Mediate the Returns to Education
  2. Why We Should Abandon Real GDP As A Measure of Economic Activity
  3. The Social Environment as a Cause in Economics
  4. Call For Papers: Energy, Institutions and Society
  5. Ten Tips For Doing Open Science
  6. Productivity Does Not Explain Wages
  7. The Tyranny of Meritocracy
  8. An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 3)
  9. Has Wealth Gone Digital?
  10. An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 2)
  11. An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 1)
  12. Tribalism in Science (and Economics)
  13. A Reading List For Economic Heretics
  14. Making Beautiful Charts Using R ggplot
  15. When Inequality Increases and Decreases at the Same Time
  16. No, Productivity Does Not Explain Income
  17. Rethinking Causation in the Social Sciences
  18. Problems With Measuring Inequality
  19. The Legacy of Aaron Swartz: The Fight for Open Access
  20. Inequality and Capitalist Income
  21. What If Scientific Impact Could Be Negative?
  22. Are We Measuring Inequality the Wrong Way?
  23. The Allure of Marxism … And Why It’s a Mistake
  24. Resources for Recovering Academic Writers
  25. A Review of Gregory Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms”
  26. As it Dies, We Talk About the ‘Free Market’ More
  27. The Growth of Managers: An Update
  28. Can A Service Transition Save the Planet?
  29. Where’s the Barefoot Revolution in Economics?
  30. The Growth of Hierarchy and the Death of the Free Market
  31. Energy and the Size Distribution of Firms
  32. Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics
  33. Visualizing Power-Law Distributions
  34. A Muckraking Challenge
  35. Three Cheers for the Empirical Muckraker
  36. Let’s Celebrate Being Wrong
  37. Agent-Based Models and the Ghost in the Machine
  38. Why Scientists Can’t Run Daycares
  39. Groping in the Dark: The Untold Side of Research
  40. Economics from the top down