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Apology from the editor This post has been withdrawn on grounds of misattribution.  But the readers’ comments, which relate to the section beginning on page 50 titled “Adam Smith and the Birth of Western Economics” in Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology by Richard R Wilk and Lisa C. Cliggett | Jan 2, 2007 have been retained. 

from Lars Syll “Mediation analysis” is this thing where you have a treatment and an outcome and you’re trying to model how the treatment works: how much does it directly affect the outcome, and how much is the effect “mediated” through intermediate variables … In the real world, it’s my impression that almost all the mediation analyses that people actually fit in the social and medical sciences are misguided: lots of examples where the assumptions aren’t clear and where, in any case,...

A few years ago, I got enthusiastic about the prospects for self-driving vehicles, and wrote a couple of posts on the topic. It’s now clear that this was massively premature, as many of the commenters on my post argued. So, I thought it would be good to consider where and why I went wrong on this relatively unimportant issue, in the hopes of improving my thinking more generally. The first thing I got wrong was overcorrecting on an argument I’d made for a long time, about the...

from Katharine Farrell    If economics is indeed concerned with how humankind goes about sustaining its own life, day to day, then representing that complexity must be built into the ontology of economic models.  Adjustments to variables, parameters and reference data can all contribute to improving models, but they do not necessarily address the ontological limitation that, in the original liberal theory “representation, [read that of Jevons and Walras] the economic process neither...

from James Galbraith Economics is a policy discipline. It is engaged with the problems, large and small, of social organization and the general good. As such it co-evolves with circumstances. It is historically contingent. The application of economic ideas to specific problems under specific circumstances may succeed or fail, and in the latter case, people with different ideas normally rise to prominence. Capitalism is an economic system whose characteristics and problems have preoccupied...

Every week my e-mail box receives a steady stream of articles aimed at cultivating public animus to Russia. The articles are always wrapped in a narrative in which Russia is a threat to democracy in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The effect is to create public support for hardline action (economic and/or military) against Russia. […]

While I reconsider what I should write about, I’m also thinking about when to get a Covid booster shot. I had planned to do so in February, six months after my second AZ shot. But now, I’m thinking I should wait until the vaccines have been updated for Omicron, maybe in March. The question I need to assess is how rapidly, if at all, case numbers will grow in Queensland once borders are reopened. So far, it seems clear that Queensland has R < 1, though not so clear why. A...

from Peter Radford Brian Arthur tells us that technology most often advances in the form of domain shifts.  In his narrative technologies cluster in related groups he calls domains.  So individual technologies might advance through a tweak here or there, but the economy advances through a shift from one cluster of technologies to another. I like this idea.  Especially when we then broaden the topic to use technology as a background against which we view a particular slice of history....