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There is no better way to honor Dr. King than to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.  It is full of moral insight, deeply moving, and an astonishing piece of political advocacy.  Here are the opening paragraphs: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that...

from Asad Zaman Statistics and Econometrics today are done without any essential reference to causality – this is much like try to figure out how birds fly without taking into account their wings. Judea Pearl “The Book of Why” Chapter 2 tells the bizarre story of how the discipline of statistics inflicted causal blindness on itself, with far-reaching effects for all sciences that depend on data. These notes are planned as an accompaniment and detailed explanation of the Pearl, Glymour,...

One of the more tenacious beliefs on the political right is that their support for nuclear power demonstrates superior rationality and openness to evidence. But the evidence is that, no matter what the structure of energy markets no one is willing to choose (new) nuclear power over any of the alternatives: gas, renewables and coal. That’s bad in the sense that the true costs of new and existing coal far exceed those of even new nuclear. But where those costs are factored in to...

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It wasn’t that long ago that everyone was talking about the “libertarian moment” in the US. Now, libertarianism/propertarianism is pretty much dead. The support base, advocacy groups and so on have gone full Trumpists, while the intellectual energy has shifted to “liberaltarianism” or, a more recent variant, Tyler Cowen’s conversion to “state capacity libertarianism“. Most of those departing to the left have mentioned the failure of libertarianism to handle climate change. It was...

Call for papers Dialogue on economics curriculum reform between Chinese and Western Scholars 15th WAPE Forum, Athens, 31 July to 1 August 2020 Dear Friend We cordially invite you to submit proposals for papers on curriculum reform and economics teaching, for a discussion at the forthcoming conference of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE), which will be held in Athens from 31st July to 2nd August, and is hosted by the Greek Association of Political Economy and Panteion...

from Lars Syll

from Asad Zaman In the previous post (Three Types of Models 5), we discussed three types of models. The first type is based purely on patterns in observations, and does not attempt to go beyond what can be seen. This is an “observational” or Baconian model. The second type attempt to look through the surface and discover the hidden structures of reality which generate the observations we see. The best approach to this type of models has been developed by Roy Bhaskar, so we can call it a...

from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan In December 2017, we posted a RWERB entry, titled ‘Profit warning: there will be blood’. We warned that, although the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition might no longer be in the Middle East driver’s seat, the oil and armament companies, the region’s oil-exporting autocracies and various non-state groups were all keen on seeing their oil incomes rise from record lows. And we observed that, in this context, ‘the prospects of a new energy conflict,...