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from Asad  Zaman When we think about epistemology (theory of knowledge), then we are doing meta-thinking. That is, we are thinking about thoughts people have, which they think is “knowledge”.  Because there are many many wrong ideas, and very few right ideas, we must learn to think critically. Unless we do so, our thoughts will be captured by the enormous amounts of fake news which circulates on social media these days. Thinking about thinking, or Meta-Thought, is very different from the...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh Anyone who has been following the upsurge of protests across the country in the wake of the CAA-NRC moves of the government would have been impressed and inspired by the role played by young women. They have been forthright and fearless in articulating their concerns and demands, even in the face of overt repression by the state, and there is no doubt that they provide much hope for the future of the country. These young women have already...

I first posted this in 2011, reposted it in 2014 and again in 2019. Sadly, nothing changes, except that the old men keep getting stupider and behaving worse. John Howard’s endorsement of Ian Plimer’s children’s version of his absurd anti-science tract Heaven and Earth has at least one good feature. I can now cut the number of prominent Australian conservatives for whom I have any intellectual respect down from two to one.[1] Howard’s acceptance of anti-science nonsense shows that, for...

With much of Australia suffering catastrophic fires and the beginning of a new war with Iran, lots of people are thinking about the idea that such disasters are good for the economy, because of the work generated in rebuilding homes, producing war materials and so on.  In my book Economics in Two Lessons, I explain why this is wrong (this is one point where I agree with Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. Here’s a link to  Chapter 6: The opportunity cost of destruction US President...

from Lars Syll Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions. John Cochrane And the tiny little problem? It’s utterly and completely...

from Asad Zaman Foundations for modern social sciences were laid in the early twentieth century, and were strongly influenced by logical positivism. The central idea of positivism is that science is true and valid because it deals (principally) with observables, while religion is false and invalid because it deals (principally) with unobservables. For a detailed discussion, see “Logical Positivism and Islamic Economics“.   Later, logical positivism had a spectacular collapse. It became...

from David Ruccio The idea that GDP numbers don’t tell us a great deal about what is really going on in the world is becoming increasingly widespread. David Leonhardt, in reflecting the emerging view, has argued that GDP doesn’t “track the well-being of most Americans.” Now, we’d expect that someone like socialist Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders would question the extent to which the low unemployment numbers, associated with economic growth, hardly tells the whole story about the...

from Lars Syll Without question, the experimental approach has produced genuine insights … All the same, there are serious limitations to a strategy centered on experimental design: 1. Good experimental design results in internal validity, where measurements actually measure the things they’re supposed to and confounding influences are suppressed. External validity, the extent to which results can be generalized to a wider array of situations beyond the confines of the experiment is a...

Two days ago I posted ‘The macro economic graph of the decade‘. The comments were highly interesting and may be summarized as: “what does ‘headline’ unemployment measure anyway”. About this: Headline of ‘U-3’ unemployment only captures a part of labor slack and is designed to capture only part of total slack. It can however be supplemented with other unemployment measurements which are designed to measure additional slack, like underemployed workers or discouraged workers. But there are...