Publications From compliance to engagement Rethinking the use of conditionality in our social security system By Tom Pollard 23 August 2023 Download the report There has been growing...

What are RCTs good for? RCTs establish causal claims. They are very good at this. Indeed, given the probabilistic theory of causality it follows formally that positive results in an ideal RCT with treatment C and outcome E deductively implies ‘C causes E in the experimental population’. Though the move from the RCT to a policy prediction that C will cause E when implemented in a new population often goes under the single label, the external validity of the...

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Were Austrian Economists lying?

The good news is that humans evolved often as cooperative and “prosocial” beings, so looking to the past and better understanding our cultural evolution as a species might help illuminate the best ways forward across the board. This is the basis of a paper published in April 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled, “Multilevel Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications.” Rather than focusing on the genetic code and physical...

If you reframe information to fit your biases you are sabotaging yourself.

from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The dramatic increase in global oil and food prices from the start of the Ukraine War did not reflect real global supply shortages or demand-supply imbalances. Rather, it reflected the impact of market concentration and financial activity in commodity futures markets, which enabled some large private players particularly global agribusinesses and financial companies to make a killing. This is now so evident from the data that it is more widely...

Dilemma . . . Do I make a jump to a mortgage at 6 to 7% just to have a bigger house? There is more to this than just interest rates. Building supplies as NDd mention have been an issue. If they are decreasing in cost, builders can lower prices to help sell new houses. Existing homeowners are still trapped by their 3% mortgages  – by New Deal democrat Higher interest rates have created a bifurcation in the housing market. While builders can...

I have written on women being included in clinical trials in 2019. The article I was asked to write included Clinical Trials, reviewing the issues with Essure, and also Maternal Mortality. Three issues which had much detail and information, difficult to cover it all , and could have been much longer. A Woman’s Right to Safe Healthcare Outcomes, Angry Bear. This article is more recent and includes additional and more up to date detail. The...

 Sturzenegger thanks Milei for his support while he was at the BCRA Javier Milei's victory in the primary election has set alarms in Argentina. Many suggest that this was unexpected, and in a sense, given the more recent polls, it was. Also, many have suggested that his strong showing represents a protest vote, since he is a complete outsider, and that this is a repeat of the 2001/2 protests that demanded that all established politicians were ousted (que se vayan todos). But these are at...