What’s the right dose of democracy?
If you haven't done so already, take the reader survey here! In medicine, there's the occasional discussion of the dose response function of some drug. People wisely assume that it…
Substack 1st anniversary, statistics, reader survey, and a new video
My Substack is growing a lot faster than I anticipated, and we've hit 2000 2100. It took about one year, as my first post was 11th October 2021: Paid subscribers…
Andrew Sullivan not allowed to tweet the wrong science
The main function of angry activist people on Twitter is to limit the discourse to within the limits they find acceptable. Since Twitter and other social media have mostly left-wing…
National intelligence really is the best predictor of economic growth
This is the sister post to the one on Anglo Reaction’s Substack. We published a new paper of high significance, and we didn’t agree about how to summarize it for…
Cognitive and income inequality: the relationship that wasn’t
The theoretical prediction seems straightforward. If income is a function of intelligence (and other factors), then all else equal, a country with more inequality in intelligence will have more inequality…
Book review: Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy by Richard Hanania
The ever-funny Richard Hanania has published his first book: Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. You…
How bad is low level lead poisoning? Probably not that bad
For some months, I've had a window open with some lead poisoning studies by economists. We know generally not to trust economist work without carefully checking out their tables and…
The big Black patent decline, or how not to use composite datasets
Twitter user AnechoicMedia has an amusing new example of research incompetence in economics. The paper in question is: Cook, L. D. (2014). Violence and economic activity: evidence from African American…
Immigration economics for economist dummies
Some time ago, I published a 50 minutes long video walkthrough of some research on economics effects of immigration for Nordic countries. Since some people don't really watch videos, I…
Comments on “The Inheritance of Inequality” (Bowles & Gintis, 2002)
Some anon sent me this paper, asked if there was a rebuttal somewhere. It's a well cited economics paper, 1248 citations on Google Scholar. I wasn't familiar with it, but…