Climate scientists are understating their findings to a significant degree. “Least drama” might be too kind a characterization. “Self censorship” might be closer to the mark.
Read more...Varoufakis spoke with Senior Editor Peter Suderman about what he learned as a video game economist, the failings of his chosen academic profession, and how computer games and virtual online worlds might be the future of macroeconomics.
Read more...Economists flunk one of their own tests, and that says a lot about what “economics” really is about.
Read more...From a reader: “two eminent professors with decades of serious work have been dumped unceremoniously by Columbia because they could no longer bring in the grant millions for the university business to extract rent from. This is Ivy-league neoliberalism at its worst thanks to the spineless Democrats/Obama White House allowing government science funding to get pummeled while Bush’s tax cuts are preserved. “
Read more...Climate change is a hard policy question to address because it pits those who believe in evidence against those committed to knowing as little as possible.
Read more...Real News Network interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann, who has come under vicious and persistent attack by right-wing groups who decided to play a reductivist game and focus their attack on one chart Mann developed which became important in popular discussions of climate change.
Read more...Alciphron is the title of the book by the philosopher George Berkeley that was most popular in his own time and is probably his least popular in ours. But in the Seventh Dialogue, Berkeley sketches out some very interesting ideas on human language — something that he recognised as being an absolutely central philosophical question and one that bears directly upon economics.
Read more...One peculiar aspect of modern marginalist economics is its obsession with equilibrium.
Read more...Yves here. Wikipedia has become widely accepted as a highly credible source (I use it and even contributed in their recent funding appeal). It’s therefore important to know its limits and how they arise. Unfortunately, it appears, like most information sources, that it is subject to pressure, in this case, as Bob Goodwin contends, the medical-industrial complex.
Read more...By a regular reader of Naked Capitalism who has asked to remain anonymous
A few days after surgery I got Tourette’s syndrome.
Read more...Once again, if you want to understand what has gone wrong with the funding of research, economists bear a lot of the blame.
Read more...Yves here. While there have been some good posts expressing consternation at the recently announced winners of the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics, this one is particularly useful in explaining how economists come to treat obviously ridiculous theories as gospel truth.
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 54 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.
Readers may have taken note of a long article by Jodi Kantor in the Sunday New York Times magazine celebrating an experiment on the Harvard Business School graduating class of 2013.
The project was deemed a winner. More women students than ever graduated with academic honors. Student satisfaction levels also rose. Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, this “experiment” looks like a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise.
Read more...If we don’t “stop now” — meaning, hit the carbon brake hard and stop the carbon car — we risk going over a cliff whose edge could be as near as five to ten years away.
Read more...Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.
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