This post begins with a sigh. For the last month, I’ve been working on a project that analyzes word frequency in economics textbooks. I’d hoped to have the final write up done by now. But I don’t … for reasons explained here. I’m calling this post ‘Working with Google Ngrams’. But even if you’re not interested in ngrams (i.e. word frequency), there’s useful information here.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Wikipedia with the subject ‘ This is a little awkward ’. I knew from the header that they were going to ask for money. But I was happy to oblige. Wikipedia is one of the triumphs of the internet — a vast repository of knowledge that’s free for everyone. I use Wikipedia daily. So I was happy to support their work.

It was a Thursday in August when all hell broke loose. The place was Logan County, West Virginia. The year was 1921. Over the next week, one million rounds of ammunition would be fired. Up to a hundred people were killed. All told, it was the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. Yet you’ve probably never heard of it. That’s because the battle was a labor dispute . It was called the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Exciting news! As of this month, I’m the new editor of the Review of Capital as Power . What is this journal? Why am I editing it? Read on to find out. The Review of Capital as Power ( RECASP for short) is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research that engages with the idea of capital as power.

A few weeks ago, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson contacted me about an essay series he’s editing called Advice for an Aspiring Economist . The series aims to give advice to students who are interested in learning ‘evonomics’ — economics from an evolutionary perspective. It will be published in This View of Life Magazine and in Evonomics . To my surprise, Wilson asked me to contribute an essay.

As many of you know, the anthropologist David Graeber died recently at the age of 59. Many of us are still coming to grips with this loss. Graeber was a rare individual — both a tireless activist and a superb scholar. In this guest post, teacher and a financial analyst Christophe Petit pays tribute to Graeber, his friend and mentor.

Last fall, I wrote a short article for The Mint Magazine about how income relates to hierarchy. The Mint, if you’re not familiar, does great work promoting pluralist thinking in economics. Check out their on-going Festival for Change — a festival devoted to building a better economy. Back to my aricle. I submitted a manuscript called ‘A Second Look at Hierarchy’. It got published in The Mint as Down to Size. Here’s my original manuscript.

In the field of ecological economics, Frederick Soddy looms large. Born in 1877, Soddy became a chemist and eventually won a Nobel prize for work on radioactive decay. Then he turned his attention to economics . Between 1921 and 1934, Soddy wrote four books that looked at how money relates to the physical economy. For his ground-breaking work, Soddy was rewarded with deafening silence.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Jeff Bezos getting richer. There’s the sound again. Another billion in Bezos’ coffers. Let’s put some numbers to this sound of money. Since 2017, Bezos’ net worth has grown by about $4 million per hour — roughly 500,000 times the US minimum wage. ¹ This accumulation of wealth would be absurd during normal times.

Exciting news! Capital as Power — the seminal text written by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler — is now available for free as both an epub and online book. Full disclosure: the typesetter was yours truly. What’s Capital as Power ? And why did I make a free ebook version? Read on to find out. You must unlearn what you have learned ¹ I don’t talk much on this blog about my personal journey.

Donald Trump took an IQ test … you’ll never guess what he scored! Apologies. That was my attempt at clickbait. ¹ Now that I’ve hooked you, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. No, not Donald Trump. Let’s talk about IQ . For as long as I can remember I’ve been skeptical of measures of ‘intelligence’. The whole procedure rubbed me the wrong way.