If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle no “problem”. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources. — Robert Solow, 1974 In the distant future, aliens come to Earth. They find a planet devoid of life. Looking closer, the aliens see that life on Earth was once abundant, but was wiped out by a mass extinction.

I’ve written a lot on this blog about the absurdity of marginal productivity theory. But I haven’t said much about the other pillar of mainstream economics: neoclassical growth theory. Today I’ll break that silence. Neoclassical growth theory is a textbook example of Murphy’s law. Everything that could go wrong with the theory did go wrong.

If the history of science has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t trust our preconceptions about how the world works. All human societies have developed stories about their place in the cosmos. Almost without exception, these stories were wrong. True, we’ve killed many of the old myths. But the process was slow and excruciating. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Today I’m going to take a break from political economy and talk about computer science. The reason? Nowadays a large part of doing science involves writing code. Scientists write code to collect data, to analyze it, to plot it and to run models that explain it. Suffice it to say that modern scientists (myself included) spend a lot of time coding. Computing is, in many ways, about repetition. It’s about doing a task over and over.

Today I’m going to revisit a topic that a month ago I committed to stop writing about — the productivity-income quagmire. Neoclassical economists argue that income is proportional to productivity. The problem is that they have no way of measuring productivity that is independent of income. So in practice, they test their theory by assuming it’s true.

Last week, Steve Keen and Phil Dobbie were kind enough to invite me on their Debunking Economics Podcast. We discussed my research on income inequality and hierarchy. You can listen to the episode here: An error occurred. Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser. You can also listen at Steve’s patreon page. Some back story.

I’ve finally had the time, over the last few weeks, to formalize some of the ideas that I’ve been developing on this blog. This is the result — a new paper that studies how hierarchy grows with economic development. You can download the pdf here. The 100-word summary . Neoclassical economists claim that the free market is the optimal form of social organization.

As social animals, humans live and die by the success of our groups. This raises a dilemma. What’s best for the group is often not what’s best for individuals within the group. If you’re surrounded by a group of trusting individuals, it’s best for you to lie and cheat. You’ll increase your relative fitness. And in evolutionary terms, that’s what matters.

Greetings readers. For some time now, I’ve been uncomfortable with the fact that WordPress (who hosts this site) inserts ads into the content. It’s annoying. But more importantly, it goes against much of what this blog stands for. My goal in this blog is to do science — to dispassionately look at the evidence. Having ads cheapens (or at least distracts from) this goal. So for some time, I’ve been thinking about getting rid of ads.

Back in January, physicist Brian Stewart asked me to give a talk to his “Radical Sustainability” class at Wesleyan University. The talk was to be in early April, and Brian offered to fly me to Connecticut for the occasion. Luckily I decided at the time to give the lecture virtually. So when the coronavirus forced us all to stay home, nothing much changed. On that note, here’s a video of the talk.

Today is the one year anniversary of Economics from the Top Down . To mark the occasion, I though I’d share with you the 5 most-viewed posts of the last year: Top 5 Posts No, Productivity Does Not Explain Income Productivity Does Not Explain Wages Debunking the ‘Productivity-Pay Gap’ An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 1) Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics You’ll notice that