I recently read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. If you’re not familiar, David Graeber is the anthropologist who wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years, a seminal book on the history of money and credit. In Bullshit Jobs , Graeber takes aim at pointless work. Graeber describes a bullshit job as: Bullshit Jobs is based largely around testimonials from people who feel that they have bullshit jobs.

In How Hierarchy Can Mediate the Returns to Education I examined the pay structure of the US military. I found that hierarchical rank is (by far) the strongest determinant of military pay. Here I want to show you that there is a regularity to military pay. In the US military, income is proportional to the number of subordinates one controls.

In The Social Environment as a Cause in Economics I argued that human behavior has two parts: Individual variation An environment that acts on this variation To illustrate these two parts, I used the example of the peppered moth. This species comes in two colors — black and white. Which color is better for survival? It depends on the environment. On natural-colored trees, white moths are better camouflaged. So being white is better.

I’m reposting here an article that Erald Kolasi and I wrote for Mint Magazine. The article discusses the problems with ‘real’ GDP and possible alternatives for measuring economic activity. The published version is under a paywall, so I’m posting our (unabridged) manuscript here.

Have you noticed that economists are missing a word in their vocabulary? In microeconomics you’ll see words like ‘individual’, ‘utility’ and ‘maximize’. But you won’t see the word ‘environment’ anywhere. It seems that in microeconomics, individuals maximize their utility in a void. [1] This lobotomy of the environment has led economists astray.

I’ve been asked to create panels for the upcoming International Conference on Thermodynamics 2.0. The conference aims to bring natural and social sciences closer. It will take place at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, USA from June 22-24, 2020. I’m calling the panel(s) Energy, Institutions and Society . I’m looking for research that connects energy to the structure of human society.

Science is the quintessential public good. It’s an iterative process in which new knowledge builds on previous knowledge. For this process to work, science needs to be ‘open’. Both the results and methods of scientific research need to be freely available for all. The open science movement is trying to make this a reality. In this post, I share some tips for doing open science.

Does productivity explain income? I asked this question in a previous post. My answer was a bombastic no . In this post, I’ll dig deeper into the reasons that productivity doesn’t explain income. I’ll focus on wages. The evidence Let’s start with the evidence trumpeted as proof that productivity explains wages. Looking across firms, we find that sales per worker correlates with average wages.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with a faith in meritocracy. Do your best, I believed, and the world would reward you. In school, this idea seemed self-evidently true. I worked hard, and was rewarded with good grades and praise from teachers. And those students who didn’t get good grades? Well they had less skill — less merit — than me. Or so I thought. In hindsight, I cringe at my naivety.

When it comes to earning income in a hierarchy, it’s not what you know that matters. It’s who you control . This was the provocative idea that I proposed in Part 2 of this series on an evolutionary theory of resource distribution. In this post, I put this thesis to the test. I look for evidence of the power ethos inside modern firms. A Recap Before we get to the evidence, let’s review what I’ve done so far in this series.

Has wealth gone digital? Both critics and cheerleaders of capitalism claim it has. The critics see non-material wealth as a problem. Digital wealth, they say, is fictitious . It’s lost touch with reality. The cheerleaders of capitalism see the same thing as a boon. Non-material wealth, they say, will decouple the economy from physical constraints. So the economy can grow forever! Which side is right? Neither, in my opinion.