As 2021 comes to a close, I’m having a distinct sense of déjà vu. A year ago, I wrote a post celebrating COVID vaccines as a triumph of science. And I noted that vaccine discovery is a collective endeavour. The cumulative number of major vaccines tracks closely with the cumulative number of scientific papers, a bellwether for humanity’s collective knowledge.
An artist’s enemy is obscurity … — Cory Doctorow Like art, the dirty secret of science is that much of it remains painfully obscure. A scientist might spend years collecting and analyzing data, only to have their paper read by a handful of people. Such is the nature of highly specialized work.
Download: PDF | EPUB Inflation is always and everywhere a phenomenon of structural change . — Jonathan Nitzan, 1992 Milton Friedman has been dead for more than a decade, but his ghost still haunts us. In the 1960s, Friedman declared that inflation is ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ — a problem of printing too much money.
This week I’m sharing some tips for web scraping. The internet is overflowing with information. But it usually takes some work to get the data into a usable form. Here are some tricks for making that happen. Scraping starts with downloading Every scrape job starts with a download. When you view a website on your computer, your browser is just displaying data that it downloaded from the website’s server.
Download PDF Abstract Although the determinants of income are complex, the results are surprisingly uniform. To a first approximation, top incomes follow a power-law distribution, and the redistribution of income corresponds to a change in the power-law exponent. Given the messiness of the struggle for resources, why is the outcome so simple?
Last week I had the pleasure to chat with Rachel Donald on her podcast ‘Platform’. The show features people who are ‘pissed off with capitalism’. Its goal is to give a platform for under-reported topics that deserve traction and attention. Rachel and I talked about a wide range of topics, but I particularly enjoyed discussing my research on hierarchy and income.
Political economist Chris Mouré has a new paper out in the Review of Capital as Power . It’s called ‘Soft-wars’, and it is a fascinating case study of the behavior of big tech. The story starts in 2011, when Microsoft led a $4.5 billion consortium purchase of Nortel and Novel. Later than year, Google responded by buying Motorola for $12.9 billion.
One of the challenges of studying the past is that time has a maddening way of erasing evidence. Take the origin of life — the ultimate cold case. Had the first organisms been wise enough to fossilize themselves, we would know exactly how life began. Fortunately, the first organisms did preserve themselves, at least in rough form. That’s because life is itself a kind of time capsule.
For several years, people have been urging me to read Geoffrey West’s book Scale , claiming that his work overlaps with my own. Having read the book, I largely agree (with some caveats below). Geoffrey West is a physicist who’s become famous for studying ‘scaling’ effects across life on Earth. What is ‘scaling’? It’s best explained through an example. Figure 1 (taken from West’s book) shows how animals’ metabolism varies with body mass.
I recently had a lively Twitter debate with Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler and Cory Doctorow 1 about the future of big corporations in the United States. The debate was prompted by Doctorow’s piece ‘End of the line for Reaganomics’, which I reposted on capitalaspower.com. Doctorow argues that we may be witnessing a sea change in the way governments treat big corporations.
In a series of essays published in 2013 and 2014 on capitaspower.com, political economist Tim Di Muzio explored the concept of ‘sabotage’ as it applies to capitalist power. I recently rediscovered these essays and was so impressed by them that I have reposted them here as a single piece. About the author: Tim Di Muzio is a researcher at the University of Wollongong.