A few months ago, I went down a rabbit hole analyzing word frequency in economics textbooks. Henry Leveson-Gower, editor of The Mint Magazine , thought the results were interesting and asked me to write up a short piece. The Mint article is now up, and is called ‘Power: don’t mention it’. What follows is my original manuscript. If you’ve ever taken Economics 101, then you’re familiar with its jargon.

Today a rant about textbooks . Every year governments spend billions of dollars on public education, teaching students knowledge that was itself created by publicly funded research. Yet each year, university students must pay anew for this information by purchasing high-priced textbooks. It needn’t be this way. Most university textbooks are written by tenured (or tenure-track) professors.

Exciting news! I have officially put all of the blog posts on Economics from the Top Down in the Creative Commons. At the bottom of each post, you’ll now see the following icon: This Creative Commons licence means that the post is officially ‘free culture’. You can do anything you want with it, as long as you attribute the original work to the author (usually me, Blair Fix) and link back to Economics from the Top Down.

Let’s talk econophysics . If you’re not familiar, ‘econophysics’ is an attempt to understand economic phenomena (like the distribution of income) using the tools of statistical mechanics. The field has been around for a few decades, but has received little attention from mainstream economists. I think this neglect is a shame. As someone trained in both the natural and social sciences, I welcome physicists foray into economics.

King, C. W. (2020). The Economic Superorganism: Beyond the Competing Narratives on Energy, Growth, and Policy . Springer Nature. If you are interested in the megatrends of the 21st century, then Carey King’s new book The Economic Superorganism should be on your reading list. It is a well-written, meticulously researched opus on how to understand the sustainability problems that face humanity.

Pity the billionaires. High in the towers on Billionaires’ Row, life is hard. The pencil-thin buildings groan as they sway in the wind, keeping penthouse dwellers up at night. Water pipes break, ruining posh décor. And elevators are unreliable, interrupting billionaires’ highly productive lives. So reads Stefanos Chen’s recent piece about the pitfalls of sky-high living.

This week I had the good fortune to talk with Rok Kranjc and Michel Bauwens about my research on degrowth and hierarchy. The full discussion will be available in a month or so at the Seoul Platform for Initiating Discourses on an Equitable and Resilient Society (which supported this research). For now, here is my presentation. I discuss ideas from the paper Living the Good Life in a Non-Growth World: Investigating the Role of Hierarchy.

This is the second in a series of two essays written for and supported by the Seoul Platform for Initiating Discourses on an Equitable and Resilient Society. These essays investigate the role that hierarchy plays in driving inequality and unsustainability. Summary Humanity’s most pressing need is to learn how to live within our planet’s boundaries — something that likely means doing without economic growth.

In my last post, I skewered human capital theory by comparing it to the pseudoscience of eugenics. Here’s a follow up — a presentation called The Trouble With Human Capital Theory . It’s a talk I gave to the SEEFAR research center at the Kedge Business School. I thank Christophe Faugère for inviting me to speak. An error occurred. Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

If there was an award for the most pernicious scientific idea ever, what theory should get first prize? I would vote for eugenics, a theory that claims we can ‘improve’ humanity through selective breeding. If there was a second prize, I’d give it to human capital theory.

This is the first of two essays written for (and supported by) the Seoul Platform for Initiating Discourses on an Equitable and Resilient Society. These essays investigate the role that hierarchy plays in driving inequality and unsustainability. This piece introduces the facts of hierarchy.