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.

A 25% chance . That’s the likelihood that when I tell someone I’m searching for a job, they’ll say: OK, maybe I’m exaggerating this chance. Still, it’s an open secret that when it comes to landing a job, it matters who you know. Many people, it seems, like to remind me of this fact.

The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. I propose a corollary in economics: nothing in economics makes sense except in the light of human social evolution. [1] I explore here how the evolution of human sociality can help us understand how we distribute resources. Although economists like to deny it, humans are social animals.

If you ask the average person what ‘science’ is, they’ll probably answer something like ‘it’s what we know about the world’. To the lay person, ‘science’ is a body of facts. To the trained scientist, however, ‘science’ means something different. It’s not a body of knowledge. It’s a method for determining what’s true and what’s not.