Highly speculative, but I found this of interest: This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited and maintained extensive psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral Ancient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic Northeast Eurasia around the Last Glacial Maximum period of the Late Pleistocene, prior to back migrating southwards into East Asia in […]
Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology
Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology
17 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, behavioural economics, economic history Tags: cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology
Cranks, crackpots and conspiracy theorists
17 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of education, economics of media and culture Tags: conspiracy theorists, cranks
The terms “crank” and “crackpot” are often used interchangeably to describe someone who holds eccentric or unorthodox views, especially in science or other intellectual disciplines. However, there can be subtle differences in their connotations: Both terms are pejorative and used to express disapproval or skepticism towards the individual’s ideas or behaviors. The distinction, while subtle, […]
Cranks, crackpots and conspiracy theorists
Allied Unified Command On The Horizon I THE GREAT WAR Week 190
17 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War I
Why tit-for-tat tariffs may not work against Trump
16 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, industrial organisation, international economics, International law, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: 2024 presidential election, game theory, tariffs
Last week, my ECONS101 class covered game theory. At the end of the final lecture, after we had been covering repeated games and tit-for-tat strategies, a really perceptive student asked me about Trump’s tariffs. A lot of the rhetoric about tariffs has been posed in terms of tit-for-tat (see here and here, for example). The…
Why tit-for-tat tariffs may not work against Trump
Institutional ownership of single-family housing
16 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, econometerics, urban economics Tags: housing affordability
In the last decade, large financial institutions in the United States have purchased hundreds of thousands of homes and converted them to rentals. This paper studies the welfare consequences of institutional ownership of single-family housing. We build an equilibrium model of the housing market with two sectors: rental and homeownership. The model captures two key…
Institutional ownership of single-family housing
Labour Energy Price Lies In Australia
16 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of climate change, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming, politics - Australia Tags: solar power, wind power
By Paul Homewood h/t Dennis Ambler Sounds like Australia’s Labour have been telling the same porkies a Britain’s! Jo Nova has the story: As the Opposition point out the Labor government went to the last election telling us 97 times how they would make our electricity $275 cheaper, but with the […]
Labour Energy Price Lies In Australia
Harvard Professor Calls for the Firing of Any Faculty Not Supporting “Gender-Affirming” Policies
15 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of education, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA, property rights Tags: Age of Enlightenment, conjecture and refutation, free speech, philosophy of science, political correctness, regressive left
The anti-free speech movement in the United States was largely an outgrowth of higher education where viewpoint intolerance has taken hold of many schools. Indeed, intolerance and orthodoxy are often defended on the left in the name of tolerance and pluralism. Harvard Professor Timothy McCarthy is one of those voices demanding the removal of faculty […]
Harvard Professor Calls for the Firing of Any Faculty Not Supporting “Gender-Affirming” Policies
Hitchens: Did Jesus exist?
15 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of religion, liberalism
Posting will be light today as I am embroiled in many issues and am troubled. One question for which I’ve always received feedback is this: did a “Jesus person”—a human on which the Biblical legends of the New Testament are based—really exist? I’m not accepting that any of the deeds attributed to a “Jesus” are […]
Hitchens: Did Jesus exist?
Is the Government’s loss of support unusual?
15 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
A reader inquired if the support lost by the major party of Government since the election is a record. I didn’t think so, but have now gone and checked the data. This compares the 1st 1 News poll of the middle year of a term against the last election result. So the biggest gain at […]
Is the Government’s loss of support unusual?
Share the “Deep Internal Conflict” of the Green Aussie Billionaire who Just Bought a Private Jet
15 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of climate change, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming, politics - Australia, transport economics Tags: climate activists
“… so I can run a global business from Australia, and still be a constantly present dad …”
Share the “Deep Internal Conflict” of the Green Aussie Billionaire who Just Bought a Private Jet
Must be a lot of them about
15 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of media and culture, entrepreneurship, monetary economics Tags: Roman empire
Dawkins and Pinker discuss evolution
14 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA Tags: Age of Enlightenment, evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, free speech, political correctness, regressive left
Here’s Richard Dawkins ostensibly discussing his new book (The Genetic Book of the Dead) with Steve Pinker, but of course you can’t confine a discussion between these two to a single book. Even from the beginning it ranges widely, in which Pinker discusses not only the epiphany that The Selfish Gene gave him, but levels […]
Dawkins and Pinker discuss evolution
*Progressive Myths*: The Kling Club Convo
14 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economic history, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, income redistribution, industrial organisation, labour economics, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: The Great Enrichment
Long ago, I co-blogged for EconLog with Arnold Kling. Now he’s running a book club for Liberty Fund. Last month, Arnold invited me and philosopher Rachel Ferguson to discuss Mike Huemer’s new Progressive Myths. Enjoy!
*Progressive Myths*: The Kling Club Convo
The death of patriotism
14 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in defence economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, war and peace Tags: British politics
These UK poll results from Matt Goodwin are disturbing. The number of adults who would refuse to fight for their country has more than doubled in 20 years from 19% to 41%. In one sense it is no surprise. When “the blob” constantly portrays your country as an oppressor, and that you should be ashamed […]
The death of patriotism
Boettke on the Socialist Calculation Debate
14 Mar 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, Austrian economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of information, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, law and economics, property rights Tags: economics of planning
An excellent EconTalk episode with Pete Boettke on the socialist calculation debate. I like Boettke on the three Ps. The three Ps–property, prices, and profits and loss. Property incentivizes us. Prices guide us. Profits lure us to new changes and losses discipline us. Today, “incentives matter” is often considered the first lesson of economics. But […]
Boettke on the Socialist Calculation Debate
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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