Download: PDF | EPUB There’s an old joke that economics is too important to be left to economists. In the same vein, I think rich people are too important to be left to the self-help industry. Yes, the popular appeal of you-can-get-rich-too books is obvious. But what’s not obvious is why so few social scientists study wealth. ¹ Clearly, the public thirsts for serious inquiries about the rich.

Download: PDF | EPUB Cui bono ? For whose benefit? Think of this question as a sword — a sharp piece of steel that cuts through bullshit. In this post, we’ll use it to slice through business-press bullshit about the stock market. You know the stuff — the ubiquitous puff pieces that gush about rising stock prices, as though they benefit everyone.

Download: PDF | EPUB Economists are not known for their literary imaginations. Flip through any economics textbook and you’ll find a barrage of terms like the ‘Philips curve’ and the ‘Fisher effect’. The jargon is simple enough — empirical relations are usually named after the person who discovered them. But this convention is neither descriptive nor fun.

Download: PDF | EPUB The rich get richer . It’s a phrase that packs a lot of punch. It’s potent rhetoric, yet surprisingly accurate at describing how rising inequality plays out. Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the rich getting richer. We just happen to live in an age of growing corporate despotism. And our friends at Forbes have been there to document the disease. Forbes . Forbes who loves the free market.

Download: PDF | EPUB Have you ever wondered what it takes to become a billionaire? Do you need rare genius? Exceptional acumen? Miraculous foresight? An uncompromising work ethic? On all four counts, the answer is no. It turns out that to become a billionaire, what you really need is the right social setting . You need to live in a society that is suitably rich and appropriately unequal.

I started this website some time ago with the aim of writing down the expansion of my knowledge and experience in the area of financial risk management. And also other things like programming with R, econometric modeling and a little about data science and machine learning . So I’m going to use this publication as a starting point, and start discussing texts and examples applied to financial risks.

DT Cochrane and I look at the network of corporate power behind Canada’s richest families.

Having decided to improve my skills in the short space of time left between my professional life and personal life, I started researching the available data science options.

With my postdoctoral fellowship wrapping up, I muse about what comes next.

I’m sick of the AI hype and scaremongering. The idea that AI could take over the world is laughable.