As societies use more energy, business firms tend to get bigger. Here’s how it happens.

Real GDP is key to macroeconomics. But is it a valid measure of economic scale?

Power laws are everywhere, but hard to grasp intuitively. I discuss some tricks for visualizing them.

If you are an empirical researcher, I have a challenge for you.

I pay tribute to scientists who I think have done excellent empirical research.

In science, being wrong is call for a celebration. Now that you think I’m crazy, let me explain. Science is about the search for truth . Logically, this means we should celebrate when we are right . But here’s the catch. How do we know when we are right? We can’t. Science is about conditional truth. We have ideas that we think are right because they have not yet been proven wrong.

I am skeptical about agent-based models. Here are my thoughts on their problems.

A story about scientist parenting.

There is an exciting side of blogging that I want to explore here. Blogging can tell the story behind research. This is something you don’t get in journals. Most scientific articles obey a formula that goes like this: Here is the question I asked. Here is how I answered the question. Here is what I found. This formula makes the article easy to read, since we know what to expect.

Welcome to the first post of ‘Economics from the Top Down’. This will be a blog about new ideas in economics and the social sciences. I use the word ‘economics’ in a liberal sense. Few trained economists will recognize what I do as ‘economics’. Perhaps a better word would be ‘political economy’. Or even better, just ‘social science’. But before diving into the content of this blog, I should introduce myself. My name is Blair Fix.