We discuss scientists’ tendency to turn hypotheses into innately true ‘essences’ passed down by tradition.

I explore the power struggle behind ‘free speech’.

I take a look at kinetic exchange models of income, and what we can learn from their mistakes.

I review Carey King’s new book ‘The Economic Superorganism’.

People seem to like to do retrospectives at year’s end. I take a longer view, but the end of 2020 seems like a fitting time to do that. Below is the text of a paper I wrote in 1995 with collaborators at the Kapteyn Institute of the University of Groningen. The last edit date is from December of that year, so this text (in plain TeX, not LaTeX!) is now a quarter century old. I am just going to cut & paste it as-was;

A hellish year is over and a vaccine is rolling out. Let’s be thankful for science.

This post is a recent conversation with David Garofalo for his blog. Today we talk to Dr. Stacy McGaugh, Chair of the Astronomy Department at Case Western Reserve University. David : Hi Stacy. You had set out to disprove MOND and instead found evidence to support it. That sounds like the poster child for how science works. Was praise forthcoming?

Here’s a tale about empirical work that demonstrates a simple rule: the deeper you go, the harder it gets.

I have been busy teaching cosmology this semester. When I started on the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1998, there was no advanced course on the subject. This seemed like an obvious hole to fill, so I developed one.

Some advice about how to avoid getting hoodwinked by mainstream economics.