An update to “The The Growth of Hierarchy and the Death of the Free Market”. I show you which countries are which.

Can a service transition help us reduce carbon emissions? The evidence says no.

Contrary to what neoclassical economists claim should happen, economic growth seems to involve less ‘free market’ and more hierarchy.

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?

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.

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.

The molecules below were discussed in the previous post as examples of highly polar but formally neutral molecules, a property induced by aromatisation of up to three rings. Since e.g. compound 3 is known only in its protonated phenolic form, here I take a look at the basicity of the oxygen in these systems to see if deprotonation of the ionic phenol form to the neutral polar form is viable.