Rogue Scholar Posts

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Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

My how time flies. As of April 11th, 2024, I’ve been blogging for five years. To celebrate, I thought I’d engage in some obligatory naval gazing. Why blog? I started this blog on a whim. In the spring of 2019, I was one year post PhD and busy publishing pieces of my dissertation. It was about as much fun as licking sandpaper. The problem, I now realize, is that I hate academic writing.

Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

Download: PDF | EPUB When it comes to Bitcoin, there’s one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the network sucks up a tremendous amount of energy. But from there, disagreement is the rule. For critics, Bitcoin’s thirst for energy is self-evidently bad — the equivalent of pouring gasoline in a hole and setting it on fire. But for Bitcoin advocates, the network’s energy gluttony is the necessary price of having a secure digital currency.

Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

Download: PDF | EPUB Tech development is often portrayed as an open road — a smooth freeway of continuous progress. But the truth is that the road of technology is more like a suburban street, paved with numerous unmarked dead ends. To see one of these dead end, look at roads themselves. As a method for moving people, roads work well … until you fill them with millions of cars.

Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

Download: PDF | EPUB In their book Manufacturing Consent , Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official narrative. Outside of war, media bias is typically less overt. But to the careful observer, it can still be discerned.

Published in Risk Taker!

Rambling (proxy for an introduction) We are experiencing the chaos of the information age, and its technological advents with voracious evolution and expansion. And in the midst of all this we have the advent of Big Data that has reached the delights of many with Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. As a result, the idea of mathematical and statistical “models” became the rage, gaining visibility.

Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

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.

Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

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.

Published in Economics from the Top Down
Author Blair Fix

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.