It’s a perennial problem in science. How do you know when someone’s a crank?

The ‘productivity-pay gap’ has nothing to do with productivity. Here’s why.

Economists purge the social environment from their theory of human behavior. Here’s why this is a mistake.

Wages correlate with firms’ sales per worker. Does this mean that productivity explains wages? The answer is no.

If you’re good at something that isn’t valued by other people, you won’t be rewarded. This is the tyranny of meritocracy.

Has the digital revolution made wealth non-material?

The ideal of science is to respect the evidence — to take nobody’s word for it. But this cuts against our social instinct to pay deference to members of our tribe.

The social sciences, I’ve come to believe, don’t have a coherent concept of causation. To talk about ‘causation’ we need to have a boundary on cause and effect. I reflect on what this means for studying causation.

Citation counts are similar to social media “likes” — they are always positive. But what if we had negative citations?

Anthropologist Jason Hickel thinks we measure inequality incorrectly. He argues we should measure absolute inequality rather than relative inequality. I think this is a mistake.