Remember all those blogposts about the Soviet Union I've been writing?
They are now a book! The Adam Smith Institute has just published _Back in the USSR: What life was like in the Soviet Union ._It is an edited version of the Soviet Series, including nicer plots, many rewritten sections, and a coherent structure. The content itself is the same, if anything it has been cut down, and many of the super-lengthy quotes I'm infamous for have been abridged. Anyway, if you liked the original posts, you will also p…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Economics
What were the problems in Yugoslavian socialism?
On worker cooperatives, also this thread
Might short-term shareholders be better monitors?
Las cooperativas como forma de empresa
Global evidence on economic preferences
The power of bias in economics research
Methodological nihilist John P.A. Ioannidis strikes fear into his enemies' hearts once again
Are so called normative statements prac…
Most political theorising and philosophical discourse happens in the anglosphere. And the anglosphere is mostly, by numbers, the United States. It is no surprise that attempts at explaining political blocs are in one way or another USAcentric.
Even in the academic literature, one can find such things as "economic conservatism", meaning "being in favour of less intervention of the government in the economy, lower taxation, etc". Those things are not conservative (in the sense of preservin…
This Sunday, with some uncertainties, there will be a referendum for independence in Catalonia. It could potentially be the most important political event in decades.
The angle I wanted to briefly touch on here is that of legality, and what the consequences of the referendum could be. The referendum, if their organises deliver on their promises, will mean a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain (UDI). The list of unilaterally declared independence is not long, most likely because it is very diff…
To understand his reasoning, I think it is important to keep in mind that Dijkstra was a mathematician and that these people have a very special/peculiar sense of aesthetics.
Let me explain what I think Dijkstra did not like about b), c) and d).
Assume you begin counting at 0, so the natural numbers are the set {0,1,2,3,...} and you want to denote the set {0,1}. If you go with b) you have to write -1 < i <= 1. Note that you have to use the number -1, which is not part of the natural numbers, to descr…
Yes, one more post about the Google memo. Here, I review the evidence that was put forward to support the idea that the gender gap in STEM participation (especially in engineering) is due to stereotypes and discrimination.
Admittedly, I haven't discussed much this topic on my previous posts, as I have a strong prior against this hypothesis, and the evidence I have presented points to a strong role for biology (And there are other things I want to read and write about!). But if one thinks that the role of st…