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11 Feb, 6 tweets, 3 min read
Leftists! Are you curious about the stock market, but also skeptical of how it's portrayed by both mainstream economics and Marxist theory?

Here's a thread for you. [Thread]
In mainstream economics, stock markets indicate 'productive' capital.

But Marxists say that stock markets are 'fictitious' capital.

In their book 'Capital as Power, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler argue that both approaches are wrong.

bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/
Capital, they say, is about *power*. Stocks are the symbolic representation of capitalists power. In their paper 'A CasP model of the stock market', Bichler and Nitzan further develop their theory of the stock market.

bnarchives.yorku.ca/494/
For a popular take on Bichler and Nitzan's approach, see these two posts

economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/09/04/sto…

economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/10/05/how…
In the paper below, Joseph Baines and Sandy Hager test/critique elements of the CasP model of the stock market. A sign of healthy science.

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
More recently, James McMahon wrote a response to Baines and Hager that deepens the evidence and theory. A masterful empirical analysis.

capitalaspower.com/2020/07/2020-0…

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More from @blair_fix

Blair Fix Profile picture
13 Jul 20
[Thread] (1) Here's the twitter summary of my recent post on the rise and fall of empires. Although the motivations for empire building differ, the end result is always the same. Empires concentrate the flow of energy.

economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/07/11/why…
(2) That means we can judge the extent of imperial power using relative energy use. We compare energy use (per person) in the empire's core to energy use in the periphery. The greater this ratio, the more "successful" the empire. (Note scare quotes. I'll return to this later).
(3) Let's look first at the largest scale ... the entire history of civilization. Along with agriculture, the first empires arose in the 'West' (the Mediterranean basin). We can chart this rise and fall with energy.
Read 14 tweets
Blair Fix Profile picture
8 Nov 19
A fascinating study about how our psychology relates to institutions. But permit me to highlight some problems. 1/n

sciencenews.org/article/mediev…
This study takes the spread of the "church" as the independent variable. It then shows that this spread correlates with a host of behavioral changes, including a drop in cousin marriages and a change to more individualistic personalities. 2/n
The study concludes that the spread of the church caused the other changes. At first, this sounds superficially convincing. But after thinking about it, there's big problems. 3/n
Read 8 tweets
Blair Fix Profile picture
8 Apr 19
1/N. This is the first in a series of posts about the philosophy of science. In honor of Richard Feynman's famous phrase, I'm calling this thread "How we fool ourselves".
2/N. In grad school, I constantly heard fellow students (and some professors) marvelling at the explanatory scope of some theory. "It explains so much about the world", they would say. Few seemed to realize that explaining too much is a liability.
3/N. Theories that explain "so much" often have the appearance of being "profound". But in reality, they are "not even wrong". This is physicist Wolfgang Pauli's, phrase for theories that fail to make falsifiable predictions. They are immune to evidence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_…
Read 16 tweets
Blair Fix Profile picture
23 Mar 19
I use to think group think was a problem unique to economics. But it seems to be everywhere in science. Sabine Hossenfelder does an excellent job documenting group think in physics: goodreads.com/book/show/3634…
Check out Hossenfelder's blog: backreaction.blogspot.com
In nutrition science, Gary Taubes nicely documents group think and the lock in of bad hypotheses: goodreads.com/book/show/1820…
Read 16 tweets
Blair Fix Profile picture
21 Mar 19
I think real GDP is a garbage indicator. Here is why:

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Preprint is here: osf.io/preprints/soca…
The problem is that real GDP uses prices as the unit of analysis. But prices fail the most basic requirement of a unit --- to be UNIFORM. Here is price change in 10 selected commodities. The unit of "price" is spectacularly unstable:
Read 10 tweets

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