Thanks, @doctorow, for the excellent summary of my research!

Let me offer a counterpoint to the argument below. 🧵

https://x.com/doctorow/status/1849385854495498489

In most societies, there’s a class of non-home-owners who would *like* to become home-owners. But this fact doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a physical shortage of dwellings.

@fictitious_cap @starpositions @NJHagens @StephanieKelton @TyKeynes @ProfSteveKeen @CareyWKing Debt is just a type of asset, similar to corporate equity but with slightly different rules.

When you buy equity, you purchase a stake in a firm's property rights. So in that sense, it's a claim on present-day property. @fictitious_cap @starpositions @NJHagens @StephanieKelton @TyKeynes @ProfSteveKeen @CareyWKing Now, this equity buys you a stake in the firm's income stream. So your property rights come with an *expected* future income. But nothing is guaranteed.

Debt works similarly way. The difference is that corporate bonds come with a promised *rate* of return.

It's time for a thread about research. [thread]

When I was younger, I thought that research had two stages

1. Researching;
2. Writing up your results.

Now I know that this is rarely how it works. 1/ The reality, at least for me, is that writing and researching happen at the same time. The reason is simple: when I start to write about my research, I inevitably realize that I need to do more research. That's what we call a positive feedback cycle. 2/

It's a lovely Friday afternoon here in Toronto. It makes me feel like Tweeting about research I enjoy. So here's a thread about capital-as-power research.

1/n The field got started with the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bicher (@BichlerNitzan) who published the book 'Capital as Power' in 2009. It's a seminal investigation of the power underpinnings of capitalism. Here's the free ebook version:
blairfix.github.io/capital_as_pow…

2/n

Today I'm tweeting about @BichlerNitzan's buy-to-build indicator.

If you're not familiar, this is an indicator that quantifies the portion of 'investment' spent buying other corporations.

#buytobuild
#capitalaspower Notice the scare quotes around 'investment'. To many people, 'investment' means to 'build new capacity'. Hence, governments are always chasing 'investment' dollars.

But here's the thing: 'investment' is purely about transferring property rights.

Ugh. This deserves a rant:

"Without NFTs, there’s no obvious way to attribute value to digital artwork."

thestar.com/business/2021/… The 'value' in art is what it contributes to society. Same goes for science. Because that's essentially a public good, there's no way to measure the 'value'. Let's just settle for this: both art and science are good.

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/

[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).

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

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.

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

I think real GDP is a garbage indicator. Here is why:

link.springer.com/article/10.100… Preprint is here: osf.io/preprints/soca…