Most internet users are by now aware of the vulnerability of their personal data. When the news broke that tech companies misuse and manipulate our personal data, there was a widespread “techlash” against the corporate giants Facebook, Amazon and Google. The explicit motive for data harvesting is the prediction of consumer wants and needs. And […]
Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be, That machines should e’er surpass our art. We are the masters, them the slaves, And thus it ever shall be so! They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn Only what we bid them learn, no more. They cannot understand the heart Or beauty of our words, you see […]
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about USD 4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent […]
The transformation of a bundle of more or less deep insights on a few voting procedures, as we saw in a preceding entry, into something like a general logico-mathematical theory about the aggregation of individual preferences into a collective choice was the work of a single man, Kenneth Arrow, in his 1951 book Social choice […]
In 2000 and 2001, the use of child slaves on cocoa farms in West Africa was exposed in a series of documentaries and pieces of investigative journalism, sparking an international outcry . This series of events was far from unprecedented. As discussed in my paper, since the 19th century, when cocoa was first introduced to […]
That collective decisions made through voting may lead to some weird consequences is something probably well known since the first time one tribe started to use some kind of voting in order to reach an agreement. Contrarily to what happens in many other areas of human wisdom, we don’t have any deep reflections on the […]
The cryptocurrency bitcoin now uses up more electricity a year than the whole of Argentina, according to recent estimates from the University of Cambridge. That’s because the creation of a bitcoin, in a process called mining, is achieved by powerful computers that work night and day to decode and solve complex mathematical problems. The energy […]
Participatory budgeting seeks to involve some form of public deliberation in the budget allocation of a city or town. The first process took place in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the late eighties. Since then the practice spread through the world, with more than 7,000 processes around the world in 2018. The logic underpinning participatory budgeting […]
2020 marks exactly half a century from the publication of one of the most important papers in the crossing of economics, philosophy, and political science (and, taking into account that it barely contained six skimpy pages, probably one of the most influential papers per page ever): Amartya Sen’s “The impossibility of a Paretian liberal”. It […]
In a recent entry, I provided a summary of Brian Caplan’s views (in his book The Case against Education ) about the main evils of our contemporary education system. In a nutshell, the main problem is, in the first place, that most of what is taught in schools and colleges is basically not learnt, or […]