The most used mechanism to guarantee universal education in a country is by providing free public education, where public means both publicly financing and public provision. Milton Friedman (1962) made the case to keep the public funding but make the provision private through a system of school vouchers. Say that the State spends 100 per […]
In 1951, the physicist Paul A.M. Dirac called for the re-introduction of the æther in an oft-quoted letter to Nature. His was an attempt to resuscitate an epistemic object that most scientists at the time, as much as today, judged to be dead and buried. By using the old-fashioned spelling, Dirac was making a statement […]
Economics needs theory, lab experiments, historical data and field evidence. Pilot programs and randomized controlled trials are particularly credible from the point of view of internal validity. However, the results of these “proof-of-concept” studies do not necessarily extend beyond the context in which they where implemented or scale up if they are generalized. Banerjee et […]
Competitive markets are a well understood economic mechanism. The Economic Theory explains remarkably well, at least for a social science, its properties and success along economic history. We have lab experimentation (see here), and plenty of historical evidence that a market oriented society improves upon a non-market oriented one. It has happened in democracies like […]
In the past entry I presented a criticism to a few common arguments (or rather, topics) that we often find ‘in defence’ of the humanities. Those arguments were problematic not only because their fallacious nature, but because they only serve to add confidence to the ones already persuaded, but they give to the rest of […]
Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas (Plato is my friend, but Truth is still a better friend of mine), they say Aristotle whispered when he explained the arguments with which he demolished the theories of his teacher, whose school, the Academy, had been Aristotle’s home for twenty years. I remember this well known phrase almost […]
Very often Economics is censured for using unrealistic assumptions, like that stating that people are selfish. According to some critics (e.g., the philosopher Mario Bunge, 2010 ), this fact is enough to show the invalidity of Economic models. After all, if we start with a falsehood, how can we hope to find useful theories? The […]
The problem of what is the relation between matter and mind, and more particularly, between the physical stuff of our brain, on the one hand, and our consciousness and their conscious, qualitative states (also known as ‘qualia’), certainly is one of the deepest and hardest questions in all philosophy. I have already written in Mapping […]
This article is not about supporting the use of animals for research or to justify the need of such models for the advance of our society (many others have addressed that already). This post is neither about the constant pressure that researchers feel from peers, funding bodies or institutions to do more and more. The […]
Game Theory studies mathematical models of strategic decision. Historically, the first approach was to study games as interactions of perfectly rational individuals, who have complete and transitive preferences and who are intelligent enough to analyze the game. This is a normative approach: it states what to do if you accept that you and the others […]