One book that has caused much stir in the past months is Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World . I confess I approached the book with some skepticism, for ‘the classical world’, I thought, was already considerably ‘destroyed’ by the time Christianism became the official, and soon the only […]
Very frequently, economic analysis must compare future and present magnitudes. Say that under policy A, the stream of payoffs for today and next year is (10, 10), while under policy B it is (13, 6). The total of payoff is higher under A, but policy B results in higher payoffs sooner. If later payoffs are […]
I’m a man slowly sliding into the old age. Being a scientist (a simple science worker), this means that for decades I’ve become familiar with the uncomfortable feeling of struggling to adapt to a constant, quick change of everything. In the very beginning of my career, still an undergrad, I joined a lab where my […]
In this article I summarize the recently published paper by José Alcalde . In this article, the author discusses the current matching mechanism that is used in Spain to assign medical graduates who pass the MIR exam to residency positions. The system works as follows. Students are ranked according to their marks in the MIR […]
If there is one worrisome fact about science here and now, it is this: the possibility that a huge amount of publications is to be retracted due to falsified or duplicated data. The phenomenon is not new, there have been more than a few reports sounding the alarm on precisely this problem, and there is […]
The progress that physics experienced during the 20 th century was probably one of the greatest and most everlasting successes of the humankind. Discovering the hidden and minute composition of matter and energy, as well as realising that the rules they obey are as further from common sense as quantum theory has revealed, are amongst […]
Ravallion (2018) questions the thesis that globalization has been a major driving force of inequality. While this is the conclusion of two recently published books (Bourguignon, 2016 and Milanovic, 2016 ), Ravallion argues that their interpretation of the data is not well supported and that is even contradicted by the economic research. Here is a […]
In our previous entries , we asked why it is that collaborating scientists prefer to publish one single paper in which all their contributions are ‘mixed’, instead of one individual paper by each co-author (with quotations to the other collaborator’s paper where necessary). There is a relatively obvious (but, as I shall show, partial) answer […]
Let me leave aside for a moment our talk about scientists and papers, and bring up a topic that, at first sight, might seem totally unconnected: Ronald Coase’s economic theory about the firm and the allocation of property rights. As in the case of the problem we mentioned in our last entry (why scientists share […]
Conspicuous consumption can be broadly defined as the type of consumption that does not satisfy a direct need or want, but rather, a desire to be regarded as someone that occupies a higher position in a hierarchy. For example, I buy a Picasso not because I particularly like the painting, but because, hanging on a […]