A s a recent mom, I can attest to the fact that at least some humans don’t quite get enough sleep, but the thing is, independently of why my baby thinks sleep is for cowards, in a new article researchers Charles Nunn and David Charles, have shown by comparing sleep patterns of 30 species of […]
In many group decisions unanimity is required to ensure that a reform will be adopted only if it benefits all its members. Multinational organizations may be the best example of this. However, when members have incomplete and private information about the convenience of the reform, a majority rule with veto power performs better in the […]
Are we in the best of the times, as Steven Pinker asserts? Or do we live in a ‘posthumous’ society, to say it with the favourite image of Marina Garcés? As I told in the previous entry, it is not easy to make a direct comparison between the ideas of both authors, because they follow […]
Keep in mind the word Enlightenment , because it’s very likely that it will be one of the most fashionable concepts within the next months. At a global level, Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment now , will probably carry the lead in terms of sellings, comments and criticisms. But by a fortunate coincidence, its publication […]
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 […]