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Category Archives: Economics
The Buffered Economist and the Porous Citizen: How Market Liberalism Mistakes What Human Beings Are
The modern defense of free trade rests on a tacit anthropology that economists rarely acknowledge because it appears to them as common sense. Beneath the language of efficiency, comparative advantage, consumer welfare, and aggregate growth sits a particular image of … Continue reading
The Synthesis That Never Happened
When I was 21, I decided that I would devote my life to reconciling micro and macro-economic theory. Then I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, spent six years in bed, and became a blogger instead. Economics’ loss is Judaism’s … Continue reading
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The Liturgy of the Identifiable: UC Berkeley Economics and the Performance of Rigor
UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics presents itself as a temple of empirical seriousness. Clean identification, administrative datasets, causal inference rendered in careful prose. The tone stays restrained in print. The claims grow confident in policy settings. To the analyst of … Continue reading
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Ten Convenient Beliefs For Economists In America Today
Models that assume rational actors and efficient markets are useful simplifications rather than ideological commitments that happen to justify existing distributions of wealth and power. Convenient because the entire apparatus of mainstream economics is built on these assumptions and abandoning … Continue reading
Posted in Economics
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Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
Elites loved this stupid 2025 book. Amazon says: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to confront a new authoritarian axis—Russia, China, and Iran. “Deftly … Continue reading
Posted in Economics
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The Engineered Hour: Why Americans Work More and Produce More
The American economic model rests on a specific symmetry between high labor input and aggressive capital investment. Workers supply long hours and sustained intensity. Firms respond with capital that amplifies each hour of effort. The result is a system where … Continue reading
The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Prestige in Economics
Economists do not compete for prestige by saying they want status. They compete by claiming authority over truth, policy, and prediction. They frame their work as science, rigor, relevance, or realism. This is the central insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance … Continue reading
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Trade Liberalization as a Coalitional Signaling Mechanism: A Political Economy Approach
Abstract Written with AI: Standard models of trade policy emphasize aggregate welfare and consumer surplus. This paper proposes an alternative political-economy mechanism. Building on Alliance Theory (Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton 2023) and sociological accounts of expertise as jurisdiction (Turner 2003), … Continue reading
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The Blind Spots Of Modern Economics
Written with AI: The 2025 book by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, notes: “A major problem with mainstream economics, once one gets past recitations of … Continue reading
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Decoding The Nobel Prize In Economics
Written with AI: The Nobel Prize in Economics, formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is usually described as rewarding work that clarifies how markets function or how individuals make choices under scarcity. In … Continue reading
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