I joined Cambridge Economics in 2011 as an assistant professor. For historical reasons, Cambridge is still a bastion of heterodox economics - not so much in the department, but definitely in the colleges. (The college structure deserves its own thread.) 1/10

Yesterday, I had some harsh words about the current state of much of “heterodox economics.” That criticism does not mean I believe mainstream economics is the only game in town. On the contrary, some of the traditions that sit outside the mainstream have taught me a great

I would like to add Bowles & Gintis to the list. I did my undergrad in a cliché latam heteredox dept. My intermediate micro class used a book they called the Anti-Varian (yikes). So I had too look for alternatives. And they were the first serious economists I found on that path.

Politicians who later become congressional leaders trade stocks like everyone else ... until they ascend to power. After ascension, their portfolios beat peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts.

Desde hace dos siglos, México funciona como un país de caudillos. Los partidos son poco más que paraguas para agrupar alianzas locales, no proyectos coherentes. En la práctica, cada región es el feudo de algún cacique que gobierna a sus anchas. Hoy Morena es la única red

España nunca tendrá que disculparse por Cortés ni por la conquista. Cortés, al final, es más mexicano que español. En cambio, España sí debería pedirnos perdón por mandarnos a esos impresentables de Iglesias y Monedero. Bastante tenemos ya con nuestros propios descerebrados en

Todo en Morena es una farsa. El líder supremo finge escribir un libro, sus acólitos fingen leerlo, la presidenta finge gobernar y sus acarreados fingen apoyarla. Todos siguen el guion como si nadie advirtiera el teatro.

Good books, but my favorite in the series is Managerial Dilemmas. Admittedly it sits awkwardly at the intersection of political economy and industrial organization, which is probably why it never got the reception it deserved, but it’s incredibly readable and accessible. It

Apparently ChatGPT is now capable of being as cringe as Neruda. Guess that means it can probably paint doodles with the clumsiness of Kahlo too.

This Oliver Sacks story is NUTS. Really significant. An absolute catastrophe for the Humanities. Or rather several brand names in the contemporary prestige public humanities. You think LLMs hallucinate? Wait until you see what humans have been doing at The New Yorker!

En Latinoamérica, ningún gobierno es capaz de garantizar lo más básico: seguridad. Pero todos quieren tener su agencia espacial y su mega computadora. Si no supiera que son ladrones rentistas, pensaría que solo son idiotas.

Eighteenth century Spain may look, at first glance, like an age of recovery and reform. But it as a century of reforms that never fully settled. What it reveals, more awkwardly, is how a fiscal-military state could be expanded on paper and still unravel quickly because the

It’s a bit troubling that people can’t seem to distinguish between death rates and fertility rates. The Black Death was a massive mortality shock, not a sustained collapse in births, and those are very different demographic mechanisms with very different long-run implications.

If you care about happiness, well-being, or growth, you should care about GDP. vox.com/policy/471950/…

Investigan a empresa aeronáutica que llevó a María Corina Machado a Noruega ✍🏻👇🏻 Carlos Loret de Mola Cuentan que en el gobierno ya mandaron investigar a fondo a la empresa aeronautica asentada en Querétaro, que es propietaria del avión en el que voló la Premio Nobel de la Paz María Corina

Es sumamente descriptivo lo que dice una parte importante de la izquierda cada vez que pierde elecciones. Descriptivo porque deja en evidencia que, en el fondo, no le importan ni la democracia, ni la libertad, ni la “voz del pueblo”, y mucho menos la alternancia en el poder. Para

Fifty-five percent is still enormous. Are we really saying half the students are great? That was one of the bigger adjustments I had to make when I started teaching in the US as a grad student. The baseline expectation was an A. Transforming grades from percentages to letters

I recently came across an interesting take on Hero, the 2002 Chinese film, and the idea that it works as fascist propaganda. I didn’t fully agree with the argument, but it did get me thinking about how “propaganda” is treated and perceived in popular culture more generally.

We published a paper on this. Besides educational polarization and gender, part of is that being a doctor has changed from being an entrepreneurial profession to a PMC position: gsb.stanford.edu/insights/close… Dentists (still mainly small business owners) remain Republican.

It’s not taxation doing the work. The comforts come mainly from the positive externalities of markets. Schumpeter saw this clearly a century ago: as societies grow wealthy, that wealth starts to look natural and inevitable. People forget the role markets played in producing it