What the article implies but doesn’t say is that we need to be more mindful about using LLMs virtuously in our science.

“But although it is easy to fit any given segment of the past neatly and intelligibly into the patterns of world history, contemporaries are never able to see their own place in the patterns.” ~The Glass Bead Game

Another way to characterize their forward-looking argument is that prices aren’t just signals. They’re symbols, loaded with meaning, not mere correlations. They are the product of how we interpret and imagine the future.

JPA aims to elicit assent to a powerful intuition; Robin Hanson insists that such assent doesn’t yet yield stance-independent truth without an argument. The disagreement is over whether shared moral certainty suffices to establish realism. Robin is targeting that precise hinge.

I show in my book how it doesn’t follow if there’s a difference between the custom of property and property rights: “Whereas the custom of property is ancient, moral, and universal to all people, property rights are modern, amoral, and majoritarian.” amazon.com/Property-Speci…

I joined Sean Rasmussen on Viewpoints to discuss the human side of economics and how experimental economics makes the hidden morality of commerce and the modern world visible. #MeaningfulEconomics viewpointspodcast.ca/episodes/meani…

Great fun with a host who had really combed through my academic work.

Economists also invoke behavioral identities—without even a whiff of accounting intuition—that are conveniently free of causality: U(x,y) = f(x,y).

Whoa, no kidding.

Apparently this graph is not reliable.

Like Lucifer in The Sandman, we imagine ourselves co-authors of our economic stories. But fate humbles our hubris. The beauty of Gaiman’s tale is showing that fate and free will can coexist. We economists need to tell that tale too.

Framing the alternative as “no objectives or constraints” is a straw-man false dilemma. The critique is that the math abstracts away the purpose, moral sentiments, and values—in short, the meaning—that shape the aims of human beings. Optimization is a tool, not a worldview.

Part of what Tim Harford is channeling is the question of what we take to be primary in economic inquiry: our observation of the world or our tools for constrained optimization. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Honored that Michael Thomas compares 'Meaningful Economics' to Menger’s 'Principles of Economics'. independent.org/tir/2025-fall/…

"Wilson wants economists to reject narrow cause-and-effect arguments because they obscure human purpose and meaning behind action." independent.org/tir/2025-fall/…

What in German tarnation is this?