(To Appear in Academia Letters, 2021) Abstract: The term “science” represents a claim to universality, but modern social science is based on lessons from European historical experience. Why, then, does it claim to have universal application? …

Introduction: In a previous lecture, we gave a New Definition of Probability. In this lecture, we will show how this definition enables us to resolve the massive amount of controversy which surrounds an apparently simple probability puzzle, known as the Monty-Hall problem. The book The Power of Logical Thinking, quotes…

A huge part of the intellectual journey in my life has involved freeing myself from the positivist blinders that were part of our university education. The empiricist philosophy emerges from the rejection of God, and goes on to the rejection of all unobservables. This has created huge problems in understanding…

Among the many dimensions I have listed in “New Directions in Macroeconomics”, the most important is the moral dimension. If we take Adam Smith as the founder, economics was born as a branch of moral philosophy. However, modern economists claim that the subject is purely positive and scientific, and makes…

This is a review and a summary of some of the key arguments presented by Mian and Sufi in their recent book “House of Debt.” It highlights the contribution of Mian and Sufi by showing how they have solved the mystery of why there was a huge drop in aggregate…

There has been a revolution in terms of understanding causal inference, launched by Judea Pearl and associates, and based on a graph-theoretic approach. As Pearl, Glymour, and Jewell (2016. Causal Inference: A Primer) state: “More has been learned about causal inference in the last few decades than the sum total…

In this lecture, we will examine global corruption rankings in light of The Four Central Questions which are central to our approach: WHY are we doing corruption rankings of countries? What do the numbers mean? How are they calculated? What is the impact of the creation of these corruption rankings? …

RG2 (Reading Guide 2) — Continues from previous post Readers Guide 1: Goodhart on Evolution of Central Banks . Write-up is given following the ten minute video: https://youtu.be/Al-oJ4iQGR0 Goodhart starts by discussing discontent with Central Banking System. He wrote this book well before the GFC 2007 -8, which has created…

[RG1-Readers Guide 1] This is an introductory post of a sequence on the history of Central Banking, built around Charles Goodhart’s book on the Evolution of Central Banking. We would plan to read one chapter a week and discuss it on posts and/or comments on posts on this blog. Those…