Tag: academia
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A Theory of (British) University Business Cycles
Put simply, the theory of political business cycles goes like this: in the run up to elections, governments increase public spending or/and lower interest rates (if they can control them) in order to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. They supply voters with more goods or cheap credit as a way to make them happy…
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What the Piketty-Financial Times Affair says about journalism and academia
Thomas Piketty has issued a response to the FT’s criticism claiming that bad computations and flawed estimates undermined the overall thesis of his book, namely that wealth concentration had increased. I have read the 10-page letter by Piketty and found it extremely convincing. Basically, he doesn’t give an inch, explaining each and every point that…
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“A useless pile of half-truths and sensationalistic linkbait”
Dear Mr. Salustri, I am the author of the piece “how academia resembles a drug gang” that you describe on your blog with the words above. You also write that it is “mortally flawed”, “laughable” and “a complete mischaracterization”. You call my argument “stupid” in a reply to a comment on your piece which defends mine.…
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Journalism also Works like a Drug Gang
I came across an old but interesting column by Roy Greenslade about “how journalism became a middle class profession“, describing how journalism progressively closed its doors to people from low-income backgrounds in Britain. I found it especially interesting because the logic described there is extremely similar to the “insider-outsider” logic I talked about for the…
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How Margaret Thatcher Made Britain a Soviet State
When I moved to the United Kingdom a year and a half ago, I thought that I was moving to a free market experiment. Margaret Thatcher and her followers – from Blair to Cameron – had crushed the unions, liberalized labour and financial markets, privatized public services, reformed the state following business principles and reduced…
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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything…
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Universities are Full of Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber writes: “Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they…