It was a night of the long knives for my PhD last week. After much internal bickering amongst the various factions, some of them produced evidence that the leader of the powerful 'planned economy' clique were being funded by the French in a secret p ...

Blog entry - dan - 22/01/2008 - 23:01 - 1 comment - 0 attachments

Just started reading Manuel DeLanda's 'A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity' 1 - a brave title! But it's got me braincells going on a Monday, so it can't be all bad. He's immediately argued against reductionism at ...

Blog entry - dan - 04/02/2008 - 15:36 - 0 comments - 0 attachments

Tory David Willetts (apparently 'Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills') is to make a speech tonight at the LSE - the Oakeshott lecture indeed - espousing the virtues of reciprocity, community and altruism. He is proposin ...

Blog entry - dan - 20/02/2008 - 12:43 - 0 comments - 0 attachments

Was reading this from Crooked Timber yesterday: Maria asks, how does OPEC exist in a world where of legal and institutional free trade? She says "I'm not looking for the realpolitik answer. That's pretty obvious. But what is the legal and institutio ...

Blog entry - dan - 01/05/2008 - 09:13 - 0 comments - 0 attachments

This is probably a foolish venture (given my math ignorance) but here's some thoughts on an economic random walk. (Any pointers to elementary fuck-ups / blindingly obvious things I'm missing appreciated.) I've come across the graphs here in each of the ...

Blog entry - dan - 02/05/2008 - 16:09 - 2 comments - 2 attachments

Over at Crooked Timber, there's a great post on the minimum wage where Kathy argues that 1) there are plenty of empirical reasons why increasing a minimum wage may not lead to higher unemployment and 2) that you'll get into trouble with the economic ...

Blog entry - dan - 12/05/2008 - 11:02 - 0 comments - 0 attachments

I caught a programme last night on the beeb about property. Nothing new there - you can be guaranteed to find a property programme of some description 50% of the time the telly goes on: if the schedulers are to be believed, we're obsessed. (Indeed, ther ...

Blog entry - dan - 14/05/2008 - 09:31 - 0 comments - 0 attachments

In 1918 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was given to Fritz Haber : he invented a method for synthesizing ammonia - that is, nitrogen 'fixed' with hydrogen - a chemical vital for organic life. The process was used during the First World War to ma ...

Blog entry - dan - 11/11/2008 - 15:53 - 0 comments - 1 attachment