Pandemic living is like doing a PhD

Greetings patrons,

I hope you are safe and healthy in these difficult times. It’s time again for another research update. In today’s update, five things:

1. Some personal notes about quarantine living

2. My foray into publishing

3. Papers in the pipeline

4. Research on societal ‘sabotage’

5. Charting a career outside academia

Quarantine living

After 4 months, I’m finally getting used to quarantine living. Actually, it’s a lot like doing a PhD — endless hours of sitting at home by yourself. Fortunately, I loved this isolating aspect of PhD research, so I’m enjoying the quarantine life.

Each day I wake up early (5 am) to get some writing/research done before my daughter wakes up. She gets up around 8 am and has a lounging breakfast and TV time while I continue to work for another hour or so. Then we both head outside for some relaxation.

My daughter is almost five, and is now big enough to go on long bike rides to our local ravine. It’s a bit of a slog getting home (5-year old legs tire easily), but with some help from a bungee-cord tow rope, we can make the round trip without too much complaining.

My wife is also getting used to quarantine living. She’s a ballet teacher and has set up virtual dance classes in the evenings. Our daughter enjoys watching/interrupting the classes.

What once felt odd (not going to work) now feels normal. I hope you too are adjusting to quarantine living.

My foray into publishing

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on converting Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s book Capital as Power into an ebook and online book.

Why am I taking a foray into publishing? It all started when I recommended Capital as Power to Evonomics publisher Steve Roth (who’s also a patron … thanks Steve!). A few weeks ago, Steve asked if there was a free ebook version of Capital as Power. Unfortunately, there isn’t. So I decided to make one!

This foray into publishing is a passion project for me. Reading Capital as Power (almost a decade ago) was a transformative experience. At the time, I was disillusioned with both neoclassical and Marxist economics. But I didn’t know of any alternatives. Not only did Jonathan and Shimshon’s book offer a devastating critique of these two schools of thought, it provided a compelling alternative for how to understand capitalism. Capital, they argue, is a quantification of property rights — a symbolic manifestation of owners’ power.

This thinking was a revelation to me, and set me on the path of skepticism (about most political economy) on which I remain. I want other people to have the same experience.

Jonathan and Shimshon retain the rights for online distribution of the book, so that means we can create a free ebook and html version. I’m typesetting the book using the R package bookdown, which renders both epub and beautiful html. So stay tuned for the ebook release of Capital as Power! (Until then, you can read the pdf here.)

Papers in the pipeline

I’m happy to say that after nearly two years of peer-review limbo, my paper ‘How the Rich are Different’ is going to be published in the Journal of Computational Social Science.

This paper attempts to connect both income size and income class to rank within a hierarchy. One of the key findings is that CEOs tend to earn capitalist income in proportion to their hierarchical power (their control over subordinates). CEOs who have more subordinates tend to earn a larger fraction of their income from capitalist sources (stock options). I show that if you generalize this trend to the whole US population, you can nicely explain the distribution of both labor and capitalist income.

This paper has previously been rejected by four other journals. The problem is twofold. First, the central hypothesis (that income relates to hierarchical power) doesn’t fit well with mainstream economics. So there’s an ideological barrier to overcome. Second, the paper develops a rather technical model of income/hierarchy. Unfortunately, radical political economists who are receptive to the paper’s main hypothesis tend to balk at the numerical model. Fortunately, the folks at the Journal of Computational Social Science (who are mostly physicists) are both quantitatively savvy and skeptical of received economic wisdom.

A sabotage index

Together with my friend James McMahon, I’m working on an exciting new project that’s going to quantify the ‘sabotage’ involved with inequality.

To understand what we’re doing, let’s back up a bit. A decade ago, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett published a book called The Spirit Level. In it, they document the things that go wrong as income inequality increases. From mental health to teen pregnancy to incarceration, it seems that societies do worse as inequality grows.

James and I are going to extend this research. James has compiled a huge database of social indicators, and we’re going to test how these indicators relate to inequality. But rather than look just at social ‘bads’, we’re also going to look at social ‘goods’. Our hypothesis is that inequality is a form of societal ‘sabotage’, meaning the growth of inequality will relate to the increase of social ‘bads’ and the decline of social ‘goods’.

If this turns out to be true, we can use the data to construct a ‘sabotage index’. Think if this index as the inverse of the human development index (HDI). Whereas the HDI indicates societal well-being, the sabotage index indicates societal self-destruction at the alter of capital accumulation.

Looking ahead

On a final note, I was dismayed to recently read that scientist James Heathers is leaving science to work in the private sector. Heathers, if you’re not familiar, has done excellent work revealing scientific fraud. Together with psychologist Nick Brown, Heathers has worked as a ‘data thug’. He looks for fishiness in the data published in scientific papers. Heathers’ data thuggery was crucial, for instance, in revealing the fraudulent work of nutrition researcher Brian Wansink.

This scrutinizing of published research is important for science. But it has little career reward. That’s why Heathers is leaving science. Academia doesn’t support the work that he’s passionate about.

Heather’ withdrawal from science has got me thinking about my own work. More and more, I’m thinking about charting a career outside of academia. Doing so is something I never seriously considered until recently. But the response to my blog has been overwhelming. I’m on track to hit 100,000 views by the end of July. If enough people become interested in my work, I’m cautiously optimistic that I can build a career on crowd-funded science. So thank-you for being the foundation of this alternative career path!

That’s it for this research update. Stay tuned for my upcoming blog post tentatively titled “The rise and fall of empire in the charts”.

Cheers,

Blair