Blair’s Updates

Into the fire

· Blair Fix

Greetings patrons,

It’s time again for another research update. In today’s update, five things:

  1. Back into the fire

  2. Stymied by a terminal

  3. Editor of the Review of Capital as Power

  4. New published paper

  5. Ask me a question

Back into the fire

As many of you know, I’m a scientist who works outside of academia. That’s partially by choice — I like the freedom of being independent. And it’s partially because the academic job market is abysmal.

Before I went to grad school, I worked as a high school math teacher. During my PhD studies, I stayed on the substitute list, which proved to be a good decision. For the past 2 years, substitute teaching has been my main source of income.

COVID changed that. Schools in Ontario shut down in mid-March, leaving me without a job. Fortunately the Federal government created an emergency relief fund that myself and my wife were able to collect. I think of this fund as a universal basic income. The Canadian government never called it that, of course. But since the government gave the money to (nearly) everyone who applied, the emergency fund was effectively a basic income.

That’s ending now. (The timing is ominous. Canada’s second COVID wave is ramping up.) With schools open, I’m headed back to substitute teaching. How long schools will remain open is anyone’s guess. But until then, blog posts will be written in the din of a high school.

Stymied by a terminal

In my first research update, I told you about a project that I’m working on with colleague Troy Cochrane. We want to test the so-called ‘separation hypothesis’, which claims that firms managed by employees behave differently than firms managed by owners. We were just about to dig into the data when COVID struck.

Here’s the problem. We were planning on using the Bloomberg terminal to get data. The Bloomberg terminal, if you’re unfamiliar, gives you access to a huge database of stock market transactions. But access comes with a hefty price — $20,000 per year. (That’s why Michael Bloomberg is so rich.)

Fortunately, Troy is doing a post doc at York University, which has access to the terminal. But there’s a catch. You can only access the terminal in person. You literally have to sit in the library at York at a dedicated computer (there’s only one). Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. Except that because of COVID, York University is running remotely. So we can’t access the terminal.

This research project, it seems, will have to wait until COVID is over. C’est la vie.

Editor of the Review of Capital as Power

As you probably know, I’m the new editor of the Review of Capital as Power. The journal was started in 2012 by Tim Di Muzio. Since then, it’s published some great articles. (You can read them here.)

Interest in the idea of capital as power is growing. And why shouldn’t it? For people who care about understanding capitalism, there is a dearth of good analysis. I hope the Review of Capital as Power becomes a thriving home for top-notch analysis and debate.

So please tell your friends about the journal. And don’t forget to tell them about the capital as power essay prize. You’re welcome to submit an essay too. If you do, just remind me that you’re a patron so I can avoid any conflicts of interest.

New published paper

A few weeks ago, my paper ‘How the rich are different’ was finally published in the Journal of Computational Social Science. (You can read the preprint here.)

Let me tell you the back story. It began about five years ago, with a simple idea. What if income within firms grows predictably with hierarchical rank? How would this affect the distribution of income? Over the next two years, I developed a model to investigate this question. I published the results in a working paper called ‘A Hierarchy Model of Income Distribution’. It eventually became a chapter in my PhD thesis.

After finishing my thesis, I worked on getting this research published. I soon realized that my ‘Hierarchy Model’ article was really three papers. The first part was about how hierarchy can create a power-law distribution of income. Getting this part published was pain-free. I submitted a short paper to the Journal of Computational Social Science, got glowing reviews, and had the paper published within months. It’s called ‘Hierarchy and the power-law income distribution tail’. (The preprint lives here.)

Publishing the next portion of research turned out to be much harder. The second paper explored the idea that income type relates to hierarchical rank. The idea is that as hierarchical rank increases, people earn a larger fraction of their income from capitalist sources.

This hypothesis seemed reasonable to me. But peer reviewers disagreed. I first sent the paper to the Review of Radical Political Economy. They asked me to revise the paper, which I did. I deepened the analysis and strengthened the results. I resubmitted the paper … waited for months … and then got rejected. More rejections ensued. New Political Economy … rejected. PLOS ONE … rejected. Critical Sociology … rejected. Finally, the Journal of Computational Social Science accepted the article with minor revisions.

That brings me to part three of my original working paper. In a forthcoming article, I’m going to look at how the growth of income inequality can be modelled in terms of a redistribution of income towards the top of corporate hierarchies. Stay tuned for this research. Hopefully, it won’t take two years to publish.

Ask me a question

One of the blogs I read frequently is called Starts With A Bang. (It’s about cosmology and astrophysics). I mention it because the author, Ethan Siegel, has an ongoing series called ‘Ask Ethan’. Readers ask him a question about physics and he answers on his blog.

As an educator, this type of question-response interests me. With that in mind, I invite you to send me questions about political economy. If it’s something I can answer, I’ll try to write up a post about it. If your question dumbfounds me, I’ll tell you.

Until next time

That’s it for this research update. Here’s hoping the future is more sane than the present.

Cheers,

Blair