Blair’s Updates

Back in academia

· Blair Fix

Greetings patrons,

It’s time for another research update. In today’s newsletter, three things:

  1. Back in academia (for now)

  2. The institution size spectrum

  3. Research on the power index with James McMahon

Back in academia (for now)

After 3 years as a freelance researcher, I’m now (as of today) back on the academic roster. I’ve started a postdoc at York University working with Jonathan Nitzan. I’m going to be focusing on my research on hierarchy, and further developing my numerical model of hierarchical income distribution. (The basic idea of the model is that one’s income grows with one’s hierarchical rank within firms.)

I began thinking about this model back in 2015, but it took me forever to create. I initially implemented the hierarchy model in R … but soon realized that it wouldn’t scale. (Here’s a presentation of my awkward first steps.) The code was too slow and too resource hungry. So I had to go back to square one and rewrite the model in C++. And that meant I had to learn C++.

I spent the fall of 2017 teaching myself how to code C++ (and more frustratingly, how to debug it). The effort culminated in the paper ‘A Hierarchy Model of Income Distribution’, which became part of my PhD dissertation.

Since then, I’ve refined and extended the model. I’ve published two rather technical papers in the Journal of Computational Social Science:

What I haven’t done so far is write an accessible explanation of this research. That’s on my agenda for this fall. So stay tuned for a series of posts that explain the distributional consequences of hierarchy.

The institution size spectrum

In the spring of 2020, I wrote a series of posts (here and here) investigating how government size fits into the overall size distribution of institutions. I compared this size distribution to a broader trend found in nature — the biomass distribution. Across life on Earth, the abundance of different organisms can be predicted from their mass. Small organisms are ubiquitous. Large organisms are rare.

The same principle holds among human institutions. The caveat, though, is that economists typically look only at the size distribution of firms. That’s odd, since governments are clearly part of the institutional mix. Why not measure their size distribution as well? If you’re familiar with mainstream economics, you’ll know that this exclusion speaks to economists’ biases. Their default assumption is that government is a ‘distortion’ on the otherwise smooth-working free market.

When you throw this thinking in the trash (where it belongs), you realize that you should study firms and governments together, and look at the size distribution of institutions in its entirety.

For about a year now, I’ve been meaning to extend my original research and look at the size distribution of government. The problem was that I didn’t know where to find data. Most statistical agencies report total government employment, regardless of the level of government. But I want data for each independent government at every level (municipal, state/province, and federal).

Last week, I discovered that the US Census Bureau has such data, and I’ve started crunching the numbers. So expect a post on the US institution size spectrum in a month or so.

Research on the power index with James McMahon

My friend and colleague James McMahon has been doing really interesting research with Bichler & Nitzan’s ‘power index’, which compares stock market prices to the average wage.

A neoclassical economist would tell you that this index tells you about the ‘productivity’ of capital relative to the ‘productivity’ of workers. But that’s bullshit. Bichler and Nitzan argue instead that the power index tells you about the power of capitalists relative to workers. Hence the name … the power index.

Last summer, I wrote two posts (here and here) that introduced the power index and showed how it relates to several indicators of class struggle. For some time now, James McMahon and I have been planning on extending this research. Last week, James returned to the project and started sharing some fascinating results.

He’s been looking at how the power index changes during periods of fascist revolution (for instance, during Pinochet’s regime in Chile, the Regime of the Colonels in Greece, and Suharto’s regime in Indonesia.) Unsurprisingly, fascist dictatorships tend to be good for capitalists and bad for workers. This corporate-friendly attitude shows up as a skyrocketing power index during these regimes.

James and I are planning on writing a post on this research soon. On that note, James has started blogging about his own research at Notes on Cinema. If you’ve ever wondered why Hollywood pumps out endless versions of the same movie, or why it’s become obsessed with franchises, I highly recommend reading James’ blog. He does fascinating research that deserves more attention. He tweets at @notes_on_cinema.

Until next time

That’s it for this update. I want to thank you for supporting my research. I often write about how corporations make money by enforcing property rights … by putting up paywalls and charging absurd rates for gated material. Although this is the dominant economic model, your support shows that other models are possible.

I like to think of your support as a kind of gift economy. I give away my research, and in return, you gift support. It demonstrates that people are not motivated purely by self-interest. So thank-you for your generosity.

Cheers,

Blair