The People's Economics

The introduction puts forward a good case for the claim that statistics has lost it's way, and that the sole focus on signficance testing is a mistake. The authors argue that somehow precision has become more important than oomph . We are introduced to William Gosset (the Student of Student's t-tes...

Markets are a central part of the study of economics, and the claims for the efficiency of markets are often made. But how similar are the markets which occur in the real world to the abstract entities which are postulated in economics? I'm looking to this bookto give me a better understanding of t...

On starting the book, I'm a bit worried by some of the examples of those who practice dialectic. For example there are Plato, Boethius and Galileo, whose arguments I find suspect in that they are one sided and look to be in to form of contrived dialogue, rathen than real dialectic. I'll have to see...

In The People's Economics I discuss how arguments hardly ever seem to be persuasive. They seem more about scoring some sort of points. So how can arguments be set out so as to actually try to reach a conclusion? This question leads me to the topic of dialectic, and the form of thesis, antithesis, s...

In the quest to make sure that results are credible, statistics is becoming more and more important in science, and in particular in the medical sciences. But somehow it doesn't seem to work. Clinical trials should provide reasonable certitude as to the effectiveness and safety of a treatment, but ...

The first part of the book lived up to my expectations. The books explains how scaling arguments can be used to explain many properties we observe in living things, and tells of how looking at the nature of networks, such as blood vessels, within living things, can predict the quarter power scaling ...

This is a detailed book, and I felt it wasn't really aimed at a non-specialist like me, but I did feel that I got something out of the book. My understanding of what the book is saying is as follows. In his 1976 Nobel lecture, Milton Friedman claimed that economists had promoted inflationist policie...

In the book How to Take a Chance we're asked to imagine a group betting on the throw of a die. It has come up 4 twice in a row. One man believes in lucky streaks and would bet on it coning up 4 again. Another believes in the law of averages and would bet against it coming up 4 again. The first belie...

After reading Orrell's earlier book Economyths I felt it had several problems. It had too many strawman arguments, and didn't deliver on the promise of something new. So I thought I'd use that as a baseline and look for places where this book did better. Since I was been somewhat negative about Econ...

I've read a few books on the history of economics, and have tried to read the original works of some of the early economists, Economics is often presented as the 'Dismal Science', which tells of the scarcity that exists in the world rather than trying to deal with it. The early economists such as A...