“This isn’t a binary world: it was never ‘Trump or nothing,’ or ‘Trump or Utopia.’ What can be reasonably ascribed to Trump is the minor difference between him and the next guy (who, in the grand scheme of things agrees with him on 95% of issues) – deflated by the sum of changes in technology,…
“Science can, and does, go wrong. It’s our job to spot its errors, point them out and fix them. Not yap on irrelevantly about where the money came from.” ~ Joakim Book
“On economic well-being, it’s clear that a country with an invasively large government sector and extraordinarily high taxes can still perform well. In the corona debates, the simplified story that lockdowns prevent spread and open societies kill people should be relegated to the dustbin of impressive theories at odds with reality.” ~ Joakim Book
“I share Harford’s deep commitment to figuring out what’s true. His calls for keeping an open mind, for being curious about scientific questions, results, and numbers, for carefully noticing your emotions on a topic – all supremely useful advice from which most of us can benefit. Abandoning or doubting all statistics you encounter is not…
“The book, while scary and disheartening, is truth-seeking and ultimately optimistic. Ritchie doesn’t come to bury science; he comes to fix it. ‘The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem,’ he writes on the last page, ‘the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice.'” ~ Joakim…
“Business responses to corona have shown us that unused items – from chairs and tables to urinals – still have value; they are still in use, even when nobody seems to be occupying them. Most importantly, government spending has little ability to raise that utilization. For this age-old economic fallacy, free lunches remain elusive.” ~…
“Lindbeck was a great economist and public voice of economic sanity. He will be sorely missed.” ~ Joakim Book
“The single largest factor for why Sweden had it much worse than its Nordic neighbors during corona is the ‘dry tinder’ hypothesis. We are sensitive about borrowing the dry tinder metaphor for the persons of human souls, but the metaphor is clarifying: Maybe a country has more forest fires this year than its neighbors because…