Human Systems and Behavior

Synthesizes philosophical and psychological perspectives on well-being and the good life.

Connects value systems to political disagreement and ideological division.

Examines the role of emotion as a mechanism for value perception.

Investigates the origins and structure of human values across psychology and sociology.

Analyzes protected values and why some things resist market logic.

Explores how the brain computes value using a common neural currency.

Examines the foundational paradox between price and value through economics and philosophy.

The Free Trade Myth: free trade is not the magic bullet it's claimed to be.

This post examines the two most common non-economic explanations for why poor countries stay poor: corruption and culture. It evaluates the empirical relationship between corruption and growth, asks why culturally identical countries at different levels of development exhibit different behavioral patterns, and traces the historical use of cultural argument as post-hoc justification for development outcomes.

This post examines the macroeconomic policy prescriptions applied to developing countries through IMF conditionality, evaluating the empirical relationship between inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy, and economic growth across the historical record. It draws on the cases of Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, and Argentina to assess whether the standard orthodoxy of very low inflation and balanced budgets produces the outcomes its proponents claim.