Ergodicity economics is an umbrella term for addressing issues in economics research by carefully considering the ergodicity problem — that’s the problem that the expected value of something may be […]
If you’re wondering where ergodicity economics comes from, where it sits in the world of science, then this blog post if for you. I won’t go into detail about any
A central puzzle in evolutionary biology is that of spontaneous altruism. When two creatures interact, why might one sacrifice something of value in order to help the other? Why, if
The business of insurance, by various measures, is the largest industry on earth. Somewhat surprisingly, mainstream economics struggles to explain its existence. This post is about how ergodicity economics approaches
In 2011 I gave a 15-minute talk to a lay audience in London. The topic I had chosen was ergodicity breaking, and the challenge was clear: how do you get
One key observation that helped launch the field of behavioral economics into stardom is called probability weighting: a human cognitive bias to assign higher probabilities to extreme events than …
Over the years, some words have established themselves at the London Mathematical Laboratory as a useful vocabulary. “Laplacing something” and “Weltschmerz” (p.32) are among these words. Another is “Democratic Domestic
When statistical things go wrong, it’s often because someone unknowingly assumed ergodicity where that wasn’t ok. This can have dramatic effects in everyday language: I will use the example of
Growth rates are at the heart of ergodicity economics, and economic news are full of them, too — “GDP grew by 3% last year,” something like that. Sometimes we also
A few weeks ago I was made aware of an experiment that was recently carried out in Copenhagen, by a group of neuroscientists led by Oliver Hulme at the Danish
If we assume that a false proposition is true, we can prove anything (ex falso quodlibet). Bertrand Russell, so the story goes, once mentioned this in class. A student raised
Not all academic fields have a clear starting point, a seminal paper that constitutes the foundation of the entire discipline. But economics does. The paper that defines modern formal economics
In June 1946 Max Planck spoke in the Göttingen physics colloquium. Planck was 88 years old, had received the highest honors of his community, including a Nobel Prize in 1918
The most interesting scientific projects are those that surprise, when the mathematics, or the code, tells us something we didn’t expect. In our study of US wealth dynamics that’s what
This is a bit of LML jargon that we felt is worth promoting, even though it’s terribly unfair to a great mathematician. So please, you admirers of Laplace, don’t take
Scientific theorizing is indeed about finding something reliable in the world — if we’re lucky something reliable enough to be called a law. Why do we want something that doesn’t
Michael Mauboussin recently re-tweeted an article by Jason Zweig in the Wall Street Journal titled “Disturbing New Facts About American Capitalism”. The article summarizes reports of an increasing concentration of
