Author Archives: Walter

To summarize: models should be used with parsimony–that is, only when we really need them–and their role should not [be] exaggerated. Models can be useful to organize the data and clarify simple logical relations between basic concepts; but they cannot replace the historical narrative, which in my view must be the real core of the […]

I’ve been posting a bit lately about data and theory, and the other week I excerpted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on big data and science. I want to return to that topic through the lens of economics. In short, the proliferation of data can be thought of as an economic shock and basic […]

Benjamin Peirce (father of Charles Sanders Peirce) on induction, deduction, and the role of math in the scientific process: Observation supplies fact. Induction ascends from fact to law. Deduction, by applying the pure logic of mathematics, reverses the process and descends from law to fact. The facts of observation are liable to the uncertainties and […]

Past posts here and here. First up, “A problem in theory,” an essay from 2019 blaming the replication crisis in psychology research largely on lack of theory: The replication crisis facing the psychological sciences is widely regarded as rooted in methodological or statistical shortcomings. We argue that a large part of the problem is the […]

Vox’s Future Perfect newsletter reports: “Just carefully reading a paper — even as a layperson without deep knowledge of the field — is sufficient to form a pretty accurate guess about whether the study will replicate. Meanwhile, DARPA’s replication markets found that guessing which papers will hold up and which won’t is often just a […]

In late 2009, a little more than a decade ago, I started this blog. It wasn’t my first time blogging, but it was my first sustained effort and I might have started it sooner if it hadn’t been for the difficulty of picking a suitable name. After far too much deliberation, someone close to me […]

Just a post to clip together some resources… Julie Battilana at Harvard, in SSIR: In this article, we build on research on social change,1 including our own research,2 for which we studied hundreds of social change initiatives over multiple years and interviewed social entrepreneurs, civil society leaders, and public officials around the world. We identify […]

Here’s political scientist Henry Farrell on Tyler Cowen’s podcast: FARRELL: Analytic Marxism, I think, is underrated. I think it’s going to come back. Now, when I say analytic Marxism, let me be specific about that. There’s a lot of Marx which I think is flat-out wrong. And the analytic Marxist project itself drove itself into […]

From Hans Morgenthau’s classic text on international relations, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace: The theory, in other words, must be judged not by some preconceived abstract principle or concept unrelated to reality, but by its purpose: to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain […]

In the new Foreign Affairs, Felix Salmon reviews Darkness by Design: The Hidden Power in Global Capital Markets, by political scientist Walter Mattli. Salmon and Mattli share the view that more competition among stock exchanges has been bad for financial markets. Here’s Salmon: Up until that point, the exchange was a mutual society: firms could […]