Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, who recently published some interesting and rather inspirational books in the Dutch language. Several of these have been translated now. The two main books I am referring to are: Bregman (2017), Utopia for Realists: and how we can get there, Bloomsbury, translated by Elizabeth Manton, originally published as Gratis…
Category: Methodological individualism
Surveying the literature on network formation under mutual consent
I just posted a survey on game-theoretic methods of understanding network formation under the hypothesis of mutual consent in link formation. The introduction of consent in link formation imposes a coordination problem in the network formation process. This survey explores the conclusions from this theory and the various methodologies to avoid the main pitfalls.The main…
Freedom in our contemporary global economy
What is freedom? It seems that this question has become very important in the age of neoliberal decline of civic society. Recently, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek discussed freedom in our age of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Zizek is as usual rather fuzzy about what exactly…
Limitations of behavioral economics
Over the past months during the current economic recession and financial crisis, there has developed a published opinion as if so-called behavioral economics could explain the crisis. Behavioral economics emanates from observations in economic and game theoretic experiments that human subjects do not behave rationally, but are clearly bounded in their reasoning about decisions. Subjects…