Paulo L dos Santos

Ponder the laundry list of civilisational failures needed to make this a headline in 2026 AD...

Just published a brief, popular entry sharing some thoughts on statistics, scientism, individualism, and economic analysis. A teaser of a few forthcoming formal pieces... Read it and other recent critical interventions just published by @hetecon.bsky.social #EconSky hetecon.net/2026/09/13/w...

"There exist numerous treatments of this topic, many of which are very good, and others continue to appear..." That's some passive-aggressive energy I need to channel more often...

de Finetti did a lot of low-key, devastating trolling

Point from my (Bayesian-inflected) Information Theory lecture yesterday: Heteroscedasticity is only a nuisance if you’ve assumed homoscedasticity. In all other cases, it’s informative. #InformationTheory #BadStats

It is remarkable how this hidden gem--in Foreign Policy, no less--has shaped neither the general understanding of the oil shocks of the 1970s nor how most English-speaking scholars think about the construction of the post-Bretton-Woods order. #EconSky Political Economy.

This is so bad I’m wishing Robbie Williams came back on…

If you're worried that Bayesian priors introduce arbitrary elements into statistical analysis, wait until you hear about the choice of null hypotheses, models, and the presumption of "iid" generative processes...

Let them eat CEO complacency!

I’m still waiting for my 2008 bailout…

Behold the informed “uninformative” prior! Or is it the “uninformative” informed posterior?

Commodity-fetishist interpretations of Marx’s writings on money have left many either longing for a return to convertibility, or making facile arguments about inconvertibility being the main source of all monetary and financial instability over the last 50 years…

Turns out the cat was not the strangest of Schrödinger’s things

El problema fundamental es que el mundo esta lleno de Susanitas y Manolos que creen ser Mafaldas.

Anybody else out there in an editorial board for an Elsevier journal being asked to sign a contract with the company that stipulates a number of obligations and waivers of rights on the editors and obliges Elsevier to nothing? I'm really not inclined to sign.

For the kids in the back who may have had trouble with the first post....

The most remarkable feature of economic reality is how neatly it configures itself as homogeneous linear effects of observables on mean outcomes, with all latent heterogeneity and interaction structures reducing themselves to sufficiently well-behaved error terms. 🙄 #EconSky

My contribution to the conversation today

Marx failed to consider that a man’s deep sense of inadequacy can shape world events.

When I first saw this video years ago I thought it was a funny illustration of differences in culinary cultures. I saw it again earlier today and realised it is a hilarious illustration of fundamentally different ontological takes on the relationship between parts and wholes... #EconSky

CAPITAL GOODS ARE PRODUCTS OF LABOUR, DRAWING ON OUR PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT! Thank you for coming to my TedTalk

People underestimate how the very title “Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities” is a comprehensive rejection of fundamental Walrasian takes on scarcity, “capital,” and factor incomes. Maybe a subtitle “bruh, capital goods are products of labour” would have helped. #EconSky

With everything else going on, I almost forgot to share the new, relaunched website for the Department of Economics at the NSSR. We are a small department committed to a pluralist, critical, and technically rigorous approach to economic analysis. #EconSky www.newschool.edu/nssr/economi...

Celebrate the 250 years since the publication of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" with his observation that profits are a deduction from the product of labour, grounded on the fact that workers do not have direct access to the materials of their work. #EconSky

No fim das contas, a crise ecológica meio que comprova: estamos num jogo zero; existe um fundo de baixa entropia e a competição é quem consegue usar até a coisa ficar ruim

The Reuters-Ipsos poll showing only one quarter of US respondents supporting attacks on Iran was carried out BEFORE the Trump administration announced the first deaths of US troops. aje.news/ydm2xf

Pretty sure it was not by multiplying the number of highly paid administrators, pilling on real-estate investments, burning money on coaches, or adopting the worst aspects of contemporary corporate management… giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

The AI boom appears to be part dotcom bubble, part Theranos hype, and part WorldCom accounting. What could possibly go wrong?? ! #EconSky giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

A nearly perfect day at an upstate second-hand bookstore… #Statistics #MildOCD

Conflate money value added per hour with labour productivity, include sectors whose “value added” involves what is better understood as transfers, and teach it for long enough to make it all seem normal, and you get this kind of assessment…#EconSky

The closing phrase about a 5yo citizen is so disturbing and telling. We’re well and truly in an environment where the words spoken by regime supporters don’t have to make logical sense. They just need to invoke the desired sense of “us versus them” to be effective.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

The media moved on when trump said he had a new tone because as the constitution states the president is the editor in chief of all news outlets

@publicseminar.bsky.social @elizabethcooper.bsky.social @plbds.bsky.social @avgevork.bsky.social My latest @washspectator.bsky.social piece-- on Trump's tariff/trade policy. Enjoy! washingtonspectator.org/tariff-man-t...

Jew in Amsterdam here. Please use Anne Frank as a comparison point to explain how state persecution of scapegoats impacts children, that is the point of her example, thanks

ICE agents are using an app developed by Palantir that draws on the health records of millions of Americans to find and detain illegal immigrants www.bmj.com/content/392/...

People need to listen closely and take stock of what is being said here. This federal official is commanding 22,000 heavily armed men across the country.

A car crash is a tragedy, Mr. President. Brownshirts terrorizing immigrants, citizens of certain ethnicities, and now openly executing people in broad daylight is rising fascism. You used to defend this kind of prevarication on electoral grounds. What’s the excuse now?

Target in Minneapolis has pulled Hispanic employees off of pick-up order duty after ICE arrested two US citizen Hispanic employees while on the job. “I’m literally a U.S. citizen!” one shouted as they escorted him into a van.

An insane, perfect encapsulation of it all: The same day Trump’s agents kill a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse in broad daylight, the CEOs of Apple and Amazon join Trump to watch a private screening of a film about his wife directed by an alleged sexual abuser who was seen shirtless in the Epstein Files

This was between the first and second shot, of a total of ten fired.

the nyt style section vs. der spiegel

The whole interview is worth it

Minneapolis protester as he's being brutalized by feds: "You're gonna have to kill me! You're gonna have to kill me! I've done nothing wrong! My name is Matthew James! I'm a US citizen! You're gonna kill me! Is that what you want?" (You can hear his wife screaming)

A candid moment by Carney on the fiction of the US-led "rules-based order," the calculations behind its historical acceptance, & their breakdown under the Trump administration. You cannot accept economic integration "when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

Federal immigration agents forced open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press.

In other news, Pope seen in local woods giving communion to defecating bear. www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

The Trump admin is moving to quickly deport two men who witnessed, they say, ICE guards choke a fellow detainee to death. The admin moved to deport men right after they spoke the Washington Post. This is the death that the medical examiner has already ruled likely homicide. wapo.st/4qR1T1U

Samir Amin, more than half a century ago… #EconSky #PolEcon

Cripes a’mighty people, Steven Miller is not staging a militarized ethnic cleansing and sending the border cops to murder people in the street to distract from the Epstein files. He’s doing it because he and Trump (and Vance and Homan and Noem etc) really really want to.