Emma Courtney

on the atlas — 8

• Your shopping bag1 savers
• Contested Boundaries in Policy-Relevant Science on JSTOR1 savers
• The wrong kind of maths1 savers
• A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals | The Quarterly Review of Biology: Vol 87, No 41 savers
• Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789 | Nature1 savers
• Wealth, shown to scale4 savers
• On integral theory: an exercise in dialectical critical realism1 savers
• Generically partisan: Polarization in political communication | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science1 savers

highlights — 4

• Contested Boundaries in Policy-Relevant Science

  Contested Boundaries in Policy-Relevant Science on JSTOR

• Behavioural economics can tell us a bit about the psychology of bubbles, but rather less about why the bursting of the dotcom bubble was mostly confined to the stock market, while the US housing bubble of a few years later developed into the largest financial crisis for decades. That’s not a question about the madness of crowds, but about the deep structure of financial markets.

  The wrong kind of maths

• Mainstream economics continues to rely on what we might call Newtonian mathematics: using calculus to optimise, subject to constraints. What is the most profitable combination of price and output for a manufacturer? Which basket of goods maximises consumer utility while staying within a budget? All useful enough, and yet not really suited to understanding the behaviour of macroeconomic cycles, or weak points in a financial system, or how consumers are persuaded to act against their own interests by sleazy app-designers and conmen.

  The wrong kind of maths

• Here, we collect existing historical records related to the Great Fear and use epidemiology tools and models4 to reconstruct the network of its transmission from town to town. In this way, we quantify the spatiotemporal spread of the rumours and compute key epidemiological parameters, such as the basic reproduction number.

  Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789 | Nature