EJW Audio

EJW hosted a book-manuscript symposium on Gregory Clark's To Have and Have Not: The Determinants of Social Status in England, 1600-2026, featuring seven commentaries and a response by Clark. In this podcast, Clark is interviewed by one of the commenters, Rosalind Arden.

David Kane, formerly of Harvard, discusses After SFFA v. Harvard: Predictions that Didn't Come True which is in the September 2026 issue. He documents the predictions (by David Card and other Nobel Prize winners) and shows that, after SFFA v. Harvard, they have been proved entirely wrong.

“Central Banking Research Is Increasingly Directed to Environment, Inequality, Gender, and Race” — say Radu Şimandan and Cristian Valeriu Păun in a recent Econ Journal Watch article. Besides documenting the trend, they say it represents a further corruption of public institutions. “It is important to safeguard against mission creep, as an unchecked concentration of public power risks the same dangers of overreach and inefficiency traditionally associated with monopolistic power.”

Magnus Henrekson and collaborators have produced three important books exposing the fraudulence of Europe’s green projects and policies. He explains why the fraud persists despite the obviousness of its fraudulence. Two of the books have been treated in Econ Journal Watch, one review essay by one review essay by John Constable and one by one review essay by Michael Munger, who kindly conducted this interview for EJW.

An influential article by Jonathan Pekar and 28 other authors published in Science in 2022 claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that the likelihood that two successful introductions to humans had occurred was greater than the likelihood that just one had occurred. Michael Weissman explains his EJW article, which discusses a fundamental error hiding in plain sight and initially pointed out by Angus McCowan. Weissman uses a simple analogy to explain the error. Correcting the error using the data, model, and simulations of the original paper reverses the implication of the analysis-the single-introduction likelihood becomes greater than the two-introductions likelihood. That undermines the article’s supposed support for natural origin. Weissman is interviewed by James M. Robins of Harvard University. Weissman and Robins discuss the editorial practices at Science, which, they suggest, ought to retract the article.