Milton Friedman was a powerful magician. His words charmed people into believing that night was day, against the evidence of their own eyes. Friedman’s maxim that “inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon” is widely believed by economists, even though it is abundantly obvious that costs of production, especially energy costs, play a major… Read More Modern Money and Inflation

This is a write-up of Section E of Chapter 1 “Why We Need A New Approach to Statistics?” of Real Statistics: A Radical Approach. To register for the ongoing online course: http://bit.ly/AZRealStats – This section describes four fundamental flaws in modern statistics, which make it necessary to rebuild the entire discipline on new foundations for the 21st Century.… Read More Four Flaws in Foundations of Statistics

Wikipedia article entitled “Getting to Philosophy” documents a very deep fact about the structure of human knowledge. If we click on the first link in any article, and keep on doing so – click the first link in the subsequent articles, we eventually get to an article in the Philosophy category. It is commonly thought… Read More Impact of Positivism on Economics & Statistics

Introduction: Logical Positivism is a toxic philosophy which forms the foundations of a Western education. Like my fellow students, I absorbed its basic tenets without even learning its name, because it is so deeply embedded as to be invisible. Time after time I ran into problems because the ways of reasoning taught by this philosophy… Read More The Poison of Positivism

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us! – Robert Burns. The essay below is my personal perspective, from an Islamic point of view, of certain aspects of the European intellectual traditions. The abstract mathematics of modern economics contain messages directly opposite to teachings of Islam. Economics says that rational behavior… Read More European Rejection of Unobservables

What is taught to unsuspecting students as truth about the world we live in, is really propaganda to justify the enormous wealth of the rich 0.01%, and the correspondingly amazing amount of poverty among the bottom billions Abstract: It is widely believed that human knowledge represents valuable information about the world we live in. Historical… Read More How Power Shapes Our Thoughts

In a previous posts Preface to Radical Statistics and Why an Islamic Approach to Statistics?, I have explained how we can develop a new approach to statistics, which rejects a century of developments based on a methodology created by Sir Ronald Fisher, father of modern statistics. It is my hope that this will be a disruptive technology – it will… Read More Real Statistics: A Radical Approach

The 1932 science fiction novel Brave New World portrays a dystopian future where history is rewritten and words are redefined in order to make undesirable ideas “unthinkable.”footnote 1 The book is often associated with George Orwell’s 1984, where those who do anything undesired by those in power are made into an “unperson,” with all evidence… Read More Making thoughts unthinkable – the soft power of economic theory

This lecture is about the personality of Sr Ronald Fisher and his foundational ideas about statistics. The idea that statistics is all about “data reduction”, is due to lack of computational capabilities at the time of Fisher – it was not possible to analyze thousands of data points, without reducing them to manageable summaries. Even… Read More Fisher’s Flawed Foundations of Statistics