Comments on: Movers and Shakers

By: Benkyou Burito

Benkyou Burito — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:03:22 +0000

In the interest of Comity, I’ll assume permission to post a link to the full text of “The Armchair Economist” that is hosted on some Chinese free e-book server.

Actually I won’t. Because, I don’t have a right of action under comity, Wiley publishing does, and I’m not going to file any sort of issue with them because I’m conflicted in my feelings about laws that “protect” people from knowledge. And because Steven definitely has a private right of action against me if I were to post a link (let alone host it on my own server) to the full text of his book.

I will say this. As someone who was threatened with expulsion because I included two lines from a Beatles song in the title of one of my research papers. The University of Rochester, where Steven teaches, would permanently cancel the internet access of a student who did this.

By: Benkyou Burito

Benkyou Burito — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:03:05 +0000

Not to be a wet blanket, but Wiley Interscience owns the rights to that article you are handing out to any who click the link to where your website is hosting it.

By: Benkyou Burito

Benkyou Burito — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:32:23 +0000

I’ve always been curious about the economics of cons, scams, and MLM ventures (which embody both I think).

It would have to include elements of other social sciences because economics generally considers people to be rational and self-interested. Yet some guy in Nigeria can talk a legal secretary into embezzling $50,000?

By: William

William — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:21:14 +0000

On Dave’s points a. and b., allow me to assert the contrary. Nice article, thanks!

By: Steve Landsburg

Steve Landsburg — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:43:56 +0000

Windypundit: Ha!

By: Windypundit

Windypundit — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:14:11 +0000

Pacanowsky’s literature survey misses Keynes’s important experimental observation that at a multi-diner table, aggregate rate of salt movement is positively correlated over time with the aggregate rate of utterances of “Please pass the salt,” from which Keynes concludes that variations of the salt movement rate can be moderated by the experimenter through the use of a confederate who has been trained to utter “Please pass the salt” when he detects a decline in the aggregate salt movement rate.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:53:20 +0000

I can’t believe that:

a) someone got paid to do this
b) you found this even mildly interesting and/or enlightening

What a complete waste of time

By: kg

kg — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:31:57 +0000

A similar enjoyable article is written by Mattias Polborn, entitled “Calibrating the World and the World of Calibration”. (Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=781624)