I once told the late Nobel prize winner George Stigler that I was teaching a course on the relationship between economics and the other social sciences. “Ah”, he nodded. “That would be haughty superciliousness, I suppose”.
I was reminded of this when a comment on a recent blogpost asked for my further thoughts on the economics of superstition. This, after all, might be one area where economics lags behind its sister sciences. And this in turn reminded me of a true social science classic—anthropologist Michael Pacanowsky’s investigation into the origins of the folk belief that the utterance “Please pass the salt” is causally linked to the passage of salt from one end of a table to another.
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)
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
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.
Windypundit: Ha!
On Dave’s points a. and b., allow me to assert the contrary. Nice article, thanks!
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?
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.
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.