Archive for the 'Personal' Category

The Tenth Time’s A Charm

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 21, 2024
in Book, Books, Economics, Personal, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 3 Comments

I am delighted to announce that the 10th edition of my textbook, Price Theory and Applications, is now available wherever good books are sold. There’s also a free sample chapter.

Here’s what’s special about this edition:

  • I started out by rereading large parts of the past several editions, from which I learned that not every change was an improvement. Some things were a lot clearer in edition 7 than in edition 9. (And sometimes vice-versa of course.) I worked hard to make sure that in the tenth edition, every section and subsection would be the best it could be — which sometimes meant resurrecting an old version, or, more often, combining the best of the old and the new.
  • In the past, I’ve tried to keep all of the end-of-chapter problem sets to about the same length, which sometimes meant omitting some really great problems. This time, I decided that was stupid. Whenever I had 40 or 50 really good problems, I included them all.
  • This edition benefited from the extraordinary talents, wisdom and persistence of the extraordinary Lisa Talpey, who read every draft, called out everything that seemed even slightly unclear, gave me a chance to rewrite, then read it all again, equally carefully, and took me through as many rounds of this as necessary until everything made sense to her. She also caught pretty much all the typos. I am sure that thanks to Lisa, this edition is far friendlier to the reader than any of those that came before.
  • For the first time, I designed my own cover! How do you like it?

The publisher’s webpage, and information on ordering for your classes, is here.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Adventures in the Rental Market

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 26, 2022
in Personal
. 6 Comments

A few years ago, I was driving a Hertz rental car at about 25 mph in a residential neighborhood when the rear-view mirror suddenly flew off and hit me in the face. I came within inches of hitting a parked car. I mentioned this when I returned the car and they graciously discounted my bill.

Today I am driving a Hertz rental car with a big clump of wires dangling down between the accelerator and the brake, so that moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake is a great tangly adventure. This strikes me as equally unsafe. I am on my way back to the car with a roll of duct tape in my hand. I plan to mention this for the benefit of the next guy, but I do wonder if Hertz keeps records of “wildly implausible complaints that were probably manufactured for the purpose of getting a discount” and whether I am about to be flagged as a repeat offender.

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Some History Lessons

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 30, 2022
in Anecdotes, Entertainment, Events, History, Humor, Personal and Video
. 3 Comments


A bit of history:

  • One day in the 16th century, a student at Oxford University was sitting in the woods reading a volume of Aristotle, when he was attacked by a wild boar. The student saved himself by shoving the volume down the throat of the boar and choking it to death. He brought the boar back to Oxford, where it became the centerpiece of a great feast. The anniversary has been celebrated at Oxford ever since, with an annual Boar’s Head Dinner.
  • One day in 1934, someone at the University of Rochester decided that Rochesterians should celebrate these anniversaries as well. Ever since, with a few interruptions, the University has been the site of an annual Boar’s Head Dinner, where a member of the University community is called upon to re-tell the story of the brave Oxford student, perhaps with some embellishment.
  • One day in 2005, I was the one who was called upon. The event was filmed, but the sound quality was horrendous. (So was the video quality, but that seems less important.) I’ve therefore almost never shared it.
  • One day a couple of months ago, I mentioned this to my awesome friend Rowan McVey, who volunteered to take the video, improve the sound quality, and add captions. (Note: Rowan was already entirely awesome even before she jumped on this task.)

Herewith the fruits of Rowan’s labors. The two videos linked below are identical except that the first has captions and the second doesn’t. The sound quality is still surely imperfect, but it’s a vast improvement over the original.

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A Message to National Review

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 12, 2022
in Consumer Advocacy and Personal
. 7 Comments

Dear National Review:

1) Your Android app no longer works. I click on ‘magazine’, which brings up images of covers of past and present issues. If I click on any past issue, everything is fine. If I click on the current issue, all I see is a list (in red capital letters): SECTIONS, ARTICLES, FEATURES, etc. — but none of these are clickable and the content is not accessible.

2) I thought this might be because my subscription had expired, so I clicked on ‘Subscribe’ and paid for an extended subscription. I see that you still have my expiration date as September 2022, so apparently you took my money but did not extend the subscription.

3) I clicked on subscription help, got back an email telling me to try a few obvious things like “log out and log back in again”, responded by saying I’d already tried those things and none of them worked, and then never heard another word from you. I emailed again, asking what to do next. After several days I’ve heard absolutely nothing.

4) I went to your customer care website, typed in the above, and was told I could not submit the above message because it is “too long”.

5) I called your customer service number (which took some digging to find because it does not appear on your website) and spent twenty minutes talking to a representative who insisted that I re-try everything I’ve already tried, none of which worked. She finally connected me to a supervisor. The supervisor came on the line and said “I understand you’re having trouble logging into our app”. I said that I’m logged in just fine; the app just doesn’t work. The call suddenly ended.

6) I called back, explained I’d been in the middle of a call with a supervisor that got cut off, and was connected to a new supervisor. I started to explain the problem, and the call ended.

7) I am now on hold trying for a THIRD time to reach a supervisor.

8) Here is what I need from you: First, fix your app and/or tell me how to make it work. Second, extend my subscription consistent with the money I just sent you, or refund the money. Third, please be more responsive in the future.

9) Because this message is “too long” for you to accept on your website, I am posting it here and sending you a link to this blog post.
Everyone else can safely ignore this post.

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Where I’ve Been

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 24, 2022
in Economics, Personal, Puzzles and Surprises
. 69 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas for the annual meeting of the Association for Private Enterprise Education, where I was honored to give an invited plenary address.

From there, I went directly to Atlanta, where I gave a short talk at the Gathering for Gardner, honoring the legacy of Martin Gardner. There were a lot of other really cool talks too.

I am sorry that the Las Vegas talk was not recorded and that the recording from the Atlanta talk won’t be available for a few months. Therefore I sat down in front of my webcam and repeated both talks, sticking as close to the original words as my memory would allow. Unfortunately there is no way to recreate the audience reaction or the question and answer periods.

Click below to view either or both of those re-creations.

The second talk is essentially a six-minute excerpt from the first. It surely benefited from the discussions here, here and here, and most especially from the comments of Bennett Haselton.

A few more words about escalators for those who care about this kind of thing:
Continue reading ‘Where I’ve Been’

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Mea Culpa

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 1, 2022
in Bad Reasoning, Economics, Oops, Personal and Policy
. 5 Comments

Economists, like everyone, should admit to their mistakes and correct them. That’s what this post is for.

The argument against taxing capital income runs like this:

1) Current and future consumption should be taxed at the same rate.

2) A tax on capital income is equivalent to a tax on current consumption coupled with a higher tax on future consumption.

Conclusion: Capital income should not be taxed.

I made this argument several years ago in a talk at the Cato Institute. I recently got a complimentary note from someone who had just watched the video of that talk, which caused me to go back and watch a few snippets to remind myself of what I’d done to earn this compliment. And I was mortified to see myself stating not point 1) above, but this far more general point:

1′) All things should be taxed at the same rate.

The status of 1′) is complicated. It is true that in an ideal world, all things including leisure would be taxed at the same rate. But in a world where you can’t tax leisure, the ideal tax system is far more complicated, with the optimal tax on each consumption good varying according to various elasticities and cross-elasticities of demand and supply. So 1′) is true in an ideal world, but surely false in our world, where leisure is very difficult to tax.

Fortunately the full generality of 1′) was not needed for my argument; all I actually used was 1). But in the video, I very clearly stated 1′) as if it were gospel, and even devoted an entire slide to it. This mistake doesn’t overturn the conclusion, but it’s still surely egregious enough that if, say, Paul Krugman had made a mistake like this, I’d have been all over him.

So: Mea culpa.

A subsidiary point: The word “should” in these statements can be interpreted in (at least) two ways — from the point of view of efficiency and from the point of view of fairness. In the few paragraphs above, and in the bulk of my Cato talk, I was using the word “should” in the first sense. But I also tried to address fairness issues in the Cato talk, and from that angle, I’m less sure that 1′) is wrong.

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Commencement in the Time of Covid

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 25, 2021
in Economics, Education, Events and Personal
. 9 Comments

I had the honor of giving the commencement address to this year’s graduating economics majors at the University of Rochester, under circumstances that were trying in several ways.

First, I learned at 10:10 PM on Friday that I was giving this talk on Saturday morning. (It’s a long story. All the communication failures leading up to this were entirely my own fault.) I got to bed rather late that night.

Second, it was so ungodly hot that I chose to shed my cap and gown.

Third, there were, I think, only about 80 students present, spread evenly around a 967 seat auditorium (family and other guests were not allowed). Laughter and applause were therefore pretty sparse (though I suppose they might have been sparse for other reasons) and even what little could be heard was mostly not picked up by the microphones.

Other than that, I thought it was a good day. Those who have seen my 2017 commencement talk will recognize roughly the first quarter and the last tenth of this one, which I recycled. The intervening 65% or so is new.

Or click here.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

“

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Is There a Way to Stop Paypal from Stealing?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 20, 2021
in Consumer Advocacy and Personal
. 13 Comments

I’ve been a quite satisfied customer of Paypal almost since the very beginning, but I am now a mightily annoyed and frustrated customer and I wonder if anyone has any advice on how to deal with this:

1) I see a charge to my Paypal account for $35.63, with the payee listed as “Google — Automatic Payment”. Looking back, I see there was an identical charge (which I had overlooked) a month earlier.

2) I disputed the charge with Paypal. 24 hours later, I was informed that the transaction was authorized and the case is closed.

3) Google denies any knowledge of this. They claim that the last time they authorized any sort of automatic payment from me to them was in May, 2020 and the amount was $4.29. Edited to add: When I go to Paypal and look under “automated payments” and then click on Google, it shows that the last automated payment to Google was in fact this $4.29. The repeated $35.63 payments do not show up.

4) When I try calling Paypal, I tell the automated phone system that I’m calling to dispute a transaction. They ask me which transaction, I tell them, the voice says that’s already resolved, and they hang up on me.

5) When I try calling Paypal back and respond to all queries about why I’m calling with the word “agent”, the voice says that to speak to an agent, I must call back during normal business hours. But I’m *already* calling during normal business hours.

6) When I use the chat function on Paypal’s webpage, I get the same responses I get from the phone system.

Question 1:

How the hell do I get Paypal to talk to me? Failing that, how the hell do I get Google to inform Paypal that they did not authorize this charge? (Google appears to be completely unreachable by phone.)

Question 2:

It looks like the only way to stop this from happening every month is to close my Paypal account. Will it then be safe to open a new Paypal account, or will they just transfer the charges to the new account?

Help!

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Is American Airlines too Reckless?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 2, 2019
in Back of the Envelope and Personal
. 22 Comments

aa

My return trip from Lubbock to Rochester took almost 36 hours, due to maintenance issues on three separate aircraft. This leads me to wonder whether American Airlines is erring too far in the direction of safety and too little in the direction of getting people where they want to go — perhaps even recklessly so.

Here’s what the back of my envelope shows:

Continue reading ‘Is American Airlines too Reckless?’

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Where I’ll Be

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 12, 2018
in Events and Personal
. 6 Comments

This Monday (October 15), I’ll be in at Webber International University in Babson Park, Florida, talking on the subject “What Do the Rich Owe to the Poor?”. The talk is at 7pm in the Yentes Conference Center. Please join us if you’re in the area!

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Errata

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 1, 2018
in Books, Oops and Personal
. 14 Comments

Somewhere on my shelves, there is a math book with a page very like the following:

I know this because I remember seeing it (or at least I think I do), but I can’t quite remember which book it’s in.

Fortunately, I didn’t try to steal this joke for Can You Outsmart an Economist?, because it turns out there’s an actual erratum in the main text. It comes in Chapter 16 where a series of problems leads the reader to discover the basics of option pricing. The arithmetic in those problems is all correct, except for one thing: In order to keep the math easy, I assumed an interest rate of 50%. But with an interest rate that high (and given the other assumptions in the chapter), nobody would be mucking around with buying options in the first place; we’d all just be putting our money in the bank and getting rich in a hurry.

So what I should have done is assumed an interest rate of 20%. If you’ve got a copy of the book, you should pencil in the following changes:

Continue reading ‘Errata‘

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Can You Outsmart an Economist?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 25, 2018
in Books, Cool Stuff, Economics and Personal
. 22 Comments

Can You Outsmart an Economist?

100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain

My new book is now on sale! Readers of this blog will recognize some but not nearly all of these 100+ puzzles (146, actually, by my count). If you’ve enjoyed my puzzle posts, you’ll probably enjoy these extended discussions of some past puzzles, and the many more that are entirely new. Most of these puzzles are designed to teach important lessons about economics, broadly defined to encompass all purposeful human behavior. All of them are also designed to be fun.

Once you’ve had a look, please don’t hesitate to share your opinions right here on the blog — or better yet (especially if your opinions are positive!) don’t hesitate to share them on Amazon or on Goodreads.

Or, if you’d prefer to taste the milk before you buy the cow, here is the introduction, absolutely free of charge.

You can read a few advance reviews here. And remember, the more copies you buy, the sooner I’ll write the sequel.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Public Service Announcement

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 29, 2018
in Personal and Recommendations
. 22 Comments

Having recently dealt with some of the same customer service issues at both Vanguard and Fidelity, I can make these recommendations with confidence:

1) Keep your money at Vanguard.

2) If you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of keeping some of your money at Fidelity and you ever need customer service, and if your customer service representative turns out to be named Cameron Marcil, hang up immediately and try again.

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Letter from an Infantryman

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 8, 2018
in Outrage, Personal and Tragedy
. 11 Comments

armydad

I found this among my father’s papers. He wrote it as a 20-year old infantryman who had been in combat for about six months.

I am struck by the eloquence, and doubly struck that he managed to be eloquent in the medium of pen-and-ink, with no copy/paste/delete and not even any crossouts:

Monday, Jan. 8 (1945)

Dear Mother and Dad:

Well, the new year has arrived and with it, sadly enough, have come no great changes. The war is still being fought, I and millions of other boys are still several thousands of miles away from home and our loved ones, and it almost seems as if there will never be an end to this useless, heart-breaking, killing war.

Whether a man is German, American, or French, he looks just the same when he is wounded, dying or dead. The battlefield bullet is a great leveler; it can make the biggest man very small or the weakest man a hero, but in this war most of the heroes are dead.

We who are actively engaged in defeating the enemy would not hesitate to lay down our arms and surrender if we thought that the people who make the peace will fail to make it permanent. The mere thought that our comrades may have died for nothing, that we may have a brief pause from this war so that we can raise sons to fight another war would cause us many sleepless nights. The last thing one dying soldier said to me was that he was dying on the battlefield so that his son would not.

I may sound very bitter and full of resentment and frankly I am. This war should have been averted in 1918 and the ensuing years, but instead of preventing war, the American people actually encouraged it by ignoring everything that was going on around them. For the sake of all the men who have gone through this hell, we must not let this happen again. We must not have allowed so many of our boys to have died in vain.

I can’t possibly express the resentment these boys feel when they hear about these “Victory in Europe Celebrations”, and when they hear about the lotteries that are held to determine the date of the European victory. Here their own sons are being killed, maimed and crippled for life, and they trouble themselves with such trivial tripe. What is the matter with the American public? Is it entirely aloof to this war?

Perhaps I don’t sound like a twenty-year-old kid anymore, but I’ve seen things that I shall never forget, ghastly things that I shudder to think about. I think that a just punishment for any of these “Victory in Europe Celebration” planners would be to pick up a soldier’s boot on a battlefield and find the foot still in it, or sweat out just one artillery barrage. If they could just realize what is going on they would spend all their spare time praying for the safety of their boys and thanking God that America has been spared everything but an army.

Aside from being a little angry, I’m feeling fine. I’ve received several of your packages and everything is swell. I know that God has been answering your prayers, and he will continue to watch over me.

Love, Norman

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End of an Era

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 8, 2018
in Personal
. 20 Comments

dad2
Norman Landsburg (1924-2018), a survivor of the worst ravages of the Great Depression, a survivor of the trenches in France, where he landed in the wake of the Normandy invasion (and, according to what I think I’ve just learned while going through his papers, was awarded two bronze stars that he never once mentioned to his wife of 68 years or any of his three children), who transcended a series of hard knocks that would have led many to despair and struggled every day, often against mighty odds, to make a better life for his family, succumbed tonight to complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

His bullheadedness was his greatest vice and his greatest virtue. I owe him a couple of good slaps upside the head (not that I ever got one from him, but he deserves them anyway) and eternal gratitude for the way he eased my setting forth and filled my world with possibilities. Neither debt will ever be paid.

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Where I’ll Be

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 14, 2018
in Events, Math, Personal, Philosophy and Religion
. 4 Comments

I’ll be speaking this Saturday at the Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin (follow the link to register!) on the topic “Truth, Provability and the Fabric of the Universe”. I’ll be glad to see you there.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Like the Groundhog, He Emerges

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 24, 2018
in Outrage and Personal
. 33 Comments

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed by now that my blogging has been mostly dormant for a while. This is partly because I’ve been working on multiple book projects (e.g. this one), partly because I felt so disillusioned after the outcome of the election season, and partly because I’ve felt like I’ve already said much of what I have to say. But sometimes you can’t resist.

This is the City Mattress store on Monroe Avenue in Brighton, New York:

My wife recently wanted to buy a mattress, drove by the store, and noticed that there were no hours posted in the window. The next day, she guessed at the opening time, happened to get it right, went into the store, and mentioned to the friendly manager that it would be nice if they could post their hours. The manager agreed that being able to post their hours would be very nice indeed, but that the town of Brighton had forbidden them to do so on the grounds that it would “make the store look like a sub shop”.

Question 1: Please study the picture above. How probable do you think it is that you’d mistake it for a sub shop? (Your answer should be a number between 0% and 100%).

Question 1A: By how much would your answer to Question 1 change if this store had its hours posted in the window?

Question 2: If you did happen to mistake this store for a sub shop, how much damage would you feel you’d incurred? (Your answer should be the number of dollars you’d have to lose to feel equivalently damaged.)

Incidentally, the lack of an hours sign inconveniences not only people like my wife, who wasn’t sure when to show up. The manager mentioned that every night at closing time, they have to turn away new arrivals who, due to the lack of a sign, were unaware of the store hours.

The Brighton Town Supervisor is Mr. William Moehle. This is a picture of his house:

Continue reading ‘Like the Groundhog, He Emerges’

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Help!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 2, 2017
in Book, Personal and Self-Promotion
. 66 Comments

Readers: I need your help!

More than once, my blog readers have proved themselves to be cleverer, smarter and more insightful than I am about a great many things. I need your cleverness, intelligence and insight now more than ever.

Yesterday, I delivered a manuscript to my editor at Houghton-Mifflin. Sometime in 2018, this manuscript will become a book. What it needs is a title!

The book is a compendium of puzzles and brain teasers designed to teach lessons about economics, statistical inference, and related matters. A recurring theme is that what’s “obvious” is often wrong. Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction.

The title should be catchy, clever, attention-grabbing and indicative of the content. What, specifically, should that title be?

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Awesomeness of Immersive VR for Molecular Modeling

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 21, 2016
in Cool Stuff, Personal and Silk
. 1 Comment

Johanna Bobrow is by day a biologist at MIT, often by night a musician (both solo and in groups), sometimes in between an aerialist, and always my friend. When I first saw this video, I told her it was awesomer than the most awesome awesomeness ever. I firmly stand by that judgment.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Small World

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 23, 2016
in Oddities and Personal
. 6 Comments

globeToday, in a moment of idleness and nostalgia, I tried Googling an old girlfriend I haven’t seen or heard from in decades. She has a very common name, so she’s hard to Google. I’ve tried a few times in the past, and have always failed.

Today, though, I found her. A few minor clues helped me pick her out from the dozens of others with the same name. There wasn’t much. I still don’t know where she lives, and I still don’t know if she has a family. The one and only thing I’ve learned is that she was the screenwriter for two short films, both by the same director.

So of course I Googled that director. The first hit was a list of all his movies, in order of their rankings on IMDB, with cast listings for each movie. The top-billed cast member on the top-rated movie was — (drumroll!) — my son-in-law.

No, there is no conceivable connection between the ex-girlfriend, who I lost touch with when my son-in-law was something like an infant, and the son-in-law himself. No, the ex-girlfriend never lived in the city where I and the son-in-law live now, or in any other city he’s lived in. Yes, I was vaguely aware that my son-in-law was involved with moviemaking as a serious hobby, and somewhat more vaguely aware that he might have done some acting as part of that hobby. That’s all I’ve got.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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McCloskey at Chicago

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 23, 2015
in Economics, Heroes and Personal
. 12 Comments

deeFor an upcoming Festschrift, I was recently asked to write an account of Dee (then Don) McCloskey‘s years as a brilliant teacher at the University of Chicago, her influence on a generation of economists, and my own enormous debts to her. This was a great pleasure to write. A draft is here.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Dear Old Golden Rule Days

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 27, 2015
in Musings, Oddities, Personal, Progress and WTF?
. 16 Comments

ssyShortly before I started Kindergarten, my mother purchased a book called “Steven’s School Years”, with pockets to store my report cards and school projects, and questionnaires for me to fill out at the end of each school year.

I was not diligent about filling in the questionnaires, and they remain mostly blank. But had I been forced to, I wonder how I would have answered the following question, which was to be answered annually at the end of Grades 1,2,3,4,5, and 6:

(According to my mother, my ambition at age three was to be an electric drill, and sometime after that a rabbit. No other records of my early career inclinations seem to have survived.)

Continue reading ‘Dear Old Golden Rule Days’

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The Generalist

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 17, 2014
in Heroes, Math, Personal and Truthseeking
. 32 Comments

groth2I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day — I feel him hovering over my shoulder. I’ve strived to read the mind of Grothendieck as others strive to read the mind of God.

Those who did know him tend to describe him as a man of indescribable charisma, with a Christ-like ability to inspire followers. I’ve heard it said that when Grothendieck walked into a room, you might have had no idea who he was or what he did, but you definitely knew you wanted to devote your life to him.

And people did. In 1958, when Grothendieck (aged 30) announced a massive program to rewrite the foundations of geometry, he assembled a coterie of brilliant followers and conducted a seminar that met 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, for over a decade. Grothendieck talked; others took notes, went home, filled in details, expanded on his ideas, wrote final drafts, and returned the next day for more. Jean Dieudonne, a mathematician of quite considerable prominence in his own right, subjugated himself entirely to the project and was at his desk every morning at 5AM so that he could do three hours of editing before Grothendieck arrived and started talking again at 8:00. (Here and elsewhere I am reporting history as I’ve heard it from the participants and others who followed developments closely as they were happening. If I’ve got some details wrong, I’m happy to be corrected.) The resulting volumes filled almost 10,000 pages and rocked the mathematical world. (You can see some of those pages here).

I want to try to give something of the flavor of the revolution that unfolded in that room, and I want to do it for an audience with little mathematical background. This might require stretching some analogies almost to the breaking point. I’ll try to be as honest as I can. In the first part, I’ll talk about Grothendieck’s radical approach to mathematics generally; after that, I’ll talk (in a necessarily vague way) about some of his most radical and important ideas.

Continue reading ‘The Generalist’

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Post-Halloween Mystery

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 5, 2014
in Empirical Puzzles and Personal
. 4 Comments

So apparently there was this pumpkin……

A colleague spotted it on the floor in front of my office door on Sunday afternoon and was intrigued enough (or weirded out enough) to snap a couple of pictures:

Unfortunately, by the time I came into work on Monday, the pumpkin had mysteriously disappeared. And I didn’t cross paths with my colleague until late this afternoon, which is when I first learned that there had ever been a pumpkin.

Continue reading ‘Post-Halloween Mystery’

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The Coinflipper’s Dilemma

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 8, 2014
in Economics, Game Theory, Memories and Personal
. 9 Comments

flipperThis is the story of how I came to write a little paper called The Coinflipper’s Dilemma.

When I was in high school, my English teacher must have had a free period at the time when my math class met, because every day he would march into the math class and empty his pockets on the table, whereupon my math teacher did the same. Then whoever had put down the most money scooped up everything on the table.

I am ashamed to admit that it took me until this summer to think about computing the equilibrium strategy is in that game.

Continue reading ‘The Coinflipper’s Dilemma’

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ACT now!!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 15, 2014
in Current Events, Personal, Politics and Recommendations
. 16 Comments

jamiewhyteIf you like The Big Questions, you really ought to know my brash and brilliant friend Jamie Whyte. After a brief but dazzling career as a philosopher at Cambridge university (he once won the prestigious Analysis prize for the best article by a philosopher under 30), Jamie distinguished himself as a management consultant, a foreign currency trader, and, via his frequent writing, an incisive and steadfast defender of rational thought and individual freedom. His little book on Crimes Against Logic delivers brilliantly on its promise to “expose the bogus arguments of politicians, priests, journalists and other serial offenders”, and his recent collection Free Thoughts (which, true to its title, you can read for free) is essential fare for anyone who cares about clarity of thought — or, because Jamie is as funny as he is brilliant, anyone who’s just looking for a good chuckle.

Now, in his most startling career twist yet, Jamie has become the leader of a political party in his native New Zealand — the ACT party, named for its forerunner, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers. ACT stands unabashedly for individual liberty, the rule of law and the enforcement of well-defined property rights. It campaigns against corporate welfare. It’s even pro-immigration. And thanks to New Zealand’s system of proportional representation, it actually gets representatives into parliament.

After several years of turmoil, the party turned to Jamie’s leadership in February of this year. With the boundless energy that inspires awe in everyone he meets, Jamie is re-building the party and promoting a principled free-market agenda in the run-up to the September 20 general election.

actThe downside of being a principled politician — and the reason they’re almost vanishingly rare — is that it’s hard to raise funds when you won’t cater to special interests. ACT opposes both corporate welfare and legal favoritism for union members, which cuts out most of the usual big donors. Here’s where you can help, and I hope you will.

Never before (and, I expect, never again) have I encouraged my readers to support any political party with their votes, let alone their dollars. That’s because I’ve spent my adult life being seduced and abandoned by politicians who talked a good game and then caved in to expediency when the chips were down. But Jamie — and therefore ACT — is different. I know him as a friend, and I know that principles are his passion.

You can help make ACT’s vision a reality by visiting the donation page and giving generously. Remember that a New Zealand dollar is worth about 88 cents U.S., so if you’re an American, a “$100 donation” is actually $88.

A little more background on New Zealand:

Continue reading ‘ACT now!!’

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Social Notes From All Over

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 21, 2014
in Events, Personal and Silk
. 6 Comments


(Click picture to enlarge)

The undergraduate Finance and Economics Council here at the University of Rochester held an event at my house last week, which included pizza, informal chat with professors, a rationality test (out of 31 students, exactly one scored a perfect 5 and one scored a perfect zero), a selfie shot or two, and some time on the aerial silks, where three students were brave enough to go up in the air — and each of them accomplished more in under ten minutes than I accomplished in my first ten weeks. The evidence:

Demo Lance Floto
Front Salto Dive
_________________________________________________________

Juan Bernardo Tobar
Front Salto Dive		 Lev Bokeria
Crossback Straddle

Thanks to Council president Shucen Wu for making this happen, to Zach Taylor for the video, and to everyone who participated. We should do this again.

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Public Service Announcement — Instructors’ Manual

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 15, 2013
in Personal
. 0 Comments

If you are an instructor using the new 9th edition of my book Price Theory and Applications, you might share my frustration at the fact that Cengage, for reasons presumably related to its ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, has still not managed to release the instructors’ manual, though its been ready for several weeks now.

Fortunately, not too many instructors are affected, since most are still using the 8th edition (we expect most instructors to switch over starting in January, 2014). But if you are one of those instructors, please do email me (you can click on the “contact” tab at the top of this page) so I can send you copies of at least the first several chapters to hold you over until Cengage gets it act together.

(Note that this offer does not apply to students! Your email must come from a recognizable college or university address, where I can check via the web that you are currently teaching this course!)

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Fortune Comes a-Crawlin’

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 11, 2013
in Blogging, Oddities, Personal and Religion
. 21 Comments


With great humility, I am honored to inform you that Eric Crampton of Offsetting Behavior has nominated me for sainthood.

Riffing off yesterday’s Acta Sanctorum post, Eric is asking for your help in making this a reality:

So, here’s the campaign for Saint Steven.

  1. Any of you who have any kind of illness at all pray to Steven Landsburg for intervention.
  2. If you do not receive divine Landsburgean intervention, don’t tell me about it.
  3. If you do receive divine Landsburgean intervention, please leave a record of such in the comments. Preferably with a link to a doctor’s note saying that your recovery was unexpected and pretty remarkable. This should happen in maybe 1% of cases.
  4. We submit the documented evidence of the successes, while ignoring the failures. Ta-dah! Saint Steven.

My hope is to beat John Paul II’s record of two reported cures, plus the toppling of one Evil Empire, or, at a minimum, the National Endowment for the Arts. Oh, and while I’m at it I have a couple of other worldly improvements in mind. Watch your step, Paul Krugman!

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Hi, Mom!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 8, 2013
in Math, Personal and Puzzles
. 23 Comments

MomMy mother, who reads this blog, reports that she’s lost a few nights’ sleep lately, tormented by thoughts of Knights, Knaves and Crazies. Serves her right. Once when she and I were very young, she tormented me with a geometry puzzler that I now know she must have gotten (either directly or indirectly) from Lewis Carroll; you can find it here. If she remembers the solution, she should be able to sleep tonight.

Herewith, a proof that a right angle can equal an obtuse angle. The puzzle, of course, is to figure out where I cheated.

But wait! Let’s do this as a video, since I’m starting to fool around with this technology and could use the practice. Consider this more or less a first effort. If you prefer the old ways, you can skip the video and read the (identical) step-by-step proof below the fold.

Or, if you prefer to skip the video, start here:

Continue reading ‘Hi, Mom!’

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