Archive for the 'Recommendations' 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.

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Potpourri

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 25, 2021
in Miscellaneous, Recommendations and WTF?
. 16 Comments
  1. I am delighted to be able to point you to the writings of my friend Herrmann Banks. For years, Herrmann has been sharing brilliant and original insights in private conversations and emails, and for years I’ve been telling him he needs to share them more widely. Now he’s up and running. Enjoy!
  2. Many American highways have “HOV” lanes, reserved for cars with multiple occupants. Sometimes a driver with no passengers will cheat and use those lanes. This is of course a blessing to all the rule-abiding drivers in the regular lanes, which have just gotten a little less crowded. So why do those drivers tend to respond by giving dirty looks to the cheaters who just made their lives better?

    I expect this is related to the phenomenon of apartment-hunters getting angry at landlords who won’t rent to them, even though those landlords are making their search easier by renting to someone and thereby reducing the competition for other apartments.

    But in the case of the landlords, the psychology seems to be something like “Yes, you’ve helped me by renting to others but you could have helped me even more by renting to me!”. (Though this overlooks the fact that anybody could have made your life easier by becoming a landlord and renting to you, so maybe you should be equally angry at pretty much everybody.) Whereas with the HOV lanes, it seems like the cheaters have already done everything they could possibly do for you (unless you think they could do more by getting off the highway completely, making a little more room in the HOV lane, and thereby encouraging someone else to cheat).

    People are odd.

  3. The next time somebody encourages you to “buy local” so you can “keep the money in the community”, try asking how they feel about the federal income tax, which is designed to facilitate the largest geographic redistribution of income ever conceived.

Hat tips to my friends Gerry Sohan for point 2) and John Barry for point 3).

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The Best Books

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 20, 2021
in Books and Recommendations
. 5 Comments

Shepherd.com is a brand-new website where authors recommend the five best books on a topic of their choosing. The topic of my choosing was The Biggest Questions, and while I doubt very much that I picked the five best books ever written in this category (by any standard you care to name), I am at least confident that I picked five well worth your attention.

Feel free to do any or all of the following:

  • Tell me (and of course our readers) what you think are the most glaring omissions from my list.
  • Tell us which other lists on that site are most worth checking out.
  • Tell us what topic, and what five books, you’ll be choosing if you ever get the call for a contribution from Shepherd.

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Recommended Reading

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 28, 2020
in Recommendations
. 14 Comments

1. Bernie Sanders says (repeatedly) that he wants the United States to be more like Sweden. Bring it on! No estate or inheritance taxes, no minimum wage, a much higher ratio of consumption taxes to income taxes, an income tax system that is by some reasonable standards far less progressive, school choice, high deductibles and copays for medical care, lighter regulatory burdens and free trade. And a government that has shrunk by a third over the last few decades, ever since the Swedes got fed up with the economic stagnation that went hand-in-hand with the old-style Swedish socialism of Sanders’s fantasies. Farad Zakaria says all this and more in a spectacularly good op-ed at the Washington Post.

2. The ever-thoughtful Robin Hanson observes that if a whole lot of us are going to be struck by COVID-19, it would be a whole lot better for us not to all get sick at once. If I were pretty sure (maybe a bit surer than I am now) that I was destined to get sick eventually, I’d much rather have it be now than a few months later when 70% of my neighbors — including 70% of medical personnel, 70% of food providers, etc. — are all sick too. So maybe it’s time to start incentivizing people to expose themselves, get their illnesses over with, and be immune when the rest of us need them. Robin points out there’s plenty of precedent — parents used to be (and for all I know, still are) routinely advised that when one kid gets chicken pox, it’s a good idea to expose the others, because it’s easier to treat three at once then three in succession. (Of course the parents are aiming to bunch while Robin is aiming to minimize bunching, but the point in both cases is to think about how much bunching is optimal and then aim for it.) More here, with, as usual in a Hanson post, much worth pondering.

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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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Letters and Numbers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 15, 2014
in Economics, Paul Krugman, Recommendations and Truthseeking
. 37 Comments

Four years ago, roughly two dozen economists and financial theorists signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke urging him to back off the policy of quantitative easing, citing, among other things, the risk of inflation.

Bernanke was apparently unmoved, and quantitative easing went ahead as scheduled. Inflation has not materialized. This raises a number of questions for the signers of the letter. Should they be ashamed? Do they have anything to apologize for? Should they renounce everything they thought they knew about economics and relearn the subject from scratch?

Cliff Asness, one of the signers, responds here. This is a terrific essay, not just on the specific topic of quantitative easing but on the general topic of the lessons we should and should not learn from our mistakes and/or from concerns that don’t materialize.

Postscript: True to form, Paul Krugman concludes that Asness, because he disagrees with Krugman, must be entirely ignorant of all the macroeconomic literature on liquidity traps. I wonder if Krugman wants to draw the same conclusion about Asness’s fellow signer John Taylor, whose likely future Nobel prize, unlike Krugman’s (who won for trade theory and economic geography), will recognize Taylor’s widely acknowledged first-rate scholarship and influence in the field of macroeconomics.

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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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Many Many Worlds

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 1, 2014
in Books, Math, Ontology, Philosophy, Physics, Recommendations and Science
. 54 Comments

tegmarkMax Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT, a major force in the development of modern cosmology, a lively expositor, and the force behind what he calls the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis — a vision of the Universe as a purely mathematical object. Readers of The Big Questions will be aware that this is a vision I wholeheartedly embrace.

Tegmark’s new book Our Mathematical Universe is really several books intertwined, including:

  1. A brisk tour of the Universe as it’s understood by mainstream cosmologists, touching on many of the major insights of the past 2000 years, beginning with how Aristarchos figured out the size of the moon, and emphasizing the extraordinary pace of recent progress. In just a few years, cosmologists have gone from arguing over whether the Universe is 10 billion or 20 billion years old to arguing over whether it’s 13.7 or 13.8.

    Continue reading ‘Many Many Worlds’

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A Pi-Day Treat

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 14, 2014
in History, Math and Recommendations
. 14 Comments

In 1706, the British astronomer John Machin calculated π to 100 digits (by hand of course). His trick was to notice that π = 16A – 4B where A and B are given by

If you’re computing by hand, this is an excellent discovery, because the series for A involves a lot of divisions by 5, which are a lot easier to calculate than, say, divisions by 7, and the series for B converges very fast, so just a few terms buys you a whole lot of accuracy. (Try using, say, just the first four terms of A and just the first term of B to see what I mean.)

Machin’s 100 digits were a substantial improvement over the 72 digits obtained just a little earlier by Abraham Sharp, using the far less efficient series

In 1729, a Frenchman named de Lagny got all the way to 127 digits, but, in the words of the scientist/engineer/philosopher/historian Petr Beckmann (of whom more later), de Lagny “sweated these digits out by Sharp’s series, and so exhibited more computational stamina than mathematical wits.”

Machin’s methods were ingenious, but no more ingenious — and certainly no more striking — than John Wallis’s 1655 discovery that


which still looks awesome to me after decades of familiarity.

Continue reading ‘A Pi-Day Treat’

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Friedman on Psychic Harm

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 7, 2013
in Blogging, Economics, Morality, Philosophy, Policy, Recommendations and Truthseeking
. 15 Comments

Four terrific posts by David Friedman, partly on psychic harm, partly on talking about psychic harm. I’d recommend these highly even if they hadn’t invoked my name.

Landsburg v Bork: What Counts As Injury?

Response to Bork and Landsburg

Frightening Ideas

Why Landsburg’s Puzzle is Interesting

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Hypocrites and Half-Wits

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 29, 2012
in Books and Recommendations
. 23 Comments

hhwThe letter to the editor is a literary genre unique unto itself. Unlike the editorial or the op-ed, the letter typically allows its author only a couple of short paragraphs to make a single compelling point. A good blog post might ramble from one loosely connected idea to another, but a good letter proceeds directly to its target.

Don Boudreaux is, beyond any doubt, the modern master — no, the all-time master — of this underrated branch of literature. When a radio station interviews a Galveston resident who’s just topped off her gas tank in anticipation of Hurricane Ike — and who is furious to learn that gas prices have jumped 50 cents a gallon overnight even though “Ike hadn’t hit yet” — a blogger (or an Armchair Economist) might respond with a long-winded explanation of why it’s a good thing that supply, demand, and therefore prices respond quickly to a change in expectations. Boudreaux, instead, skips right to the heart of the matter:

Your reporter should have immediatedly asked this woman: “Well, why were you topping off your tank? Ike hadn’t hit yet.”

Continue reading ‘Hypocrites and Half-Wits’

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Today’s the Day

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 7, 2012
in Book, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 37 Comments

The new revised edition of The Armchair Economist is now on sale in paperback and electronic versions. Last week’s glitch (where the electronic versions were of the wrong edition) is fixed.

For almost twenty years, Armchair has been widely recognized among economists as the book to give your mother when she wants to understand what you think about all day. In this new version, fully updated for the 21st century, I’ve completely rewritten several chapters to make them even clearer, livelier and more contemporary.

I (and you if you buy the book) am deeply indebted to Lisa Talpey who read every chapter multiple times, insisting that I keep rewriting until everything met her meticulous standards of clarity. Chapters I’d thought were pretty good are vastly improved thanks to Lisa; these include:

  • Why Popcorn Costs More at the Movies (and Why the Obvious Answer is Wrong)
  • Was Einstein Credible? (The Economics of Scientific Method)
  • The Indifference Principle (Who Cares if the Air is Clean?)

    • and

  • Why Taxes Are Bad (The Logic of Efficiency)

Others are almost completely rewritten to focus on issues that are in the news today; these include

  • The Mythology of Deficits

    • and

  • Unsound and Furious: Spurious Wisdom from the Media

By way of general housecleaning, I’ve excised all references to cassette tapes, Polaroid film, and Walter Mondale.

You can read the preface here. You can buy the book here. Here are direct links to the updated Kindle and Nook editions. (These editions are advertised as “published November 2007”, but don’t panic; that’s just the lingering shadow of last week’s glitch. They’re actually the brand-new 2012 edition.)

Dan Seligman at Fortune called the first edition of The Armchair Economist “enormous fun from its opening page”; Alfred Malabre of the Wall Street Journal called it “the most enjoyable and sensible book by an economist about economics that I’ve read in donkey’s years”; Milton Friedman called it “an ingenious and highly original presentation of some central principles of economics for the proverbial Everyman”; George Gilder called it “a crisp, lively, pungent display of the economist’s art”. This second edition is, I believe, all that and more.

The Armchair Economist is indeed the perfect gift for your mother, or for your father, or for the new college grad in your life, or even for yourself. Enjoy it, and come join the discussion right here.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Hang On There ….

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 1, 2012
in Books, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 5 Comments

Edited to Add: These problems are fixed now! The electronic versions are correct. They are still advertised as November 2007 editions, but they are in fact the May 2012 edition. You can now trust the links at http://www.TheBigQuestions.com/buy .

________________________________________________________________

hangToday (May 1) was the official publication date for the all-new revised edition of The Armchair Economist. (Read the preface here.) Unfortunately, we had a major communication screw-up and purchasers of the electronic editions (Kindle, Nook, etc.) are still receiving the 1993 edition (which is labeled the “2007 edition” because that’s when it was converted to an e-book). This will be fixed in a day or so. I’ll post to let you know when it’s safe to buy.

Meanwhile, if you’ve recently purchased an electronic Armchair Economist, I encourage you to return it, wait just a day or two till you see the announcement that all systems are go, and then buy it all over again.

I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am about this. There is at least one very particular head I’d like to see roll.

Thanks for bearing with the glitch, and watch this space for the big announcement that all systems are go.

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Hi, Sierra

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 19, 2012
in Personal and Recommendations
. 148 Comments

sierra-and-family-smallOur occasional commenter Sierra Black is the subject of a 20/20 documentary scheduled to air on ABC tomorrow night (Friday the 20th) at 10PM Eastern Standard Time. You should watch it.

I’ve had the great blessing of getting to know quite a lot of you (some better than others of course) in the few years I’ve been blogging, but Sierra is one of the few I’ve met face to face. She and her husband Martin have more than once been guests in my home; my daughter occasionally babysits for Sierra’s daughters Rio and Serena. (The picture at the top was taken in my living room.) My family and Sierra’s camp together (along with quite a few other friends) every summer, and while we’re not always in close touch, we do keep track of each other. They’re good people.

The 20/20 program will focus on Sierra and Martin’s unconventional relationship choices. We here at The Big Questions are strong enthusiasts for all things consensually unconventional.

Continue reading ‘Hi, Sierra’

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Cato University

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 17, 2012
in Cool Stuff, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 9 Comments

This is a reminder that I’ll be teaching at this year’s Cato University, where I and a distinguished cast of faculty will lecture on the political, historic, philosophical and economic foundations of liberty. There will also be ample opportunity for informal conversations with the faculty and, even better, with the other students, who I have learned from past experience are always bright and lively and fun.

Come join us, July 29 through August 3, at Cato’s newly expanded headquarters in DC. The insights you’ll gain, and the friends you’ll meet, will last a lifetime.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Armchair Economist: Revised, Updated, and Available May 1 — or for pre-order now!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 11, 2012
in Books, Economics, Recommendations and Self-Promotion
. 44 Comments

FROM THE PREFACE:

One day in 1991, I walked into a medium sized bookstore and counted over 80 titles on quantum physics and the history of the Universe. A few shelves over I found Richard Dawkins’s bestseller The Selfish Gene along with dozens of others explaining Darwinan evolution and the genetic code.

In the best of these books, I discovered natural wonders, confronted mysteries, learned new ways of thinking, and felt I had shared in a great intellectual adventure, founded on ideas that are dazzling in their scope and their simplicity.

Economics, too, is a great intellectual adventure, but I could find, in 1991, not a single book that proposed to share that adventure with the general public. There was nothing that revealed the economist’s unique way of thinking, using a few simple ideas to illuminate the whole range of human behavior, shake up our preconceptions, and jolt us into new ways of seeing the world.

I resolved to write that book. The Armchair Economist was published in 1993, and attracted much critical praise along with a large and devoted following. But what I take most pride in is that The Armchair Economist is still widely recognized among economists as the book to give your mother when she wants to understand what you do all day.

Continue reading ‘The Armchair Economist: Revised, Updated, and Available May 1 — or for pre-order now!’

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Launching the Innovation Renaissance

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 20, 2011
in Books, Economics, Policy and Recommendations
. 8 Comments

tabarroIn late 17th century England, there were no newspapers outside of London, and scarcely a printer outside of London, Cambridge and Oxford. The difficulty and expense of conveying large packets from place to place was so great that an extensive work took longer to reach Devonshire or Lancashire than it took, in Victorian times, to reach Kentucky. As a result, books and printed matter generally were largely unavailable outside of London — and London, for most rural Englishmen, might as well have been the moon.

I learned this from Macaulay’s History of England, which I just pulled up on my Kindle, which of course gives me instant — and searchable! — access to pretty much everything that’s ever been published. But the Kindle, and its brother e-readers, are more revolutionary than that. Not only do they give us easy access to existing literature; they call forth entirely new literary genres, such as the Kindle e-book, which brings to market extended essays that are too long to be magazine articles but too short to be traditional books — and are priced to sell.

All of which brings me to Alex Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, which is both a product and a celebration of the innovation revolution, along with a recipe, or rather a set of recipes, for nurturing that revolution.

This is a great book. It’s fast-paced, fun to read, informative as hell, and it gets everything right. At first I wished I’d written it— until I realized I could never have written it half so well.

Continue reading ‘Launching the Innovation Renaissance’

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The Machinery of Freedom

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 24, 2010
in Books and Recommendations
. 17 Comments

machineryDavid D. Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, a classic of libertarian thought, has long been out of print and hard to find. (Well, it’s easy to find, actually. But hard to find for less than about a hundred bucks.) It is therefore a very good thing that David’s gotten his publisher’s permission to post the entire book on the World Wide Web, for free.

What does David get out of this? Well first, of course, he wants you to read his book. But second, he’s about to start preparing a third edition and welcomes reader feedback. If you post your comments here, I’ll make sure he sees them.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Making Math Palatable

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 2, 2010
in Education, Math, Rants and Recommendations
. 10 Comments

My colleague Ralph Raimi is witty, acerbic and wise about many things, but particularly about mathematics education. A little time spent browsing around his web page will reap ample rewards in the form of both entertainment and edification. Today I’d like to share a little passage he sent me by email:

I have never tried to count the times I have read a newspaper article explaining that students are bored with math that has no visible practical application, and follows with an example of a teacher, or club, that rectifies the situation in some novel and engaging way.

In the present case a class has built a sculpture that resembles a graph of a modulated wave motion. Of all the practical, real-world
applications of mathematics! It is as practical as a snowman.

Why doesn’t anyone ask for real-world applications of table tennis? What a bore any game must be, that has no real-world application! Why do kids stand for it? Ping-pong again? Ugh.

But I can think of something: Let’s all make a model of a ping-pong ball in the school yard, seventy feet high, blocking all the entrances and thus preventing all us students from entering the (ugh) school. Then we can take our fishing poles and torn straw hats out from under our beds and, with the hats on our heads and fishing poles over our shoulders, all traipse together down the dusty road to Norman Rockwell’s house.

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Free Will versus Determinism: The Web Comic

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 16, 2010
in Cool Stuff, Philosophy and Recommendations
. 13 Comments

lukesurl

Like everyone else I know, I am of course a longtime fan of the webcomic XKCD. But somehow it took me until last week to become aware of the frequently brilliant competitor Luke Surl, of which the above is a delectable example. What else out there am I missing?

Hat tip to Harry Brighouse of Crooked Timber.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Cultivating Failure

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 5, 2010
in Education, Policy and Recommendations
. 22 Comments

Caitlin Flanagan is such a smashingly good writer that I normally devour anything she’s written. But when I saw her latest piece in the Atlantic—roughly 5000 words in opposition to public school gardens, where students learn horticulture instead of long division—it seemed well, too petty a subject for Flanagan’s vast talents—so I put it aside without reading it.

Today I read it. Wow, was I wrong. This is Caitlin Flanagan at her blistering best. I’ll offer you a few choice quotes, but my real recommendation is to leave now and go read the entire piece.

With the Edible Schoolyard..the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time…has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and the another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outercourse” and in another it’s abstinence-only education.

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it?…If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: A way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

Until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise we become complicit—through our best intentions—in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, undereducated underclass, but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its state.

There’s much more where that came from. Why are you still here?

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Jellyfish Math

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 12, 2010
in Books, Math, Ontology, Philosophy and Recommendations
. 20 Comments

livio
Is mathematics invented or discovered? In my experience, applied scientists often think of mathematics as a human invention, while actual mathematicians (with a few notable exceptions) feel sure that mathematics was always there to be discovered. (Of course, it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of this is genuine disagreement and how much is a language barrier.)

I’ve just finished reading an excellent book by Mario Livio which is entirely about the invention/discovery question, though he’s chosen the (somewhat unfortunate) title Is God a Mathematician? Much of the book is a lively romp through mathematical history, with a well chosen mix of biography and exposition. Although he parts company with them in the last chapter, Livio gives a more than fair hearing to the many great mathematicians who have insisted that they are discoverers, from Pythagoras through Galileo, G.H. Hardy, Kurt Godel, and the contemporary Fields Medalist Alain Connes (among others). Here, for example is Connes:

Continue reading ‘Jellyfish Math’

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Unbelievable

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 4, 2010
in Belief, Recommendations and Religion
. 17 Comments

bathtubYou know that metal plate in your bathtub? The one with the little lever on it that opens and closes the drain? What happens when the water level rises above that plate?

When my sister asked me this question over Thanksgiving dinner, I answered, with the utmost confidence, that it causes (quite instantaneously) an enormous flood. (Note the exact wording. This will be important later.) My sister nodded sagely and said “That’s what I thought, too.” My sister and I had the same mother, you see.

And then she asked, quite innocently, “So. How exactly does that work?”. And I was stunned—absolutely stunned—to realize not only that I had no answer to this question, but that there could not plausibly be an answer. Which somehow had never occurred to me in the half century or so that I’d been harboring this ridiculous notion.

Continue reading ‘Unbelievable’

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On the Amazon: Christmas Edition

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 14, 2009
in Oddities and Recommendations
. 2 Comments

Some gift ideas for the more unusual people on your Christmas list:

First, with a hat tip to my sister, three from Amazon.com.

  • For your ex’s divorce lawyer: A laptop desk to attach to your steering wheel! Proceed as follows (you’ll thank me, really): First cursor over the customer images on the left side of the page. Then read the customer reviews.
  • For the political activist on your list: Uranium ore!. Again, read the customer reviews. Again, you’ll thank me.
  • For your oddball cousin: Wolf urine!. Not a common taste, but for those who indulge, there simply is no substitute. And of course: Read the reviews.

And speaking of Amazon customer reviews, I was more than pleased to stumble on this quote in a review of The Big Questions:

Also, if you are a parent and are blessed with a math/science inclined child, please, please, please buy them a copy!

It’s not too late!

Finally, as a Christmas gift to my readers—or at least to that vocal subset of my readers who have been clamoring for answers to the honors questions I posted a couple of weeks ago: Your wish is my command.

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Economists Calendar

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 11, 2009
in Recommendations
. 7 Comments

aeaCalendarIf you were choosing 18 economists to highlight in a calendar, who would they be?

The American Economics Association has chosen, among others, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Adam Smith and Joan Robinson. (Can you identify the rest?) I haven’t yet held the Economists Calendar in my hands, but the reliable Mark Skousen has, and his verdict (via private email) is “Bravo!”

The calendar includes, according to Skousen, “an amazingly complete listing of top economists through the ages”, along with the featured 18. There’s still time to order before Christmas.

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