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A Little Arithmetic
The mathematician John Baez has been dazzling science lovers on the web for over 15 years with his weekly Finds in Mathematical Physics. (He was a blogger long before there were blogs). Baez recently...
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Krugman to the Rescue
It’s always impressive to see one person excel in two widely disparate activities: a first-rate mathematician who’s also a world class mountaineer, or a titan of industry who conducts symphony...
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A Call for Help
It seems to be well known that supermarkets charge cereal companies for prime display space. It seems to be less well known that bookstores do the same thing. They do, though. For example, the...
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Weekend Roundup
Lots of good discussion on the blog this week. We began with a lively debate about the moral basis for antidiscrimination laws, which inspired some thoughtful commentary from the anonymous Rust Belt...
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The Economics of College Admissions
The final chapter of The Big Questions is called “What to Study”. This post is about where to study it. Stanford professor Carolyn Hoxby reports that in the college admissions market, the big change...
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Krugman: The Flip Side
Having recently bashed Paul Krugman, and in the full expectation that I’ll have occasion to bash him again, let me interject that Krugman is not just a first rate economist; he is also, when he wants...
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Too Marvelous for Words
The greatest financial mistake of my life occurred on the day my father offered to bet his entire net worth against mine that the great Johnny Mercer had written the song Don’t Fence Me In. Now “Don’t...
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Work and Play in Europe and America
My post about Paul Krugman’s loopy proposals on employment policy generated some considerable discussion about why Europeans work so much less than Americans do. Actually, there are two separate...
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The Honors Class, Part I
Each year, the economics department at Oberlin College invites an outside examiner to determine who among its top graduating seniors should receive an honors degree. Last spring, I was that outside...
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Weekend Roundup
Lots of economics this week. We celebrated the Dr. Jekyll side of Paul Krugman (after having lamented his Dr. Hyde a week ago), explored the economics of college admissions and of work and play, and...
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Snidely Whiplash
I’m going to dole out the answers to the first half of my honors exam slowly over the next several days. After that I’ll post the second half of the exam. Let’s start with this one: Question 3. Snidely...
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Analogize This
Over on Econlog, Bryan Caplan uses an example from The Big Questions to illustrate his intuitionist approach to meta-ethics: Start with concrete, specific cases where your ethical intuition is clear,...
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From the Sierra Club
I am a proud member of the Sierra Club. No, not that Sierra Club; what I mean to say is that I am a regular reader of the parenting blog ChildWild, and a fan of its wise and charming proprietor Sierra...
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Rational Irrationality
On his blog A Blank Slate, Vishal Patel posts a cute little brain teaser (with a hat tip to the Cosmic Variance blog): Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but...
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Godel in a nutshell
Godel’s theorem (or at least one of Godel’s theorems) says that no matter what axioms you adopt, there will always be true statements in arithmetic that can’t be proven. In Chapter 10 of The Big...
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Giving Thanks
After the philosopher Daniel Dennett was rushed to the hospital for lifesaving surgery to replace a damaged aorta, he had an epiphany: I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I...
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In the Spirit of the Day
If you’re at work on this post-Thanksgiving morning, it’s probably a slow day around the office (unless you’re in retail, in which case you’re probably not reading this). So to help you while away the...
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Weekend Roundup
We started the week with the solution to one problem from Part I of my honors exam; I still owe you answers to the remaining four questions, and I still owe you the questions from Part II. Stay tuned....
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The Oracle of Eighth Avenue
Randy Cohen, the house ethicist at the New York Times, frequently strikes me as disappointingly shallow. Take, for example, his latest column, posing this ethical quandary: You’re redesigning a website...
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The Lament of Deirdre
Deirdre McCloskey has changed my life several times, and always for the better. I had my first economics lessons from friends who were so inspired by Deirdre’s lectures that they felt compelled to...
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