Posts filed under ‘Ephemera’
The Geography of Sin
| Lasse Lien |
I used to think geography was a dry and slightly boring subject, but then I found this. Peter, where is your house again?
Professional Defenses
| Nicolai Foss |
In Critical Mass (an excellent book, although its treatment of economics is confused, but that is a different story), Philip Ball recounts an amusing anecdote about James Lighthill, an expert on the physics of fluid flow who did early work applying this part of physics to understanding traffic patterns:
In the Lighthill-Whitham model, the individuality of drivers is entirely submerged beneath average driving behavior. . . . This is ironic, for Lighthill himself was anything but average in his driving habits. He was a persistent speeding offender, but would explain in court that as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (the chair once occupied by Newton), he was fully aware both of the laws of mechanics and of his social duty not to waste energy. As a result, he told the hapless judges, he felt obliged to desist from braking when going downhill. It seems that this defence was occassionally succesful (pp. 197-98).
Perhaps economists and management scholars should try something similar:
- The Decian Excuse: “Yes, your Honor, I did pay below the minimum wage, but that was because I know that what truly matters to the plaintiff is his intrinsic motivation.”
- The Kirznerian Excuse: “I did sell that stock in my company after learning from the CEO about the breakthrough in our drug development, but I did so in order to close pockets of ignorance in the market.”
- Etc. Please add.
An Official O&M Holiday
| Mike Sykuta |
This date, May 8, is a holiday of sorts at O&M and certainly in the field of Austrian economics. As Peter is traveling today and has thus far not taken the opportunity to remind us of the day’s significance, I simply refer you to one of Peter’s earlier posts and wish you (and Peter) a Happy Hayek-Klein Day.
Phishing Scam Targets Academics
| Peter Klein |
Some of you may have received a weird email this morning, purportedly from Elsevier, soliciting “manuscripts in all Fields of human Endeavour.” It has the general form of a call for submissions but gets the details wrong, e.g., asking authors to submit all papers to a central address, with Elsevier then deciding which of its subject-area journals is appropriate — a “special publication procedure,” it says — and, craziest of all, promising decisions within one week of submission. It also bears the usual marks of a phishing scam, such as as reply-to address that does not end in “elsevier.com.”
My guess is that naive authors, after being sucked into corresponding with the fake editors, will at some point be asked for credit card information to cover submission fees or page charges. Sadly, our publish-or-perish climate will probably lead some inexperienced scholars to fall for it. Anybody know of similar scams targeting academics?
Tweets That Might Get You Fired
| Peter Klein |
Some of these made me laugh (via FastCompany). I assume they’re real. If I had more time I’d perform a similar exercise, searching online for tweets that might get one of my students an F.
As ResumeBear reminds its readers:
It may not seem important to you now, but what you post and share online could come back to haunt you someday when you least expect it. Everything on the internet can be archived, which means it is also searchable. Your online profiles might be just for friends now, but later on, your online content might keep you from getting that scholarship, the job of your dreams or even prevent you from running for public office.
Think before you post — especially before you post to social networking sites or blogs.
Wait a minute, I blog, don’t I?
O&M Turns Three
| Peter Klein |
Saturday, April 25, 2009, marked this blog’s three-year anniversary. During the past three years we’ve served up 1,801 posts, hosted 4,597 comments, and entertained 525,624 unique users (that last figure comes from StatCounter and may or may not mean anything). Thanks to the O&M community for making blogging such a fun and interesting experience!
My Working Relationship with Lasse
| Peter Klein |
Every coauthoring relationship is unique. Scholars bring different strengths and weaknesses to the table, and there are many opportunities to exploit gains from trade. The best coauthoring relationships are marked by strong complementarities (a theorist and an empiricst, a conceptual thinker and a detail-oriented person, an expert in literature A and an expert in literature B, a “starter” and a “finisher,” etc.). It doesn’t always work, but — as has been frequently noted — sole-authored papers are increasingly rare in business and the social sciences, suggesting that the benefits, on average, outweigh the costs.
Lasse and I have an excellent working relationship resulting in several published and forthcoming papers, numerous works in progress, some joint teaching projects, and more. If there were any doubt that my role in the partnership is basically that of a glorified research assistant, this website, in which one Peter Klein offers “Pre-Lien Services,” should put those doubts to rest.
Contracting Hazards (Adult Edition)
| Lasse Lien |
If you need a rich example of the hazards of contracting, this one is particularly pregnant. Make sure you read it through to the end. Best suited for mature audiences.
Economists More Ethical; US Researchers Not
| Mike Sykuta |
Thanks to Josh Wright over at TOTM, I found Ben Edelman and Ian Larkin’s recent HBS Working Paper on “Demographics, Career Concerns or Social Comparison: Who Games SSRN Download Counts?” Their abstract reads:
We use a unique database of every SSRN paper download over the course of seven years, along with detailed resume data on a random sample of SSRN authors, to examine the role of demographic factors, career concerns, and social comparisons on the commission of a particular type of gaming: the selfdownloading of an author’s own SSRN working paper solely to inflate the paper’s reported download count. We find significant evidence that authors are more likely to inflate their papers’ download counts when a higher count greatly improves the visibility of a paper on the SSRN network. We also find limited evidence of gaming due to demographic factors and career concerns, and strong evidence of gaming driven by social comparisons with various peer groups. These results indicate the importance of including psychological factors in the study of deceptive behavior.
Their results suggest that papers published in the Economics Research Network of SSRN are significantly less likely to have “fraudulent” downloads (as measured in their paper) while papers in the Finance, Legal, and Accounting Networks are significantly more likely to have fraudulent downloads. Aren’t these the places in which ethics are being more broadly taught? Business and Law?
Among their other interesting results, papers by non-US authors are less likely to have fraudulent downloads. Perhaps surprisingly, one’s status on the tenure track seems not to be important, but one’s peer comparisons do. Sadly, there is no attempt to directly measure the O&M effect.
Follow O&M on Twitter!
| Peter Klein |
Twitterers or Tweetheads or whatever the correct term is can now receive O&M updates by following orgsandmarkets. This works through TwitterFeed, which I learned about from Lynne. Kool!
Another Regulation Not Worth Its Salt
| Mike Sykuta |
Thanks to Randy Westgren for calling attention to an April 7 article in the New York Times concerning a new regulatory initiative in the Big Apple. It seems Mayor Bloomberg has decreed that salt consumption should be cut in half and has pledged the coercive power of New York City’s food industry regulatory system to launch a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry to change its salty ways.
Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has identified salt consumption as a major public health crisis. Never mind that scientific research fails to demonstrate a causal relationship between salt consumption and actual health outcomes. Never mind that the human body requires some level of salt and there is no research demonstrating the potential health consequences of restricting persons’ salt intake to the level the Mayor prescribes. And don’t even think about the idea of personal responsibility and liberty in choosing what to eat and whether (and how much) salt to consume.
“if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by people.” Perhaps a better approach would be to throw out such ill-founded regulations and trample them under foot.
Best NCAA Championship Game Headline
| Peter Klein |
From the New York Daily News: “No bailouts for Michigan State in NCAA final loss.”
I have to admit, as an auto-industry-bailout opponent, I was getting a little tired of the “Michigan State basketball brings a ray of sunshine to struggling Detroit” storyline. Sheesh. Oh, did I mention that I’m also a rabid UNC basketball fan?
(I’m really happy for Carolina star Tyler Hansbrough, with whom I feel a close connection. Tyler’s a Missourian who went to UNC; I did my undergraduate work at UNC and now live in Missouri. My former next-door neighbors are from Tyler’s home town of Poplar Bluff, MO. My wife taught Tyler’s older brother Greg here at Mizzou. And, like Tyler, I have some pretty sweet post-up moves . . . NOT!)
April Fool’s!
| Peter Klein |
I’m too lazy to come up with an April Fool’s post (this comment notwithstanding), so I’ll just recycle a couple of old ones:
Here are some other good ones.
South Park’s Less-Famous Metaphor
| Dick Langlois |
One of my students sent me this link to a recent South Park episode, which not only effectively skewers the bailout but also has its own take on the nature and meaning of “the market.” A mini-Fable of the Bees for modern times.
Imaginary Tweets
| Peter Klein |
If Twitter had been around way back then (courtesy of Norman Chad):
Michelangelo: “Sistine Chapel ceiling larger than it looks; back is killing me.”
Christopher Columbus: “No sign of land yet.”
Robert Peary: “Man, it’s cold up here.”
And Adam Chudy imagines Obama’s tweets:
Just spent $3.5 billion …
Just spent $30 billion …
Just spent $787 billion …
Smoke break …
Just spent $285 billion …
On a related note, here’s a new stream worth following: Twecipie.
Railway Gauges and Path Dependency
| Dick Langlois |
You’ve all read the viral email asserting that the railroad gauge we have today — and, in some versions, the size of the space shuttle fuel tanks, which had to be transported by rail — is a direct result of the wheel gauge of Roman chariots. Not surprisingly, the real story is more complex, and many gauges coexisted (and to some extent continue to coexist) in the U.S. and around the world. My former colleague Doug Puffert tells this story in full detail in his new book, Tracks across Continents, which has just appeared from the University of Chicago Press. The book is a useful addition to the catalog of case studies of path-dependent technology.
The book came out of Doug’s thesis at Stanford, where he worked with Paul David and Brian Arthur. He was a visitor at UConn in the 1988-89 academic year. I can still remember his seminar presentations, which involved simulating the evolution of railways on a Macintosh of the era. (One thing you probably won’t learn in Doug’s official bio is that, before coming to UConn, he won a car on Wheel of Fortune. I always tell students about this when I teach the QWERTY story — a student of Paul David who really knew his letter frequencies.)
L’effet de Klein
| Peter Klein |
In 2006 I spent two weeks in Paris to visit colleagues and give a series of seminars. My first seminar was scheduled for a Tuesday in March. That day students decided to go on strike to protest a proposed labor law, the host university was closed, and my seminar was canceled. The next seminar was scheduled for the following Tuesday. Sure enough, that was the next day of protests, and that talk was canceled as well.
Now I am in France again to give some lectures at the University of Angers and ESC Rouen. Tomorrow I was planning to go by train from Angers to Rouen for an afternoon seminar. So, guess what’s planned for tomorrow? You guessed it: general strike. Trains are shut down, so no Rouen seminar for me.
Sooner or later someone in France is going to run some Granger causality tests and I will be banned from the country forever.
Update (Thursday): Here are some photos I took of this morning’s activity in Angers. For those who can’t read French, the signs say “Klein Go Home” and “French Lectures for French Professors.”
John Nash’s Dissertation
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to Dave Prychitko for linking to the original, which I hadn’t seen before. Things I didn’t know about the dissertation:
- The symbols and equations are hand-written (standard practice for 1950, I assume).
- There is no discussion of social-science applications — in fact, no discussion of any applications other than poker.
- The bibliography contains two items, von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) and an earlier paper by Nash.
- The whole thing is only 27 pages long.
“I’m 30 Years Old, and I Made $600 Last Year”
| Peter Klein |
Bart Simpson explains graduate school (via Per):
My favorite Matt Groening take on grad school remains this one.
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