Posts filed under ‘Ephemera’
New Foss Hobby Blog
| Peter Klein |
Tyler Cowen has his ethnic dining guide, Teppo Felin has his photography page, and now my co-blogger too has a hobby site: Jazz & Archtops. If you don’t know what an archtop is you’re probably not in the target demographic.
So, if you’ve been wondering why Nicolai doesn’t have time to blog more often on O&M, now you know!
(Looks like I need to add another entry to this list.)
The Stand-Up Economist
| Peter Klein |
A very funny translation of Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics by Yoram Bauman, billed as “the world’s first and only stand-up economist.” (Thanks to Eddie Garrett for the link.)
It’s good stuff, but not nearly as funny as a principles lecture by Bill Breit. I attended this session in honor of Breit at the 2001 Southern Economics Association annual meeting. You’ll notice in the transcript of Ken Elzinga’s remarks the note “Excerpts from the Spring 1969 Breit lectures played.” Omigosh (as my students would say) — Breit’s routine was as funny as anything I’ve ever seen on HBO or Comedy Central. The other people in the session were literally doubled over with laughter. And this was a lecture on Adam Smith! (I’ve since asked Elzinga if he would make the recording available but he didn’t feel comfortable doing so. Perhaps a groundswell of requests from the O&M readership would convince him to change his mind.)
John Stuart Mill in Math
| Peter Klein |
When I teach Bayes’s Theorem to my graduate students I use the Monty Hall paradox for illustration.
- Priors:
- Suppose you choose door 3; Monty reveals door 2.
- What’s
?
It’s
So you should switch doors!
The problem is that few students in their 20s or early 30s have ever seen an episode of Let’s Make a Deal. (I have a college friend whose mother was a contestant on the show, dressed as a giant chicken.)
Glenn Whitman provides another example for illustrating Bayes’s Theorem, based on this quotation from John Stuart Mill: “The Conservatives, as being by the law of their existence the stupidest party. . . . ” Mill subsequently offered this clarification: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” (more…)
Nerd Alert, Part III
| Peter Klein |
I stopped at OfficeMax today to have new business cards printed and found myself drawn magnetically towards the pen section. I cannot resist trying new pens!
Today I bought a two-pack of Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm ballpoint retractable gel pens with purple ink. Oooooo, they write so smoothly . . . with such violet-purpleness . . . ahhhhh. . . .
That’s Anne Zelenka asking “Do You Have An Office Supply Fetish?” at Web Worker Daily. I’m sure some of you have one. What office supplies do you covet?
(I think we are ready now to add Nerd Alert as a general category.)
Demanding the Right to Be Offensive
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is an online campaign to defend unrestricted freedom of inquiry in universities, recently started by Academics for Academic Freedom. Its Statement of Academic Freedom reads:
‘We, the undersigned, believe the following two principles to be the foundation of academic freedom:
(1) that academics, both inside and outside the classroom, have unrestricted liberty to question and test received wisdom and to put forward controversial and unpopular opinions, whether or not these are deemed offensive, and
(2) that academic institutions have no right to curb the exercise of this freedom by members of their staff, or to use it as grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.’
The A..hole Factor in Economics
| Nicolai Foss |
I may be entirely mistaken, but my personal and admittedly casual observations after working in academia since 1989 seem to point toward something like the following approximate generalizations: “Orthodox” (or “mainstream”) economists and finance scholars are — I stress: as a crude approximation — reserved, not very wordy, introverted, but still direct (bordering on brutal, particularly in seminars). They are spiteful of “softies.” On the other hand, “heterodox” (“non-mainstream”) economists (including many management scholars) are generally more extroverted, easier to get along with, and less direct/brutal. However, they are as spiteful of mainstream economics as mainstream economists are of the soft stuff (Marxist economists are, however, a lot like mainstream economists). Again, this is just a tendency; there are many, many counter-examples. Am I right? Or just biased (e.g., by hanging out with too many heterodox types)? (more…)
Spooky CEO Research
| Nicolai Foss |
Research on corporate governance and the importance to value creation of CEOs is becoming increasingly morbid. Check out the abstract of a recent paper by CBS colleague Morten Bennedsen (as the paper doesn’t seem to be online, you will have to write Morten for a copy; mb.eco@cbs.dk):
Estimating the value of top managerial talent is a central topic of research that has attracted widespread attention from academics and practitioners. Yet, studying the impact of managers on firm performance is difficult because of endogeneity and omitted variables concerns. In this paper, we test for the impact of managers on firm performance in two ways. First, we examine whether top executive deaths have an impact on firm performance, focusing on the manager and firm characteristics that are associated to large manager-death effects. Second, we test for the interaction between the personal and professional activities of managers by examining the effect of deaths of immediate family members (spouses, parents, children, etc) on firm performance. Our main findings are three. First, CEO deaths are strongly correlated with declines in firms operating profitability, asset growth and sales growth. Second, the death of board members does not seem to affect firm prospects, indicating that not all senior managers are equally important for firms’ outcomes. Third, CEOs’ immediate family deaths are significantly negatively correlated to firm performance. This last result suggests a strong link between the personal and business roles that top management plays, a connection that is present even in large firms. Overall, our findings demonstrate CEOs are extremely important for firms’ prospects.
Three Great Austrian Economists in One Book!
| Nicolai Foss |
My co-blogger abundantly possesses that increasingly scarce resource: Modesty. So, I suppose it falls on my shoulders to announce to the blogosphere that the Mises Institute has just published a beautiful new edition of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics with a foreword by Peter. (more…)
Nerd Alert, Part II
| Peter Klein |
Though we often tease our colleagues in the MathEcon tribe, we hope to make O&M a comfortable place for them. Henceforth, we proudly announce, for you math geeks out there, that our server now knows how to process 
While management working papers are almost always written in Word,
or the definition of Bayesian Nash equilibrium,
then O&M is the blog for you!
The Weatherhead School’s Tumor
| Peter Klein |
Case Western Reserve University’s Peter B. Lewis Building, the Frank Gehry-designed home of the Weatherhead School of Management, recently made critic James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month list. “If your dog had a tumor like this,” writes Kunstler, “the vets would just shake their heads and put him to sleep.” (HT: Max Goss)
Nerd Alert!
| Nicolai Foss |
What can possibly be more relevant for an econ-oriented blog than to wax lyrical about calculators? Do you remember Hewlett-Packard’s ill-fated experiments with Reverse Polish Notation? Or their excellent HP 41 model? (We will forget about their wristwatch-calculator.) Did you own a TI-57 and its excellent successors TI-58 and 59? Or, did you have to manage with a crappy TI-30? And what about the super-innovative Casios? Chances are that if you are old enough and are reading this blog, you were part of the great calculator craze of the 1970s and 1980s.
Receiving my first electronic calculator from my grandparents on my 9th birthday in 1973, I acquired a taste for these great gadgets and probably owned around 50 of them from 1973 to 1983 at which point of time I completely lost interest (unlike this über-nerd — who is even German). Those of you who harbor nostalgic memories, check out The Old Calculators Web Museum or the Pocket Calculator Show.
Breaking Up (Used to Be) Hard to Do
| Peter Klein |
“Breaking up is hard to do,” sang 1970s crooner Neil Sedaka. But he didn’t have a mobile phone. According to a Virgin Mobile USA survey (reported in today’s WSJ), one in ten 18-to-34 year olds has dumped a romantic partner via text message. “Yes, the lack of face-to-face contact can avoid prickly encounters and get the deed done without bloodshed,” writes the Journal reporter. “But as we contemplate Valentine’s Day 2007, it also is an indication that interpersonal relationships today are often less personal and more cowardly than they used to be.”
Fodder for the Bowling Alone crowd. And helps put Radio Shack’s decision last year to fire 400 employees via email in context.
Which Economies do Economists Study?
| Peter Klein |
Michael Robinson, James Hartley, and Patricia Higino Schneider have an interesting paper, “Which Countries Are Studied Most By Economists? An Examination of the Regional Distribution of Economic Research,” in the February 2007 issue of Kyklos (volume 5, number 1). Not surprisingly, bigger and wealthier countries, countries that are more open to outsiders, and countries that make economic data available get the most attention. Other significant predictors of the amount of economic research on a country are tourism receipts, whether English is an official language, and the number of domestic economic research institutions. Parts of Africa get less attention even controlling for these observables.
Most Interesting Syllabus I Saw Today
| Peter Klein |
Steven Pinker, who is very smart, and Alan Dershowitz, who is, um, well, on TV a lot, are teaching a Harvard course cross listed as Psychology 1002, “Morality and Taboo,” and Harvard Law School 47212A, “Thinking About Taboo Subjects.”
Among the general issues we will cover are the following: Psychological and legal aspects of morality, the moral sense, dangerous ideas, offensive ideas, and related topics. Can it ever be immoral to consider, research or evaluate taboo ideas, such as ones about torture; revenge; innate group differences; the environment; colonialism; debunking religious, cultural, scientific and other “truths;” infanticide; misuses of the Holocaust and other disasters; overuses of charges of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism; or the legalization of distasteful but victimless practices? When is it rational, or moral, to choose to be ignorant?
Check out the complete reading list. My old favorite Defending the Undefendable by Walter Block makes the cut!
HT to an anonymous Harvard student.
I Do “Simplistic” and “Comical” Work
| Nicolai Foss |
Of course, all of you knew already — but I confess that it came as a bit of a surprise to myself to have my work (rather than my blog posts) with Christian Bjoernskov, “Economic Freedom and Entrepreneurship: Some Cross-country Evidence” (here is an early version and here is a revised Danish version), characterized as “simplistic” and “comical” by the Danish deputy prime minister and the chief economist of the Danish labour unions, respectively. Here is the context. (more…)
Bloggers versus Newspaper Columnists
| Peter Klein |
Arnold Kling, we recently noted, finds bloggers more valuable than journal editors. Richard Florida says bloggers are more interesting than newspaper columnists:
I not only prefer reading bloggers to columnists, I very much prefer blogging to writing a column. For several reasons. Columnists have to cover a wide range of turf, are forced to write in a formulaic 850 word framework, can’t hyper-link to source material and other content, and often are writing in areas and on subjects where they are not really experts. Plus they have “artificial” deadlines and can’t engage their audience. It seems to me that the on-line future favors bloggers over columnists in a big way.
Who are we to disagree?
A Super Chicago Sunday
| Cliff Grammich |
Word on the street here in frigid northeastern Illinois is that there’s a football game being played in south Florida tonight of considerable local interest. (Just one bit of evidence: my choir director selected this as our postlude this morning, something I would not have done — and something, I confess, that I’m not sure I’ve ever sung with as little alcohol as transubstantiated wine provides.)
It’s hard to put a new spin on this game, but here’s some local ephemera that might interest O&M readers. (more…)
4 February 2007 at 5:45 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
Economists Are Not Entrepreneurs
| Peter Klein |
Edwin Cannan, writing in 1902:
I do not mean to argue that a knowledge of economic theory will enable a man to conduct his private business with success. Doubtless many of the particular subjects of study which come under the head of economics are useful in the conduct of business, but I doubt if economic theory itself is. It does not indeed in any way disable a man from successful conduct of business; I have never met a decent economist who was in a position of pecuniary embarrassment, and many good economists have died wealthy. But economic theory does not tell a man the exact moment to leave off the production of one thing and begin that of another; it does not tell him the precise moment when prices have reached the bottom or the top.
This is from Cannan’s Presidental Address to the Royal Economic Society, reprinted in the January 2007 issue of EconJournalWatch. I have spent most of my career teaching economics to business students, and I am always careful to emphasize that knowledge of economic theory, while valuable, is neither necessary nor sufficient for commercial success.
A Good Use of PowerPoint
| Peter Klein |
Make your customer-service complaint come to life. (HT: Fred Tung. And see this for the backstory.)
Our Scientistic Age
| Peter Klein |
Maxwell Gross at Right Reason points us to an AP story linking teen promiscuity to raunchy pop music. (Here is the study referred to in the news item.) Notes Max: “A sure sign of the scientism of our age is the presence of those who will not believe a blindingly obvious truism unless preceded by the phrase, ‘studies show. . . .'”
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