David Friedman is a very interesting thinker. Here’s a talk he gave at Google in 2008 about his recent book Future Imperfect.
I’m reading Gordon Tullock’s On Voting. It’s an odd little book, but very entertaining. Tullock comes across as the kind of old curmudgeon you see on TV sitcoms, albeit one who practically invented an important sub-field of economics. I discovered today that someone interviewed him before the 2008 election and put together [...]
I came across an unfamiliar word in the translation of Don Quixote I’ve been reading: guerdon. (Walter Starkie was fond of archaism.) According to the Oxford American Dictionary, it means ‘a reward or recompense.’ This isn’t terribly exciting, but the etymology is.
Get this: guerdon comes, via Old French, from the Medieval [...]
I don’t feel like providing a wealth of citations, but the press is awash lately in talk of how economists were wrong to believe in market efficiency and rationality, and how they remain unwilling to change their opinions in light of recent events. Unfortunately, most of the commentators don’t know what they’re talking about.
Many [...]
