Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

This site has the 1935 recording of an Ivory-billed woodpecker call.

One of my old professors from undergrad days at Yale, Lloyd Reynolds, died this year. I took “Eight Great Economists” from him (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Keynes, Marshall, Schumpeter, Fisher), a very good course reading the original works. He didn’t say much that I remember about them, but he didn’t have to—it was the reading and writing that taught us. I found an obituary which says he shoudl get credit as the department chair who lifted Yale economics from the liberal mediocrity criticized by Buckley around 1951 to its later liberal eminence. (more…)

I was wondering whether speeding is a criminal offense or not. The site Expertlaw explains that it is not, even though its procedures bear some similarity to criminal procedure. (more…)

At a banquet last night, one of the speakers (Michael Lynch?) talked about his research in evolutionary biology. What he looks at is the evolution of DNA apart from natural selection. That sounds odd, but it isn’t. Suppose mutations occur that neither help nor hinder fitness. What will happen? Creatures will evolve randomly, and it is interesting to study what happens– how much diversity one gets, and so forth. Also, much of human DNA is “junk DNA” that does not seem to have any function, or “jumping genes” that move from place to place on the genome. These are something like parasites, and their spread only incidentally is determined by natural selection on the DNA proper. An interesting topic.

How much has AIDS cost America? Below are some numbers from a 1995 LA Times article, “The Economic Cost of AIDS”. I searched for something more recent, but couldn’t find anything, despite a plethora of articles on the cost of AIDS in Africa. If one is looking for the costs of homosexuality the cost of AIDS is obviously important, which is perhaps why so little is written on it. It would be interesting to know the monetary transfer from non-homosexuals as a group to homosexuals. At any rate, here are a few old figures: (more…)

The persimmons are ripe. I found these lying under the one persimmon tree in my neighborhood while I was jogging, after a rainstorm. Persimmons are, like paw-paws, a special fruit, native American and too delicate to be packed and sold in stores. Thus, they are a seasonal delight, and you must pick them yourself. There is something good about that. It is odd for an economist to say it, but easy availability can reduce the value of a good. That I can buy croissants and sushi in Bloomington makes those things less special, and makes the existence of France and Japan less important to me. Seeming internationalization actually reduces the value of foreign countries and cultures. (more…)

I saw the movie, The Matrix, recently,though it came out around 1999. In it, artificial intelligence by2080 has turned on men and keeps them in a trance, fed by tubes, and imagining they are living in the year 1999, as in an Internet virtual world. A few humans survive outside of the dream—”the matrix”— and they extract the protagonist from his trance, freeing his real body. They go in and out of the 1999 virtual world, and can be killed in either world.

There is a lot to say about the movie, which is a good one despite, somehow, many implausibilities (e.g., that the free humans suffer from boring food, despite being able to go to the virtual world with virtual money they could create and have a gourmet dinner whenever they wanted). Here, I will just note that it matches Plato’s Cave Metaphor in The Republic, which I quote at length here: (more…)

(Updated version of an October 2004 post) After a chat with Professor Harbaugh, I thought I’d collect my thoughts on communication games, thinking about revisions to my Games and Information. These notes won’t mean much to non-economists, I’m afraid.

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Jim Dunnigan makes two points about tough basic training: it helps save lives, and feminism weakens it:

Basic training in the U.S. Army has gone through lots of changes in the last two decades. In the 1990s, training was diluted to appease politicians who insisted on men and women going through “boot camp” together. The girls couldn’t keep up with the boys when it came to the physical part of the training, so the training was toned down to the point where it was ineffective. But for the combat troops, who still trained in all-male units (no women were allowed in combat units), “basic” was still as challenging and intense as it needed to be. When September 11, 2001 came around, the issue was still being debated in Congress. Things didn’t really change until 2003, when the results of the lukewarm basic training for non-combat troops was seen as the main cause of some of these troops getting killed in combat. All of a sudden, basic got more intense.

I was thinking about models of sales, since my student, Barick Chung, is working on them. Joel Sobel has a good 1984 model, which I will summarize here. (more…)

Via Clayton Cramer comes the observation that cruelty to animals is a subject on which libertarians and conservatives differ, in connection with puppies as shark bait (go no further unless you really want details): (more…)

I just added this story about proving the existence of God to my still-unfinished essay, “The Moving Target Argument: Why Agnosticism is Rational if God Exists”. (more…)

You can click for bigger copies of the images of Germany and the United Kingdom. I found them via Three Hierarchies, which says, (more…)

Economists concentrate on consumption as a person’s goal in life,
but of course that is only part of a person’s utility function. He
also wants self-esteem and the esteem of others for his
accomplishments. These accomplishments might be externals such as
writing books or earning a lot of money or internals such as being a
good wife or a good American. By “internals”, I mean the achievement
of a certain identity, of matching to some ideal. Thus, a soldier may
be proud of having killed many of the enemy, an external, but he might
also be proud simply of obeying orders and being a good soldier. (more…)

This is a post about evolution— about two criticisms one might make of the theory : (a) the fossil record has big gaps where we ought to be finding fossils of intermediate forms, creatures halfway along an evolutionary path, and (b) we have observed no examples of actual new species arising. I think criticism (b) is wrong, but criticism (a) is correct (though by no means fatal to the theory, especially if we can invoke intelligent design). (more…)

Wallsten and Kosec at the AEI have a new working paper doing a cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq War, in the style of the old Davis et al. paper that I blogged about long ago (use the old search engine if you want to find my entry on it). They find that the cost of the war is about 1 trillion dollars and the benefit (from not having to contain Saddam and from saved Iraqi lives) is about 429 billion. I don’t know if they divide the costs between the costs of the war to topple Saddam (which achieved most of the benefits) and the cost to rebuild Iraq.

I’d seen memos that made me think Professor Bradford (see here for earlier posts) did not formally apply for tenure (or perhaps that he voluntarily withdrew his application), but a September 13 Frontpage article says he did apply and implies that he did not withdraw voluntarily.

I don’t know what to believe about that, but in any case it seems he has been told that he can now apply for tenure in the usual way. I applaud this. The Frontpage article is outraged that the usual people– the law faculty, the dean, etc.– will be allowed to vote, but that outrage is misplaced. It would be an outrage *not* to follow the usual procedures and let everyone have a voice. Keep in mind that the faculty vote, for example, is not binding. It is very common for people who get positive votes from their department to be denied tenure further along in the process, and it also happens sometimes that people who get negative votes are granted tenure. After the faculty, the Dean, an all-campus faculty committee, the Chancellor, the President, and the Trustees all have their say in the process, if it is like IU -Bloomington’s. (more…)

If anyone out there is interested in learning about the Crawford-Sobel (1982) model of information transmission, the classic sender-receiver game, take a look at the notes I wrote today. I’m hoping to put them into the 4th edition of my game theory book,but I haven’t had a chance to teach from them, so comments are very welcome.