prior probability

Wait, what?! This imposing statue of the great Adam Smith was first unveiled in Edinburgh, next to St Giles Cathedral, on 4 July 2008 (see here).

In honor of the upcoming ten-year anniversary of this blog (5 July 2023), I am reposting two of my blog posts on the economics of popcorn prices at movie theaters–one from 2017 (link #1 below); the other from 2019 (link #2):

1. Popcorn puzzle (a brief survey of the literature)
2. The economics of cinema concession stands

Enjoy!

One of my favorite talks at Glasgow University’s “Adam Smith 300” conference was “Adam Smith–the first true liberal” by Professor Deirdre McCloskey. Among other things, three observations she made stood out for me: 1. for McCloskey, Adam Smith is something akin to a secular saint; 2. we know, however, very little about Smith the man; and 3. his name is invoked by people of all political persuasions–progressive and classical liberals alike.

Although 2023 is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, what really matters are his beautiful ideas and metaphors, such as the invisible hand and the impartial spectator. Pictured below is an original edition of Smith’s first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments; the Scottish philosopher was 36 years old when his treatise on ethics was first published in 1759.

Yesterday, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton delivered a lecture on “Economic failure or failure of economics?” (see here) as part of the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Tercentenary Week. In brief, the first half of his lecture sounded a lot like one of Tucker Carlson’s monologues. Among other things, Professor Deaton described the despair and declining life expectancy of blue-collar workers in North America, but the second half of the lecture was just a hypocrital mishmash of progressive platitudes (I don’t need to be lectured about inequality by a tenured professor at Princeton) and debunked Keynesian ideas and barely made any mention of Adam Smith.

One aspect of the lecture, however, that caught my attention was Professor Deaton’s critique of Lionel Robbins’s “infamous” definition of economics as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends (see below). But this critique begs the question, How else should we define economics? Although Deaton himself did not bother to provide an alternative definition of economics, I wonder, for example, what definition the great philosopher-economist Adam Smith would have preferred.

Today I will be presenting my work-in-progress “Adam Smith through the Eyes of Horace Walpole” at the University of Glasgow. (As an aside, in preparation for my talk I made significant revisions and corrections to my draft and posted the updated version here.) Suffice it to say that Smith and Walpole have to be one of the oddest of odd couples of all time, so what is the connection between them? Read my work to find out!

I mentioned in my previous post that this blog is about to turn ten years old and that I will be reposting some of my favorite blog posts from the last ten years to honor this occasion. To wit: I posted “Chess piece survival rates” on 22 October 2014 (see here or screenshot below), and to this day, that pithy blog post turned out to be the most popular one that I have ever posted.

In brief, I began blogging here on 5 July 2013–i.e, nine years and 11 months ago to the day–and to commemorate this occasion, I will from time to time in the next four weeks be reposting some of my favorite blog posts from the last ten years. To get the ball rolling, pictured below is a screenshot of my very first blog post, which features a photograph I took of some bridges, trees, and buildings in one of my favorite cities in the world. Notice too how that post contains only seven words, including the title. Although most blogs consist mostly of words (mine included), one of my goals when I started “Prior Probability” was to convey information and ideas via pictures, charts, and other types of images.