On this day (20 October) in 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase treaty by a vote of 24 to 7. (More details here, via Wikipedia.)
On this day (July 4) in 1803, the terms of the treaty between the United States and France for the purchase and sale of Louisiana — the Vente de la Louisiane or “Louisiana Purchase“, a treaty that quite possibly changed the course of world history — are announced to the public: $15 million for 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi River.
Put another way, now that the Twitter deal is apparently back on (see here, for example), is Elon Musk about to make the biggest and costliest mistake of his storied business career? According to this Hudson Institute report, Twitter’s total revenues for 2021 were roughly $5 billion, but at the same time Twitter’s estimated “enterprise value” is $36.51 billion. (See also this May 2022 report via Forbes.)
Below are the L.A. Lakers’ stats from last night’s NBA season opener against the Golden State Warriors. I readily concede that this is a small sample size (one game), but combined with last year’s statistics, maybe it’s Anthony Davis–and not Russell Westbrook–who should be traded? (At the very least, Westbrook is less injury-prone and thus a more reliable overall athlete than AD.) Change my mind!
According to this recent report (hat tip: Drudge), Birds Aren’t Real is a “parody movement” that claims all birds in the US have been replaced by lookalike drones, which are used by the government to spy on citizens. Most (some?) members of this group, however, admit they do not truly believe in this far-fetched conspiracy. Either way, check out this website (https://birdsarentreal.com), which sells “Birds Aren’t Real” merchandise.
On this day (16 October) in 1793, Marie Antoinette was sentenced to death by a French revolutionary tribunal after a one-day sham trial. She was beheaded at 12:15 PM, and her last words were: “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès” (“Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose”), after accidentally stepping on her executioner’s shoe. More details about this gross miscarriage of justice are available here, via Wikipedia.
I mentioned in my previous post that I finished reading “Wild Problems” by Russ Roberts. What I did not mention is how Stephen Stigler’s new book “Casanova’s Lottery,” which I also recently read, influenced my reading of Wild Problems. In brief, Roberts’s beautiful book focuses on problems that are not amenable to economic analysis or rational choice models. (Alas, this is not a new insight; by way of example, see the Carl Jung quote pictured below.) Take, for instance, such transformative decisions like where to go to college, who to marry, or what career to pursue. According to Roberts, these types of life-changing decisions are “wild” or insoluble. But are they? By way of comparison, consider the decision whether to buy a lottery ticket. Although the expected value of a lottery ticket is always going to be negative because, as they say in Las Vegas, “the house always wins,” the expected utility of that same ticket might actually be positive–i.e., the pleasure I get at the thought that I might win a big payday is greater than the cost of a ticket. Likewise, there is no reason in principle why can’t we apply this same expected utility framework to Russ Roberts’s laundry list of “wild” or insoluble problems: college, marriage, career, etc. Worse yet, even if Roberts is right that such life-changing decisions fall outside the rational choice paradigm of game theory and economics, his book does not provide any real guidance for how to make such decisions. Nevertheless, I still recommend “Wild Problems” because Russ Roberts is a great writer. His discussion of the vampire problem and the annotated bibliography, where Roberts traces his own intellectual development, are especially worth reading.
I finished reading “Wild Problems” by Russ Roberts yesterday and will post a review in the next day or two. In the meantime, I will be attending a symposium on Constitutional Ethnography at the University of Alabama today: Friday, 14 October. (P.S.: There is also a Zoom option; details here. P.P.S.: Here is a good introduction to “constitutional ethnography” authored by Kim Lane Scheppele, who teaches at Princeton.)
Among other things, I am a huge fan of my fellow classical liberal scholar Russ Roberts, and I am also fascinated by conspiracy theories, especially when they are true (see, for example, my paper on “The Leibniz Conspiracy“), so when I stumbled upon the new books pictured above at my local bookstore earlier today (shout out to Writer’s Block in Winter Park, Florida), I knew what I had to do: buy the books and start reading! I will report back soon …
prior probability 