prior probability

According to this 2021 Pew Research Center report, “Columbus Day” is a public holiday in only 20 States, as well as American Samoa and Puerto Rico. (See infographic below.) Although Christopher Columbus has become a polemical figure in some quarters, his 1492 voyage changed the history of the world. For a fair and balanced portrait of the great Genoese explorer, here is his Wikipedia page.

Perfect timing: my copy of Stephen Stigler’s new book on “Casanova’s Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance” arrived a few days ago. I will read it over the weekend and report back soon …

Below are three observations that caught my attention during the Cato Institute’s 6 October conference on “New Challenges to the Free Economy“:

1. Hal Varian (Google): Google has more than 60,000 patents. (See slide below from Professor Varian’s Cato talk.)
2. Matthew D. Mitchell (Mercatus): the Tullock paradox still hasn’t been solved. (Look it up!)
3. Bryan Caplan (George Mason): political discourse is about social desirability bias. (Me: what about academic discourse?)

SpaceX launched their fourth manned spacecraft on 5 October (yesterday); meanwhile, the costly and obsolete Artemis rocket is still grounded …

The editors of the Mercer Law Review have invited me to present my work on Ronald Coase, cattle trespass, and nuisance law at their Annual Symposium, which is scheduled to take place this Friday, October 7, 2022. (See the full schedule below.) The symposium is open to all and will be “live-streamed” for free, but you must register here. P.S.: My panel will take place in the early afternoon, starting at 12:45 PM Eastern, and my co-panelists include my colleague and friend Cathren Page (Mercer), who will speak on the problem of “post-truthism,” as well as Matt Saleh (Cornell), who will address the following fascinating question: How do law’s narratives construct one of its central objects: the human body? For my part, my talk will be devoted to one of the most famous legal narratives of all time: Ronald Coase’s cattle-trespass parable in his landmark paper “The Problem of Social Cost.” (The tentative title of my talk is “Coase’s Parable“.)

The latest issue of Econ Journal Watch is available here. Among the many items in this new volume that caught my attention was this Erroneous Erratum section, which begins as follows: “Previously, Stephen Walker criticized an article in Journal of Accounting Research (here and here). Now the authors [of that JAR article], Yang Bao, Bin Ke, Bin Li, Y. Julia Yu, and Jie Zhang, have issued an Erratum in JAR, citing Walker’s critiques. Walker takes a hard look and calls on JAR to do an investigation into research misconduct.” For my part, instead of calling for another toothless investigation, what if we imposed legal liability for research fraud, an idea I proposed back in 2015?!

That is the duration of this catchy but lesser-known Rolling Stones track from their 1981 album “Tattoo You“:

Below is the “remastered” version (same length):

On this day (October 2) in 1789, President George Washington sent copies of 12 newly-proposed constitutional amendments to the legislatures of the States for their ratification. (The Congress had approved these first 12 amendments on September 28, 1789.) Only the last ten of these amendments, however, which are now known as the “Bill of Rights”, were ratified by the requisite number of States. One of the two unratified amendments is reprinted below:

“After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.“

Had this amendment been ratified, we could have had more than 6,000 representatives today, compared to the 435 we currently have! (More details about this unratified amendment are available here.)

In conjunction with the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, the Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, and the International Adam …

Call for Papers: Smith, Ferguson, and Witherspoon @ 300, St Andrews, 18-21 July, 2023