prior probability

Happy New Year, my peeps! On this day (1 January) in 1804, Haiti became the first black-majority republic and the second country in North America (after the United States) to gain her independence.

Was yesterday’s (30 December 2022) blitz game between chess grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Richard Rapport one of the most exciting ever? Via Chess.com: “Carlsen very nearly lost his first game of the tournament against [Rapport] in round 14 in one of the wildest encounters of the [2022 World Blitz Championship]. The game was full of twists and turns and the evaluation bar swung like a pendulum as the players navigated the imbalanced middlegame. Three promotions at different stages of the game meant that five queens graced the board during the 71-move duel …” In case you missed it, you can watch David Howell’s commentary of this epic chess battle below, starting at the 1’02” mark:

Or you can watch Antonio Radić’s expert analysis of the Magnus-Rapport game here:

In addition to my regular teaching duties, here is a summary of my scholarly production this past year:

1. In January, the Saint Louis University Law Journal published Teaching Tiger King, a pedagogical paper I co-authored with my teaching assistants. (This paper describes how we totally redesigned our business law survey course from scratch during the first few weeks of the pandemic.)
2. In February, I discovered a 1939 edition of Horace Walpole’s 1765-1766 Paris travel journal, which contains over 20 references to Adam Smith or to Smith’s pupil at the time, the future Duke of Buccleuch, and I then began researching and writing a lengthy paper describing the places and people Smith saw during his first few weeks in Paris in early 1766. (This work consumed the months of March, April, and May.)
3. In May, my work Breaking Bad Promises was published in Better Call Saul and Philosophy (available here), edited by Joshua Heter and Brett Copenger.
4. In June and July, I presented my work on Adam Smith in Paris in 1766 (see here) at two academic conferences: the History of Economics Society (HES), where I finally met my fellow Ronald Coase scholar Steven Medema, and the International Adam Smith Society (IASS), where I met another of my intellectual idols, Tyler Cowen.
5. In August, my work Adam Smith in Love was republished in a new collection of essays on Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, and d’Argenson (available here), edited by Dan Klein. I also made substantial revisions to my Adam Smith in Paris manuscript.
6. In September, the Journal of Law & Public Policy published my work The Leibniz Conspiracy, which does four things. First off, I show how Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, himself fell for a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Next, I present a number of plausible “conspiracy theory theories” to explain why such ideas are so popular. Last, I survey the growing calls for social media censorship and then propose an alternative approach: a conspiracy theory betting market.
7. In October, I presented my work on Coase’s Parables at Mercer University, a paper rated “highly recommended” by legal scholar Larry Solum (see here).
8. In November, I re-presented my conspiracy theory betting market idea at the annual Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium, and I also chaired a panel devoted to Adam Smith at the Southern Economic Association.
9. In December, to recharge my intellectual batteries, I attended a performance by Burna Boy in Orlando (my wife and I love afrobeats); flew to Los Angeles to visit my parents, attend Derek Thompson’s “Progress Summit” in person, and catch a Laker game at the Crypto arena; and then ended the year by flying back to Florida and visiting the Hemingway Home in Key West.

The highlight of my family vacation in Key West, by far, was visiting the former home of Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer on 907 Whitehead Street; below are just a few pictures from our recent visit:

Birthday blessings to my beautiful wife Sydjia! The picture on the left was taken on a chilly Thanksgiving weekend day in Florida in 2010, shortly after we started dating. The one on the right was taken earlier this year on a warm summer’s day in Jamaica after 10 years of marriage.

Update (12/31): To supplement the original music video (posted above) of the catchy K-pop ballad “We Go” by the South Korean girl group fromis_9, the video below presents a color-coded guide showing which girl is singing which part of the song in real time.

Feliz Navidad! Listed below are some of the works that I am reading this holiday season, in alphabetical order by title:

1. A book I bought at “Books & Books” in Key West, Florida: Adios Hemingway by Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Canongate 2005).

2. A used book I found at a “little free library” at the old Gato Cigar Factory in Key West: Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal (Penguin 1981) [1968]. (Both the book cover and the old cigar factory are pictured below.)

3. A new book about an unusual murder case that I have been following since 2014: Extreme Punishment: The Chilling True Story of Acclaimed Law Professor Dan Markel’s Murder by Steven B. Epstein (Black Lyon 2022).

4. Research for my family vacation in the Florida Keys: the second edition of Hemingway’s Key West by Stuart B. McIver (Pineapple Press 2012).

5. My “beach reading”: a history of the South Sea bubble of 1720 with the annoyingly long and misleading title of Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich by Thomas Levenson (Random House 2020).

6. And last but not least (for now): Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon by Rebecca Lowe (Adam Smith Institute 2022).

To celebrate Christmas Eve or Nochebuena, below is a reproduction of a painting by El Greco (the Nativity).