prior probability

Below the fold is a small sample of English-language dailies marking the end of “the war to end all wars” — the original Armistice Day (11 November 1919).

That is the title of this short film by Cuban filmmaker Eduardo del Llano: (in Spanish; 25 minutes; hat tip: my fellow “Hispanophile” Tyler Cowen)

That is the subject of the Spanish-language docudrama “Historia de un crimen: Colosio“. (For your reference, more details about this entertaining 2019 Netflix series are available here, via Wikipedia.) In summary, Luis Donaldo Colosio was the presidential candidate of Mexico’s ruling party, the PRI (“Partido Revolucionario Institutional”), for the August 1994 elections. (Amazingly, this political dynasty had ruled over Mexico for 71 straight years(!), from 1929 to 2000.)

But on March 23, 1994, a day that will live in infamy in Mexico’s political history, Colosio was assassinated at a political rally in Lomas Taurinas, a poor neighborhood close to the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. (A video of his last speech is embedded to this blog post below.) By all accounts, the candidate was hit by two bullets: one to the head, the other in the abdomen. Although these two bullets were fired from different directions, and although several individuals were detained immediately after the assassination, only one man (the mysterious Mario Aburto) was charged with Colosio’s murder. Furthermore, if the Netflix series is to believed, corrupt officials in Mexico’s national government covered up evidence of a possible conspiracy against Colosio, a conspiracy that may have been set in motion at the highest levels of the Mexican government, i.e. then-President Carlos Salinas de Gotari.

How credible are the allegations in the Netflix series? Before watching the Colosio docudrama, I had put the odds of a conspiracy against Colosio (or against JFK, for that matter) at 50/50 or 51/49. Why even odds, or odds slightly in favor of the conspiracy hypothesis? Because of an epistemological principle often referred to as “Okham’s Razor“–the simplest explanation is more likely to closer to the truth than a complex or convoluted story with many moving parts.

Spoiler alert: Now that I have watched the Colosio crime series for myself, I put the odds at 99 to 1 in favor of the conspiracy hypothesis! Like JFK, Colosio had a lot of enemies, and the official investigations into both of the their assassinations are full of anomalies and contradictions.

I am wrapping up my “Narcos Mexico” and “Historia Colosio” binge sessions and will be writing up reviews of those Netflix series in the next day or two; in the meantime, check out the topological map of the world pictured below, or in the words of u/Shevek99, who posted this map on Reddit, “borders and nothing else”:

… my wife and I are binge-watching season 3 of “Narcos Mexico” followed by “Historia de un crimen: Colosio” tonight!

In honor of my intellectual hero Thomas C. Schelling, check out the syllabus and final exam for his fall 1970 course at Harvard on “Conflict, Coalition, and Strategy” (Econ 1030). Hat tip: Irwin Collier.

I was lucky enough to visit Knoxville, Tennessee for the first time this week and fell instantly in love with this “scruffy little city“!

What happens when you analyze a text by deleting the words, leaving only the punctuation marks? Clive Thompson created an online tool that allows you to do just that. Here is a link to his website, which is called “just the punctuation”, and here is an extended excerpt from his essay “What I Learned about My Writing by Seeing Only the Punctuation” (italics and the final ellipsis in the original):

“Back in 2016, Adam J. Calhoun wrote a fascinating Medium post in which he showed off something quite cool: What novels look like if you strip away the words, and show just the punctuation. *** This image below? On the left, it’s Calhoun’s analysis of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, compared to Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, on the right …”

I have posted a “new & improved” (i.e. shorter) version of my paper “Breaking Bad Promises” on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). In summary, the new version of the paper, which focuses on some of the “bad” or illicit promises in the popular TV show Better Call Saul (see faux lawyer ad pictured below), is just 13 pp. long (double-spaced) and contains four color images. The old version of the paper, by contrast, was much longer (over 40 pp., single-spaced!), in part because it presented in great detail many more examples of “bad” promises from past and present times, including the evil Transatlantic slave trade, popular Mexican drug-smuggling ballads called narco-corridas, and modern-day usurious payday loans. Not to fear, however, as I will most likely revisit those examples (and many more!) sometime in the future, as I plan on writing a book-length treatment on the problem of bad promises.