prior probability

Alternate Title: Two Cheers for Freedom & Open Borders!

The Anglo-American economist Ronald Coase was born on this day (29 December) in 1910. My mentor Guido Calabresi introduced me to Professor Coase’s path-breaking paper “The Problem of Social Cost” back in 1990, a paper I did not fully appreciate at the time. I returned to Coase’s work after I began teaching law in 1998 and eventually became a “Ronald Coase Fellow” in 2006. In his honor, here is my 2012 paper “Modelling the Coase Theorem.” Also, here is an excellent survey of Coase’s ideas (via David Friedman).

… is this quote by Pierre-Simon Laplace:

“The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.” Théorie Analytique des Probabilités (1812).

For your visual reference, a portrait of the great Laplace appears below:

Via Wikipedia (with boldtype and html links in the original): “The Round City of Baghdad is the original core of Baghdad, built by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur in 762–766 CE as the official residence of the Abbasid court. Its official name in Abbasid times was The City of Peace (Arabic: مدينة السلام‎ ; romanized: Madīnat as-Salām). The famous library known as the House of Wisdom was located within its grounds.” More details about this splendid lost city are available here.

With apologies to Deborah Mayo (@learnfromerror), this is what happens when you combine Twitter with a bout of insomnia: a tweet at 3:51 AM! In any case, here is the entire thread for your reference …

Check out this explanation of Boxing Day by Jonathan Thompson. For my part, I like to think of Boxing Day as a “Reverse Nochebuena” because in Latin America we celebrate the Christmas holiday with a big extended family dinner on the 24th instead of the 26th.