by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Shortly after my arrival at Cambridge I struck up a warm friendship with a very bright young faculty member, Jim Mirrlees (who was to get the Nobel Prize later), recently returned from a stint of research in India. (Although he was a high-powered theoretical economist, he had what seemed to me an almost religious/moral fervor for doing something to help poor countries). Even more than Frank Hahn, he got involved in the theoretical analysis in my dissertation, and helped me in making some of the proofs of my propositions simpler and less inelegant.

One time I had found an error in the proof of a proposition in a widely-read article on Growth Theory recently published by Hahn (jointly with Robin Matthews). I was pretty sure that their proposition was correct, but not the way they proved it. The morning I showed this to Hahn in a Department common room, he and several others got busy on the blackboard with constructing an alternative proof, but all of them failed. At one point Mirrlees entered the room and asked what was going on. He looked from a distance for a few minutes at the futile attempts on the board, and then proceeded to another part of the board, and wrote down a neat proof. Everyone in the room clapped. His method of proof also gave me an idea in proving some propositions later in my dissertation.

In Cambridge your supervisor cannot be your examiner, the dissertation has to be approved by two examiners, one internal (to the university), the other external. Mirrlees eventually was appointed my internal examiner. Incidentally, later Mirrlees also became the internal examiner on Kalpana’s dissertation, even though her work was not on theory, but on Indian agriculture. I used to tell Jim that while other people had a family doctor, we had in him a family examiner. Whenever he and his first wife Gill (who I think was a school teacher) went to a dinner party, and economists indulged in their bad habit even there of talking technical economics, I used to notice Jim’s sweet gesture in valiantly trying to whisper into Gill’s ears translations of those technical arguments in more comprehensible language. (He later lost Gill to cancer). Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Bob Moses was a moral giant who worked tirelessly to fundamentally improve the world for others. He came from a low-income family but, through talent and hard work, earned a degree from Hamilton College and a master’s degree from Harvard in the philosophy of mathematics. He left graduate school for family reasons. To earn a living he began to teach mathematics at a private school in New York City. After a few years, Moses read of the people his age who were conducting sit-in protests against segregation in the South and knew he had to join the struggle.

Moses was viewed with some suspicion when he first arrived. He was an academically inclined, Harvard-educated philosopher who seemed out of place in the hot, dangerous climate of the civil rights South. Suspicions were only heightened when they heard he spent free time attending a mathematics lecture at Atlantic University on the “Ramifications of Gödel’s Theorem” [2]. Soon enough they discovered he was the real deal. Read more »

Reply to Ricardo who wrote:
How U b?

.I b well enough.

work’s fairly regular— ’bout 4-5 hours a day at regular pay,
plus a couple of side jobs drawing, lucky to have work
chug chug

keep my hand in the writing game: blogs, two local paper gigs
shooting my mouth off at greedy vampire windmills sucking global blood

working at finishing the room downstairs under the kitchen
have not been writing poems though, ‘cept this —it comes it goes

breath flows till it won’t:

interesting set of circumstances without comprehensible explanation
mysterious as sunlight flooding somewhere
lifting us on swells of gravity

it rose again today!

happy and light bouncing off glittering frost bright and beautifuller
than any precious metal a commodities speculator might hoard

grass beneath more verdant and moist than the greenest suck of banker’s air
crisper than a fresh thousand dollar bill, as breathable as necessary,
almost fine almost sweet
things change
..
’Bout you?
…

Jim Culleny
11/6/11

by David Oates

For my whole life, the world has been ending. For various alleged reasons. . . but always there’s been an overhang of dread and fear, the end times already here, human cussedness and sinfulness and greed at work in every moment, everywhere, eating away at what’s left of goodness and preparing the Day of Wrath, the horror, the tribulation, the Last Conflict, the End.

The “end times” got preached regularly from our Baptist pulpit, and during the summer a traveling evangelist would offer several days of extra-scary sermons, whoo boy, could that guy paint a picture! And we’d get scared all over again.

And yet, somehow, all of the various Beasts and Final Battles have failed to materialize. The Late Great Planet Earth spins forward in its usual way, bestselling doomsters notwithstanding, and lo, now I have arrived at my seventy-first year in this cavalcade of dread. Intact. Unscathed. Or anyway only mildly scathed. It’s been prediction, prediction, prediction. . . then nothing.

Funny how that happens. Read more »

Baseera Khan. A New Territory, 2021.

More here, here, and here.

by Tim Sommers

If we take action now to mitigate global climate change, it might make life a little worse for people now and in the near future, but it will make life much better for people further in the future. Suppose, for whatever reason, we do nothing.

Since future people will have much worse lives, it seems that we owe it to future generations to do something now. But if we do things differently now, it will have the side-effect of bringing into existence different people than those that would have been brought into existence if we did nothing.

That might sound strange. But if you procreate in October instead of December, if you go build windmills and delay going to college and so meet someone else or the same person at a different time, if you do almost anything differently the children you have will not be the ones you would have had.

If we do nothing, do people in the future have a right to complain that we made their lives much worse? Here’s the odd bit. The future people who have better lives because we acted, and the ones who have worse lives because we didn’t, are not the same people.  As long as your life is worth living, you can’t complain about things done before you existed that helped bring you into existence, because if any of them had been different, very likely you would not exist. Again, as long as your life is worth living the choice is not between you having a better or worse life, it’s a choice between existing and not existing.

That seems crazy, right? Philosophers call it the nonidentity problem. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Corporal punishment is a sickening and ugly procedure. Apart from the fact that one person is deliberately hurting another (usually smaller) at close quarters, it is often associated with anger, and even sadism. It is too often administered without reflection, too soon after a perceived offence has been committed. It is humiliating for the victim, especially if done in public, possibly causing lasting resentment and/or low self-esteem. It may encourage the development of violent attitudes among its recipients. The recent efforts to outlaw it are therefore humane and well-intentioned and, as far as they go, praiseworthy.

Unless, as in the case of Capital Punishment (q.v.), the alternatives turn out to be worse.

Let us look in turn at three loci in which corporal punishment has been used (and is now outlawed) in the UK: school, the home, and the criminal justice system.

As a teacher for half a century, I’ve given a lot of thought to how classes might be managed and children’s misdemeanours dealt with, and much has changed in that time. In the past, in addition to formal canings or beatings, administered by a headteacher or a responsible deputy, teachers in the classroom were given unofficial licence to strike children – which, as they were usually sitting in desks, meant hitting the part of the body most exposed: the head. Sometimes they threw things – chalk, if you were lucky. Aside from the obvious physical danger of this practice, it was inconsistent and suffered from flawed motivations. Teachers developed irrational hatreds for particular students, and therefore punished them with exceptional savagery. They were sometimes angry for some extraneous reason. The relationship between the crime and the punishment was ill-defined. I can remember dropping off to sleep in a warm classroom after lunch, and waking to find my head ringing from a blow, my spectacles broken on the floor beside me, and the red face of my French teacher a few inches from mine, roaring with rage. QED – it was a long time ago, and I still remember it vividly! And I particularly resented it because I was a keen student, who normally kept to the rules. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

As a consequential Supreme Court term gets underway, with potentially large consequences for women’s autonomy and health, it’s worth thinking about the ways in which judges do or do not consider the real world consequences of their decisions.

In his confirmation hearings, Justice Roberts, like a Clark Kent intent on hiding his true identity, possibly embarrassed by the size of his ambitions and self-conception, adopted a pose of humility: On the bench, Roberts said, he would just call balls and strikes. No one goes to a ball game to watch the umpire. He wouldn’t pitch or bat, just call ‘em like he saw ‘em.

The metaphor can’t work for an apex constitutional court. The whole point is that the court has final say over the interpretation of the constitution; in other words, the justices determine the rules of the game, not just the size of the strike zone, at the margins. Nor does the metaphor work for lower level courts, which do not merely apply statutory law and judicial precedent, but strategically push the boundaries of laws, rules, and extant court opinions, which themselves are often purposefully vague or discretionary. As if umpires were saying, “Strike three! In my opinion. For now. If so and so is true.”

The metaphor also fails because umpires are participants in the game of baseball. They enforce the rules. If a batter says, “I know that’s three strikes, but I’m staying up here and taking another swing, anyway,” an umpire righteously tosses the batter from the game.

In contrast, in the United States (and most other countries) judges typically don’t enforce, or even monitor the effects of, their rulings. Read more »

The Dolomites in the South Tyrol, partially obscured by a low cloud layer, as seen from Spiluck at the end of August.

by Thomas Larson

Yesterday during a morning nap, Mrs. Jo Anglemire, a downstairs neighbor at the apartment complex where I live and the wife of Val, the maintenance man, died. I came home around noon, arriving moments after their adult daughter had heard the news. As I walked up, I could hear her shouting repeatedly, “No, not my mommy!” and “Daddy! Daddy! Make Mommy come back!” The words cut the air like mad hornets.

I walked up to their apartment. The screen door was propped open. Three people were in the living room. One man, tall and gaunt, stood alone. The other, heavy-set with shorts and long socks, stood holding the woman who wailed. The large man stood still, in an eerie frieze—arms clamped around her as she pushed her head up and screamed. He held tightly, her head giddy as if under the broadside of a fire hose. Leaning against the outside wall was a white-cushioned stretcher. I slumped against the doorjamb.

Her squalls kept on, piercing my muscles, weakening me. I turned away, walked toward the yard. “No, Daddy. She can live, Daddy. You can change it, Daddy. Daddy, you can change it!” She shrieked and gulped in her words, and some sobs got caught in a rhythmic clucking, seemingly unstoppable. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

I knew that Cambridge was by the river Cam, but the first day when I looked for it I could not find it. From the map I knew that on my way to the Economics Department I had to cross it, I stopped and looked around but I could not see anything like a river. Then I asked a passerby, and he pointed to what I had thought was a small ditch or a canal. It was difficult to take it as a river, as in India I was used to much bigger rivers. Over time, however, I saw the serene beauty of this mini-river, with its placid water by the weeping willows, the swans, gliding boats and all.

There was a time when the Cambridge Economics Department was one of the most famous in the world. By the time I went as a student its relative rank had declined somewhat, particularly compared with a few American universities, but it was still very high. As I was going to specialize in International Trade Theory, the professor who was assigned to supervise me was James Meade (later to get the Nobel Prize in that field). He was an extremely decent, soft-spoken, and modest man (he declined a knighthood). I was told that he was a superb musician (I occasionally heard him humming inside when I knocked at his door) and an excellent carpenter.

He was also an austere man. He usually gave me appointments at 8 AM; in wintry mornings when I arrived shivering from the long walk from my bed-sitter, I’d find that he had switched off the heating in his office (he, of course, asked me if I minded, but how could I). He was the most conscientious supervisor imaginable. He’d promptly and meticulously read all the writings I inflicted on him, write detailed comments on the margin, mark a few lines on some pages saying that he had not vetted those lines as the mathematics used there was somewhat beyond him, which I should get checked by someone else (at his urging, I had soon a joint supervisor appointed: Frank Hahn). Read more »

by David J. Lobina

Last time around I said I would bring this series on language and nationalism to an end by considering an actual example: the case of Catalan nationalism, a discussion likely to be testy. I still intend to do that, and to be a bit argumentative about it to boot; however, it has occurred to me in these last four weeks that the follow-up between the first three posts and the case study of Catalan nationalism is not as smooth as it should be. This is because of an issue I brought up in the last post, where I rather briefly mentioned that the Catalan case exemplified what is sometimes called a peripheral nationalist movement, in contrast to core nationalist movements. To this I should have added that in the case of peripheral nationalisms the historical process that turns a state or a country into a nation-state is slightly different to what is the case for core nationalisms – additional factors are involved – and this point deserves to be spelled out a little bit. I shall do just that this week, and I will come back to the Catalans, finally, in the next post.

As explained in the previous three posts, it is certainly noteworthy, though not at all surprising, that the word nation seems to have been initially used in history as a place name and only much later did the politically-laden term of nationalism actually appear. The feeling of belonging to a particular place, after all, has plausibly been a feature of human gatherings for centuries and it is not intrinsically tied to the concepts of “nation” or “nationalism” per se.

In medieval Europe at least, the village where a person was born was typically that person’s “country”, as the historian Henry Kamen has chronicled, and this sentiment was still present in many parts of the world well into the 20^th century. For instance, the Belorussian-speaking people of Polesia, a historical region stretching from modern Poland to Russia, simply replied ‘from here’ when asked about their nationality in a 1919 census, and even as recently as the 1950s, we have the curious case of captured Egyptian soldiers during the second Arab-Israeli war who seemed to know very little about their own country, instead identifying more strongly with their local villages.^[i] Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

The well-known counterintuitive Monty Hall problem continues to baffle people if the emails I receive are any indication. A meta-problem is to understand why so many people are unconvinced by the various solutions. Sometimes people even cite the large number of the unconvinced as proof that the solution is a matter of real controversy, just as in politics an inconvenient fact, such as the ubiquity of Covid-19, is obscured by fake controversies.

This analogy is a bit deeper than it may seem. So, first the original problem, which arose because of a television show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” that was popular in the ’60s and ’70s and has been resurrected in one form or another since then. In the show a contestant is presented with three doors, behind one of which, he or she is told, is a new car. The other two doors have nothing behind them.

“The Let’s Make a Deal” host, the eponymous Monty Hall, asks the contestant to pick one of the three doors. Once the contestant has done so, Monty opens one of the two remaining unpicked doors to reveal what, if anything, is behind it, but is careful never to open the door hiding the promised new car. After Monty has opened one of the two unpicked doors, he offers the contestant the chance to switch his or her choice. The question is: Should the contestant stay with the original choice of door and hope the car is behind it or switch to the remaining unopened door? Read more »

Looking Up

the horizon circle,
past which I can see no further
in any direction other than up,
hems me in,
but looking up I can see forever
or as far as lightspeed allows
or until more time passes
or, more truly,
until now shifts again,
but by then I will have passed,
whatever that means,
since to pass is merely a term
proffering a hint of understanding
without understanding,
but there’s so much hint in being alive
the truth of our metaphysical deficiencies
has become second nature, acceptable,
we’ve become creatures of sacred
misunderstandings,
we live by them
never silent
looking up

Jim Culleny
9/21/21