Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
British Bookmakers William Hill and Ladbrokes both have these odds on the US Presidential race:
Barack Obama 1/2
Mitt Romney 13/8
That means people putting real money on the table are saying that as of today the odds are 2 to 1 in favor of Obama, 8 to 13 in favor, i.e. 13 to 8 against Romney.
This is consistent with the steady 60 on Intrade in favor of Obama.
Disregard the polls.
The betting money says Obama wins.
It is an uphill race for Romney.
Recently I was walking in River North and a restaurant was touting their “local farming” element. Fine but that hay bale seemed to be sprouting some extra fungus. I don’t think Dan would feed it to his animals.
I liked this gull on a lamp.
…and its successor, the computer-driven phototypesetting machine.
Because in the Olden Days, when typesetting was done by hand, the typesetter would need a physical piece of type for each occurrence of a specific letter in a particular composition.
If we were still at that level of technology, there would be a serious “I” shortage for print-media reporting of the speeches of a certain individual.
Arthur Brooks (surely one of the very few people to pursue a career as a professional player of the French horn before becoming a professor of business and government) has a good piece in today’s WSJ.
The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.
During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”
Read the whole thing.
