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.
Sherman, Nancy, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind, Oxford University Press, 2005. 242pp. A recent article in the New Yorker discussed the repeated use of torture on the TV program “24.” Portraying torture as an effective, speedy means of extracting critical information from prisoners is flawed, it claimed. The program’s producer, Joel … Read more
I notice that Prof. Macfarlane has several “experiments” with new media. I was going to send him my thoughts, but decided I’d post them here instead. Two of his experiments are blogs. One called How the World Works is a restatement of parts of his book Letters to Lily, which is a book written in … Read more
Recently, in the excellent Ikle review comment thread, James McCormick, had some very insightful (and erudite) remarks: RE: “deep cultural” and “economic meta-” perspectives. The two may seem very different however the Anglosphere discussion has often focused on the economic impacts of social behaviour. It’s not random chance that we still quote an 18th century … Read more
[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings] [based on a free review copy provided by the publisher] Anderson, Chris, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, New York, 2006. 238pp. In late 2004, about the time that the Anglosphere Challenge was published, WIRED magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote an influential article called … Read more
John Jay’s post, below, entitled Terms and Models discusses the mental models people develop to understand the world in a non-mathematical way which is based generally on the weight to be given to various variables in a partial differential equation, and it reminded me of something I had read by Alan Macfarlane. The best discussion … Read more