Gladwell on Lanning

UM doctoral alum Jon Lanning, now teaching at Bryn Mawr, gets attention from Malcolm Gladwell in a column about why it is helpful to think about professional sports franchises as art objects rather than businesses.

A good bit:

... it is one of the surreal qualities of professional sports that they are as welcoming and lucrative for those owners who chose to behave like 14-year-olds as they are of those owners who chose to behave like grown-ups.

Jon's paper is about the racial integration of professional baseball and, among other things, estimates the costs (in foregone profits) that owners implicitly paid to keep their teams white. An apparently ungated version of Jon's paper is here. Gladwell uses it to motivate the general idea of owners getting psychic returns from their teams.

Bob Fogel on life expectancy and health policy

Chicago Booth School economic historian Bob Fogel writes on how to think about longevity, his thoughts on likely health breakthroughs in the near future and on how to think about health expenditures and health policy. There is wisdom throughout.

I took Bob's class on "business ethics in historical perspective" when I was in graduate school and thoroughly enjoyed it. Despite the title, what it really was about was the general history of ethical movements in the US. That subject matter formed a natural outgrowth of Bob's famous research on slavery and the civil war. I read his second civil war book, Without Consent or Contract, late in graduate school. It changed my views in many ways and also sharpened my sense of the valuable toolkit that economic historians bring to the economics discipline as a whole.

Larry and FDR

Via Mankiw, the best short summary of FDR's economic achievements that I have ever seen.

The coolness of economic history

A fine piece on the recent doings of my friend Sheilagh Ogilvie, who is an economic historian at Cambridge. She and her co-authors are using property lists from two German towns to study consumption patterns - i.e. when do certain goods appear and how do they diffuse among the population - and economic growth more broadly.

And how can you not smile at the enthusiasm of this bit:

“We encountered our first coffee cup in an inventory of 1718,” said Professor Ogilvie. “After that we expected that a fashion for coffee and its associated equipment would take off, but instead there was no further mention until 1733. We have just found our third coffee cup in 1739. We know that they become common by the 1750s so we are on tenterhooks for the next couple of months while we work our way through the 1740s.”

Sheilagh came to Chicago to do an MA in economics during my early years in graduate school and was part of our little libertarian graduate student group at the time. We need to get her to Michigan for a seminar.

Aside: Wikipedia provides the story, in case you, like me, have no idea what a tenterhook might be.