Economist post-tenure hobbies

In the last couple of months I have learned that two of my economist friends have embarked on novel post-tenure hobbies. One is restoring old tractors. To my surprise, there is a whole industry devoted to supplying this hobby, such as this store. The other has become a part-time lavender farmer. Oddly, the website for my friend's lavender farm does not highlight the fact that it is run in part by an economist, something one might imagine would be a major selling point.

Lately, my hobby has been buying too many books at Borders before it closes for good. I'll have to think of a new one after that.

Hitchens on voice

A moving essay on talking (and not being able to talk) from Hitchens' "year of living dyingly".

The Onion on recreating lost youth

Both touching and funny.

It is certainly, and helpfully, true that as you age, you care less and less about what other people think. My older relatives often said that to me when I was young and I did not quite believe them at the time but now I do.

This piece also reminded me of a late evening spent drinking beer with an economist friend in one of the student bars in Madison during the Institute for Research on Poverty summer research conference. I have never felt as completely invisible in my whole life as I did that night. As far as the drunken Badger undergrads were concerned, we were just not there. I like to think that our being invisible made our amateur ethnographic observations more credible.

Hat tip: Kim Ross

Happy holidays to all!

Via Chris Blattman, some British adverts that should inspire holiday reflection.

MR does wedding planning

Marginal Revolution ventures into wedding planning. Read the comments, some of which hint at some very funny stories.

Some thoughts of my own:

1. If your prospective partner is really, really into the surface aspects of the wedding and into counting the $$ spent as a measure of your affection, think carefully about marrying the person. One of the things I most value about my wife is how little she cares about this sort of thing.

2. I actually much prefer the video we had done to the photographs. The video is particularly nice for people who could not come to the wedding but really wanted to, and there will always be some of those. I'd spend on a good videographer and be sure to have them walk around talking to the guests.

3. Our reception was "dry" but at a hotel with a bar. My economist friends sorted the solution out pretty quickly.

4. If you are older and well-established when you get married, I suggest skipping the gifts altogether. We did, and asked people to give us their "words of wisdom" instead. This worked really, really well. Periodically we will go back and dive into the box of words of wisdom and re-read some of them. It always makes for a fun, informative and romantic time. Plus a few folks did their "words of wisdom" live at the reception. Both the economists and the relatives proved remarkably entertaining. My favorite line was from my cousin, who suggested imagining your partner naked when having an argument.

Exactly!

Wow ... does this ring true:

Procrastination is a best-response to perfectionism. A perfectionist spends too much time on a task, so she should optimally procrastinate so that the deadline disciplines her to work quickly and settle for imperfection.

I think the point is even broader. Particular tasks expand to fill the time available. The only way to be sure not to spend too much time is to wait until only the optimal amount of time is available.

From Cheap Talk.

Life in the think tank world

Strobe Talbot in the Onion on his lost day.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

Facebook thought of the day

"Oh Maggie, it's the BEST idea EVER! I down my anti-depressant with alcohol all the time!"

Mustache

At the risk of providing material for next year's economics department skit night less than 24 hours after this year's featured one of my posts about Salon Vox, I will note that I am now without a mustache for the first time since high school. I grew the mustache so that I could get into R-rated movies, most particularly Logan's Run, whose skinny-dipping scene with Jenny Agutter remains in my memory.

At my mustache has recently gone gray, it continues to perform the function of making me look older, but now that function is perhaps less desired!

More on ways to go

An arguably nicer, but perhaps more embarrassing, way to go.

Hat tip: Ed Vytlacil (on FB)

Not a nice way to go

An electrifying ending.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

On stock brokers

An entertaining Atlantic piece on why you should fire your broker.

I learned this lesson myself back in the 1990s. I inherited about 20K from my grandmother when I was in college. I put the money in an asset management account at Merrill Lynch; at the time, such accounts were exciting and new. In those days, the account came with an actual personal broker, my broker was a gorgeous young women, only a few years older than I was, with a habit of wearing smart business suits with very short skirts. I would drive or take the bus to downtown Seattle every few months to meet with her. She was actually a good broker in the sense that the REIT she had me put about half the money into has continued to pay a very nice dividend year after year through ups and downs. I still have it. She also did me the favor (as I learned later this is very much a discretionary favor) of letting me in on the Costco IPO. I made several thousand dollars on that in less than a week.

Sadly, she moved on to better things and was replace by someone I remember only as the frat boy broker. He was the sort of broker that the Atlantic piece is all about. He had me invest in something called Merrill Lynch's "emerging growth fund". During a several year period in the 80s when the market roughly tripled, the "emerging growth fund" grew by exactly zero. I suppose I should be happy that it did not go down! I got smart and learned my lesson at some point in the 90s and sold it and resolved never to deal with brokers again. I suppose I should be glad that this lesson cost me only (in opportunity cost) a few thousand dollars.

Economists worry about markets with information asymmetries for good reasons!

Men, new media, and divorce

Today I learned that a friend of mine is divorced (not getting divorced but all the way divorced) because he changed his Facebook status to single.

The Facebook bit is odd enough but I am perplexed that I managed not to notice something was amiss during the entire process. The male of our species can be mighty clueless at times.

Afghanistan

Captain Thom, who appears in the latter part of the video, is my mother's sister's son's son. I am never quite sure if that makes him a second cousin or a first cousin once removed. In any case, I have a picture from when I was in college of me holding him when he was about two. Neither of us looks very happy about the arrangement.