My Nobel Prize

Many years and one wife ago I discovered that personal microeconomic behavior did not mimic the classic model curve of cost versus demand. My then-wife's father was in the flexible package printing business which meant that we could get one of his clients, Marcal's paper products for free ... toilet paper, napkins, paper towels, etc., you name it. Now we were just starting out and were living on cracked-ice sandwiches ... so, to me, this was a pretty good deal. But not to my lovely wife. She wanted Scott paper products and no cajoling on my part could switch her tastes to Marcal. It drove me nutso ... since I had studied economics in college and knew that, at zero costs, we should be acquiring infinite amounts of Marcal stuff!

And I often expounded, with waving arms, on this discrepancy between what was in the economics  textbooks and what was real-life. (Possibly one reason for our divorce?)

Fast forward well over fifty years ... and now this economist from the University of Chicago, Richard Thafer, describes this same type of unorthodox personal economic behavior and wins the Nobel Prize for Economics for heaven's sake ... and over a million bucks to boot ... see: CNBC Story.

No fair! That's rightly my medal and money!

Free Speech on Campus

My wife was taken aback and so am I with a recent op-ed in the Boston Globe advocating a return to free speech codes at colleges and universities ... surprisingly written by none other than Janet Napolitano, the current president of the California University System ... see: Boston Globe Story. Our former head of Homeland Security and a clear Liberal, Ms. Napolitano is to be commended for her bold stance ... even though she is not the first recently to return to this long-held American principle. That nod goes to the University of Chicago ... see: New York Times Story for a thoughtful and well-stated avowal of kicking all this current silly Liberal newspeak to the curb.

My question therefore is: Where are all our so-called bastions of liberal thought and learning, the Ivy League schools, on this critical pedagogical issue?

[Sound of crickets] ...