The Three Ps of Liberty: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Polycentricity
Holy Smoke
If you like your single malts on the peaty Islay side of things, then you’ll enjoy this brew by Church-Key Brewery. It is a delicious dark ale that distinctively utilizes Scottish peat-smoked whisky malt. I’d best describe this as “comfort beer”. I can easily imagine it as a lifting ingredient in all styles of winter comfort cooking. Ontario’s finest!
Democracy, Liberalism, and Discretion: The Political Puzzle of the Administrative State
The Consolation of Dunces
Available via Amazon.com — Amazon.ca — Amazon.co.uk — Barnes & Noble — Indigo.ca — Indi Bound — Kobo — and last but not least, if you want to take advantage of a 30% discount code, available here), go directly to Rowman & Littlefield.
Extract from Chapter 5 — Stephen Utz
Al Jaffee: 99 not out
Guardian article from 4 years ago. MAD has long-since lost it’s “humourific” mojo but Jaffee never lost his. I treasure his Snappy Answers collection.
Bounded Rationality in the Digital Age
The fifteenth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.
Peter E. Earl
One of the great tragedies in economics in the decades since Simon received the 1978 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is that the uptake of his ideas within the discipline has been either poor or in a partial manner that does not properly capture his vision (as with mainstream models purporting to address bounded rationality). In this chapter I begin by trying to make sense of this situation and then argue that the digital revolution is making it more imperative than ever that economists take up Simon’s key ideas – not merely his satisficing view of choice in the face of bounded rationality but also his thinking on artificial intelligence and the evolutionary roles of altruism and system design. The modern economy is undergoing supply side upheavals at the heart of which lie the issues of programmability and modularity. On the demand side, buyers now have to contend with choice problems of extraordinary complexity, whose solutions increasingly rely on social inputs.
A recurrent theme in what follows is that, in the digital age, Simon’s (1991, pp. 306–7) Travel Theorem takes on a wider significance. He set out the Theorem with reference to what one can hope to learn about something in a good public library, as opposed to making a journey to study it at first-hand for a short period (for example, as a tourist or business consultant). His contention was that if information is all one hopes to obtain, being there is far less efficient that trying to gather it remotely. Hence, if journeys are actually undertaken, they are/should be for reasons other than the gathering of information. In the world of the Internet, the webcam, smartphones, Skype, virtual reality experiences, and so on, Simon’s Travel Theorem provides a powerful starting point for asking questions about motivation and economic organisation.
Reclaiming Democratic Classical Liberalism
Theology and Geometry and Taste and Decency
Available via Amazon.com — Amazon.ca — Amazon.co.uk — Barnes & Noble — Indigo.ca — Indi Bound — Kobo — and last but not least, if you want to take advantage of a 30% discount (available here), go directly to Rowman & Littlefield.
Extract from Chapter 4 — Leslie Marsh
Sigma Kids
March 7th makes the 45th anniversary of the release of Young Americans. While released midway into Bowie’s creative purple patch, for me at least, it doesn’t rank as a first-order Bowie album. Back in the day it was of course a massive surprise and a pleasant one at that, the direction already telegraphed in Diamond Dogs’ 1984. It was the backing vocals led by Luther Vandross along with Ava Cherry and Robin Clark that made the album. A friend of mine under 30 claims YA tops his Bowie list and listening to Carlos and Robin’s Q+A has elevated my respect for YA. In the UK we heard through the grapevine about the Sigma kids. As I’ve said many a time, Bowie never treated his fans as fuckwits and the Sigma Kids story validates this. By the way, the backstory of the cover of YA can be found here (who’d have thought Norman Rockwell?) but for the full story here is an interview with Eric Stephen Jacobs, the cover photographer.
More positive were the Sigma Kids, a band of Bowie fanatics who had camped outside the studio in rain or shine from the moment the band arrived, and were rewarded with an in-studio preview playback at the end of the sessions. “We had been hanging out around the studio for roughly two weeks,” Sigma Kid Patti Brett told Esquire in 2016. “One night when he arrived at the studio he said that if we were there when he came out he’d have a surprise for us. He told us it was unlike anything else he’d done and that he really wanted to get some feedback. They played [the album] for us, and you could tell he was nervous. But at the end someone shouted, ‘Play it again!’ And he got this huge grin on his face and said, ‘Really?’ And everyone screamed, ‘Yes!!’ And he played it again, and that started the party.”
Alomar remembers that moment: “When they asked to hear it again, David became extremely fluid, mixing with them, talking with them, chatting them up, smiling, laughing. If he knew how to high five at that time, he probably would have done it.”
“It was a beautiful moment,” Garson recalls. “It showed a part of him that had a lot of humility… Because this was such new territory for him I guess he didn’t want to feel like a poser or fake.” — Independent
Symposium on Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why it Matters
