James E Hartley

Will You Be Honest With Me?

Should you always tell the truth? That seems like one of those questions which is really easy to answer. Set aside the question of whether it is permissible to lie in order to save someone’s life. Suppose you are asked a simple question and nobody will die if you are honest. Should you be honest?

Let’s take a particular example. Suppose someone you know tells you they wrote some poetry and they would like your honest feedback on it. Suppose the poetry is unbelievably awful. If you want a good example of what this could be like, consider the poetry collection described in a recent blog post. Suppose I came up to you and told you I was really proud of this poetry collection I wrote and asked you for your honest evaluation of it.

Would you tell me the truth? Would you say, “That collection of so-called poetry is too lame for words. I have never seen something so unbelievably idiotic. What were you thinking?” Or would you politely tell me that, well, you aren’t the best judge of poetry, but it isn’t your sort of thing but you are sure that people who know about poetry would really like it.

Why wouldn’t you tell me the truth? It is objectively bad. It is inane. Indeed it is so unbelievably horrid that nobody could ever think it was worth reading.

Moliere examines exactly this problem in The Misanthrope. It is a funny play, laugh out loud funny. What gives the play its comedic force is Alceste, who always tells the truth. If someone were to ask him if a poem is bad, Alceste would not hesitate to tell the truth. Indeed, he does exactly that in the play. Calling the poem “tedious rot,” he proceeds to dissect just how awful it is.

Should we admire Alceste? He is the type of person who, if asked “How do I look?,” would actually give an honest answer. Is that the right thing to do?

We read this play in one of my reading groups, and the students were fascinating. When asked the pair of questions about a situation involving a polite lie “Should you tell the truth?” and “Would you tell the truth?,” the majority of the students said Yes to the first and No to the second.

We had an impossible time sorting out when you should be honest and when you should engage in a polite lie.

On the other hand, the play also has a character, Celemine, who is the perfect flatterer, always telling everyone exactly what they want to hear. Nobody thought that was a good idea. Such lying always catches up with you sooner or later.

So what then? Moliere does not give a good answer to how we should live our lives. But, he does do a marvelous job explaining why there is so much bad art and so many bad arguments. People simply are not willing to be honest with others if there is any danger of hurting someone’s feelings.

One complaint about the current generation of college students is that they have no resiliency, that they collapse at the slightest criticism. There is frequent blame on others for never telling these students “Not good.” As a result, they grow up never learning the difference between a good poem and a bad poem. So, they write horrible poetry. Nobody ever tells them that their writing is awful, so they are awful writers. They grow up never knowing the difference between a good argument and bad arguments. So, they make really bad arguments.

Moliere comes along with a play that is a perfect illustration of the problems with this generation…well, except this play was written over 300 years ago. It seems that even thee centuries ago, the idea of just being honest was laughable. Maybe college students today are not all that different than people in France in the 1660s.

What then shall we do? It seems pretty obvious that it cannot be a good situation if nobody ever tells the truth. It also seems pretty obvious that if you decide you will always tell the truth, nobody will talk with you anymore. We expect people to tell us those polite fictions, but that means we also know that nobody is ever being honest.

Is my poetic collection from the earlier post worth reading? Is this current reflection on The Misanthrope any good? I know the answer to both. The more interesting question is whether you would be honest with me if I asked you.

A New Poetic Masterpiece

One fine summer day, I wandered over to the Stimson Room in the Mount Holyoke library. It’s a gorgeously wonderful place to read—quaint, comfortable chairs, and quiet. It’s also the room where they house a large selection of books of poetry. Looking up from the serious tome I was reading, I noticed on the shelf a small volume of poetry with the title coffee coffee.

Not surprisingly, I was deeply intrigued, and so I picked it up to look at it. I then proceeded to read the whole volume. It took less than 2 minutes. Really.

(Since you will soon think I must be making this up, I will remind the reader that the book covers in these posts are links to the Amazon web page for the book. So, if you doubt the book is real, click on the picture of the book cover above and feel free to buy yourself a copy.)

The first poem:

though

That’s not the title of the poem, by the way. That’s the whole poem. Other poems:

Acre
sleep
phone

That’s not one poem; that’s three different poems. Not all the poems were one word long; there was, for example:

Air
air
air
air

Each poem is printed roughly centered on the right hand page (what would be the odd page in a book with page numbers). The font resembles that of an old manual typewriter.

I cleverly realized that this volume of poetry was different from the sort of thing which Milton used to do. I figured it was some new statement about something or other, then got to wondering why Mount Holyoke had bought the volume, so I looked it up. Much to my surprise, the volume is a reprint of an old 1960s volume of poetry. Curiouser and curiouser. Then I found out that the author, Aram Saroyan, once received an NEA award for the masterpiece:

lighght

Your tax dollars at work.

Now many people might grouse about this sort of poetry, but it inspired me. So, I herewith offer up the following manuscript of poetry for any publisher who would like to publish the Next Big Thing.

The volume is entitled

cancoffetos

It is a series of 100 poems, broken into three sections. The first section has 34 poems, the following 2 have 33 poems each. The poems are printed on the left hand page (what would be the even page, though this volume has no page numbers). The first poem in each section is printed one-third of the way from the top of the page; the following poem is printed one third of the way from the bottom of the page, and the placement then goes back and forth for the remainder of the section. The poems printed in the top third are in the font Cambria; the poems printed on the bottom third are in Perpetua. The exceptions are the last poem in each section, which is printed in Old English Text MT and in all three sections is located one-sixth of the way from the bottom on the right hand page. The poems in the first and third sections are in 18 point font; the poems in the second section are in 16 point font. The first twelve poems in the volume are as follows (each line is the complete poem):

Dawoodrk
mammattermoth
agearlyainst
flaquaticits
tilaplethorapia
orabluenge
deficlefning
googeigeinvaluele
bruqwertynch
esgablesence
iwhaled
flophalynxuride

The volume ends with the poem

comstarsedy

Also of interest to a prospective publisher is that the volume of poetry clearly will market itself. Indeed, a large initial print run will be desirable due to the truly innovative and avant-garde nature of the work. I am also happy to pass along one of the initial reviews of this volume:

A breathtaking new work of poetry, cancoffeetos, by James E. Hartley, has recently been published. In what is clearly a bold update of the tired work of Aram Saroyan, Hartley has taken Saroyan’s idea and inverted it, showing us how the world around us envelops us even as we seek to master it. The human effort in this technological age to make sense of our surroundings through the ever increasing drive into the microcosm, epitomized by the ubiquitous cell phone and Saroyan’s single word poems, is called into question on every page of this volume as simple concepts are wrapped up in often surprising ways, invariably smothering our original notions on how to make sense of the world, problematizing the very question of our existence. The very location of the poems on the left hand side, alternating between top and bottom of the page, point out the conventional nature of Saroyan’s work, demonstrating that what we used to think of as bold innovation was really just sterile adaptation of the sterile modernist era. The locations change and the fonts change, leaving us with the realization that here we have no firm ground on which to stand.
The poems are puzzles in themselves, refusing to reveal their secrets until the reader has worked at it. For example, the poem

bupuntter

stares out from the page at the reader, asking for interpretation, but offering no immediate clue. Gradually, the reader begins to notice that the poems all consist of one word thrust violently into the heart of another word. The outer word encompasses the inner word, revealing a juxtaposition of the attempt to understand the irrefragable nature of the conventional definition with the hermeneutical epistemology of the broken outer word (or should that be broken outer world?). In the poem reprinted above, for example, the realization that punt (which could be either a boat or a term from American football) loses its solidity of (dual?) meaning in the substance of butter, which has no solidity. Why is the butter being divided by the punt (verb or noun?)? Are our lives simply being transported (by boat or kick, notice) from a state of solidity (hardened butter in the cooler) into a state of dispersal (spread over bread). The poem tantalizes with possibility, never quite revealing its full secret.
The very title of the book offers up this exploration of the duality in which we live. Coffee is clearly a reference to the work of the epigone Saroyan, and it is surrounded by cantos. Thus, the title of coffee inside cantos conjures up the image of Bach Coffee Cantatas, a secular work by a religious composer. The cantos (or songs) make up a Bachian (or should that be Bacchanalian) opera, while the coffee provides stimulus to the brain.
In short, this work is a masterpiece, and its reception will undoubtedly rival that of The Rite of Spring or The Wasteland.

I should also add that while that review does capture many intriguing things about this proposed volume, the reviewer did miss some things which should have been obvious. Note that the structure of the volume, divided into 3 sections of 34/33/33, is the same as the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, each section of which is, of course, called a canto. Furthermore, the embedded word at the end of all three sections is stars, again echoing Dante. Moreover, the reviewer also completely missed the change in font size and its obvious significance to the work as a whole. These and the other such hidden clues (e.g., the connection between the 14th poem and the 41st poem, the relationship between half of the prime numbered poems (and since there are 25 primes, it is uncertain if that is 11 or 13 poems which are related), the importance of the missing secondary color and the sole tertiary color in the series) scattered throughout the work, mean that literary scholars will inevitably favorably compare this magnificent volume to Finnegans Wake.

Bondage of the Will

Martin Luther is rather obviously one of the Great Polemicists.

Indeed, if the standard of greatness is influence, then he is inarguably the Greatest Polemicist.

His most important works inaugurate the Reformation. Those works are fun to read; he goes for blood. Consider the title alone of one of them: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In that essay, Luther draws on the Old Testament narrative to argue that the Pope and his minions in Rome are the equivalent of the Babylonians who captured and enslaved God’s people. Jeremiah seems tame compared to Luther.

Great Writer. Important writer. We can all agree on that.

So, now explain Bondage of the Will.

The thesis is remarkably simple:

If then the prescience and omnipotence of God be granted, it, naturally follows, as an irrefragable consequence that we neither were made by ourselves, nor live by ourselves, nor do anything by ourselves, but by His Omnipotence. And since He at first foreknew that we should be such, and since He has made us such, and moves and rules over us as such, how, I ask, can it be pretended, that there is any liberty in us to do, in any respect, otherwise than He at first foreknew and now proceeds in action!

You have now read the whole argument. The book is 400 pages long, however. What are the other 399.75 pages doing?

Erasmus, the darling of the sophisticated intellectual Renaissance Christians, wrote a book attempting to refute Luther’s views on predestination; in it he argued that people have free will. Luther responded in a stereotypically Lutherian fashion with Bondage of the Will.

The structure of Luther’s book is the following:

Statement 1: Erasmus says verse X (choose 1):

a) proves there is free will, or
b) seems to oppose free will, but really does not.

Statement 2: Erasmus is a fool.

If statement 1 was option a): The verse actually opposes free will as anyone with even a small amount of reading ability and common sense and intelligence will obviously recognize.
If statement 1 was option b): The verse actually opposes free will as any idiot can obviously see.

Repeat. Ad nauseum.

In other words, this is an odd book, to put it mildly. The paragraph quoted above which states the thesis is actually philosophically interesting. In a well-written book, it would be good to add maybe a couple dozen pages of explanation and examples. In what world does anyone need 400 pages of the same?

Luther is like one of those lawyers who just keeps talking and talking until you finally cry out no mas and then he raises his hand in triumph.

This does not make you want to read the book. You may thank me at your leisure.

Setting aside the books stylistic failings, the question of determinism or predestination is, and has been for a very long time, fascinating. Luther isn’t the first to wrestle with this, obviously. Oedipus Rex is entirely about this problem. Homer wrestled with it before Sophocles did. What Luther brings to the table is an argument that Scripture answers the question. Decisively.

Is he right? In one of those ironic moments, we now have a wide swath of philosophers and scientists arguing that free will is dead. If you take a philosophy course these days, you will encounter a whole string of modern arguments that there is no will, that everything you do is done for purely deterministic reasons. Brain imagery suggest that you actually make decisions before your cognitive self is even aware you made them; all our cognitive selves are doing is rationalizing the decisions we have already made.

Luther would have loved these modern arguments. He would say they illustrated his point completely. (He would not say they proved his point, because Luther was certain that Scripture already proved his point.) The next time you meet someone who believes that free will is done and buried, ask them if they have read Bondage of the Will. When they say they have not, recommend they get a copy because it says exactly the same thing. The walk away merrily.

Is this actually a really important question? Once upon a time, I thought it was. Indeed, I thought it was the single most important question. If you had talked to me during my sophomore year of college and asked what theological problem was the one the Church most needed to instantly resolve, I would have said, “It needs to realize predestination and not free will, is the Truth.” If you had cared enough about me in that conversation to gently chide me, you might have suggested that perhaps the Nature of Christ was a bit more important, but I would have airily dismissed your suggestion with a, “Well, everyone in the Church knows the Truth about Christ; that stuff is child’s play—we need to talk about real theology.”

My undergraduate self was not a very sophisticated thinker. One might even have called me sophomoric.

Over the years, I haven’t really changed my theology on this point all that much. But, I have discovered that it really is a very boring debate. We simply cannot reconcile predestination and human agency. Scripture clearly says God predestined us for adoption as his children. Scripture also clearly indicates the existence of human agency and responsibility for our decisions. It is hard to reconcile those passages cleanly; lots of people have reconciled them, but the fact that there are ever new attempts to reconcile them suggests that nobody is really persuaded that there is not a seeming contradiction.

The problem with all this debate is that it is attempting to reason out something that is, quite possibly, completely beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. If we can’t understand time (and we can’t), then it is a fairly simple logical step to realize we also can’t understand predestination and human agency. It is one of those mysteries, comprehensible in the mind of God, but not in the human mind.

What then? This makes predestination one of those subjects which often fails to be an interesting subject of conversation because people don’t understand that every conversation is not a debate. If your goal in a conversation about predestination and determinism and free will is to prove your point so that the other party will be convinced by the force of your argument, then the conversation will be rather dull because in the end, this is a matter of faith, not reason. However, if the point of the conversation is to discuss the idea, not to convince people, but just for the simple exchange of ideas on it, then it is an incredibly fascinating conversation.

Problem left as an exercise for the reader: Was I predestined to write the above or was it my decision to do it?

A Pirate’s Life for Me

So you want to be a pirate?

Not one of those newfangled pirates running around shipping lanes off the coast of Africa or Indonesia, but a good old-fashioned 18^th century pirate on a wooden sailing shop flying the Jolly Roger.

You saw Pirates of the Caribbean and thought, “I want to be Captain Jack Sparrow.” You read Treasure Island as a kid and thought you could outsmart Long John Silver. Mostly, you just want to find buried treasure marked on a map by a big X. Or maybe what you really want is to bury the treasure and make one of those cool maps.

Ah, but you aren’t bloodthirsty enough to join a pirate crew? Or are you worried you’d have to walk the plank or end up marooned with a pistol and a single bullet?

Or maybe (gasp!) none of this has any appeal to you at all.

In any event, everything you know about Pirates is wrong, so sorry, you couldn’t have had that life anyway.

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates is one of those marvelous books that not only will you enjoy reading (regardless of whether you care about pirates), but when you are looking for a fabulous gift for someone who reads books, it is a surefire hit.

Peter Leeson (the author) is obsessed with Pirates and Economics, and the book is a perfect marriage of the two. I was recently asked what book would be the best for teaching economic intuition to a home-schooled high school student. Hands down, this book should be at the top of the list.

What do we learn? Pirates were a much more organized society than they at first seem to be. They have the reputation of being an anarchic, lawless bunch of sadistic scum of the earth. But, for example, did you know that before they set off on a voyage, they would all sign a contract specifying each individual’s voting rights, rules and responsibilities, and share of profits?

These Pirate Constitutions are amazing documents. The Captains really were elected. There was a quartermaster whose job was to curtail the authority of the captain. The crews could depose a captain. There was a rudimentary health insurance program; the size of the payment for a loss of limb or life is well set out in the constitution.

In what is perhaps the most surprising revelation in the book, if you compare life on a pirate ship to life on a legal merchant vessel, there isn’t much doubt in which place you have more rights. Merchant ships of the day were run as complete totalitarian dictatorships. The captain’s word was the Law. If the Captain wanted to abuse you, there was nothing stopping him from doing so. And merchant captains were very happy to abuse you. As it turns out, one of the biggest source of pirates was the crew of merchant vessels who realized life on a pirate ship was much better.

So, what about all the evil torturing? Pirates spent a lot of time cultivating a reputation as being brutal sadists. Why? Well, suppose you are a pirate and you want to steal the cargo off another ship. The worst thing for you is if the other ship decides to fight to the death. So, to convince the other ship to surrender, you cultivate the reputation of being unmerciful to anyone who fights with you. Then surrender is much more likely. Lives are saved, the cargo is unharmed. Everyone wins. Well, everyone except the owner of the ship the pirates just stole, but the owner was off in some nice country house, so nobody really cared about him.

Something similar happens with pirate conscription. Suppose you decide it is in your best interest to join up with a pirate ship. The danger is if you get caught, you will be hung, which is not a painless way to die. So, you make it known that you were kidnapped by pirates and forced into service. Then if you get caught, people feel bad for you and you walk away free and clear. It was in the pirates’ interest to pretend that everyone was forced into service.

And so on. This book is a masterpiece of showing what happens when an economist walks into a literature. The economist just sees things differently. By constantly asking, “Why is this action in the interest of the person doing it?” you can uncover all sorts of interesting things.

But, truth be told, the real reason you want to read this book is not just all the economic insights into pirates. It is because pirates are cool. And a well-written book with lots of pirate stories? Yeah, you really want to grab a bottle of rum and read this.

Related Posts
McRaven, William Sea Stories “Remembering to the Ending of the World”
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales “Do Goods Have an Inherently Just Price?”

What a Coincidence

A Gentleman of Leisure is the story of Jimmy Pitt, the rather wealthy gentleman of leisure from the title, who on a trip from England to New York falls in love with a girl, but sadly never learns her name, gets back to New York, converses with some friends about a play involving a burglar, makes a bet with his friends he can burgle a house that very night, goes home and falls asleep only to wake up and find his house being burgled, interrupts the burglar, pretends to be a bigtime thief himself in order to impress the burglar, arranges with the burglar to go burgle a house that night, breaks into a house, which ends up being the house of the chief of police, who is, it turns out a corrupt chief of police well-acquainted with Jimmy’s new burglar friend, but alas the conversation which would have ensued is interrupted when the chief of police’s daughter wanders in, who is, lo and behold, the very girl Jimmy Pitt fell madly in love with on the boat.

Oh, don’t worry that the plot was just spoiled. That is just the first few pages of the book. Most of the book is all about how all these characters end up in the same castle in England. Throw in a bunch more characters, parties, jewels, thefts, detectives, valets, and butlers.

Will Jimmy get the girl?

Of course he will. This is a Wodehouse novel, after all. They all have the same plot.

One feature of Wodehouse novels is a remarkable series of coincidences. Take the above. What are the odds Jimmy Pitt will end up breaking into the very home where the girl he saw on a boat is currently living? Near zero, right? And that she is the daughter of the chief of police who knows Jimmy’s new burglar friend? Or that the burglar would break in the very night Jimmy made his silly bet? And none of these are the most improbable coincidences of the novel—every one of these things is vastly more likely than the things we see happen in the rest of the novel.

So, Wodehouse acquires a reputation of telling improbable stories. Everything is always just too coincidental. It is incredibly unrealistic. Right?

But…what makes us think that coincidences are unrealistic? If life really free of coincidences?

A few weeks ago, I was telling a student with whom I have had quite a number of memorable conversations (many involving American Girl books) over the last two years the story about the Family Trust my grandfather set up to benefit a small cemetery in the town from which his family came. The Foundation benefits not just the cemetery but other nonprofits in two incredibly rural counties.

I then mentioned the name of the counties: Custer and Lemhi. The student’s jaw hit the floor. It turns out, she has relatives in exactly that part of the country. She went on vacation there all the time when she was growing up. We then swapped stories of going to Idaho for vacation when you were a kid.

What are the odds of finding out someone you know used to vacation as a kid in roughly the same parts of rural Idaho as you did. And let’s be clear. We are not in Idaho right now—we are in Massachusetts. Neither of us grew up in Idaho. We both just used to get hauled by our families on vacation to the middle of nowhere to visit relatives.

Improbable?

Or how about this. I was at a conference in Utah this summer. I was talking with the organizer of the conference, whom I had never met before. Swapping stories, we discover we both went to the same college, UC Davis. Not that improbable; it is a big school. But…we graduated in the same year. We shared a major. We almost certainly took classes together in those large lecture halls where you don’t know a soul. What are the odds?

Or this. I was at a conference in Kentucky a few years back. The conference was for high school history and social science teachers in Kentucky. I was talking with one of the teachers there and discovered she was also from California. Big state, not so surprising. She went to high school in San Jose. Big city, not so surprising. She went to the same high school I did. OK, a bit suspiring. She graduated one year after me. Here I am a professor at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts and she is a high school teacher in Kentucky and we meet at a conference nowhere near San Jose, California.

Things like that never happen, right?

It turns out, when you think about it, your life is full of improbable coincidences. Indeed, when you think about it, everything you have ever done, every place you have ever been, and every person you have ever met is an incredible coincidence. It is just most of the time, you never know how unusual it is that you met that particular person at that particular time in that particular place.

Cormac McCarthy memorably describes this phenomenon in No Country for Old Men:

You know what date is on this coin?
No.
It’s nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And I’m here. And I’ve got my hand over it. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

So given that our lives are one big coincidence, why does Wodehouse seem so unrealistic?

Think about the stories I told above. Why did I pick those stories? Because they seem unusual. I could have told three other stories about talking with people which would not have seemed unusual. Most of those stories would seem pointless to relate. So, we naturally relate the stores which seem improbable.

Now consider the World of Wodehouse. If Jimmy Pitt had never again seen the girl from the boat, there is no story. In fact, if you imagine the full world in which this story is set, nobody else on that same boat had a story to tell. Why do we read Jimmy Pitt’s story? Because it is the only interesting story.

What are the odds that Jimmy Pitt would have this strange set of events in his life? That seems small. But what are the odds that someone on a boat will have an interesting story? That doesn’t seem improbable at all.

Maybe Wodehouse isn’t that unrealistic after all. Wodehouse is a clever one. His novels seem so effortless and fun and full of coincidence, but when you start looking at it, you realize he is actually describing what life is really like. Your life is full of incredibly improbable events. You just don’t notice them. Wodehouse does notice.

Embrace your inner Wodehouse. You think your life is full of dull routine, but you are immersed in an incredibly wonderful and complicated play, with improbable events and curious characters all around you. You just have to pay attention.

And there is no better way to remind yourself of this than to read P.G. Wodehouse.

Outsmarting Economists

Sometimes a book title seems very, very promising.

Can You Outsmart an Economist? 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain is such a title.

Economics! Puzzles! Together in one place!

I really wanted to love this book. I mean I really, really, really wanted to love this book.

Sigh.

It’s good, not great.

Oddly, with a different title, I think I would have liked it more. Then again, with a different title, I don’t think I would have ever read it.

The problem: there isn’t very much economics in this book. It is really just a puzzle book. Don’t get me wrong: if you are an economist or an economist in training, there is much in this book that will be very helpful in showing how to think through puzzles.

There are some interesting puzzles in which you have to use backward reasoning. There are quite a few problems in which you have to think deeply about probability. There are some interesting game theory exercises.

So, it is true that if you want to be a good economist, you need to learn to think through these sorts of problems.

But, does that make it an economics book? Does this book merit a title asking if you can outsmart an economist? Hardly.

Consider an algebra book or a calculus book or a graduate level mathematics textbook. If you read a book about how to solve mathematical problems, you will be a better economist. The same is true with reading books on statistics. So, can we take a book on probability and retitle it Can You Outsmart an Economist?

No need to stop there. An economist would benefit from reading philosophy or history or political science or literature. Should we retitle Pride and Prejudice while we are at it? Lots of economic insights in that novel (really, this is true).

So, if the book were more correctly entitled: Some Fun Problems to Help You Learn About Deductive Reasoning, Probability, and Game Theory, then I would not have been nearly as disappointed in the contents. Obviously the book would not sell as well. Which is an economic problem: if the point of a title is to help sell the book, then Landsburg and his publisher chose wisely.

That raises an interesting another economic problem: how far can a title deviate from the content of the book and still have the benefit of more sales from the better title outweigh the cost of risking future sales if people are disappointed in the content of the book?

A book about thinking like an economist should be hyper-focused on thinking about tradeoffs like that. If there is one thing that economists do and do very well it is always applying this principle:

People act in a way that the perceived marginal benefit of their choice is greater than the perceived marginal cost of their choice.

Enough on my disappointment about the misleading title. How does the book do on the terms of being a book of problems? OK.

Landsburg writes well and tells stories nicely with a humorous air. That is, after all, how he made his name. The puzzles are always told with an amusing story. There are tales about a guy trying not to be eaten by dinosaurs, ferocious pirates, and the Slobbovian czar of agriculture.

For the most part, the problems are interesting. The trick in a book like this is to quickly form an initial instinct, and then take the time to work the problem out to see when your initial instinct is wrong. It often is—well, unless you have seen a problem of type X before and know that your initial instinct is wrong and so you have the opposite initial instinct.

So, if you like puzzles, particularly probability puzzles, there is a fair amount of good material herein told by a skilled raconteur. Enjoy.

However, some of the problems are downright annoying. In the quest to show that your initial instinct is wrong, Landsburg is perfectly willing to engage is sly little word games where the question is written ever so slightly differently than the question you thought was being asked. This can lead to pages and pages of explanation about why if you were answering the question you are thinking he is asking, your instinct is right, but because of this seemingly irrelevant change in the wording right here, you get some crazy answer which is mathematically correct.

This sort of exercise in minutia is all fine if you just want to argue about trivialities. And if the title of the book was different, it would not bother me at all. But, remember the title: it is about outsmarting an economist.

Economists, as noted above are really good at one thing: they ignore trivialities. If you have a question, and you figure out the answer to the question you actually have, then you did what you wanted to do. Then along comes someone who says, well, if you alter the question in this seemingly trivial way, then you get a different answer. You then have a choice: you can spend hours and hours arguing about this matter, or you can say, I have already answered the question I set out to answer, you agree with me that I have answered the question I was actually asking, so why do I need to spend hours debating this?

The example which was the most egregious case is about the expected numbers of boys and girls in a population in which every couple wants to have a son. As Landsburg notes it is completely true that in expectation the number of boys will equal the number of girls. However, it is not true, Landsburg notes, that in expectation half of all children are girls.

If you look at those two statements, it is obvious they are in fact identical statements, so one cannot be true while the other is false. So, in this case, Landsburg is obviously engaged in some subtle changing of the question.

If you want to spend your time figuring out the verbal sleight of hand that Landsburg is playing there, then you are going to love every part of this book.

But, don’t think that you are committing some crime against economics if you think the marginal cost of figuring out what Landsburg is doing exceeds the marginal benefit of doing so.