TANSTAAFR

Ladies and gentlemen, the Owlbear song.

Geek cred to the first commenter explaining my cryptic title and the problem in Marcotte's song to which it alludes.

Marcotte's D&D works are up on Spotify (and here and here). Listen to them during your next campaign.

HT: my search on Spotify for the word "Owlbear". This is the only song that came up. If you need to ask why I'd have searched Spotify for Owlbears, you've not been reading me long enough.

Econ Geek Envy

My grad school roommate was a few years ahead of me in the programme at George Mason. He went part time to work on the Hill shortly before I arrived there; the opportunity costs of finishing his PhD quickly became too high. He loved to tell the story of how David Friedman showed up for a barbeque at his house once after giving a seminar at George Mason. I always envied him that party.

In the New York Times via BK Drinkwater's shared items feed, Milton Friedman and Monopoly:

Monopoly was taken seriously in Shorey House at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s. A room was set aside as “The Monopoly Room.” But in that post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan era, all assumptions were questioned and a game our parents played was no exception. Rules were meant to be altered. The house even convened a “constitution convention” to change the official rules of the game to allow a person to build a hotel on a property without first having to own four houses. Mr. Zelenty, now a corporate lawyer in his native New Jersey, remembers holding a sign that said, “New Jersey Espouses / Hotels Without Houses.”

The other thing taken as seriously in that dorm was free-market economics or, more precisely, Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economics professor. This was a house that frequently invited Professor Friedman and his wife, Rose, to sherry hours. House members ran a snack bar in the basement of the dormitory called Tanstafl, an abbreviation of a saying favored by Mr. Friedman, that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Mr. Zelenty owned the greatest of treasures any of us could imagine because it combined those two passions. He had asked Mr. Friedman to sign his Monopoly board at one of those sherry hours. The Nobel laureate did so, writing, “Down with” above the game’s name. We didn’t play on that board. No one ever played on that board. (Mr. Zelenty said he still has it and wants to donate the relic to the university one day. “It’s in a place of safety more than a place of honor,” he said.)

The precise details of our classic game are blurred by the alcohol consumed that night and the years that have passed since then, but this much is recalled. We decided that Monopoly was hostile to a free market because it restricted the number of houses or hotels one could buy. We voted that a player could buy as many hotels as a property could physically bear and rents would be raised proportionally.

Read the whole article to work through the effects on gameplay.

Zelenty got to drink sherry with Milton Friedman. And he has a signed Monopoly board memento. Econ geek envy.

But I got to play Dungeons and Dragons in an all economist D&D group where Bryan Caplan was Dungeon Master and William Dickens was a half-ogre named Grissumpf. David Mitchell was a gully dwarf. And Scott Beaulier was some kind of fighter. My Sage/Assassin, Dougal, had a charisma of 3 - I flipped the points over to other characteristics after a bad roll but really enjoyed role playing the lowest possible charisma. You might think it wasn't much of a stretch. You might be right. It was awesome.

If you ever get invited to Capla-Con, go. I can vouch for the "Punctuated Equilibrium" scenario; I generated the Dentist character in its inaugural playing.

Lousy fixed costs

Cowen told me New Zealand would teach me the importance of fixed costs.

And so I cannot order this. Bigby's Crushing Thirst Destroyer?! Sigh. They'd otherwise have replaced my giant Lord of the Rings water cup for lecturing next semester...

You folks who take Amazon free shipping for granted back Stateside, please stop doing so. Relish that surplus.

HT: BoingBoing

Advice, for what it's worth

Not the bunch most usually asked to give this kind of advice. Would be interesting if Roissy were to score it.

Moral panics of days past: D&D edition

One of the serious disadvantages of growing up in a very rural area was a paucity of D&D players. So, somewhere around age 10 or 11, when I went up to Winnipeg to spend a week at my second cousin's place and attend the University of Manitoba's MiniUniversity for kids, I brought my Original Dungeons and Dragons set with me (the old Red Box). Finally! Some potential players! My cousin's father freaked out when he saw it and banned it from the house.

Cory Doctorow points to a potential reason why: a documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that meets every expectation I have of CBC quality. Apparently, Doctorow is one of the kids pictured playing if you watch the second follow-up part! Note that Peter Mannsbridge once had hair.



I wonder whether it's possible to quantify just how much stupider the CBC has made Canada over time.

Vitas

We're not hiring this year, but if we were, and if I were on the committee, and if I saw a vita that were the Econ equivalent of the one below, I would move heaven and earth to get the applicant an interview at the AEAs.I'd put high odds that one or two folks round the traps would see this kind of vita as being a reason to rule a candidate out. It would be highly interesting if some job market candidate next year were to do a randomized trial on whether this kind of vita or the generic sort landed more AEA interviews. Highly interesting 'cause the costs don't fall on me and I'd want to know the results. If there weren't so many veto players in hiring processes, the strategy would induce a nice separating equilibrium.

As a side note, I can imagine how I'd come up with scores on strength, dex, con, intelligence: get measures of strength, dexterity, stamina and IQ, get some population averages, then map them to the 3d6 distribution. I have no clue how wisdom could be measured in the real world; charisma would similarly be tough.

I don't buy the guy' scores if he's using a standard early edition set of D&D rules. 3d6 gives an average of 10.5 and sd is 3. So he's claiming to be >4sd above average - IQ 162.5 - in a part of the distribution you can't get by standard rolls. Of course, I'd expect any PhD-bearing candidate in Econ to score at least a 19 INT; I'd also expect to see some GRE scores to back that up. My GRE scores gave me a D&D INT score that rounds to 21, if 1998 GREs are still a reliable predictor. The rest of my scores would be much much worse.

Could be fun over Christmas...the D&D Vita. Publications and such as Inventory...