Sharing is Caring

I believe a commentary on the public transport system in my new hometown is overdue. I miss the metro. Even the weird uncles who would repeat, "Metro sahi hai" to anyone who looked in their general direction. The buses here are no better than the buses anywhere else in India. But I must admit that the bus conductors here do have a better sense of irony than those in Delhi, who yell, "Andar ho jaao" to passengers who can't even find any space for their hands - in their desperation they put them in other people's pockets. Local trains are just larger versions of buses without the convenience of dropping you close enough to your destination, thereby ensuring that you to turn up for work looking far from presentable. 

Autowallahs here are so awful that I feel like I should start praying for the good health and longevity of the autowallahs in Delhi. On the bright side, autowallahs here don't discriminate. It doesn't matter if you're a local or an outsider; if you take an auto, you will be fleeced. It often costs more to take an auto than a cab. In exchange for the cost advantage, cabs are delightfully unreliable and cab companies are yet to figure out call wait. 

That leaves share autos. Travelling in a share auto is a lot like life. You keep waiting for an auto that will "be right" for you: not too crowded and headed towards the place you want to reach. But when you start feeling like time isn't on your side anymore, you take what you get. You struggle to get your foot in the door. You fight for your space. You let people step on your toes and put up with much discomfort because you have to reach your destination somehow. And as soon as you get comfortable, it's time to get off.

The level of ingenuity and dexterity displayed by most of the people on the road makes driving the sole preserve of those with infinite patience and wisdom. There are two activities that can seriously compromise your psychological health: dealing with bureaucracy and driving. I foolishly undertook both roughly around the same time. As a result, I have become  ridiculously foul-mouthed, at times surpassing my own knowledge of my proficiency in the area. 

Experience has taught me that in order to feel that warm afterglow after you swear, that feeling of being in perfect harmony with the universe, you have to swear in Hindi. Our national language is brilliant, for no other language could permit you to be so concise and still curse in such detail. 

iNegotiate

I've spent a good part of my life negotiating with authority figures about how late I can return home. I belong to a certain social sect that thinks monsters and werewolves slink about the streets at night. The first time I did stay out late at night, I was quite disappointed by the conspicuous absence of vampires. 

Suppose the curfew-setters believe that the risk of something untoward happening at night is normally distributed, then after 9 PM, we can say that the probability of being a victim of crime increases steadily, reaching its peak at 1 AM. But even the criminals need to go home and get some sleep to be fresh and alert for the next day, so after 1 AM, the probability of crime reduces, returning to pre-9 PM levels at 5 AM. So parents shouldn't tell their kids to "return home by 12 or not return home at all." They should tell them to return home before midnight or after 3 AM, thereby avoiding travel during the peak crime hours. 

But behaviour usually doesn't follow this logic, so I'm forced to assume that the normal distribution idea doesn't appeal to most parents. In fact, considering how their impatience escalates with time, I surmise that they probably think that risk is uniformly distributed over the 9 PM to 6 AM interval. As time goes by, the total area under the curve increases and that explains their panic. Worry not. I have the perfect negotiation strategy. At all events, it is unlikely that the distribution of the probability of crime at night is a discrete distribution, because that would suggest that a crime can only be committed at specific points in time. A continuous distribution is far more plausible. However, in a continuous distribution, only intervals have positive probability. The probability of crime at any given point of time will be zero. Explain to your parents that while you understand that there is some risk spread over the time interval in question, if they think of your safety at a specific point in time, their fears are inconsistent with their beliefs. 

Let's assume that doesn't work either. As a final resort, I recommend negotiating for spending the night at a friend's place instead of coming home late. You don't actually have to spend the night at anyone's place. You push your friends to party till the wee hours of the morning and return home like a good kid just as the lamps are being lit and the prayers recited. Your parents will love your devotion to family life and your friends will think you are a party animal of sorts. If that isn't a win-win, I don't know what is. 

Ageing Gracefully and Other Lies

I am absolutely terrified of getting old. Not the lines, wrinkles and knee replacement fears, no. I’m afraid of turning into one of those people who are so not fun that you just can’t accept the fact that they were once kids. You take one look at them and it’s implausible. “Nooo! That guy? Why, he must have worn a well-tailored suit and a frown ever since he was a baby!” Horrifying, isn’t it?

Age figures quite prominently in pop culture. There are numerous hilarious references to ageing and old people.  And that’s just as well. Pop culture is, after all, a youth thing.

So do “I hope I die before I get old?” Well, I don’t really hope to die. I know I will someday, but I think we can all agree that it’s not something that most of us really look forward to. That said, I must admit that dying young has its perks. You never have to worry about ageing gracefully, whatever that is. You remain forever youthful in everyone’s memory because nobody has ever seen you any other way. You don’t get to the point where you have to eat your words because you don’t live long enough to be brought to account for your verbal diarrhea. And you get to leave the world having severely pissed off your insurers and bankers. That’s got to feel good.

How about Benjamin Button? Get old age over with as soon as you’re born? That arrangement makes dying early really suck. Besides, I’d hate to have to worry about my dentures and cataract when I should be a curious toddler excited about the world. Not taking that deal ever.

That leaves Dorian Gray: staying young forever. I would’ve said Peter Pan but the boy could never get a drink. Most of us fancy being Dorian Gray. Botox takes us halfway there. But I’m not impressed. I don’t think we stop doing foolish things until we realise how foolish we look doing them.

I think Biology has got it about right. 

Even Cheaper Talk

I’m quite intrigued by cheap talk, probably because it constitutes about 90 per cent of my conversations. Cheap talk models would probably be better understood if course instructors use more frequently occurring examples from the students’ lives. Consider the example of asking an instructor what the syllabus for an exam is. He has (or will) set the paper himself and he knows whether or not a student should read a certain paper with a probability of 100 percent. However, there are conflicting interests at work. The instructor wants the student to read and learn as much as possible and uses the exam as an incentive mechanism to achieve his end. He may also want to ask a student to read all the papers in a reading list because he wants to keep his options open (in the event that he is yet to draft the question paper). So when a student asks an instructor whether a paper that was not covered in class but was referred to in some lecture or is available in the reading list is important for the exam, the standard answer is, “You can read through it”: the babbling equilibrium. Just as the theory predicts, this isn’t reason enough for many students to understand that there’s no point in playing the game at all.

Economics students would probably be a lot smarter if they weren't so rational. 

Size Matters

A lot of economics is about predicting people’s behaviour using axioms akin to laws in physics. The assumption that economics is like the physical sciences really bothers me. I side with Friedrich Hayek: the system is too complex for us to be able to provide a precise model of economic behaviour.

That scientific tools should not be directly applied in economics has been said many times before, but it’s not a point that usually receives the attention that it should, probably because most (but not all) of the people who say so are those who suck at maths. It’s hard to say why people persist with the use of complex calculus in behavioural modelling even though it is impossible for a majority of the population to even understand the reasoning process being ascribed to them, and the minority that does understand it would have to be in need of therapy if they really stood around at supermarkets trying to figure out how many units they should buy to equate the marginal utility to their marginal utility from money.

Russ Roberts argues that economics is more like biology than physics, and draws an interesting analogy between the two:

“We do not expect a biologist to forecast how many squirrels will be alive in ten years if we increase the number of trees in the United States by 20%. A biologist would laugh at you. But that is what people ask of economists all the time.”

Economists are rather cocky and don’t acknowledge the limitations of the field. We can look for the causes, try to understand the relationships between variables, figure out what incentives work, which ones don’t and in what settings or the channels through which a policy or action can take effect – but to believe we can predict the exact outcome and mathematically calculate the magnitude of the change in different variables is, well, cute – we can’t, and we’ve been wrong nearly every time we tried.

But perhaps there is something we can learn from physics. In his talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Richard Feynman says,

“Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics... we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things.”

Early models of the atom had subatomic particles arranged like the solar system: a nucleus at the centre with electrons orbiting it. There was no reason to assume such perfect symmetry between the two. It later turned out that the atom looked quite different.

In economics, we assume identical, rational micro agents and predict macro results by aggregating their behaviour. Microeconomics is more intuitive, in a sense more reliable because it is reasonable to assume that individuals try to maximise over certain parameters. But expecting perfect conformity between micro and macro outcomes may not be quite so reasonable. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that on the macro level, the presence of some non-rational agents or collective decision-making leads to thoroughly counterintuitive results.

The results might be quite different if we focus on studying macro behaviour as a whole instead of specifying individual motives for each micro agent beforehand. All we can really say is that when a lot of people’s behaviour is aggregated, on average it tends to produce certain types of results. 

Talk is Trash

I recently studied a few cheap talk models, beginning with the seminal paper by Crawford and Sobel in 1982. By “cheap talk”, most economists really mean free talk. A cheap talk game is one where one agent can send a message without incurring any exogenous cost: the only cost incurred is endogenous, i.e. it affects the sender’s payoff by influencing the receiver’s action choice. In short, cheap talk is a costless signal.

From a linguistic perspective, the “talk is cheap” maxim is traditionally taken to mean that the words in a message could be meaningless and need not be supported by truth, actions or evidence. The rising popularity of sarcasm should lend some added meaning to the phrase: what is said is very different from what is meant because the inherent meaning of our words is often diluted by how we say it.

So is the game theoretic use of the phrase cheap talk itself cheap talk? No! Economists are nothing if not precise. But it is possible that calling an entire subset of signalling games “Cheap Talk” is an attempt to make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is. If cheap talk is enough to make a paper sound interesting, imagine how much more intriguing a trash talk model would seem. Measuring the cost of indulging in trash talk and weighing it against the psychological advantage it confers could help us calculate whether being courteous is worthwhile at all. Children waste much of their childhood learning social conventions and much of their adult life brimming with resentment as they teach their children to fight their instinct to be frank.

Such a model might do to social relations what the prisoner’s dilemma did to gang loyalty – although it is socially optimal for all of us to be nice and the outcome is Pareto superior to any other, if each of us acts in a self-interested manner, being nasty would be a dominant strategy unless social ostracism outweighs the personal gain from feeling smug. However, if the psychological cost of courtesy is greater than its social benefit, we could adjust social structures to eliminate the rationale for teenage rebellion and angst altogether. It would be fascinating to see teenagers rebel by being excessively nice to everyone because their parents were so blunt all the time. Gandhi would be so proud. 

13

If there’s one thing we all absolutely adore, it’s superstition; even if it isn’t our own creation. If a lot of people seem to believe it, then it must be true. The lack of logic just gives it some mystique. Everyone could use some mystique, right?

It is courtesy our charming ways and beliefs that many buildings don’t have a 13^th floor. They call it the 14^th floor instead. As if poor counting will negate bad luck. Apparently two wrongs do make a right. The number 13 being unlucky is an old Christian belief but it seems to have found resonance across cultures. My research informs me that there’s actually a word for it: triskaidekaphobia. 

It’s quite interesting to me that an arbitrary set of beliefs can affect outcomes. People believe 13 is unlucky and so very few of them are willing to buy a house or an office on the 13^th floor. This  causes prices and/or the probability of sale to fall, thereby ensuring that the number becomes unlucky for real estate developers merely because enough buyers believe it to be. So people choose to drop poor 13 from the number system altogether. Self-fulfilling prophecies don’t get any stranger than this.

I must consult a numerologist about the importance of lowest common multiples and highest common factors in arriving at decisions about how lucky a number is. Are multiples of 13 also unlucky? Would people be all right with living on the 26^th floor or is that twice as unlucky as 13? The problem with detecting self-fulfilling prophecies that are irrational is that you don’t gain any predictive power from such knowledge. 

Poise

I think part of the reason why I didn’t have a job for such a long time was that I was afraid of getting one. I'm still afraid of getting started. Right now, my record is clean. Empty. Not a spot. There’s a certain amount of liberty you can take with the way you see yourself when you’re unemployed. You get neatly boxed and labelled once you have a job. When I tried to explain my immense loss of identity from getting a job to a friend, he directed me to First World Pains. I’m offended.

Speaking of jobs, I know of a man who knows how to get exactly the one he wants. I do envy his self-assured, confident poise, his manly tears at his unsurprising victory and the eyes that twinkle under the neatly Botoxed forehead. Putin’s election has also generated some classy headlines, the likes of which may never be seen again. Congratulations, Mr. Putin. But I don’t believe you.

Business Communication

 “…for the businessman, the greatest gift is to be able to speak so many words which seem to signify something but don’t, which convey a general attitude but are free from commitment.”

For 3 years I studied business and desperately groped for words to describe the exasperating imprecision of every statement I read. Mr. R.K. Narayan puts it so accurately, succinctly and seemingly effortlessly, that I’m afraid I may have become a business(wo)man myself.  

Much as I lament the English language’s limitations for expressing romanticism, I must praise its pliability for business: the scope for ambiguity is immense.

That said I’m quite scandalised with my English these days. It started when I first discovered online dictionaries that would pronounce words like the Americans and the British do: I realised that I didn’t speak like either of them and to add to it, my pronunciation didn’t even resemble the spelling – I was wrong in every way it was possible to be wrong.

We don’t realise how much of the “good English” we speak is actually very bad English. Being able to string a sentence together is hardly indicative of mastery of the language. If the British ever come back to visit they’ll never guess that we’re speaking their language. We can try to speak in a polished accent or use big words, but speaking correctly is a far cry for most of us, and is unlikely to become a reality unless we decide to spend a lot of time scanning Wren & Martin (oh, you boys) and listening to that stuck up witch on TFD speak “propahly” everyday. 

The Agreeable Shortness of Being

For long I have wondered why I attract so many short jokes. I’m not particularly short. Okay well I am, sort of. But I am the chosen target even when there are shorter people in the vicinity. I think I’m at that optimal height where it’s all right to make short jokes without worrying that I may have some underlying medical condition. Personally, I love short jokes. They are particularly funny when a person of my height cracks them.

Perhaps I’m partly responsible for attracting attention to my height. I can never resist an opportunity to show off the merits of being small. Short people have some remarkable advantages: leg room is never an issue, sleeping on the couch isn’t all that uncomfortable, low-ceilinged rooms are less likely to make us claustrophobic and we are, on average, better limbo dancers.

Beethoven and Picasso were 5’4”, as is Scorsese. As Bill Bryson says in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “The world belongs to the very small – and it has for a very long time.” If anything, short people are more likely to be able to adapt to sudden changes. We do live in the more oxygen-rich part of the atmosphere. We have the choice of being taller by wearing heels or stilts, while tall people can’t be short without undergoing some very unusual surgery. One of the few things economics has successfully taught me is that a larger choice set means better optimisation. 

In Defence of my Frenemy

I read a wonderful article about maths recently. It drew my attention to the treatment of maths in economics. Social scientists hold what can only be described as militant views on the use of mathematics. Those who are good at it insist that it is the only plausible reasoning mechanism. Those who aren’t argue that it’s hogwash. Oh what well-reasoned arguments.

The need for mathematics is well-established in the physical sciences. But it is, after all, just a tool. Considering a paper good just because it is sufficiently mathematical is akin to rewarding the methods employed rather than the result achieved. It could be argued that the result is more rigorous when proven mathematically, but that’s not always a valid argument when one is trying to describe human behaviour. Given that there are more than enough people who hate maths, it is probably reasonable to assume that nobody will employ a very complex reasoning process merely because some researcher believes that it is the only one sufficiently sophisticated to be attributed to a rational individual.

Asserting that the use of mathematics to derive economic results is rubbish just because it is beyond one’s comprehension is pretentious. It takes an ostrich’s brain to insist that something is not true merely because one lacks the cognitive capacity to understand it. The use of maths brings some regularity and predictability to behaviour, a necessary simplification for modelling anything. 

There might, however, be a case for substituting bedtime stories for children with bedtime mathematical equations. They’ll fall asleep quicker, there is a lower chance of them imbibing any prejudices on account of the parents’ carelessness in choosing a story and who knows, they might turn out smarter. 

Picketing, Pocketing

Suppose each of your pockets can be picked with an equal probability on any given day. I’m going to take a conservative estimate of 10% and assume that the probabilities are independently and identically distributed. You have some money, say Rs. 500 that you would like to carry. Would you prefer to distribute them across both pockets so that the probability of you having nothing is minimised, or would you prefer to keep it in a single pocket to maximise the probability of getting to keep all your money? To put it another way, by putting your money in a lot of different pockets, are you actually raising the probability of at least something getting stolen?

Is it correct to say that the probability of each pocket being picked is independent? We could argue in favour of this assumption because it is unlikely that pickpockets would take the risk of checking all the pockets of the same person once they’ve found something. But if the assumption is correct, then you should be indifferent between the distributions (250, 250) and (499, 1), which you are not. So let us further simplify by assuming that the money is equally divided between all pockets.

Let’s calculate what you should do, shall we? If you put all your money in one pocket, the expected value of the money that you can expect to have at the end of the day is 0.9 * 500 = Rs. 450. Since we assume that the probability of the first pocket being picked is completely unrelated to the probability of the second pocket being picked, the intersection of the events should simply be the product of the two probabilities. So the probability both pockets being picked is 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01. If you equally distribute your money over both pockets, the expected value will be 500 – P(AUB) = 0.1*250 + 0.1+250 – 0.01*500 = Rs. 455. While the amount you put in each pocket doesn’t affect the expected value, the number of pockets will. So it’s rather rational to keep your money in many different pockets if you’re an average person.

But there could be pickpockets who grab opportunities with both hands. Assuming a probability distribution over all pockets instead of conditioning it on the individual does not allow for a fantastically unlucky individual who has all pockets picked on a single metro ride. Let’s just say nobody likes that guy too much anyway so we aren’t relaxing any assumptions for him. This also means that we don’t think a person’s pocket is more likely to be picked just because he has a lot of them. I’m forced to concede that this, too, isn’t very unrealistic. Where will the pickpocket look in a pair of Dockers?

So even without accounting for risk aversion, our model shows that it is indeed rational not to put all your eggs in one basket. In any case, the preference for not losing everything is probably stronger than the preference for not losing anything. But extend this concept to too many pockets and regardless of what the calculations tell you, you should know that you will end up losing at least some money just by forgetting about it (true story). It is reasonable to say that there is an upper bound to the number of pockets you will split your money across: just as it would be embarrassing to find out that you are broke because your pocket has been picked, it would be rather awkward to have to fish out tenners from four different pockets to pay for a doughnut. The answer, my friend, is moderation. 

Oh Karma, you used to be cool...

Few people would be as fond of karma as I was. It's "practically Newtonian": what goes around, comes around. And we all like to believe the world is fair. Even Bénabou and Tirole agree. Karma extends this idea to a multiple lifetimes with reincarnation setting. In every lifetime, you accumulate points for doing good things and get negative points for anything that makes God frown. The higher your score, the better your next life will be. It's quite an elegant system: it ensures that one has the will to live a decent life even when one is about to die. 

Lately, however, I've been having some misgivings. Or perhaps I should call them reasonable doubts. As I get older, it's a bit difficult for me to continue to believe that someone keeps score so fastidiously for the whole world's population. Is ignorance adequate grounds for arguing innocence? Do you need to create a good score for moksha too or is it based on seniority? If the latter is true, then everyone who spent all their lives amassing good karma would presumably want to spend all of it on a wonderfully hedonistic life in the last time period. Or at least bequeath it to the subsequent generation. How do inheritance laws work with karma? How does one know which time period is the last one before attaining moksha? 

Isn't it enough to have to chase so many things in one lifetime without the additional worry of topping the karma charts across lifetimes? 

Mind it

My family and friends like the way I write. Or at least they say so and I choose to believe them, partly because trust is the foundation of every relationship and all that but mostly because it does wonders for my ego. I suffer from a condition called the writer’s flow nearly as often as I court its daft and lazy brother writer’s block. I have a way of really holding people down to the words they utter and making them wish they hadn’t been quite so magnanimous with their compliments. I start sending them a lot of reading material, probably more than they have to go through at work. There comes a point after which they give up. Reader retention is not one of my strengths.

That’s probably why I’m not particularly generous with praise. I’m cautious with my compliments to begin with so that it’s easy to retract when the person’s work suddenly becomes absolute crap or escalate when it turns out to be a lot better than I expected. And it feels wonderful when others don’t do the same thing to me. Karma is great but the “do unto others” idea is far too anglicised for my taste. 

Lie Your Heart Out

Is it rational to be honest if you know you'll get into trouble? From the point of view of behavioural economics, there are three types of people: rational (they make an action choice in the first time period and stick to it), quasi-hyperbolic naive (they change their mind when the time comes to act on their choices) and quasi-hyperbolic sophisticated (they know that they are unlikely to stick to their original choice so they make arrangements to prevent themselves from deviating from the chosen strategy). 

I'm given to understand that rationalists are nasty, lying reprobates who act entirely in self-interest. I suppose they will lie every chance they get. Never trust a true rationalist. The quasi-hyperbolic sophisticated person wants to lie but knows that there's a good chance that he will end up telling the truth so he will make arrangements to commit himself to lying, say, by extinguishing the truth, brainwashing himself, testing himself to see if he holds up under torture: the sophisticated guy is classic contract killer material. 

A quasi-hyperbolic naive person is a spineless, useless creature. Being naive, he will want to lie but helplessly blabber the truth when the time comes. He is clearly the most lovable one of the three. 

Lane Walking is Sane Walking

I strongly advocate lane systems for walking inside metro stations. There is usually more traffic inside major metro stations during peak hours than there is on the most important flyovers in the city. I’m really tired of slamming into people or getting stuck behind slow movers.

Here’s how the system works. Elementary. On the staircases, we have three lanes. The right lane is for athletes and dreadfully unpunctual people, the centre lane is for people moving at an average speed and making good time, the left lane is for slow people. Everybody should stay to the left side of the divider on the staircase, just as we drive on the left. Escalators are only for people with luggage, arthritis or other reasonable liabilities. If anybody wants to run up the escalator, they should be forced to do so on those moving in the opposite direction. Elevators are for the elderly. Train doors opening is akin to a red light. Everyone on the platform should stop moving around and let the people from the train quietly file away in the wonderfully efficient lane system. For the incoming traffic, the left lane gets a green signal first because they need seats the most. It is reasonable to assume that anybody who has the energy to stay on the right lane also has the energy to stand on the train. Train doors closing is the next red light. Throw in a couple of roundabouts and some cardboard monuments and the metro will truly be world class. 

A Matter of Class

I’m quite a fan of an online cartoonist who has devoted much of his time to researching minor behaviour and speech modifications that can make you appear “100% classy.”While he usually deals with more serious issues like the possibility of adding, “You may quote me,” at the end of each sentence or naming your dog ‘Sir’, I decided to turn my attention towards the more mundane matter of appearing classy on paper so that I could help people ooze class on their webpage or blog. I have the first step all figured out. It’s quite elementary, really. In order to appear classy, I must do exactly what Wikipedia does to be mistaken for a real source of information: obsessively reference everything I write and add footnotes wherever possible.[1]

The second step, obviously, is to use hyperlinks. Now this step calls for some prudence. If you hyperlink everything, your page ends up looking rather shady. Hyperlinks must be evenly distributed, thoughtful and used judiciously. One hyperlink for every 150-200 words is ideal.

The third step is to replace a few words with more complex synonyms. This will require a little bit of effort to ensure the context is correct. Another excellent idea is the use of third person. “One” is just so much classier than you or I.

The last step of course is style. If one doesn’t have that, there’s not much one can do.

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[1] Support for this school for thought can be found here.

Talk to the Hand

In my experience, the smartest people have perfectly awful handwritings, barely legible, almost as if the brain is too engrossed in more complex thoughts to care about aesthetics. This observation bothered me. What gets you a slap on the wrist with a ruler (not that I was in that kind of school) when you’re young is perceived as character and the willingness to be different when you’re older. This was a matter of great concern for me because my writing has always been more than legible. I was quite worried that I would come off rather dense, as I probably do in this neatly typed post.

Lately, however, I’ve changed my mind. Yes, a lot of smart people I know do have dreadful handwritings. But any handwriting that’s legible and doesn’t look like it’s straight out of a cursive writing book is a mark of artistic ability. I write like crap when I’m “not in the mood.” Can a person with a lousy hand write well when they “feel like it?” More choice means better optimisation. So there.

Sometimes I can’t help feeling that 2 years of economics hasn’t done much for me other than adding the words “optimisation” and “equilibrium” to my daily vocabulary. 

The Waiting Game

I’m not the sort of person who is usually on time. I have a rare condition. I once arrived so late that one of the people I was supposed to meet, having waited for me for over an hour, went home. I didn’t notice. I also frequently lie about my location to make it easier for the other person to endure the wait. Of course, when it becomes apparent that I lied because it doesn’t take 2 hours to reach anywhere from Connaught Place, they get a bit annoyed, disregarding the fact that I did it for their own good. Nobody appreciates how considerate I really am.

I do, however, have very strict rules about waiting for others. I don’t like to do it, so I don’t. I make sure I’m adequately late so that I don’t need to do so. In addition to my natural gift for being appallingly late, this determination helps me time things to perfection. Of course, this means that I have no idea of how to reach a place on time, say, for an interview. I turn up freakishly early, try to while away time, lose track of it and end up being late anyway.

Recently, one of my friends turned this habit into a two-player waiting game and lied about her location as well as the time we were supposed to meet. Imagine her astonishment and my indignation when I was the first to reach. Obviously, this means that I will have to further delay my arrival in future to account for the possibility of her lying. The only optimum that exists is for everyone to tell the truth while I do as I please. Otherwise, as a cursory study of any cheap talk game will tell you, there will only exist a babbling equilibrium. 

How Drumming Will Improve Your Economics

I’m convinced that drummers would make marvellous economists. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t. They are used to dealing with a lot of variables at the same time. Anyone who can handle tom-toms, a floor tom, a bass drum, a snare drum and a variety of cymbals should laugh in the face of hypothetical constructs like treatment effects. A good drummer is as precise as a good economist, if not more. They also appear to find joy in pursuing something that was considered an accompaniment, and have gradually taken centre stage, becoming an indispensable part of the paradigm that created them. Additionally, drummers have a certain charisma that economists could really use.

Given my track record in economics, what would happen if I tried my hand at drumming? Well it’s a relatively easy forecast for a seasoned pseudo-economist like me to make. At first, I would appear almost prodigious, “a natural” at what most people find difficult. Then suddenly it would dawn upon everyone that I lack some skill that is essential for drumming, say timing. Then I’ll reject the principles of drumming and call them counterintuitive. And finally I’ll wind up as a technically flawed “intuitive” pseudo-drummer. I think I’d be all right with that. Just as the most appealing part of an economist to me is eloquence, the thing I value most in a drummer is panache. I read my fairytales carefully and I know appearances wouldn’t appear if they didn’t matter.