Author Archive | Sasha Volokh

right now, but I just wanted to claim the post-Post post.

Talking about Isaiah Berlin the other day, I almost said Irving Berlin. But has anyone ever seen them together? For instance, consider the lost first draft of the lyrics to the American standard “Let Yourself Go” from Follow the Fleet. (Note: Before doing this, you may want to read the comments to this post.) Man’s […]

YouTube on British Conservative Party leader David Cameron and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Hat tip: Tom Palmer.

A great story about the true etymology of “nachos.” And, the Nietzsche Family Circus, which “pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.” (Hat tip to Paul Hsieh, twice: For nachos via GeekPress, and for Nietzsche via NoodleFood.)

Glad you all liked the series of Ellsberg paradox posts. If you’re interested in these issues, check out the following fairly accessible article: Mark J. Machina, Choice Under Uncertainty: Problems Solved and Unsolved, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1987, at 121.

Back to the Ellsberg paradox (so-called, ’cause it’s not really a paradox). Based on a bunch of previous comments, let me summarize where we’re at, with a simplified version of the paradox. There are three balls. One is red. For each of the other balls, someone flipped a fair coin to determine whether they would […]

Looks like my Ellsberg paradox post below was pretty popular — about two dozen comments just in the first hour, between 11 p.m. and midnight (Eastern)! I’ll repeat the problem below, then give my explanation. If you haven’t done so before, you may want to think about what you would choose before reading the explanation. […]

There are three balls. One is red. Each of the others is either white or black. Now I give you a choice between two lotteries. Lottery A: You win a prize if we draw a red ball. Lottery B: You win a prize if we draw a white ball. Which lottery do you choose? Now […]

In a previous post, I mentioned Kant’s phrase, which Isaiah Berlin translated as: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” This is a loose translation from Kant’s original “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”; Berlin seemed to have valued […]

My former classmate (now AU prof) Ezra Rosser‘s paper, “Obligations of Privilege,” is now available on SSRN. Here’s the abstract: Little attention is paid to the nature of the high incomes of the rich nor to legal or norm-based obligations the rich owe society. This popular and scholarly inattention reflects the general acceptance of the […]

A fun quote from Joseph A. Schumpeter‘s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (I’m reading from the 3rd edition from 1950): The conclusions alluded to at the end of the preceding chapter [unsympathetic to capitalism] are in fact almost completely false. Yet they follow from observations and theorems that are almost completely true. Both economists and popular […]

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Does anyone know the actual source for this in Kant, and the actual quote in German? A Google search for “krummen Holz” yields a number of different formulations and no actual citation. Does Isaiah Berlin (whose book I don’t have on hand) […]

I can think of various reasons why people might favor policies that favor their industry. For instance: (1) Naked self-interest. (2) False consciousness: They wrongly come to believe that what’s good for the industry is good for America (“What’s good for GM…”). (3) True consciousness: They’ve learned how important their industry is from the experience […]

One of the reasons for the enactment of the antitrust laws was to safeguard political freedom by preventing the formation of large corporations powerful enough to control the government. Taft, in his book The Anti-Trust Act and the Supreme Court (written in 1914, after his presidency but before he joined the Supreme Court), said the […]

I know Eugene disapproves of funny article titles, and I tend to agree. Nonetheless, sometimes you just come up with a title that someone, even if not yourself, can use…. So, if your title is, say, “An Analysis of Intermunicipal Competition, 1980-87,” you might consider renaming it to “Seven Years in Tiebout.” Similarly, if your […]