BOOKS OF MY YOUTH: LUCKY JIM. Studying economics changes you. (For example, children can be viewed as human capital.) I loved LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis when I was about twenty. It is still funny and liberating, but I have changed. Jim is a struggling young academic whose career may turn on the success of an article he has written. He shrinks from even repeating the title of the article: “It was a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.” And the title? The title is: “The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485.” I still find the passage very funny, but I am rueful that today I would think that awful subject was very important (those shipbuilders changed the course of history). Worse, I would read that awful article if I had the chance.
Archive for April, 2008
BOOKS OF MY YOUTH: LUCKY JIM.
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008CHILDREN AS HUMAN CAPITAL (COMMENT).
Monday, April 21st, 2008CHILDREN AS HUMAN CAPITAL (COMMENT). Nick commented here that he rarely thinks of the family as an economic unit. Kids, it may surprise you that—when economists look at families—you can be considered as either consumer durables or as investments in human capital. Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics in part for his pioneering work in this area. Parents can be considered as treating children as consumer durables when they take pleasure in their children’s charms and accomplishments. They can be considered as treating children as investments when they hope that the children will care for them in their old age. Note in the wikipedia article that a major component of investment in human capital is opportunity cost. A mother’s time in child care could be spent earning income; similarly, when you go to college an opportunity cost is what you could have earned if you had a job.
RATIONAL CONSUMERS STRIKE BACK.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008RATIONAL CONSUMERS STRIKE BACK. I posted here about some of the ways that sellers can take advantage of irrational consumers. Lee Bryant sent me an article about how college textbook publishers issue new editions every few years. The result is to destroy the resale value of used copies of the books. Economists Austan Goolsbee and Judith Chevalier have done a study which shows that when a textbook reaches an age when a revision is to be expected, sales of the book drop sharply. Students take the publication date of a textbook—and therefore the resale value—into account when they are buying books.
MY MOTHER AND THE ZOO.
Saturday, April 19th, 2008MY MOTHER AND THE ZOO. Because of my mother’s connection to the Brookfield Zoo through Mr. Bradley, the Zoo played a big part in her life and our life. She chose our family dentist because he had been helpful with the elephants at the Zoo. Her brother Walter worked in the bird house at the Zoo before World War II. Once he brought home some emu eggs and my grandmother made an omelet from them. My grandmother also had a pet alligator name Allie, originally from the Zoo. She kept it in the bathtub and brought it up to the family summer place in Lakeside, Michigan, where apparently it disappeared. My mother told the story of the difficulty she had in phoning around looking for a veterinarian who could treat a sick panda on April Fool’s Day. She knew a lady who kept snakes, including Big Ben (a cobra, I think). My mother spoke of being at the Zoo before it opened (in 1934) when a snake escaped. People called out to her, “Don’t move, Miss Pallesen.” When she told the story, she always added, “I wasn’t going to move anyway.”
HERBERT BRADLEY—FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD.
Friday, April 18th, 2008HERBERT BRADLEY—FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD. Alice Bradley’s first husband said that Herbert would not stand out in a crowd of two, which may demonstrate that the husband was preoccupied with outward show. Herbert Bradley was a remarkable man. He was a self-made man. He left home in Canada as a young man. Years later, he sent an inquiry to his family about whether he should visit. The answer was: don’t bother to come. Herbert was an African explorer and animal collector in the twenties and took his wife and his six year old daughter with him on safari. My mother said that Herbert had tasted human flesh prepared by the cannibals. She said that he thought it tasted something like chicken. She also said that the cannibals thought that the flesh from the hand was the greatest delicacy. Herbert was a practical man. Throughout Africa and everywhere else, even into his eighties, he always carried a sewing kit.
MY MOTHER WAS A BRAVE WOMAN.
Thursday, April 17th, 2008MY MOTHER WAS A BRAVE WOMAN. My mother had a courage that may have come partly from the Bradleys. She told me of apartment sitting at the Bradleys’ apartment when they took long trips. Once she went to see the famous Orson Welles production of MacBeth and found herself frightened when she got home to the empty apartment. My mother, who never fired a gun in her life, got one of Mr. Bradley’s guns and slept with it under her pillow. She also was responsible for handling Mr. Bradley’s apartment buildings while they were away. Once she got a phone call from tenants who told her that the janitor at their building had threatened tenants with a gun. She went in person to tell the janitor that he was fired.
MY MOTHER—PIONEER LAWYER.
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008MY MOTHER—PIONEER LAWYER. Our family knew the Bradleys because my mother had been the legal secretary for Herbert Bradley for many years. Herbert Bradley clearly was a feminist for his time and for any time, offering support to his wife, who was such a strong, achieving woman. I wonder if his influence helped make Alice Bradley Sheldon the strong woman she was and perhaps created some of Alice’s problems. Alice’s parents made her a woman capable of, and driven to, achievement at a time when the outside world was hostile to feminine achievement. I know that Mr. Bradley and his friend Harry Bigelow (a supporting character in the Julie Phillips book, but the Dean of the University Chicago Law School) provided essential support to my mother, who, after taking night classes, in 1938 became one of the very few women lawyers in the country.
ALICE SHELDON—STILL MORE FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD.
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008ALICE SHELDON—STILL MORE FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD. Just before we arrived, Mrs. Bradley—who was 75—had stumbled upon a hornet nest. Alice had helped her to put some kind of lotion on the stings. They had counted over 70 stings. Mrs. Bradley was very cheerful and stoic about the stings. Ting Sheldon (Alice’s husband) and a friend from the CIA (certainly Bob Koke, based on the Phillips book) had arrived from Milwaukee by taxi so as not to miss any fishing time (everybody spoke openly of the fact that both men worked for the CIA). Everybody got together in the main cabin at the Lodge for dinner. The conversation was dominated by Mrs. Bradley telling wonderful stories about Africa. Ting got Alice talking about seeing before and after photos from World War II. In her war work she would identify bombing targets. The after pictures showed the destruction wrought by the bombings she had targeted. Ting speculated after one dinner that as an artist Alice would remember faces more accurately than others. A fragment of conversation: Mrs. Bradley: “Alice, did you give yourself that haircut with library shears?” Alice: “Yes.”
ALICE BRADLEY—MORE FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD.
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008ALICE BRADLEY—MORE FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD. On page 155 of the biography by Julie Phillips, Alice Bradely Sheldon is quoted on her dissatisfaction with her female body. Alice told us in 1957 that she thought that she had loved horseback riding as an adolescent for the same reason that a lot of teenage girls do. She was dissatisfied with the weakness of the female body and valued the power that a horse gave her. I had no idea what to make of this at the time, but what I have selected from the Julie Philips book clarifies things. Alice told us about being at a camp when she was roughly our age where she was miserable. She didn’t like her roommate and didn’t like the housekeeping rules. There was a prize, the “Camp Beast”, a stuffed animal that was awarded to the neatest cabin, but Alice’s cabin, to the disgust of the roommate, earned only criticism because Alice was so messy. Then the roommate had to go to the infirmary for an extended period. Alice triumphed by cleaning the cabin once and then disturbing nothing in it, sleeping on the floor to avoid having to make the bed. She won the Camp Beast throughout the period the roommate was away.
ALICE BRADLEY—FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD.
Monday, April 14th, 2008ALICE BRADLEY—FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD. My brother and sister and I spent somewhat more than two days with the Bradleys at the Lodge, in 1957 as best I can recall. My parent spent most of their time with Mr. and Mrs. Bradley and Alice spent basically all of that time entertaining us youngsters, who were twelve and fifteen. I want to record the important fact that Alice Sheldon was very nice to young guests that she didn’t know. She showed us a cabin with shelves lined with Science Fiction magazines and also with paperback mysteries. She said that she loved reading mysteries, but that science fiction was her true love. She showed us the woods, including a rock she liked to go to, and told us all about the mushrooms in the vicinity. She showed us what she called “Inky coprinus”, which when bruised gave off a bluish liquid that could be used as ink. In fact, we did use some of the liquid as ink. She pointed out an angel of death mushroom, but she knew the edible mushrooms in the area. We asked about one, and she replied that it was not poisonous, but that it would taste like an old baseball glove. She told us she had asked a hotel in Washington if she could have the mushrooms on their lawn and was allowed to take them.
