qui tacet consentire videtur

I want to shout it from the rooftops

I think the optimal strategy in the market for love is emotional volatility arbitrage. Much like LTCM’s strategy of convergence trades, the aim of emotional volatility arbitrage is to reduce the risk of destabilizing shocks in one’s life. If happiness in life is a function of expectations, then to expect too much is to invite disappointment and be unhappy. In view of the inevitable regression to the mean in life, we should have low expectations that are almost always pleasantly exceeded, rather than high expectations that always lead to disappointment.

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The Scholars Program organized a trip for first-years to The Pond at Bryant Park last night. I wanted to go partly to learn how to ice-skate and partly because of I thought it would be something like that scene from ‘Full House’ where Hyegyo takes Bi to an empty LotteWorld rink to learn ice-skating (The scene is about a minute into the clip). Unfortunately my teacher-to-be chose not to go, so there was no one to teach me how to ice-skate.

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Farewell Milton Friedman.

For some reason I can’t quite recall now, I started reading Capitalism and Freedom in late JC1, which somehow got the attention of the econ teachers and landed me in the s-paper class, which introduced me to everything wonderful about economics that the A-level syllabus did not include, and the best tutor of all, Aaron. I can only imagine that Friedman had, in a path-dependent skills acquisition kind of way, had a big impact on the initial conditions for my present commitment to economics.

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Apparently I received an ‘honorable mention‘, though I didn’t receive any e-mail notification. There seems to be some sort of prize, but not an invitation to the award ceremony… What a pity, I really wanted that all-expense-paid trip to Tokyo.

The policy proposals of Bryan Caplan’s (of EconLog fame) new lead Cato Unbound piece to adjust for voter irrationality are practical to the point of being machiavellian, but they seem to be based on principles somewhat contrary to libertarian ideals, which worries me. Though I agree that more issues should be taken off the table and out of the sphere of the state, some of his ideas might be very disturbing to libertarians.

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