Do yourself a favor

Read George Will's latest column. JK Galbraith shuffled off the mortal coil this week, and this is Will's critical yet respectful remembrance of the last of the great price-fixers. Galbraith definitely had a great effect on my education, though not in any way he would have appreciated. The Econ department at UT, at least in the late 80's/early 90's, was dedicated to his proposition that economics is a normative, not objective, endeavor. Econometrics, statistics, etc., were just minor formalities--the overriding goal was to show, over and over and in as many varied ways as possible, that at best markets didn't work, and that at worst they were merely tools for oppression of whatever particular group had the most multi-culti cachet at the moment. Hell, we had our own certified Marxist economics professor (his wife was my first Russian teacher).

What I learned: as George Will likes to say, some ideas are so patently absurd that only an intellectual can believe them.