February 17, 2007

The Logical Donkey

The funny thing, however, is that if you took your economics courses seriously, they would cripple your drive to make a bundle in the business. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis, for example, really does inspire the old joke about the two University of Chicago professors walking down the street who see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. They think about picking it up, but keeping walking because it's much more likely that they are both suffering mutual simultaneous hallucinations than that the free market would be so inefficient as to leave a $20 bill lying around.

--Steve Sailer
This reminds me of the medieval paradox of the perfectly logical donkey, standing between to two identical bales of hay, who starves to death because there's no reason to prefer one bale to the other.

A logical citizen wouldn't vote, either. What are the chances that your one vote is going to make any kind of a difference?

No comments: