Random Stuff

I haven't posted anything in a long time. Why? Because facebook is eating up all my spare time. I love it so much....many of you may have already been stalked without knowing it.

I am currently taking a course in microeconomics that is really interesting and I thought I would post a link to a really cool paper we looked at for a problem set. You can find the paper here.

Basically the author looks at assassinations and tries to determine statistically whether a successful assassination attempt has any measurable effect on the political institutions of a country (relative to cases where an assassination attempt failed). Interestingly, in autocratic regimes a successful assassination seems to be associated with an increase in the chance that the country will move toward democracy. In democratic regimes, there was no really strong effect.

Very interesting stuff, but is it really economics? It seems to me that a lot of economics these days involves squatting in other people's fields and using statistics to analyze their data. Didn't we used to call these people statisticians and not economists?

Anyway, I really need to get to bed. We had an exam on Monday and it had been so long since I'd written one that I got completely stressed and didn't sleep the whole night. I'm still messed up.

I encourage all readers to join facebook and add me as a friend. You can also join the MIT micropoker club (it's open to everyone) and witness how I completely dominate the discussion board. Many can exceed my posts in quality, but no one can post as relentlessly and in the sheer quantity that I do.