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Additional Material
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| Having just spent five years in the South, I am accustomed
to people having more time on their hands than you enjoy. And in those
days, I had no compunction about making students read anything I happened
to enoy. Of course, I wouldn't do that now. But below are a selection of
readings that expand on the themes in the readings given above. The readings
below are strictly optional; they were just too good for me to discard. |
| The Great Eskimo Vocabulary
Hoax by Geoffrey Pullman is a wonderful piece, ostensibly about linguistics,
but really about intellectual laziness. He deconstructs the myth that the
Inuit have hundreds of words for snow, by first exploring whether the question
even makes any sense in the context of the structure of Inuit languages,
then laying out carefully what criteria might be reasonable for addressing
the issue, and then evaluating the best evidence he can put together. Pullman
does linguistics like a good economist should do economics. |
| There are also several readings by Steven Landsburg,
a professor at Rochester who writes a column for Slate
magazine and who, many years ago, used to host a radio talk show in Pittsburgh.
In Too Good to be True, he points
out how even in academic circles one must be skeptical of novel explanations
of social phenomena (and this idea is explored formally in Data
Mining. In Attack of the Giant Shipping
Carts, and Taken to the Cleaners,
Landsberg explores some perhaps trivial questions -- why have shopping
carts become larger, and why do women pay more at the dry cleaners -- that
are illuminating about the standards required of a good explanation in
the social sciences. Finally, The Meaning of Christmas
and The Bad News Quiz, are short items
that drive home the message that a lot of what you hear about economics
in the media is confused and confusing. |