I was due to appear at The Gladstone Hotel Gallery, 1214 Queen St West, Toronto Thurs Jan 31; 7:30 pm (doors 7pm), but sadly not. The event is cancelled and I’m very sorry about this. I’ve been routed back to New York to do TV there instead & will arrive in Toronto too late for the planned event. I apologise.

http://www.poppy.org.uk/

Amit Varma has won the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism. My esteemed colleague Clive Crook is runner up. Last year I shared the prize with Jamie Whyte, who coincidentally I am meeting with tomorrow. Jamie and I will raise a glass to you, Amit.

Leonid Hurwicz is not only the oldest man to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economics, he is the oldest person to win a Nobel prize of any sort. Here is Hurwicz on his work:

I tried to see how one could formalize the incentive issue. Initially I was thinking of it in rather informal terms, somewhat along these lines: Let us say a country has some economic problem, for instance its balance of payments is in bad shape, as in pre-war Poland. What would it do?  It might, say, introduce exchange controls (you must not export money, and so on). But what happens then? People figure out ways of exporting money: one has an uncle in London, others over-invoice or under-invoice… all the usual tricks. You could of course put them in jail or shoot them. But that is a distinct failure of economics, isn’t it? Because what economists should be able to do is to figure out a system that works without shooting people.

Read the whole article, by the ever-excellent David Warsh.

I’m going to emulate Marginal Revolution’s longtime comments policy: open on some posts and closed on others. Tyler and Alex claim to have got a better class of comment as a result.
Sensible? Um, comments are open…