Random thoughts this week

I've been reading a lot of economics books lately: Tim Harford's "The Undercover Economist" and "The Logic of Life", Malcolm Gladwell's "The Outliers", and now am reading "Discover Your Inner Economist". I also found in the book store today that Gladwell has a new book - "What the Dog Saw" and there is a sequel to Freakonomics called "Superfreakonomics", so I bought both of those, too.

In "The Inner Economist", the author - Tyler Cowen - cites a study that proved a point I made in a blog entry a few months ago regarding putting credentials after your name, a practice I call "Signature Resumes". To quote from the book:

"[Two professors]...hypothesized that of all the people with a given title, such
as Ph.D., the least successful people from that group should be the most likely
to advertise that title." (p. 110)

The findings - people of higher prestige used titles 4% of the time while people of lower prestige used titles 78% of the time. Pretty compelling if you ask me.

Our daughter is playing Uno - and often winning, though we do help with the strategy. In an attempt to make her feel proud of her achievement, I showed her the box that indicated the game was for children 7 and older. To my surprise, she walked away sad. We asked her to come back and play. She refused because the rules state you have to be 7. She wouldn't come back until I said 7 and older, or 3 years old and wearing pink pants. Then she came back, and proceeded to beat us. The next night when we wanted to play she wasn't wearing pink pants and wouldn't play. Now she believes that 3 year olds can play as long as they play with their parents.

Two other items categorized under "from the mouths of babes":

1) Our daughter likes to watch the closing credits of her movies because they often have characters dancing and singing as the credits roll. When the movie is over, she now asks us "Can I watch the credit cards"? Seems she goes shopping with momma a little too often.

2) Cajoling adults is a new past time for her. When she wants us to do something, she asks "Can you do me a favorite?"

Final comment of the day: Tomorrow we will have a son. He did not make me miss my beloved Broncos go to 6-0 by convincingly defeating the team everyone thought would win the division. We are inducing. Tomorrow at 7:30 AM we will give the baby a little nudge into the world. I'm assuming the nudging doesn't require 16.5 hours to complete.