My posts in the past day or two have prompted comments on a
wide variety of topics, so here is an omnium
gatherum of responses.
To Andrew C: We are
feeding our birds sunflower hearts. I
too was astonished to see a robin at the feeder, but there it was, and followed
by a number of others. Here in North
Carolina I saw something completely new to me:
a huge flock of robins gathering on the golf course outside our window
[don’t ask] and then as a group flying away.
I had no idea robins did that.
Susie and I are not birders – we do not have life lists, for example. But we have actually been on three birding
expeditions: a trip to the Asa Wright
house in Trinidad, a cruise off Baja California, and a birding safari to East
Africa. At our house in Western Mass, we
had a bird feeder, and I counted maybe 25 species of birds over the years,
including even a flock of wild turkeys that showed up several times, and a magnificent
cock pheasant that paraded around on our back patio.
To Marcel Proust: I
planned a third book on Marx but never wrote it, even though I did research
into such arcane topics as the history of the development of index
numbers. Several of my unpublished
writings deal with what would have been the subject of that book, including “The
Future of Socialism,” “The Indexing Problem,” “A Unified Reading of Marx,” and “The
Thought of Karl Marx,” all archived at box.net, accessible via the link on the
top of this page of my blog.
To S. Wallerstein: If
I were a bigger man, I would not mind that Vegara beat me to it, but alas I am
not a bigger man. I am reminded of the experience
of my old friend and sometime mentor in things Economic, Sam Bowles. Marx claimed that there is a tendency for the
rate of profit to fall because as production becomes more capital intensive,
there is less exploitable labor, which, he thought, was the ultimate source of
profit. Sam proved a very lovely theorem
showing that in a standard Sraffian model, a capital-intensive innovation in
production that gave its discoverer a temporary super-profit would, when it had
been adopted by all his competitors, result in an unambiguous rise, not fall, in the rate of
profit. When he announced this to his
graduate class, prior to publishing, a student said, “Sam, Okishio proved that
years ago.” Sam was reduced to
publishing a paper in the Cambridge
Journal of Economics with the title “A New Proof of Okishio’s Theorem.” Not at all the same thing!
3 comments:
It's not that you're not a bigger man.
You're someone who might be called "almost famous" (that was the title of a movie about a rock band about 20 years ago). Most people like me are definitively not famous and are never going to be famous and we realize that fairly early in life. Others are clearly famous and street are named after them: Martin Luther King, Salvador Allende, etc. Others are famous among all cultured people: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, James Joyce, Leonard Bernstein, etc.
Now you're almost a famous philosopher. You're close enough to being famous that at times you function like a famous person: everybody who reads knows that Camus, not Sartre, wrote The Plague and Camus justly wanted credit for that.
Not famous people like me long ago gave up on hoping that we'd be credited and applauded for whatever good and original ideas we come up with from time to time. No one cares, we realize.
Almost famous people still hope that they'll be credited and applauded for their good and original ideas. So it's not that you're not a big enough man: it's your situation as an almost famous person that makes it harder for you to accept that someone had the idea before you.
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