Ideas from Others

By Ramesh Akkineni

Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one's monopoly - Dhirubhai H. Ambani

Economics was always more multidisciplinary than the rest of soft science. It just reached out and grabbed things as it needed to. And that tendency to just grab whatever you need from the rest of knowledge if you’re an economist has reached a fairly high point in Mankiw’s new textbook Principles of Economics. I mean, I opened that textbook; I must have been one of the few businessmen in America that bought it immediately when it came out because it had gotten such a big advance. I wanted to figure out what the hell the guy was doing where he could get an advance that was that great. So this is how I happened to riffle through Mankiw’s freshman textbook. And there I found laid out as principles of economics: opportunity cost is a superpower, to be used by all people who have any hope of getting the right answer. Incentives are superpowers. And lastly, the Tragedy of the Commons model, popularized by UCSB’s Garrett Hardin. And that caused the delightful introduction into economics -- alongside Smith’s beneficent invisible hand -- of Hardin’s wicked evildoing invisible foot. Well, I thought that was a more complete picture of economics, and I knew the merit that Hardin introduced me to that model, a Tragedy of Commons, that it would be in the economics textbooks eventually, and low and behold it finally made it about 20 years later. But it’s right for Mankiw to reach out in that way. What’s wrong is the way he does it, because he grabs without attribution. He doesn’t label it as physics or biology or psychology, or game theory, or whatever it really is. Fully attributing the concept to the basic knowledge from which it came, if you don’t that, it’s like running a business with a sloppy file system. It reduces your power to be as good as you can be. Now Mankiw is so smart he does pretty well already. He got the largest advance any textbook writer ever got. But, nonetheless he’d be better if he had absorbed this hard science ethos that I say has been so helpful to me. - Charlie Munger

During the contest an unlucky occurrence hurt his cause exceedingly. One of our adversaries having heard him preach a sermon that was much admired, thought he had somewhere read the sermon before, or at least a part of it. On search he found that part quoted at length, in one of the British Reviews, from a discourse of Dr. Foster's. This detection gave many of our party disgust, who accordingly abandoned his cause, and occasion'd our more speedy discomfiture in the synod. I stuck by him, however, as I rather approv'd his giving us good sermons compos'd by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, tho' the latter was the practice of our common teachers. He afterward acknowledg'd to me that none of those he preach'd were his own; adding, that his memory was such as enabled him to retain and repeat any sermon after one reading only. - from 'Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin'

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