Econlinks

  • Intercontinental flights are also occasions to watch on-the-watch!-list movies you didn’t watch yet: in my latest I finally saw Woody Allen’s– already (in)famous — “Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona” (IMDb, RottenTomatoes). My verdict: the movie is excellent (my favourite from Woody Allen remains however Sweet and Lowdown), with some of the dialogues between the main characters simply brilliant. In particular, I think Javier Bardem should have also gotten (the movie did get one) the Golden Globe (though I have to confess that I have not seen yet ‘In Bruges’, with the winner at this category, Farrell– hence this assessment is simply using my biased priors). Bardem’s role in this movie, Juan Antonio, is a perfect maximizer of instantaneous utility, has a close-to-infinite temporal discounting factor and, needless to say, I also share with him, though so far with less practical success, the more ex/rotic principles :-).
  • Email your future self in T years, where 0.25 less than T less than 29 (constraints as of now/ for now). Check for instance if your current principles are time invariant… or simply wish yourself “Happy Birthday” for when you’re likely to be alone and grumpy :-). PS. Make sure the email address you provide will actually survive those T years…
  • With the occasion of my San Francisco & surroundings trip, after my ASSA conference, I also gave a seminar at UC Merced, a very new UC university, on my (older) co-authored paper “Returns to tenure or seniority?” (download the latest draft; a new version will be available soon); get also the actual presentation from Merced, for any of you interested. The Econ group at UC Merced is very small still, but I had a great time interacting with each of them, and some really interesting comments. Many thanks to Alex, Katie, Shawn, Todd and Justin– with very special thanks to Alex for the invitation and organizing everything! My only regret: did not manage to make it this time to Yosemite, despite its being very close to Merced! Next time, there will obviously be a next time…

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4 thoughts on “Econlinks”

  1. Impressive that you hold ‘In Bruges’ so high, now I am curious :-). RottenTomatoes ranks it very high (81%), but so does with Woody Allen’s movie in context, with basically the same grade (82%), so I will get to make the difference then :-). <BR/><BR/>Now on the other thing: as I said, I don’t think the movie is necessary fabulous, though I like it a lot, I said more about the acting. All of the

  2. OK, I saw "Vicky Cristina, Barcelona". A delightful moment, but I couldn’t make out much of it’s finale. It may be that there’s nothing much to make out of it:) Javier Bardem plays greatly a guy who is a maximiser of instantaneous utility, like you say, but he’s such a bad maximiser in the short/medium term and even that doesn’t require that much effort in his situation – speaking of the scene

  3. Now that you mention this, there’s an interesting contrast between actors who always play well and you know that even if the movie is rather dull their role will be just perfectly played (among the mentioned ones, Bardem falls here; I have 5 names or so on such a list, next to Bardem) and actors that typically play dull even in interesting movies, except for very rare occasions (Rourke falls here

  4. I didn’t see "Vicky Cristina, Barcelona" – but I will – I saw "In Bruges" but I don’t really have a strong opinion about the Golden Globe award for the best actor in a comedy. "In Bruges" was absolutely great, time well spent:)<BR/><BR/>But what about the best actor in a Drama category? I only saw "Milk", "The Wrestler" ans "Frost/Nixon" and Mickey Rourke definitely deserved the prise among these

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