We all complain about what we do, but short of being an actual professor, I think I’ve got about the best job a philosophy/politics geek could want. Here I am (I mean RIGHT NOW), one floor down from my office in the GMU Law School, in a room with Bob Cooter (Yeah!), Gerd Gigerenzer (Yeah!), Robert Frank (Boo!), Cass Sunstein (Double Boo!), Vernon Smith (Double Yeah!), and various other intellectual luminaries arguing with each other about the Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior. Well, that’s just cool. In two weeks, I go to St. Louis to eavesdrop on a discussion of Douglass North’s new book manuscript. I can’t imagine a grad program that could possibly provide me with so much exposure to first rate, bleeding edge, social thought. It’s like a moveable interdisciplinary department that has the social science all-stars as the faculty. Or like the intellectual wannabe’s version of being a stagehand at Woodstock. Lucky boy!
OK shouldn’t be doing this… back to taking notes… Varieties of Internalization via cognitive dissonance or self-perception… OK.