Reading a list of words, although commented, may sound boring. Admittedly, at times it is, but Bill Bryson’s approach and style is refreshing and amusing. A good example is put on the back cover:

Barbecue is the only acceptable spelling in serious writing. Any jounalist or other formal user of English who believes that the word is spelled barbeque or, worse still, bar-b-q is not ready for unsupervised employment.

If I should criticise anything, it would be that the book is more aimed at journalists and perhaps authors of novels and the like, rather than at technical and scientific writers like myself. But of course, there are more journalists than scientists in the world.

I’m astray. My intention here was to post a few noteworthy entries from the book (and probably more in later posts as I work my way through the book; right now I’m somewhere on ‘F’):

exception proves the rule, the. A widely misunderstood expression. As a moment’s thought should confirm, it isn’t possible for an exception to confirm a rule – but then that isn’t the sense that was originally intended. Prove here is a ‘fossil’ – that is, a word or phrase that is now meaningless except within the confines of certain sayings (‘hem and haw’, ‘rank and file’ and ‘to and fro’ are other fossil expressions). Originally prove meant ‘test’ (it comes from the Latin probo, ‘I test’), so the exception proves the rule meant – and really still ought to mean – that the exception tests the rule. The original meaning of prove is preserved more clearly in two other expressions: ‘proving ground’ and ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

Never liked that expression, now I have good reason too. I just noticed that Bryson’s punctuation is slightly at odds with what I’m used to (in particular, see his placement of commas relative to quotation marks). Perhaps it’s an English thing, perhaps it is contentious. (Bryson has an appendix on punctuation, by the way, I’ll get to it in a hundred years, perhaps, with my normal progression). Anyway, another interesting entry:

fact that. This phrase made Strunk ‘quiver with revulsion’ and he insisted that it be revised out of every sentence in which it appeared. That may be putting it a trifle strongly. [Perhaps, but Strunk wrote his book almost a hundred years ago.] There may be occasions where its use is unaviodable, or at least unexceptionable. But it is true that it does generally signal a sentence that could profitably be recast. ‘The court was told that he returned the following night despite the fact that he knew she would not be there’ (Independent). Try replacing ‘despite the fact that’ with ‘although’ or ‘even though’. ‘Our arrival was delayed for four hours due to the fact that the ferry failed to arrive’ (Sunday Telegraph). Make it ‘because’.

UPDATE: More entries worth checking out: abbreviations, allusion, anticipate, between, but, claim, compound, dangling modifiers, data, double meanings, double negatives, due to, and enormity. Long list, I know, better read the whole thing while you’re at it.

Economists must inevitably try to sort out systematic patterns from random variations in the past-if only because, unassisted, policymakers would do the same thing more naively. In doing so economists will need probabilistic models and statistical methods of inference. Like historians, though, they must accept that a single agreed view of the causal structure of the record they examine will never emerge [Sims, C. A., 1981, What Kind of a Science Is Economics? A Review Article on Causality in Economics by John R. Hicks, The Journal of Political Economy, 89 (3), pp. 582-582].

* From The Erdös Number Project: Paul Erdös (1913–1996), the widely-traveled and incredibly prolific Hungarian mathematician of the highest caliber, wrote hundreds of mathematical research papers in many different areas, many in collaboration with others. [...] Erdös’s Erdös number is 0. Erdös’s coauthors have Erdös number 1. People other than Erdös who have written a joint paper with someone with Erdös number 1 but not with Erdös have Erdös number 2, and so on. If there is no chain of coauthorships connecting someone with Erdös, then that person’s Erdös number is said to be infinite.

“Congress is so strange,” a Russian immigrant once observed. “A man gets up and says nothing. Nobody listens. Then everybody stands up and disagrees.”

Amusing. The quote is from Buchholz’s New Ideas from Dead Economists, which I’m still(!) laboring away at.

The father of Economics was, as every economist know, Adam Smith, at least if we are talking about economics as its own, scientific disipline (and we are!). Adam Smith was from Scotland. Given that and Brittain’s position as world leader (in politics, trade, military, you name it), it comes as no surprise that all the early, great economists were British. They were also all rather close; this is how Buchholz begins the chapter on John Stuart Mill:

Almost all renowed British economists since Adam Smith have been linked through close friendships. Remeber that Smith’s good friend David Hume was a “godfather” to Thoms Malthus, who was an intimate friend with David Ricardo, whose comrade James Mill encouraged his economics. James begot John Stuart Mill. A slight break occurs since Mill did not befriend his successor Alfred Marshall. But Marshall learned from Mill’s works (and from the economist F.Y. Edgeworth, nephew or Ricardo’s friend Maria Edgeworth) and then thaught Keynes, who dominated British economics until World War II and produced numerous prominent disciples [p. 91].*

No surprise, perhaps, that the early development of a new field has a geographical structure, so to speak; after all, they had to learn from each other and compete for the same, few positions. Anyway, that it was a hegemony is beyond doubt:

In 1848, Mill published his chief work on economics, Principles of Political Economy. For decades it dominated the book market like monopolies Mill discussed within its pages. Oxford relied on the Principles until 1919, probably because its successor was written by Marshall, a Cambridge man. Indeed, the works of all the great economists illuminate long paths. [Here it comes:] From 1776 to 1976, just five books regined over economics in nearly unbroken succession: Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ricardo’s Principles, Mill’s Principles, Marshall’s Principles, and Samuelson’s Economics. What they lack in imaginative titles, they make up in endurance [p. 102].

Looks like I just got five new books on my ‘buy and read’ list. Perhaps a tall order, but 200 years of economics, almost 90% of its history, in just five books sounds rather cheap. (But how many volumes?)

* New Ideas from Dead Economists, Revised Edition, Todd G. Buchholz, 1999, Penguine Books.

Initiated and funded by the non-profit Indira Foundation, this effort was inspired by David Hilbert, who challenged the world to solve 23 fundamental mathematical problems in 1900. Since then, mathematicians have solved 10 of the now-famous ‘Hilbert Problems’, creating new fields of knowledge along the way.

“Hilbert made two powerful observations,” said Nicholas Nash, a member of the Indira Foundation. “First, having important, unsolved problems is essential to the vitality of a discipline. And, as important, by identifying those problems, we can inspire future generations to solve them.”

Taleb was there, not surprisingly, and suggested the ‘Black Swan problem’:

How can we be robust against “Black Swans”; that is, how can we (1) identify domains where these consequential rare events play a large role (these are too rare for any statistical models track them properly), and (2) instead of predicting Black Swans, build systems and societies that can resist their shocks.

King suggested the problem of international institutions:

What is the relationship between strong international institutions and international cooperation? Do strong international institutions lead to or result from international cooperation?

King also suggested a methodological problem:

A major methodological problem is how to avoid (or ameliorate) post-treatment bias in big social science questions. Post-treatment bias occurs when the causal ordering among predictors is ambiguous or wrong or when, in an attempt to control for confounding variables, one controls away a consequential variable.