A Blind Economist’s Insight
The story was NOT apocryphal.
An email from Marjorie Oi, the widow of the late economist Walter Oi, prompted this post.
I had written an appreciative piece in Regulation in 2014, shortly after Walter Oi died in December 2013. I often don’t like the titles that editors choose; I usually prefer my own. But I couldn’t have done better than the title that the Regulation editors chose: “The Moral Vision of a Blind Economist.” It emphasizes Walter’s work in helping end the draft and keeping the draft proponents at bay when they wanted to reintroduce it.
By the way, reading it now after not having not done so for years, I think that it’s in my top 20 of the over 400 popular pieces I’ve written.
I want to quote one passage before I get to the passage that Marjorie emailed me about.
One example of Walter’s persistence in his professional work is his role in helping prevent the reintroduction of the draft. From time to time since the draft ended, there have been calls for renewing it. One happened in the late 1970s, after a few years in which the U.S. military was not recruiting the number of high-quality people it wanted. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) led the charge. Walter, like Meckling, the Hoover institution’s Martin Anderson, and Milton Friedman, realized that the all-volunteer force needed defend- ing, and he did so. He attended the Hoover-Rochester Conference on the All-Volunteer Force in December 1979, the first conference on the draft to be held since the 1966 Chicago conference. The papers and proceedings of that conference were published in the 1982 book Registration and the Draft. Walter, who loved pithy lines, gave a great illustration in response to the claim that a draft would conscript from the powerful as well as the weak. Said Walter: “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts gave [draft] deferments to all members of the legislature and to the fellows of Harvard College.”
Now to the passage in my article that Marjorie referred to.
I first met Walter when I was a graduate student at UCLA and he came to give a paper on workmen’s compensation in our Law and Economics seminar, run at the time by my
mentor, Harold Demsetz. Walter was well along in his presentation and had actually put some numbers on the board and, if I recall correctly, an equation or two. i was sitting beside a student named Ed Rappaport. Ed wanted to ask Walter a question and so he raised his hand. He kept his hand in the air and I whispered, “Ed, he’s not going to call on you. He’s blind.” “Really?” responded Ed. “Yes,” I replied, “that’s why that dog is sitting in the corner.” That’s how good Walter was at presenting.
This next story may be apocryphal, but I think it’s true. Walter was at a conference where another economist was writing a long equation on the board. I’m guessing
the economist had to have been saying the terms out loud as he wrote. Walter raised his hand. “Yes?” the economist said. Walter: “That third term in the equation. Shouldn’t that be a minus sign, not a plus sign?” The economist turned and looked at the equation. After a pause, he said, “Oh, yes. Thank you.”
It turns out that the story is true. Here’s how I know. In a September 18 email, Marjorie wrote:
I was looking up some information for my daughter [Eleanor] to use in a presentation about Walter’s work in ending the draft and one of the articles I sent her is your Cato piece about Walter. In it, you mention the story of Walter noting an incorrect equation in a seminar at Rochester. I can now confirm that the story is true. A former student of Walter’s, [X–Marjorie doesn’t have permission to quote him by name], just moved into my retirement community. He was a graduate student and at the seminar where Walter pointed out the error. I’ve heard the story many times from many people, but never from a primary source. [Franco] Modigliani was giving the seminar. Hope you are keeping well.