Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Economists can be powerful, so to say, in more than one way. Let's see two of them:

1."Lauren Cohen, professor at the Harvard Business School and champion powerlifter and strongman. Also known as “Dr. Chest”, he is among the top 20 powerlifters in the world in his weight class, and he was runner-up two years in a row for the best paper in the Journal of Finance. He can bench press 500 pounds and squat-lift 700 pounds. That’s what I call “powerful”.

2. Alfred Kahn, a respected economist who worked on government regulation, died recently.

"While he respected numbers, he loved words and hated to see them misused. “The passive voice is wildly overused in government writing,” Mr. Kahn’s memo to his Civil Aeronautics Board staff continued. “Typically its purpose is to conceal information — one is less likely to be jailed if one says, ‘He was hit by a stone,’ than if he says, ‘I hit him with a stone,’” he wrote, adding that “The active voice is far more forthright, direct, humane.”"


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