econ

[caption id="attachment_240” align="alignleft” width="157” caption="Leo Tolstoy”][/caption] Leo Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the famous lines: “All happy families are happy in the same way. All miserable families are miserable in their own way.” I did my graduate thesis on the spatial relationship of stochastic variables. The stochastic variable which I found most interesting at the time was farmer corn yields. Since yields can’t go any lower than zero I had a preconceived notion that in bad years all farmer yields were bunched up down close to zero and on good years yields were very spread out with some farmers having average yields and some having nearly double their average yields.

[caption id="attachment_100” align="alignleft” width="200” caption="Hal Varian - Superstar”][/caption] So one of the top jobs in the world has to be the friggin’ gig that Hal Varian has. He’s the chief economist at Google. He might as well have business cards that read “Hal Varian, Mother Friggin Rock Star.” Plus he did his BS at MIT and got his MA in math and his PhD in econ at Berkeley. According to Wikipedia (aka digitalgod) he finished his education at MIT in ‘69 and his PhD at Berkeley in ‘73.