What I'm Missing Today...
"No. Very few people from Berkeley make any of the seminars at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco," says Chad Jones.
"That's easy to explain," says George Akerlof. "Consider the high quality of the marginal seminar you miss here at Berkeley."
Today's seminar that I'm missing is by Stanford's Bob Hall (I have to teach). Bob says: "I'm giving the 1023rd paper applying George's lemons model to the labor market. And yet there is still something new to say."
Q: Why are we justified in inferring that Bob Hall was once a computer programmer, and that his mind has been shaped by close encounters with a machine with a ten-digit register?
A: The number "1023." 1023 is as high as you can count in ten binary digits. The use of "1023" as a synonym for "a very large number" is a sign of having once spent a lot of time with a ten-digit register.
April 28, 2-4 p.m., 639 Evans MACROECONOMICS: Bob Hall (Stanford University), "The Amplification of Unemployment Fluctuations through Self-Selection": http://www.nber.org/papers/W11186.
UPDATE: Bob Hall corrects the record.
