David I. Meiselman
1924-2014
ITAs an economist, David Meiselman made a mark early, collaborating at the University of Chicago with eventual Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. His dissertation, The Term Structure of Interest Rates, was published by Prentice-Hall in 1962 and won a Ford Foundation award. David knew everyone and anyone in the circles of liberal-market thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, who held the chair at the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago. Among friends he was extraordinarily good-natured. Toward socialists, he was contemptuous—though I never saw him in their company, so I don’t know whether the scorn became personal. I wondered once that statists could get around Hayek’s insight on the epistemic deficit of planners, and David replied coldly, “They ignore it.”
When I complained about feckless Republicans and shilly-shallying think tanks (he was involved with both the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute), he said we have to live in the world we’re given, not the one I might like.
We both liked the business of markets. Through David and Winnie I met Henry Manne, scathing and cheerful critic of all things regulatory. For several years David and his wife brightened our winters in Sanibel. Either Win or my wife snapped the shot above, David as an expansive Tevye, at Purim twenty years ago.
August 7 2019
When I complained about feckless Republicans and shilly-shallying think tanks (he was involved with both the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute), he said we have to live in the world we’re given, not the one I might like.
We both liked the business of markets. Through David and Winnie I met Henry Manne, scathing and cheerful critic of all things regulatory. For several years David and his wife brightened our winters in Sanibel. Either Win or my wife snapped the shot above, David as an expansive Tevye, at Purim twenty years ago.
August 7 2019
I’m a paragraph. Drag me to add paragraph to your block, write your own text and edit me.
Henry G. Manne
An Economist To Remember
ITHenry G. Manne, founder of the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, died a year ago. He was 86. Most of our recent years’ visits to Florida had included lunch or dinner with Henry and his wife. The last time was two years ago. He was ill then, but still cheerful and analytical in considering the two alternative treatments that were available to him. There is a short wiki article on Manne that covers the basics but overlooks his enormous goodwill. Various memorial tributes note his influence in developing the theme of economics in law. But it was his 1966 book, Insider Trading and the Stock Market, that made him an icon at Barron’s Financial Weekly when I worked there in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Manne understood that the function of markets is to arrive at prices by processing information. Insiders possess more information than most market participants. Wasn’t it economic folly, then, to preclude them from acting on the information and thereby creating more efficient pricing? I never thought to ask Henry how he felt when a nominally free-market president, Ronald Reagan, considered bringing on Rudy Guiliani, a knee-capper, to head the SEC’s enforcement division. At Barron’s, the SEC was known as the Keystone Kops, at least on the editorial page presided over by Robert Bleiberg, who celebrated Henry Manne as a bringer of light to the economically benighted (who by and large insist on remaining in the dark). We met through a friend who passed away about a month before Henry. I may write a note about him another time.
January 25 2016
January 25 2016