I’m in the midst of a four week string of conferences and travel, and terribly backed up with posts on some great new papers, but I can’t let the tragic passing today of John Nash go by without comment. When nonacademics ask what I do, I often say that I work in a branch of applied math called game theory; if you say you are economist, the man on the street expects you to know when unemployment will go down, or which stocks they should buy, or whether monetary expansion will lead to inflation, questions which the applied theorist has little ability to answer in a satisfying way. But then, if you mention game theory, without question the most common way your interlocutor knows the field is via Russell Crowe’s John Nash character in A Beautiful Mind, so surely, and rightfully, no game theorist has greater popular name recognition.
Now…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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