I read the Economist for the laughs. Was searching the Web last night for some recent info on Long-Term Capital Management and ran across the Economist's writeup of a year ago when the 1997 Nobel prize for economics was awarded. Pretty funny stuff then, hilarious today. Lead follows:
"ECONOMISTS may sometimes seem about as useful as a chocolate tea-pot, but as this year's Nobel prize for economics shows, it isn't always so. On October 14th, the $1m prize was awarded to two Americans, Robert Merton, of Harvard University, and Myron Scholes, of Stanford University. Their prize-winning work involves precisely the sort of mind-boggling mathematical formulae that usually cause non-economists either to snooze or scream. That is too bad, for it ranks among the most useful work that economics has produced."
Carl Remick