Things I've Been Reading #6

Welcome to the weekly link-post. It’s a collection of things I thought were worth reading. Some odds and ends first: I am starting a collection of all the datasets I’ve seen used in economics on my website. Your contributions are welcome.

1. George Stigler was the first to seriously tackle the problem of minimizing the cost of subsistence, and by proxy linear programming. The simplex method hadn’t been invented, so he used some basic heuristic methods to chuck out unpromising foods, arriving at the somewhat absurd results as below. Converting for inflation, that’s $924 dollars and $1,089 respectively.
   

2. George Dantzig, who would invent the simplex method of linear programming, checked the solution, and found he was off by only 24 cents. (The calculations took 9 clerks two weeks to do. Such was life before computers!). The rest of the article is an amusing story of his misadventures in using linear programming to find the best weight loss diet. A quote from a colleague: “You crazy or something? We solve models to obtain optimal schedules of activities for others to follow, not for ourselves.”