We still haven't gotten to Star Trek, my 8-year-old and I. He is currently enchanted by lightsabers ...

1. Wonkblog: RIP Leonard Nimoy, economist
We still haven't gotten to Star Trek, my 8-year-old and I. He is currently enchanted by lightsabers
and Ewoks, practicing his Jedi mind tricks. Star Wars has zippier ships and bigger explosions. The
one time we pulled up Captain Kirk and co. on Netflix, he was slightly bored.
That will change soon. Boys mature, attention spans lengthen. Someday soon I will sit him down and
say, my boy, the time has come to meet Mr. Spock.
Let him teach you some economics.
In Spock's embrace of logic, my son, like generations of sci-fi fans before him, will find the cold
realities of economic theory laid bare. Spock eschews sunk costs. Spock maximizes utility. Spock
shows, as FiveThirtyEight's Ben Casselman wrote so elegantly today, "that logic can point the way to
morality, that evidence is the basis for truth, that curiosity matters more than dogma."
As Austan Goolsbee, a former chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, said on
Twitter this afternoon, "In many ways, he was the first economist on TV."
And yet in Leonard Nimoy's most famous scene as Spock - and that is why I'm writing this, because
Leonard Nimoy has passed at age 83, and we who so enjoyed him are left to mourn and remember
and celebrate - he expertly sketches the limits of economics, as they relate to the real world. He has
sacrificed himself to save his ship. He waits behind glass for death to come. His friend Kirk stands
outside the glass.
"Do not grieve, Admiral," the dying Spock says. "It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh..."
"The needs of the few," Kirk says.
"Or," Spock says, "the one."
Logical, yes, but not economically rational. People in theoretical models don't sacrifice themselves
for the common good. They ride free. They deplete the commons. They do what's best for
themselves, even if that's not what's best for everyone.
The world is not a theoretical model. Real people are not always rational economic actors. It is a
truth that economists are still struggling to account for, and one that I will share with my son, once
we finish crying.
And then I will tell him Leonard Nimoy is gone.

2. Jim Tankersley covers economic policy for The Post. He's from Oregon, and he misses it.
http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/c/34656/f/636543/s/43e05938/sc/17/l/0L0Swashingtonpost0N0Cblo
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siness/story01.htm