{"id":1441,"date":"2020-03-02T17:03:26","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T17:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1441"},"modified":"2021-05-21T18:22:03","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T18:22:03","slug":"a-beautiful-mind-by-sylvia-nazar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1441","title":{"rendered":"A Beautiful Mind<\/em> by Sylvia Nazar"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A Beautiful Mind<\/em> by Sylvia Nazar<\/h1>\n

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Economists\u00a0are an easy profession to poke fun at. There’s an old joke:<\/p>\n

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Q: <\/strong>What’s the definition of an economist?
A: <\/strong>Someone who didn’t have the personality to become an accountant.<\/p>\n

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Then there is the quote attributed to President Harry Truman:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cGive me a one-armed economist. All my economists say, \u2018on the one hand…on the other’\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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John F. Nash Jr. at his Princeton graduation in 1950, when he received his doctorate<\/em><\/p>\n

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So it’s perhaps a bit surprising that the biography of mathematician\/economist John Nash was a best-seller and later became a very successful movie by Ron Howard starring Russell Crowe as the title character. I read the book, saw the movie, and then re-read the book. Both were excellent in their own way although the movie omits a number of darker anecdotes of his early life.<\/p>\n

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Nash was a professor who mysteriously spiraled into a\u00a0severe state of paranoid schizophrenia<\/strong>. He was institutionalized for many years and subjected to the\u00a0harsh\u00a0medications and physical treatments that were customary at the time. He then miraculously emerged from the illness<\/strong>\u00a0and once again became a productive member of the Princeton University faculty — owing much to his wife Alicia.<\/p>\n

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The Nobel prize for economics he received in 1994 was actually based on work he had done decades earlier. His conclusions came to be known as the “Nash equilibrium”<\/a>. So far as I can understand it this principle was illustrated pretty accurately in the movie. In a scene at the\u00a0bar, the student John Nash and his college buddies\u00a0are sizing up girls from a distance. Here Nash explains that — as applied to this particular situation of optimizing outcomes — Adam Smith<\/a> (perhaps the most famous and revered economist in history<\/em>) was\u00a0wrong.<\/strong> No false modesty here.<\/em><\/p>\n

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In spite of Nash’s recovery, there was ultimately a tragic ending as he and his wife were killed in an automobile accident in May 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″ _builder_version=”4.3.2″][et_pb_video src=”https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Governing-Dynamics-Ignore-the-Blonde-A-Beautiful-Mind-3-11-Movie-CLIP-2001-HD.mp4″ image_src=”https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Russell-Crowe-as-John-Nash-and-Jennifer-Connelly-as-his-wife-in-A-Beautiful-Mind.jpg” thumbnail_overlay_color=”rgba(0,0,0,0.6)” _builder_version=”4.4.2″ box_shadow_style=”preset2″][\/et_pb_video][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.3.2″ custom_padding=”0px||||false|false”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.3.2″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.3.2″]<\/p>\n

Personal connection<\/h4>\n

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The brother of a friend of mine actually had Nash for a class at Princeton during the period he was slipping into the schizophrenic fog. According to my friend’s brother, Nash was indeed a pretty unlikable character during this time.<\/p>\n

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