Last week, we reported the passing of law and economics pioneer Walter Oi.
At the Big Questions Blog, Steven Landsburg, Oi's colleague at the University of Rochester, has posted a moving and humorous account of Oi, including details about Oi's monumental work in monopoly pricing and quirky anecdotes from a long and storied career, to wit:
But you can’t talk about Walter without coming back to his eccentricities. You could always count on him to derail a boring conversation by saying something perfectly irrelevant and perfectly incomprehensible, and then forcing everyone to guess what he was talking about. Once in the midst of a dreadfully dull discussion about the possible future business strategies of the Xerox corporation, Walter interjected (in that booming voice, always that booming voice): “I’ll tell you what scares me, boy. It’s that Ukrainian guy.” Of course, someone — it might have been me — fell for it and asked “Ummm…what Ukrainian guy?”. To which the answer was a perfectly predictable booming affirmation: “That Ukrainian guy. That’s what scares me, boy. That Ukrainian guy.” After several equally uninformative rounds, we dragged it out of him: Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, some Ukrainian guy bought some land in Canada, then rode out in a stagecoach to inspect his land, and somehow got abandoned in the woods. “Scares the hell out of me, boy — being lost in the woods like that.”
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He must have cultivated these traits for a very long time, because the Economics Department at the University of Chicago has a long (but sometimes broken) tradition of awarding, at the end of each academic year, the “Walter Y. Oi Award” to the graduate student who has asked the most irrelevant question — presumably in commemoration of something Walter asked in his own student days at Chicago over half a century ago. I’m not sure anybody knows what that question was, but according to one rumor, it came in the midst of a fairly technical lecture in Milton Friedman‘s Price Theory class, where Walter suddenly raised his hand and asked “Do you just make this stuff up as you go along, or what?”.
And somehow this reminds me of the time he walked into the coffee room and asked: “How much would you have to pay for a block of stainless steel?”. I asked him what size. He waved off the question and said “Not too big”. I will forever regret that I failed to answer “Not too much.”