The story is NOT apocrypha.
An email from Marjorie Oi, widow of the late economist Walter Oi, mentions this post.
I had written a thank you note Regulation in 2014, shortly after Walter Oi’s death in December 2013. I usually don’t like the topics chosen by the editors; I tend to pick my own. But I couldn’t do better than that title Regulation editors choose: “The Moral Vision of a Blind Economist.” It emphasizes Walter’s work in helping to end the draft and keeping draft supporters out of the way when they want to bring it back.
However, reading it now after not doing so for many years, I think it is in my top 20 of the more than 400 famous pieces I have written.
I want to quote one passage before I get to the paragraph that Marjorie emailed me.
One example of Walter’s persistence in his professional work is his role in helping prevent the reintroduction of the draft. In the time since the draft ended, there have been calls for a renewal. One happened in the late 1970s, after a few years when the US military was not recruiting the number of high-level recruits it wanted. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) led the charge. Walter, like Meckling, Martin Anderson of the Hoover Center, and Milton Friedman, realized that all volunteers needed to protect themselves, and he did. He attended the Hoover-Rochester Conference on the All-Volunteer Force in December 1979, the first conference on the draft to be held since the 1966 Chicago conference. The papers and proceedings of that conference were published in a 1982 book Registration and Drafting. Walter, who was fond of pithy lines, gave an excellent illustration in answer to the claim that the frame would be gathered from the strong and the weak. Said Walter: “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts gave [draft] the demotion of all members of the Legislature and friends of Harvard College.”
Now to the part of my article that Marjorie refers to.
I first met Walter when I was a graduate student at UCLA and he came to present a paper on workers’ compensation at our Law and Economics seminar, which was held at the time
advisor, Harold Demsetz. Walter was getting good at his speech and had put numbers on the board and, if I remember correctly, a figure or two. I was sitting next to a student named Ed Rappaport. Ed wanted to ask Walter a question so he raised his hand. He kept his hand in the air and I whispered to him, “Mhl, he won’t call you.” He is blind.” “Really?” replied Ed. “Yes,” I replied, “that’s why that dog is sitting in the corner.” That’s how good Walter was in silence.
The following story may be apocryphal, but I think it is true. Walter was at a conference where another economist was writing a long equation on the board. I’m guessing
the economist had to speak aloud as he wrote. Walter raised his hand. “Yes?” said the economist. Walter: “That’s the third term in math. Shouldn’t that be a minus sign, not a plus sign?” The economist turned to look at the equation. After a pause, he said, “Oh, yes. Thank you.”
It turns out that the story is true. Here’s how I know. In a September 18 email, Marjorie wrote:
I was looking for some information for my daughter [Eleanor] which you can use in a presentation about Walter’s work in finishing the draft and one of the articles I sent him is your Cato piece about Walter. In it, he tells the story of Walter noting the wrong number at a seminar in Rochester. I can confirm that the story is true. Walter’s former student, [X–Marjorie doesn’t have permission to quote him by name]I just moved into my retirement community. He was a graduate student and it was at the conference that Walter exposed the error. I have heard the story many times from many people, but never from a primary source. [Franco] Modigliani was giving a meeting. I hope you are fine.
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