Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Nickel and Dime

When I was a little kid, I had a lemonade stand for a day. An early brush with capitalism. My mother made the lemonade, we put a table and chair at the sidewalk, and placed the pitcher and a small sign on the table. 

I set the price at two cents a cup. 

My brother was my first customer. He handed me a dime and asked for his change. I wasn't sure what to do. My brother looked at the change I had, and picked up a nickel and three pennies.

I knew that wasn't right. He's giving me one very small lightweight coin and taking away four larger heavier ones? I told him I wasn't born yesterday, and I knew that wasn't fair.

My brother was quite amused. He explained the arithmetic, but I wasn't buying it. He was clearly trying to cheat me. No one would create a currency in which a small coin was worth ten times as much as a heavier larger coin. That doesn't make sense.

Perhaps that's why my brother is a physicist-turned-economist and I'm a (too logical) mathematician.

When I ran the above story past my brother, he replied (bemusedly, according to him, which led to a bemusing discussion about what "bemused" actually means):

Logically, though, the conclusion should be the other way around. Your little kid self argued in terms of size, i.e., in physical terms, while my teenage self argued in symbolic, i.e., mathematical terms. And I didn't try to cheat you, which my present economist self finds surprising.