I will be flying to Southern California this week for the ASSA meetings, which got me thinking about red-eye flights. For those of you not in the US, red-eye flights are so named because they are overnight flights on which one typically has a hard time sleeping. It is very common for travelers flying from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States to take red-eye — or overnight — flights, since those are typically cheaper, among other benefits.
So I have been thinking about red-eye flights. Or rather, I have been thinking about how grateful I am that my wife has decided not to book a red-eye flight on the way back from Southern California.
The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
When I left Rome to go to graduate school in 2001, one of the farewell gifts I received from an Italian friend was a copy of Carlo Cipolla’s Allegro ma non troppo.
Cipolla was an economist at Berkeley until his death in 2000; Allegro ma non troppo is a collection of his tongue-in-cheek essays.
The title can be interpreted in a few ways. The whole expression is often found in music, where it means “Fast but not too much.” “Allegro” can mean happy or cheerful, but it can also mean superficial or thoughtless, and I think Cipolla meant it in the latter sense, i.e., “Superficial, but not too much” given that the essays in the book are, for the most part, satirical.