The story was NOT apocryphal.
An email from Marjorie Oi, the widow of the late economist Walter Oi, prompted this message.
I had written an appreciative piece in it Regulation in 2014, shortly after Walter Oi passed away in December 2013. I often don’t like the titles editors choose; I usually prefer my own. But I couldn’t have done better than the title that the Regulation editors chose: “The moral vision of a blind economist.” It highlights Walter’s work in helping to end the draft and keeping the draft’s proponents at bay when they wanted to reinstate it.
By the way, reading it now, after not having done it for years, I think it’s in my top 20 of the 400+ popular pieces I’ve written.
I want to quote one passage before I get to the passage Marjorie emailed me about.
An example of Walter’s persistence in his professional work is his role in helping to prevent the draft’s reinstatement. Since the end of the design, there have been calls from time to time to renew it. One of them happened in the late 1970s, after a few years of the US military not recruiting the number of high-quality people it wanted. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) led the charge. Walter, like Meckling, Martin Anderson of the Hoover Institution, and Milton Friedman, realized that the all-volunteer force needed defense, and so he did. He attended the Hoover-Rochester Conference on the All-Volunteer Force in December 1979, the first draft conference held since the 1966 Chicago conference. The articles and reports from that conference were published in the 1982 book Registration and design. Walter, who loved pithy lines, provided a nice illustration in response to the claim that conscription would draft both the powerful and the weak. Walter said, “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts gave [draft] reprieve to all members of the legislature and to the fellows of Harvard College.”
Now to the passage in my article that Marjorie referred to.
I first met Walter when I was a graduate student at UCLA and he came to give a paper on workers’ compensation at our Law and Economics seminar, led at the time by my
mentor, Harold Demsetz. Walter was well into his presentation and had put some numbers on the board and, if I remember correctly, some equations. I sat next to a student named Ed Rappaport. Ed wanted to ask Walter a question, so he raised his hand. He held his hand in the air and I whispered, “Ed, he’s not going to visit you. He is blind.” “Real?” Ed responded. “Yes,” I replied, “that’s why the dog is in the corner.” Walter could present that well.
This next story may be apocryphal, but I think it’s true. Walter was at a conference where another economist wrote a long equation on the board. I suspect
the economist must have spoken the terms aloud as he wrote. Walter raised his hand. “Yes?” said the economist. Walter: “That third term in the equation. Shouldn’t that be a minus sign, not a plus sign?” The economist turned and looked at the equation. After a short silence he said, ‘Oh yes. Thank you.”
It turns out the story is true. Here’s how I know. In an email dated September 18, Marjorie wrote:
I was looking up some information for my daughter [Eleanor] to use in a presentation on Walter’s work in finishing the draft and one of the articles I sent her is your Cato piece on Walter. In it you mention the story of Walter who noticed an incorrect comparison during a seminar in Rochester. I can now confirm that the story is true. A former student of Walter, [X–Marjorie doesn’t have permission to quote him by name]just moved into my retirement community. He was a graduate student and was at the seminary where Walter pointed out the error. I’ve heard the story many times from many people, but never from a primary source. [Franco] Modigliani gave the seminar. I hope you are doing well.