It’s Saturday noon and my toddler is taking a nap; I am not in the mood for doing academic work and by now too heavily pregnant to do any serious amount of housework. So here are two musing about books.

The first is a real book, with a wonderful 1970s smell. I finally could get hold of a copy of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare. I made photocopies of that book when I studied welfare economics in the mid-1990s, and subsequent attempts to buy the book always failed. It hasn’t been reprinted for yeeeeeeears, and the only second hand version that I once found was a few hundred dollars – too much for my budget. But purely by accident, I had another look earlier this week on the Amazon second hand market, and found one, for 50 dollars. A first edition, with the errata-page included. It arrived from California today – less than 5 days after I ordered it. It’s a first edition, previously owned by someone called David Owen Butcher. Thank you David, you made my day.

The other book is Facebook. It seems that the virus finally caught me. Last week a friend showed me the ‘inside’ of facebook, and tried to lure my into joining. I saw the phantom of the timesink in the close distance, so resisted the temptation. Yet “Chris’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/11/reforming-inheritance-tax/ suddenly made me think that perhaps facebook can also be useful, and hey, the economist in me woke up, and earlier this week I joined. I even joined the Crooked Timber group (not sure what that implies, though). So, did those of you who joined Facebook in July after “Henry set up the group”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/11/trying-not-to-lose-face/, ever went back to work on your social facebookrelations there?