Day three at LSE

Thursday October 9th

It is very noticeable that the journey to and from London is becoming a little easier each day. When I used to commute from Oxford to Hyde Park Corner every day, I was eventually able to develop a very suitable routine to help me cope with the 4 to 5 hours travel per day. It was clear that such commuting requires a certain detachment of mind. I remember being very impressed with a book I read on a life time spent commuting from Didcot to London - with the excellent title of "Notes from Overground". Stoicism is the main requirement of the long-distance commuter - the ability to become detached from the unique features of each day's journey and, instead, focus on the averages overtime. Once the distribution of the times of the journey is understood internally, so each day's journey loses its individual effects.

I am continuing the "power walk" from Marble Arch to LSE each day - a walk of just over 30 minutes. Today's stop off was at Camisa's, our favourite pasta shop in Soho and somewhere I have been going to regularly for over 20 years now. Then into LSE by just after 12:00

I have been sketching out the piece I am planning to do for the dissertation seminar in a couple of week's time, and spent some time this morning working through the Lakatos collection on the third floor - my objective, something that gives me further information on early Greek heliocentric theories. I settled on T.E. Heath's Aristarchus of Samos - a book I remember from one of the history of science courses I took 25 years ago. This is a really excellent book - I don't suppose it is still possible to buy a copy though as it dates from 1910.

And so to the first seminar in Philosophy of Economics with Nancy Cartwright. Oddly enough, this takes place prior to the first lecture (which surely is a mistake). I sat with Lily (who also attends most of my other courses) We have a short chat to introduce ourselves and I am surprised to discover that there is another person who is both part-time (but just starting her second year) and formerly involved in investment management.

We have a seminar discussion about the Stern report on climate change - I haven't done the reading for this but do remember that a critical point relates to the discount factor to be applied to the future. I remembered that this had been set very low, whereas empirical data suggests people have quite high personal discount factors (15% say). So I suggest that action to battle is doomed to fail due to the personal discount factors implying no one places much value of things in the future - 10 years plus, let alone 700 years.

I also think that each generation accepts the world as they find it and so the worse environment in the future won't bother them as much as it would us.

Afterwards I had a drink in the Garrick cafe with the lady in her second year (whose name I can't remember). She told me alot about her first year experiences (seminars etc) and we discussed financial markets. Then we both went off to hear the first Cartwright "P of E" lecture (after which I definitely had a much better idea about the various "value judgements" underlying work like Stern's). In fact, this was probably the most interesting lecture I have been to so far.