Alice Rivlin, RIP, 1931-2019

by  Tyler Cowen in

My apologies for not having covered this earlier, but I have been traveling and relying on auto-published posts.  You will find many fine tributes here on Twitter.  I did meet and interact with her several times, and always found her the essence of both impressiveness and graciousness.  Arnold Kling has written a nice appreciation.

Comments

Ray Lopez

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RIP Alice Rivlin, we barely knew ye, but we're not economists...

Where in the world is TC now?

Calvin Hobbes

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Here’s a quirky bit of Rivlin history.

I knew her son Allan Rivlin briefly while he was an undergrad at Stanford. At the time, he spelled his first name with three L’s: Alllan.
It made me think his mom must be pretty weird to give him that name.
Now he goes by Allan, so the three L’s were probably just a temporary affectation.

mkt42

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Re the spelling of names: here's an amusing footnote to the saga of the fight over ownership of Gustav Klimt's masterpiece "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer".

Randol Schoenberg was the lawyer and family friend who helped Maria Altmann recover the painting, he's a grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Arnold had a son named Ronald. So when Ronald had a son, to remain anagrammatically correct he was named Randol.

Which fits with both the musical proclivities of that family, and Randol majored in math in college. I wouldn't be surprised if he studied combinatorics or group theory or the like.

Randol IIRC has a son and a daughter, but he didn't say if his son is named Roland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch-Bauer_I

Calvin Hobbes

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Here:

https://www.geni.com/people/Randy-Schoenberg/6000000002764082210

It says Randol has two sons, Nathan Arnold and Joseph Samuel.

Too bad neither is a Roland. Great story, though.

mkt42

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Some of us had commented on her passing in comments to a previous post by Tyler.

I wonder about Tyler's "auto-publishing". I'm presuming that it means auto-scheduled, i.e. pre-written and then he goes traveling.

Or has AI gone farther than we think, and this is the secret to Tyler's productivity -- he has a computer do the work for him? Including reading those stacks of books?

A Turing test to distinguish a real Tyler post from a synthetic AI one might be pretty difficult, given how terse Tyler's posts often are. Just add the words "self-recommending" and it'll look like the real thing! ;)

Barkley Rosser

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Somehow there are supposed to be 8 comments here, but I see only 4. I shall add only a bit to the praise for Alice Rivlin, whom I did know, as well as her husband, Sid Winter, also a distinguished economist. She was the first woman Vice Chair of the Fed, founded the CBO and set it on a path of non-partisanship and high professionalism that has lasted to the current day, and also played an important role in saving Washington, D.C. from its serious financial mess in the 1960s.

She was always honest, straightforward, and highly professional, as well as wonderful personally. She will definitely be missed.

JJ

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Tell us more about these auto published posts and how they fit into your production function

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