de Vany article

Arthur de Vany is interviewed in the Times, and it's interesting. It focuses mostly on his theories about dieting, which I didn't realize were so thoroughly worked out. de Vany is professor emeritus of economics at one of the University of Californias (Irvine I think). I think he had an illustrious career as a kind of economist-statistician. A lot of what I read by him was heavily statistical, but not econometrics so much. It felt like someone doing truly original applied statistical work to something in economics, but using whatever instrument he had created to show it basically described the most important general pattern in that industry. I know of him from his excellent book Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. After reading that book in grad school, I wanted to study the film industry so bad. It was a real revelation. But I stuck with prisons and gonorrhea instead. Anyway, de Vany's thoughts on dieting come from his more general theories about evolutionary fitness, and it's really interesting stuff. It sounds like he, like many others, sees a low-carb diet as the way to go. (ht to mr)