As a graduate student at MIT, I studied a bunch of econometrics and one of my favorite instructors was Prof. Jerry Hausman (he of the Hausman test).  Prof. Hausman would find a way in every lecture to somehow include his signature remark: “And that once again proves that life is unfair."  I am not sure whether anything in particular prompted him to be saying this but I took it as a comment on the stochastic nature of the world: with randomness, it is inevitable that bad things will happen to good people and good things to bad people (and yes, I realize that in life good and bad are often not all that clear).

So I find myself reassured on those occasions when things work out and some degree of fairness seems to prevail.  That is certainly true in the case of Osama Bin Laden.  Yesterday, the folks involved in the search for Bin Laden finally caught their break and his streak of escapes ran out.  No matter how one feels about the whole "war on terror” (and I am largely not a fan), with everything else that’s been going on, such as earthquakes and tornadoes, this is the kind of outcome that makes it a bit easier to put up with the inherent “Hausman unfairness” of life.

As a graduate student at MIT, I studied a bunch of econometrics and one of my favorite instructors was Prof. Jerry Hausman (he of the Hausman test).  Prof. Hausman would find a way in every lecture to somehow include his signature remark: “And that once again proves that life is unfair."  I am not sure whether anything in particular prompted him to be saying this but I took it as a comment on the stochastic nature of the world: with randomness, it is inevitable that bad things will happen to good people and good things to bad people (and yes, I realize that in life good and bad are often not all that clear).

So I find myself reassured on those occasions when things work out and some degree of fairness seems to prevail.  That is certainly true in the case of Osama Bin Laden.  Yesterday, the folks involved in the search for Bin Laden finally caught their break and his streak of escapes ran out.  No matter how one feels about the whole "war on terror” (and I am largely not a fan), with everything else that’s been going on, such as earthquakes and tornadoes, this is the kind of outcome that makes it a bit easier to put up with the inherent “Hausman unfairness” of life.