December 10, 2008
I found this post at Death and Taxes Blog titled Nudge, Shel Silverstein, Smart, and Negotiation It's just too funny not to pass on. Pretty ironic.

I'll quote from the post . . .

I'm currently reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by the U of C professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. I'll probably post a review later, but I found one part (on page 77) particularly interesting. Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein are the authors of are using a Shel Silverstein poem called "Smart" as the basis for an example, and they ask the reader to Google the poem and read it before continuing in the book.

Why not just print the poem? The answer is in a footnote:

Silverstein had originally given Thaler permission to use the poem in an academic paper published in 1985... but the poem is now controlled by his estate, which, after several nudges (otherwise known as desperate pleas), has denied us permission to reprint the poem here. Since we would have been happy to pay royalties, unlike the Web sites you will find via Google, we can only guess that the managers of the estate (to paraphrase the poem) don't know that some is more than none.

Here is the first stanza of the "Smart."

My dad gave me one dollar bill
'Cause I'm his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
'Cause two is more than one!

and it goes on from there.

The people in charge of Silverstein's estate must not have read the poem.
Many of you are probably familiar with it. If not, it's an quick google search away.