Authorities are once again yanking on the levers to keep the market from backsliding into some sort of price discovery. And it worked. The markets in China were up on Monday, with the Shanghai Composite rising 0.8% and the Shenzhen Composite surging 2.6%, which set the tone in Asia. All major Asian markets showed gains, except in Japan where markets were closed due to the National Founding Day, one of the 16 market holidays of the year. So they missed out.

And it is calming the waters in the US. Well done. But then, why even have markets? Why can’t Chinese authorities just set the price of each stock and make it go up at regular intervals, at a rate deemed to be appropriate by authorities? It would offer true risk-free investing in stocks. It could become a national wealth builder. The entire world would invest in such a scheme. Think of the possibilities! And it would be a lot more efficient than this haphazard guessing-and-manipulation game.

The amiable Joe Stiglitz says that whenever there is a "spillover"—my ugly dress offending your delicate eyes, say—the government should step in. A Federal Bureau of Dresses, rather like the one Saudi Arabia has. In common with Thaler and Krugman and most other economists since 1848, Stiglitz does not know how much his imagined spillovers reduce national income overall, or whether the government is good at preventing the spill. I reckon it's about as good as the Army Corps of Engineers was in Katrina.

Thaler, in short, melds the list of psychological biases with the list of economic imperfections. It is his worthy scientific accomplishment. His conclusion, unsupported by evidence?

It's bad for us to be free.

I looked around the room in amazement. This was the heart of a supposedly progressive San Francisco Bay Area, and yet the city planned on partnering with a powerful intelligence contractor to build a police surveillance center that, if press reports were correct, officials wanted to use to spy on and monitor locals. Something made that scene even stranger to me that night. Thanks to a tip from a local activist, I had gotten wind that Oakland had been in talks with Google about demo-ing products in what appeared to be an attempt by the company to get a part of the DAC contract.