All hail the world champion St. Louis Cardinals, who optimally distributed their wins. As the Chicago Sun-Times observed, the Cardinals were only five games above .500 (83 wins, 78 losses) in the regular season, but six games above .500 (11 wins, 5 losses) in the postseason.

On Friday I flew from St. Louis to Detroit on a plane filled with sad Tigers fans. (The previous night the Tigers had lost game 4 of the World Series in St. Louis.) I was on my way to Hillsdale College in Michigan to give a talk at a conference (more on which below). Friday night at the reception I brazenly wore a name tag that said “St. Louis, MO” while I watched Game 5 in the company of local Tigers fans. I tried not to gloat too much.

On Sunday I returned to the Detroit airport, where Tigers apparel was now 25% off. I flew back to St. Louis, and while taking the train from the airport back to campus (where I’d left my car) I discovered that the Cardinal’s victory parade would be starting downtown in half an hour. What the heck – I put my bags in the back of my car and got back on the next jam-packed train (reminiscent of my days commuting to NYU from Brooklyn) headed downtown. I become one of some 500,000 folks dressed in red lining Market Street in downtown St. Louis. Pujols, Edmonds, Carpenter, Eckstein, et al., rode in pickup trucks past crowds twenty deep.

Back to the Hillsdale conference: I was part of a panel on monetary policy Saturday after lunch. First up on the panel was Ned Gramlich, ex- of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, talking about the history and mission of the Fed. Second up was Robert Barro, talking about the macroeconomic outlook. I was up third, talking about “The Free Banking Alternative”. In Q&A I got interested-but-skeptical questions from Barro and from Richard Epstein (in the audience; he’d been the lunchtime speaker). People later told me that Gramlich looked rather dyspeptic during my talk. The papers will become available on a Hillsdale website in a few weeks; when I have the URL I’ll post it here.