Michael T. Maloney passed away this week. We both loved applied price theory and golfed to the exact same handicap.
We both liked sailing too and together sailed around Long Island in less than 24 hours. He frequently asked why we had to spend so much time scouring the ocean for our competition. To this day I don’t know how to answer this question coming from a first-class IO economist, but perhaps he did not want to imitate Ahab too much.
I wish to find better pictures (Skip has several on facebook) but here we are crossing the starting line first in 2011. Below we are about half way down the island on the ocean side.
Our 2011 corrected finish time was the best in that year’s fleet (and many other years’ fleets). We (Mike and me and 2 others) especially liked beating the two U.S. Navy college teams, which had crews of a dozen each, larger boats, and of course government money.
We almost lost Mike a few years ago when he parked in front of his house, went inside, and minutes later saw his Suburban completely crushed by the falling of a large tree.
An indicator of both how he viewed economics as a unified field and how much he enlivened his department is the number of colleagues who published articles with him despite coming from different subfields. Bobby (McCormick), Skip (Sauer), Bob (Tollison), Bruce (Yandle), Bentley (Coffey) and Matt (Lindsay), to name a few. Also many Clemson students.
Mike was particularly saddened when Matt Lindsay passed away in 2015. I hope they are together again.