It seems that a Harvard economics professor has been fined for stealing horse manure from a neighbor’s farm.
Perhaps it was rational for the professor to steal fertilizer rather than producing it: comparative advantage, you know. And of course the difference between stealing and paying is no more than a transfer, with no efficiency implications at all.
On the other hand, a former Kennedy School colleague sees evidence of moral degeneration, and a step on the path toward plagiarism. “When I was there,” he writes, “it was a point of pride among Harvard faculty that we made up our own horsesh*t.”