On its third day, the Herbert Simon Society Conference on Bounded Rationality mounted at the Italian Institute on Park Avenue and 66th Street moved uptown to its partnering sponsor Columbia University at the Italian Academy on Amsterdam and 107th St, the magnificent club like premises whose great hall hosted a well remembered mathematics conference a few years ago where the great fractal theorist Bernard Mandelbrot gave a seminal talk suggesting that Wall Street had been wasting its money developing and relying on mathematical models to help make stock market investing more profitable.

The Herbert Simon conference sounded similar themes in the two major addresses which wound up its esoteric intellectual adventures on Wednesday, following a second round of technical seminars reporting interesting results from experiments in how irrationally people think.

Jonathan W. Schooler, a professor of psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara who looked more like a rock star than a quiet academic, showed us how creative inspiration depended on free floating mind wandering as much as purposeful dedication to finding solutions.

Joe Stiglitz, Columbia's Nobel prize winning economist who has become famous for his advice to the White House to avoid budget balancing austerity while the US economy is threatened by recession, gave a rip roaring final keynote showing how economists' models of how things worked were still out of date in too many ways for him to show us (he was able to explain only some of his more than forty slides on the topic).

Evidently Herbert SImon would have been pleased with both speakers.