I’d Like to Buy the World a Coase
posted by Frank Pasquale
You can find some wonderful things on SSRN. Here’s a paper that sounds like a plan for world peace:
I show that in a true Coasean world - a world with no transaction costs - there would be no disagreement on moral questions. . . . There would be no disagreement on the question of capital punishment or abortion.
I’d like to buy the world a Coase, too . . . . or at least improve education. As the world approaches DeLillan surreality, perhaps it’s time to send in the clowns.
September 27, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law
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Responses (6)
Paul Gowder - September 27, 2008 at 5:35 pm
????? Judging from the abstract, I’m terrified to read this paper — it sounds horrible.
Frank - September 27, 2008 at 7:55 pm
well, I honestly thought it was like Sokal Hoax II, for law profs. But there’s a chance it’s real. his book Physics of Immortality was reviewed in the NYT Book Rev., I think.
the coke commercial link is meant to suggest the extraordinary naivete such an attempted conflation of fact & value reveals…something more appropriate for a saccharine ad for a drink conglomerate than for scholarly work.
Daniel S. Goldberg - September 27, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Wow. Just, wow.
A.J. Sutter - September 27, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Tipler’s immortality book was also reviewed, as I recall, in Science, Nature, and maybe Physics Today. He’s a mathematical physicist of some repute, still actively publishing on stuff like quantum gravity (a kind of Holy Grail in physics, which Tipler thinks was actually discovered by Feynman almost 50 years ago). But many in his field regard him as having gone off a religious deep-end. Last year he published a related book, “The Physics of Christianity”. It seems especially American that he’s combining these interests with economics.
A.J. Sutter - September 27, 2008 at 11:13 pm
BTW, Frank, title of the post was great — don’t explain your jokes, it really takes the air out of them!!
Miriam Cherry - September 27, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Some pun!
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