« Two Women, Great Legacies | Main | Thinking Through a Crisis »
September 27, 2008
I'd Like to Buy the World a Coase
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.
Posted by Frank Pasquale at September 27, 2008 03:50 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/4303.
Comments
????? Judging from the abstract, I'm terrified to read this paper -- it sounds horrible.
Posted by: Paul Gowder at September 27, 2008 05:35 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.
Posted by: Frank at September 27, 2008 07:55 PM
Wow. Just, wow.
Posted by: Daniel S. Goldberg at September 27, 2008 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.
Posted by: A.J. Sutter at September 27, 2008 11:10 PM
BTW, Frank, title of the post was great -- don't explain your jokes, it really takes the air out of them!!
Posted by: A.J. Sutter at September 27, 2008 11:13 PM
Some pun!
Posted by: Miriam Cherry at September 27, 2008 11:48 PM
