17 Aug 2016

David Friedman Bask

David Friedman, Economics 12 Comments

(Remember, we don’t beg on this blog, we ask.)

In a recent EconLog post, Bryan Caplan quotes from Friedman’s book *Hidden Order*:

Economists are often accused of believing that everything –
health, happiness, life itself – can be measured in money.
What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that
everything can be measured in anything.
–David Friedman, Hidden Order

Can somebody please provide me with more of the context surrounding this quote? I have the book, somewhere, but I just moved and it would be equivalent to one-eighth of a murder for me to find it right now. (Read Caplan’s post if that seems like an odd statement.)

12 Responses to “David Friedman Bask”

  1. Keshav Srinivasan says:

    Bob, it’s the first sentence of this chapter: gdurl.com/SS5C He’s basically talking about how economists measure everything on the same scale.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Thanks Keshav. But just to be clear: Is that something you scanned and posted? I don’t think I can link to that publicly, right?

      • Keshav Srinivasan says:

        Bob, I took an ebook version of David Friedman’s book, then did “print as PDF” on the pages of chapter 2, then uploaded the PDF to Google Drive. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be all right to link to that publicly; a 9-page excerpt from a book is presumably small enough to be covered by fair use.

        • Keshav Srinivasan says:

          Oh, do you mean it wouldn’t look professional to cite a Google Drive link? Yeah, I suppose that’s true. You could just cite the book and the page number.

          • Bob Murphy says:

            No, I meant copyright issues. I know DeLong had to take down a chapter from SuperFreakonomics that he uploaded.

  2. skylien says:

    Well I really hope you are not looking for 9 books currently. (Though I am aware that the relationship of finding a book to murder has not to be constant. It could decrease per additional book, but it also could increase, even fast..)

  3. Harold says:

    Does the confusion and problem with these ideas have something to do with the difference between willingness to accept and willingness to pay? Where these are the same we can talk about the “value” of something, but if they are different we have no single “value” to discuss.

  4. Andrew_FL says:

    Menger is dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

  5. RatFink says:

    Hi Bob,

    Quick question, perhaps a bit off topic but nonetheless regarding ABCT and what RW is talking about over at EPJ. He keeps touting that there’s no recession in sight, so says his M2 crystal ball. He has this odd notion that the ABCT that just as long as M2 goes up…a recession is basically impossible.

    He loves to perverse the ABCT to try to insinuate that M2 is can be used as a looking glass into where we stand in terms of the business cycle. (Either a bust or boom)

  6. Ryan Murphy says:

    A 1/8th murder? You’re willing to pay close to a million dollars not to not dig around boxes for a book?

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