“david friedman”
7 posts under this tag.
David Friedman ELZR introduces a fascinating classification of human cooperation in The Machinery of Freedom ELZR. There’s
force (imposing my end on you),
trade (“I’ll help you achieve your end if you help me achieve mine”),
and love (“making my end your end”).
The definition of love alone is, I think, a great achievement. It surely doesn’t include everything we mean by that impossibly burdened word (it doesn’t mention romance, liking or sex) but it does reveal one of love’s most important yet often implicit threads. It is abstract yet the more likely we are to call a love pure, the more likely it is about A caring about B for B’s sake alone.
An interesting exercise came to mind after reading the classification: What human activity/field corresponds to each kind of human cooperation?
The first two kinds are straightforward loosening words up a bit: Politics is the exercise of force. Economics is the exercise of trade. With love, I stumbled for the longest time. I have an answer now.
The exercise of love is… technology. A tool is the purest embodiment of love, of making someone else’s end your end. That’s why technology is so ambiguous, its ends are its users’ ends. Giving you a tool is the ultimate act of love, the more so the more control of it I give you, because by doing that I make my end your end, whatever your end may be—defending your life or stealing. Think of the geeks that cobbled up the internet, ignoring wtf the thing would be used for, coding only so that it would allow for it.
Don’t dismiss this as one geek’s techno-euphoria. There’s something deep in here. Technology is the exercise of love. “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” Nothing less than the meaning of our lives could be here.
Liking David Friedman’s Hidden Order a whole lot. Not trivial reading, but rewarding. Through intuitive graphs and simplification he comes up with some interesting economics theory (with my math background the hand waving and naivete of the presentation’s obvious but I’m still rather unconvinced of a formal, math-based economics).
But perhaps the part I liked most is this inspiring little quote, awfully important in an age when technology allows contracts to make the dreams and nightmares of both sellers and buyers to come true, from DRM to discography torrents.
Suppose you are a businessman or an attorney negotiating a contract. It is tempting to go through the contract term by term, trying in each case to get whatever term is most favorable to you or your client.
But a more profitable strategy may be to go through looking for the contract terms that maximize the combined gain to both parties. Only when you get to the final term—the price—do you shift back to trying to make it as favorable as possible, thus collecting as much as possible of the gain produced by your well-designed contract. Most of your job is maximizing the size of the pie. The bigger the pie, the bigger you can make the slices for both sides.
There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we first grow the raw material from which they are made—wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.
From our standpoint, growing Hondas is just as much a form of production—using American farmworkers instead of American autoworkers—as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just hte same for us if there really where a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles. Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers —from other American workers.
David D. Friedman, Hidden Order
particularly now that my lil sis studies economics, how funny it is that economists are far and away mostly of use to govt’s. While theirs is a fine and beautiful knowledge, the only people that actually pay economists to work —besides universities, who employ them to train more economists, a nice pyramid scheme— are either bureaucrats or lobbyists warding or manipulating bureaucrats. At first that made me wary, but lately I’ve come to realize that what good economists (as opposed to bribed sycophants or bad economists) actually have to say to the gov’t is fuck off—stay away, you do more harm than good. Dismantling or even just holding off the gov’t beast is a worthy mission, quite possibly one of the most important.
 Milton Friedman WP, E died 9 days ago, November 16, and though I wanted to write about it that day, I dared not. I had mostly read only about him, his life, his reputation, and reverberations of his arguments; I had bought but not yet read two of his booksELZR; treasured a sentence (“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”) found in the only thing I had read from him (the prologue to Hayek’s Road to SerfdomAM ); and deeply admired his son, David FriedmanELZR. In other words, I could only lay claim to love the idea of the idea of the man (2nd degree platonic love, common personal affliction). I knew I’d fall in love with him, I only needed time, and so I didn’t dare write an obituary that Thursday—but I’m gonna.
I’ve downloaded Friedman’s Free to Choose series (also available as a free stream) to watch as I read the sametitled bookAM and the first episode has already confirmed Friedman as a most worthwhile man. Far as I can gather from a sample of 1, the series consists of a brief, excellent documentary narrated by Friedman, followed by lively debate with a group of economists, politicians, and businessmen. As much as I’m lately having serious misgivings about arguing in general, it’s a pleasure to watch him passionately refute and belie his often downright frightening partners in debate (“It’s demagoguery, if you’ll pardon me, Michael Harrington…”).
Seeing those suited men from the seventies I couldn’t help but think of what future debates on the subject will be like. One of the intriguing things about Milton Friedman is how his ideas have been carried on by his children. Himself the greatest XXth century defender of capitalism, he still didn’t dare (?) take the leap to anarchism (he couldn’t have put it more bluntly at the debate from Free To Choose’s first episode: “I am not an anarchist. I am not in favor of eliminating government. I believe we need a government.”). His son, David Friedman ELZR, is on the other hand the most prominent anarchocapitalist alive, and David Friedman’s son, Googler Patri Friedman, wants to homestead the oceans in turn.
One can only wonder what little Tovar Miles Friedman will come up with.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Verse engraved on the base of the statue of liberty.
Until the middle of the 1920s,this country followed a general policy of unrestricted immigration; except for some exclusion of orientals, anyone who wanted to come was welcome. From 1905 to 1907, and again in 1910, 1913, and 1914, ,over a million immigrants a year came. They and their descendants have created a large part of our economic and cultural wealth. It would be hard to find any major public figure willing to argue that this policy was a mistake.
It would be almost as hard to find a major public figure who would advocate a return to that policy. Recent debates have been on how we should allocate and enforce our limited immigration quota among different nationalities, not on whether the quota should exist
In my opinion, the restriction on immigration is a mistake: we should abolish it tomorrow and reopen the most successful attack on poverty the world has ever seen.
One danger in this policy is that poor immigrants might come with the intent of somehow surviving until they became citizens, and then going on welfare. I therefore include in my proposal the condition that new immigrants should face a fifteen year ‘resi¬dency’ requirement before they become eligible for welfare. I also suggest that the federal and state minimum wage laws be altered so as not to cover new immigrants, or, better yet, be repealed.
We would receive a vast flood of immigrants, probably more than a million a year, possibly several million. Most would come from Asian and Latin American countries. Most would be poor. Many would work as unskilled labor for the first generation, as did most of the previous immigrants. They would bring with them levels of education, nutrition, and health, which would appall our social workers; they would live, by our standards, very badly, but they would live well by their former standards, and that is why they would come.
Unrestricted immigration would make us richer, as it has in the past. Our wealth is in people, not things; America is not Kuwait. If a working wife can hire an Indian maid, who earned a few hundred dollars a year in India, to work for her at six thousand dollars a year, and so spend her own time on a 30 thousand a year job, who is worse off?
As long as the immigrants pay for what they use, they do not make the rest of the society poorer. If increased population makes the country more crowded, it does so only because the immigrants produce wealth which is worth more to the owners of land than the land is worth, and the immigrants are able to use that wealth to buy the land. The same applies to whatever the immigrants get on the free market; in order to appropriate existing resources for their own uses, the immigrants must buy them with new goods of at least equal value.
The immigrants will get some governmental services for which they will not pay directly. They will also pay taxes. Given present conditions, I see no reason to expect that they will cost government more than government will cost them.
The new immigrants will drive down the wages of unskilled labor, hurting some of the present poor. At the same time, the presence of millions of foreigners will make the most elementary acculturation, even the ability to speak English, a marketable skill; some of the poor will be able to leave their present unskilled jobs to find employment as foremen of “foreign” work gangs or front men for “foreign” enterprises.
More important than any of these economic effects is the psychological effect on the present poor; they will no longer be the bottom of the barrel, and as Liberals have pointed out with some justice, it is where you are, not what you have, which defines poverty. Mobility will be restored; each generation of immigrants will be able to struggle up to a position from which to look down on their successors.
A policy of unrestricted immigration would bring us more than cheap unskilled labor. It would bring a flood of new skills, not least among them the entrepreneurial ability that has made Indian and Chinese emigrants the merchant classes of Asia and Africa. Once the new citizens become familiar with the language and culture of their adopted country, they will probably work their way into the great American middle class just as rapidly as did their predecessors of eighty years ago.
It is a shame that the argument must be put in terms of the economic or psychological “interest” of the present generation of Americans. It is simpler than that. There are people, probably many millions, who would like to come here, live here, work here, raise their children here, die here. There are people who would like to become Americans, as our parents and grandparents did.
If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, ”America the closed preserve/That dirty foreigners don’t deserve.” Or we can open the gates again.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Open The Gates
The American flag.. is worthless except as a symbol, a symbol of men achieving their ends by voluntary association, cooperating through mutual exchange in a free society. Capitalism.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Might have been
A saint said “Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood.”
A man cried out “I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan.”
They were one man.
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