Your explanation of “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch" is very logical. Yours are examples without tradeoffs involved, right? In this case I agree with you. However, isn't the famous phrase created to exemplify the fact that when you have choices, you must face tradeoffs?
I'd say there's a clear tradeoff in the consumer-surplus case, in that you trade money to be able to consume. The lunch isn't free; it just costs less than you think it's worth.
Thank you! I read David in a previous comment section saying the same thing, and had a gut reaction that something he said was wrong.
It's not that he is wrong, but that we were using the term differently. I think of the term the way that you do, nothing is ever free even if it's cheaper. I apply this to things like YouTube - technically I don't pay for it, but someone does. I gain a consumer surplus from the transaction, but even I don't find it "free" in both time and a money sense. YouTube gains value from me through ads, at the least. YouTube also sells my usage data. That may not be a large cost to me, depending on how I feel about it, but it's still a cost that I personally bear, even though I see it as totally worth what I get in exchange.
On Rainbow Washing the Past, I've often thought that limiting copyright law to something shorter than current law [life + 70] would help. The original version could be published alongside the cleansed version. Don't know how much it would help. It might with Dr. Seuss.
TANSTAAFL: I do not think that your considerations about consumer surplus relate well to the intent of the slogan (at least as I understand it). To me, it means that every good costs something to produce. It takes real people real effort and real resources to produce. Politicians frequently promise to make various services and outcomes "free" when they obviously cost people even if the system hides and widely distributes the cost.
Yes, I know. But neither does anyone I know think TANSTAAFL is about free lunches.
I don't think of TANSTAAFL as any kind of literal economic saying. I have never known anyone who takes it to mean anything different from "ALAGHITM" -- be wary of "free stuff", of "too good to be true".
It's sometimes hard to take economics jargon seriously, like "rent seeking". I know what the phrase means. I've read the economics definition of "rent", but I sure don't remember it, and the few times I've seen it by itself in an economic context, I momentarily remember "seeking", although usually the context is enough. I'll stick to lay jargon. I have more experience with it, and that reminds me that TANSTAAFL started as lay jargon, not economics, so perhaps economists would be better off using the lay meaning. If you have a rental property and your tenant greeted you on the first of the month with "Have you come seeking the rent?", what would you say?
To me the obvious counterfactual to voting myself is to put an equivalent amount of effort (or money equivalent to that effort) towards convincing other people to vote.
So if my average hourly income is 50 dollars, and voting takes roughly an hour including the commute, you should compare it to giving 50 dollars to your favourite political organisation.
If they are any good, with 50 dollars extra they should be able to swing more than one extra vote? I don't know if that's true, but that's one of the counterfactuals any argument in favour of voting has to overcome.
This becomes even more acute if you don't live in a swing-enough state, and the organisation of your choice is working on swinging votes over there. Even if your 50 dollars statistically turns less than a tenth of one vote, the trade might still be worth it in that case.
I don't think you should look at your average income, but your marginal income. For me, personally, I've gotten an extra €0 of income from the time I've saved by not voting.
"a panelist made it clear that she had been surprised, reading “Peter Pan,” to discover that the author did not have modern attitudes on race and gender."
I loaned some Marx Brothers movies to a coworker who had never heard of them. He returned them in disgust at their sexism.
To me the usual attitude that one is obliged to vote feels like a state religion I am being urged to accept. I often vote, as a consumption activity not to change the outcome, but I don't wear the "I have voted" sticker they give you, which implies that I should be proud of having voted.
I did a deep dive on the voting question, just a few days ago. I found that the probability of flipping this election is about 1-in-2-million in top swing states, but that if you take any plausible market estimate of the value of an election outcome, then the social value of voting correctly is still quite huge (thousands of dollars):
Is that the value to the world or to the voter deciding whether to vote? They are very different and it is the latter that is relevant to his decision?
For the world. But as you say, "you probably value benefits to other people, even if not by as much as you value benefits to yourself."
One could value gains to the world at just 1% of gains to oneself, and my numbers suggest it would still make sense to vote in swing states, if one has any sense of which candidate is better.
I am even less sure which candidate is better for the world than which candidate is better for Americans or better for me. That's particularly true in this election but I think also true for most.
If someone believes that "Democracy is on the ballot" or that "this is the most important election of our lives" that does seem to put a very high value on the vote. How do you put a dollar figure on replacing 1-3 SC justices? Not to mention other judges, cabinet level positions, etc. It has to be quite high. Arguably the election is worth a significant fraction of the economy of the world, the difference between a working US and a failed state - if you take it as seriously as all that.
Even heavily discounting the effect on the rest of society, it's possible that votes are worth millions of dollars. Non-swing state votes might even be more than worthwhile in that case, maybe a few hundred dollars.
> "the value to you of the the benefit you believe the random American gets from your candidate being elected... heavily discounted because nobody is altruistic enough to count benefits to strangers as equivalent to benefits to himself"
I like Zach Barnett's take on this:
"we have the capacity to engage politically in a way that is impartial and reflective of giving everyone’s interests equal consideration, even if we don’t always adhere to those values. In short, we can be temporarily altruistic, while thinking through our political views and going to the voting booth."
You might also appreciate his discussion of the odds of casting a decisive vote, which formally prove that it is at least 1/N (for population N) when three plausible conditions are met.
I live in Arizona, a swing state. I moved from England to the USA in 1987 and got citizenship early in the 00s. I never bothered to vote for many years since it be nothing more than signaling (in California until 2002, in Texas until 2011). My vote is marginally more likely to make a difference. Filling out the ballot takes much less time than watching an episode of a TV series I enjoy, and less than the next short story in the 1200 page "best of a century of SF" collection I'm reading. So I don't feel terribly irrational about voting this time.
Of course I'm voting for Trump. I can't stand the guy and think his (stated) policies are worse than last time. Last time I voted Libertarian but the candidate (Mark Victor) threw his votes his votes to Trump without my permission. Dislike Trump as I do, I see the Democrats as being much greater threats to democracy, economic liberty, and prosperity. That is sufficient motivation to vote. (And, hey, writing this comment took almost as long as filling out the ballot.)
I don't know about IQ, but I was in a research group headed by James (Jim) Schubert, back in 1990s-2005 or so, where we found consistent political (votes) advantages for both males and females when we used regularity of facial features (16 or so different features.)
We showed several thousand (over the years) respondents from the US and a dozen or so other countries, manipulated campaign photos and partyID/policy stance.
That is one group would see the candidate with the more symmetrical face being of one party or the other, and another group would see them in the opposite party. Same with policy stances, so we had at least 4 different groups rating each candidate by saying if they would vote for them or for the less symmetrical-faced (but not unattractive) .
For both males and females the more attractive candidate got about a 2.5% 'swing' among voters. That is easily enough to affect an election.
I suspect something like that would show that people with more symmetrical (i.e. attractive) faces would be perceived to have higher IQ. The facial symmetry of good genes plus good health leads to all kinds of assumptions by viewers.
As an aside, we also measured a lot of well-known politicians. Up through 2005, Bill Clinton had the most symmetrical male face we measured and Sheila Jackson-Lee had the most symmetrical female face. I tend to think Clinton had the higher IQ. ;-)
I have some followup ignorance about TANSTAAFL and consumer/producer surplus. In the consumer surplus example, presumably someone put it on sale for some reason, like advertising, which is not visible to you. In the producer surplus example, you presumably wouldn't have been paid if you were just Joe Random Doe instead of the Famous David D. Friedman. Isn't that part of being Not Free?
Things I have done that make people want to hear me speak don't represent an additional cost of that talk and have already paid for themselves in other ways.
Minor quibble: shouldn't "have men rank them by pulchritude, and see if the ranking correlates with the ranking of colleges by average SAT score" only consider rankings by successful men?
Only if we have good reason to believe that successful men would rank pulchritude differently than unsuccessful ones. While that’s plausible, idk we have any reason to think it particularly likely in modern America.
The question is about successful men and beautiful women. Either successful and unsuccessful men are different, or they aren't. You can't ask about a subset as if they are different, then wave away the difference to test the theory.
I think you are interpreting my imagined test as testing my conjectured mechanism. I intended it as a test of the claimed fact, a correlation between intelligence and pulchritude, that that mechanism was offered to explain.
The economist's key insight is not that free lunches don't exist, but that people tend to eat them! Hence the economist's natural suspicion of a free lunch left lying around.
Your explanation of “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch" is very logical. Yours are examples without tradeoffs involved, right? In this case I agree with you. However, isn't the famous phrase created to exemplify the fact that when you have choices, you must face tradeoffs?
I'd say there's a clear tradeoff in the consumer-surplus case, in that you trade money to be able to consume. The lunch isn't free; it just costs less than you think it's worth.
Thank you! I read David in a previous comment section saying the same thing, and had a gut reaction that something he said was wrong.
It's not that he is wrong, but that we were using the term differently. I think of the term the way that you do, nothing is ever free even if it's cheaper. I apply this to things like YouTube - technically I don't pay for it, but someone does. I gain a consumer surplus from the transaction, but even I don't find it "free" in both time and a money sense. YouTube gains value from me through ads, at the least. YouTube also sells my usage data. That may not be a large cost to me, depending on how I feel about it, but it's still a cost that I personally bear, even though I see it as totally worth what I get in exchange.
On Rainbow Washing the Past, I've often thought that limiting copyright law to something shorter than current law [life + 70] would help. The original version could be published alongside the cleansed version. Don't know how much it would help. It might with Dr. Seuss.
Most free cheese is to be found in mousetraps.
TANSTAAFL: I do not think that your considerations about consumer surplus relate well to the intent of the slogan (at least as I understand it). To me, it means that every good costs something to produce. It takes real people real effort and real resources to produce. Politicians frequently promise to make various services and outcomes "free" when they obviously cost people even if the system hides and widely distributes the cost.
"There ain't no such thing" is a stronger statement than "some things claimed to be are not."
So is "Always look a gift horse in the mouth." You might want to turn the horse into glue, and gain nothing from any inspection.
"Never look a gift horse in the mouth" is a standard phrase which this is playing off of. It isn't about horses.
Yes, I know. But neither does anyone I know think TANSTAAFL is about free lunches.
I don't think of TANSTAAFL as any kind of literal economic saying. I have never known anyone who takes it to mean anything different from "ALAGHITM" -- be wary of "free stuff", of "too good to be true".
But then, you aren't thinking about it from the standpoint of an economist.
It's sometimes hard to take economics jargon seriously, like "rent seeking". I know what the phrase means. I've read the economics definition of "rent", but I sure don't remember it, and the few times I've seen it by itself in an economic context, I momentarily remember "seeking", although usually the context is enough. I'll stick to lay jargon. I have more experience with it, and that reminds me that TANSTAAFL started as lay jargon, not economics, so perhaps economists would be better off using the lay meaning. If you have a rental property and your tenant greeted you on the first of the month with "Have you come seeking the rent?", what would you say?
About the value of voting:
To me the obvious counterfactual to voting myself is to put an equivalent amount of effort (or money equivalent to that effort) towards convincing other people to vote.
So if my average hourly income is 50 dollars, and voting takes roughly an hour including the commute, you should compare it to giving 50 dollars to your favourite political organisation.
If they are any good, with 50 dollars extra they should be able to swing more than one extra vote? I don't know if that's true, but that's one of the counterfactuals any argument in favour of voting has to overcome.
This becomes even more acute if you don't live in a swing-enough state, and the organisation of your choice is working on swinging votes over there. Even if your 50 dollars statistically turns less than a tenth of one vote, the trade might still be worth it in that case.
I don't think you should look at your average income, but your marginal income. For me, personally, I've gotten an extra €0 of income from the time I've saved by not voting.
Always look a gift horse in the mouth, and check all four hoofs and everything in between.
addendum: Especially if the government gifts you the horse!
"a panelist made it clear that she had been surprised, reading “Peter Pan,” to discover that the author did not have modern attitudes on race and gender."
I loaned some Marx Brothers movies to a coworker who had never heard of them. He returned them in disgust at their sexism.
For me, it feels cynical not to vote. I don't think cynicism ought to be encouraged in this country. There's way too much of it as it is.
To me the usual attitude that one is obliged to vote feels like a state religion I am being urged to accept. I often vote, as a consumption activity not to change the outcome, but I don't wear the "I have voted" sticker they give you, which implies that I should be proud of having voted.
I did a deep dive on the voting question, just a few days ago. I found that the probability of flipping this election is about 1-in-2-million in top swing states, but that if you take any plausible market estimate of the value of an election outcome, then the social value of voting correctly is still quite huge (thousands of dollars):
https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/deep-dive-is-voting-rational-in-swing
Is that the value to the world or to the voter deciding whether to vote? They are very different and it is the latter that is relevant to his decision?
For the world. But as you say, "you probably value benefits to other people, even if not by as much as you value benefits to yourself."
One could value gains to the world at just 1% of gains to oneself, and my numbers suggest it would still make sense to vote in swing states, if one has any sense of which candidate is better.
I am even less sure which candidate is better for the world than which candidate is better for Americans or better for me. That's particularly true in this election but I think also true for most.
If someone believes that "Democracy is on the ballot" or that "this is the most important election of our lives" that does seem to put a very high value on the vote. How do you put a dollar figure on replacing 1-3 SC justices? Not to mention other judges, cabinet level positions, etc. It has to be quite high. Arguably the election is worth a significant fraction of the economy of the world, the difference between a working US and a failed state - if you take it as seriously as all that.
Even heavily discounting the effect on the rest of society, it's possible that votes are worth millions of dollars. Non-swing state votes might even be more than worthwhile in that case, maybe a few hundred dollars.
> "the value to you of the the benefit you believe the random American gets from your candidate being elected... heavily discounted because nobody is altruistic enough to count benefits to strangers as equivalent to benefits to himself"
I like Zach Barnett's take on this:
"we have the capacity to engage politically in a way that is impartial and reflective of giving everyone’s interests equal consideration, even if we don’t always adhere to those values. In short, we can be temporarily altruistic, while thinking through our political views and going to the voting booth."
https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/utilitarianism-and-voting/
You might also appreciate his discussion of the odds of casting a decisive vote, which formally prove that it is at least 1/N (for population N) when three plausible conditions are met.
I live in Arizona, a swing state. I moved from England to the USA in 1987 and got citizenship early in the 00s. I never bothered to vote for many years since it be nothing more than signaling (in California until 2002, in Texas until 2011). My vote is marginally more likely to make a difference. Filling out the ballot takes much less time than watching an episode of a TV series I enjoy, and less than the next short story in the 1200 page "best of a century of SF" collection I'm reading. So I don't feel terribly irrational about voting this time.
Of course I'm voting for Trump. I can't stand the guy and think his (stated) policies are worse than last time. Last time I voted Libertarian but the candidate (Mark Victor) threw his votes his votes to Trump without my permission. Dislike Trump as I do, I see the Democrats as being much greater threats to democracy, economic liberty, and prosperity. That is sufficient motivation to vote. (And, hey, writing this comment took almost as long as filling out the ballot.)
I don't know about IQ, but I was in a research group headed by James (Jim) Schubert, back in 1990s-2005 or so, where we found consistent political (votes) advantages for both males and females when we used regularity of facial features (16 or so different features.)
We showed several thousand (over the years) respondents from the US and a dozen or so other countries, manipulated campaign photos and partyID/policy stance.
That is one group would see the candidate with the more symmetrical face being of one party or the other, and another group would see them in the opposite party. Same with policy stances, so we had at least 4 different groups rating each candidate by saying if they would vote for them or for the less symmetrical-faced (but not unattractive) .
For both males and females the more attractive candidate got about a 2.5% 'swing' among voters. That is easily enough to affect an election.
I suspect something like that would show that people with more symmetrical (i.e. attractive) faces would be perceived to have higher IQ. The facial symmetry of good genes plus good health leads to all kinds of assumptions by viewers.
As an aside, we also measured a lot of well-known politicians. Up through 2005, Bill Clinton had the most symmetrical male face we measured and Sheila Jackson-Lee had the most symmetrical female face. I tend to think Clinton had the higher IQ. ;-)
I have some followup ignorance about TANSTAAFL and consumer/producer surplus. In the consumer surplus example, presumably someone put it on sale for some reason, like advertising, which is not visible to you. In the producer surplus example, you presumably wouldn't have been paid if you were just Joe Random Doe instead of the Famous David D. Friedman. Isn't that part of being Not Free?
Things I have done that make people want to hear me speak don't represent an additional cost of that talk and have already paid for themselves in other ways.
Minor quibble: shouldn't "have men rank them by pulchritude, and see if the ranking correlates with the ranking of colleges by average SAT score" only consider rankings by successful men?
Only if we have good reason to believe that successful men would rank pulchritude differently than unsuccessful ones. While that’s plausible, idk we have any reason to think it particularly likely in modern America.
The question is about successful men and beautiful women. Either successful and unsuccessful men are different, or they aren't. You can't ask about a subset as if they are different, then wave away the difference to test the theory.
I think you are interpreting my imagined test as testing my conjectured mechanism. I intended it as a test of the claimed fact, a correlation between intelligence and pulchritude, that that mechanism was offered to explain.
The economist's key insight is not that free lunches don't exist, but that people tend to eat them! Hence the economist's natural suspicion of a free lunch left lying around.
But tend to eat them (the market tends towards efficiency) is different from *always* eat them (the market is always perfectly efficient)
And DF’s point was that in public policy, sometimes there are.
Allowing a lot more high-skill immigration into your country is one example of a “free lunch”.
Why did Milton Friedman come to believe that “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” wasn't really true?
I answered that question in the post you are commenting on — because consumer and producer surpluses are free lunches.
But that is not what most people understand by the phrase. At least, that seems plausible to me. (Longer comment elsewhere.)
I think "Always look a gift horse in the mouth" comes closer to what people mean by the phrase.