David D. Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, a classic of libertarian thought, has long been out of print and hard to find. (Well, it’s easy to find, actually. But hard to find for less than about a hundred bucks.) It is therefore a very good thing that David’s gotten his publisher’s permission to post the entire book on the World Wide Web, for free.
What does David get out of this? Well first, of course, he wants you to read his book. But second, he’s about to start preparing a third edition and welcomes reader feedback. If you post your comments here, I’ll make sure he sees them.
Why not release it on the kindle?
And while you’re at it, do the same with “Price Theory and it’s Applications”
Nice! It’s the one book by him I haven’t read*, so I was hoping it would find its way to the web sooner or later. I’ll get reading soon.
*Well, nonfiction. I haven’t read either of his novels.
I recently read “The Machinery of Freedom” (along with all his other books, actually). It was very eye-opening. I already made this comment on David’s blog, but you and he should start getting your books out on audiobook. I’m not sure how big the trend is, but all my friends (and myself) have been getting audiobooks. Your “readership” will be much larger if your books are available in that format. If your goal is to spread ideas rather than earn royalties on book sales, that’s a good strategy.
Greg, the trouble with audio books is that the voice is that of George Kostanza.
You’re right, Mike. I take it all back.
Part I: A Necessary Digression
1. Does Friedman’s thesis only apply to people who work hard?
2. Does Friedman’s analysis confuse aggregate and marginal benefit?
I understand Friedman to argue in this section that workers derive the majority of the benefits of their labor. In other words, I understand Friedman to argue that the producer surplus exceeds the consumer surplus. I was not aware of any thesis demonstrating this proposition.
The example Friedman offers discusses the price at which a worker provides a service and a consumer purchases a service. Of course, here we’re talking about the MARGINAL product and the MARGINAL consumption. I’m acquainted with arguments that the consumer and producer surpluses of the marginal product should approach zero; I’m not acquainted with any argument relating these phenomena to aggregate consumer or producer surplus.
For example, what does the supply curve look like for the creation of pacemakers? I imagine that there’s a lot of up-front research & development costs, etc., causing the supply curve to start pretty high, then plunge, then level off and begin rising gradually. In contrast, I could imagine that the demand is pretty inelastic, falling steeply. I’d expect the intersection of these graphs to look more like + than X. Under such circumstances, I’d expect aggregate consumer surplus to utterly swamp aggregate producer surplus.
Am I missing something here?
3. What difference does it make whether or not aggregate consumer surplus exceeds aggregate producer surplus? Does a worker suddenly move from the “non-exploited” to the “exploited” category if the left portion of the demand curve shifts, causing aggregate consumer surplus to exceed aggregate producer surplus?
for those who like audio— Friedman reads this book as a series of podcasts linked on his blog.
to our blogger here– I for one miss the Big Q type topics and lament the shift toward politics and quickie links.
Fenn:
I for one miss the Big Q type topics and lament the shift toward politics and quickie links.
There will be more of the Big Q type topics before long, I promise. Those generally take a little longer to write and I’m rather swamped with research and travel right now, which is why there have been fewer of them. But I’m eager to get back to them.
>for those who like audio— Friedman reads this book as a series of podcasts linked on his blog.
Fenn, do you have a link? I downloaded some of his podcasts, but didn’t see any MP3’s for The Machinery of Freedom.
@Steve: “There will be more of the Big Q type topics before long, I promise. Those generally take a little longer to write and I’m rather swamped with research and travel right now, which is why there have been fewer of them.”
Steve, that is simply not good enough! We expect you to drop your research and your travel and entertain us for free. Isn’t that what being a blogger means?
(As an economist, I still don’t understand the economics of blogging. Maybe you will enlighten us sometime.)
Michael— sorry, man. my mistake. the podcasts I remembered seeing arem’t of Machinery. there one of his fantasy novels.
I’m not accusing David Friedman of being racist, and I certainly hate euphemisms and P.C. language as much as the next guy, but he might want to go through the book and kind of… “update” some of the language. There are parts where he says things like “the black on the stool of a restaurant” or “retarded children” or “Ghetto parent”.
I realize it’s all quasi-offensive (and I really hate growing level of euphemisms), but a lot of those phrases have a tendency to sort of “jump out” at people. Let’s get practical, if he’s trying to sell Libertarianism to people, it’s probably a good idea to “modernize” some of the language.
“…the black on the stool…” really stood out to me too (far more than the others which seem basically OK). I doubt he would ever have referred to the owner of the restaurant as “the white”, which to me is pretty damning evidence of how he views (or perhaps viewed) minorities, and as such is more than just quasi-offensive. And note the problem isn’t a case of using one description (“black”) instead of a pc alternative (“African-American”?). Just changing “black” to “black customer” improves the sentence without using any silly politically correct terms
Eh. As “the Swede”, “the Jew” or the “African-American” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, I wouldn’t ascribe any racist motivation. I’ll agree that in English as she is spoke today, black in the singular is generally used as an adjective, and that phrase is thus best adjusted. (Which is not particularly different from what Super-Fly was saying.)
David Friedman is not and was not a racist; he would consider it too costly to be so. Good editing can improve a book (see Erik’s a “black person” example) but Friedman’s “black on the stool” syntax succinctly focuses the reader’s attention on what Friedman was illustrating. Besides, as the father of a black son whose lineage is not clearly from Africa, African-American is not helpful.
Anyone wanting to read this book and find a free Kindle converter with a search that will convert from pdf to the appropriate format: search
This is great news! Thank you!