Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture

Tuesday, November 28th, 2017

Scott Alexander reviews David Friedman’s Legal Systems Very Different From Ours and really nails it:

Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.

And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”

Friedman’s perhaps best know for his anarcho-capitalist manifesto, The Machinery of Freedom, but I was more impressed by Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters, which ties in to this topic even more tightly.

Leave a Reply