Max Borders lists his ten favorites from The Original Freakonomics, counterintuitive economic concepts from before Levitt and Dubner’s recent book:
- Comparative Advantage
- Whose Laffing Now?
- Simon says… Be not afraid of scarcity
- Spontaneous Order
- Soul-selling and Logrolling
- Property Rights Saving Species
- Broken Windows
- Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC)
- New Institutional Economics
- The Invisible Hand
He illustrates spontaneous order with Leonard Read’s I, Pencil, a pencil’s first-hand account of how it came to be:
The process is long and complicated. Involved is: paraffin wax from Mexico, cedar from California, graphite from Sri Lanka, rubber from Southeast Asia, etc. And all of this had to be hauled, cut, honed, and assembled. And all this hauling, cutting and assembling was carried out by complex machines with yet more complex stories behind them. Through the magic of prices, all of this can be delivered as a complete product to your neighborhood store for you to purchase for a measly nickel. That, folks, is spontaneous order at work.