Subtitled “How The Economic Way Of Thinking Can Justify Your Horrible Personality”, Life Coasing is a terrific return to form for Levitt and Dubner. These two authors have done more than anyone else to bring the economic way of thinking to the attention of popular culture. Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics were cultural phenomenons which hugely influenced a generation of horrible people. I am pleased to exclusively offer extracts from their latest book.
Inspired by the saga of the knee protector, this kindle single (pictured above) introduces the ideas of Ronald Coase, and how his idea of making small side payments can totally justify your horrible treatment of everyone around you. Going beyond Coase, who focused on policy, Levitt and Dubner show that through the total disregard for other’s feelings only arseholes have, they can enable more transactions by ignoring the feelings of others. It’s going to be huge in Silicon Valley, I assure you.
Without further ado, I have a few teasers to share with you:
“Chapter 1: How is reclining your seat like buying a newspaper?”
We were shocked to hear people were using knee protectors to prevent people reclining other people’s airplane seats. I’m sure you were outraged too. But how do you solve a problem like a reasonable person trying to remain comfortable in a hostile environment? Contrary to what your mother told you, the answer is to make the environment more hostile. Every person has a price, and although some people might pretend to be moral, what they actually mean is they are expensive.
Newspapers, remember them folks? They’re expensive, not only because you have to distribute a paper parcel (not even by drone), but you have to bundle up a variety of different news items together to someone who only wants part of it. Hence you pay for a lot of information you don’t want. Conversation around reclining seats if often a lot like this. People take forever to get to what you want: the price of their comfort.
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So as you have seen already, the economic way of thinking is already proving incredibly useful in justifying your horrible personality. We’ve got you a more comfortable seat and you’ve learned something along the way, but we’ve passed over something which needs explaining.
“Chapter 2: What are transaction costs anyway?”
What is a transaction cost anyway? You’re probably unfamiliar with some transaction costs because arseholes have low transaction costs. A transaction cost is a way of describing the frictions people face in life contracting. You might be familiar with lawyers fees from copyright disputes over poorly conceptualized satires. That’s an enforcement cost. I wouldn’t bother about these. Nope.
There are other costs too, searching for something you want and getting the information you need to make an informed decision are important. Most important for this book are bargaining costs. These are the costs required to come to an acceptable agreement with the other party to the transaction, drawing up an appropriate contract and so on.
In Coase’s The Problem of Social Cost he explains how property rights can enable those who suffer the pollution of a nearby factory to negotiate with the owners. If people own the right to clean air then they can sell that right for the right price. Pretty neat huh? You don’t necessarily own a polluting factory (although I’m sure some of our entrepreneurial readers actually do.), but in a way your personalities are pollutants. But just like the answer to global warming is to pollute the air in a slightly different way, your terrible personality pollution is also the answer to your problems.
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Because you have low bargaining costs, because you quite literally don’t care if people hate you, you can negotiate your way out of being an arsehole. One of the largest barriers to these transactions is hurting other people’s feelings. Luckily, if you’re reading this book you probably don’t care about people’s feelings. You can facilitate many more transactions. Your horrible personality really can make the world a better place. And isn’t that the wonder of the economic way of thinking.
“Chapter 3: Out of the mouth of babes”
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The ultimate coasean bargain is the extraction of lunch money by school “bullies.” (H/T) Everyday, up and down the country, 11 year olds are rediscovering Coase’s seminal work. But instead of praising them we punish them. If children did not value the services of the bully (and what else is a bully but a proto-state, a stationary using bandit), they would not hand over their lunch money. The money involved is often low denomination and usually very small fees actually exchange hands.
We could work out the cost of bullying directly if we knew the wages of children, but sadly we do not. However, thanks to these coasean pioneers we can extrapolate from these bullying fees figures to come up with the reservation wages of children. From these we can imagine what transaction fees must be like for children and develop a rough cost of bullying (Perhaps Mr Piketty thinks the only way of collecting this data is to tax children!).
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If bullying mattered, don’t you think the children would have sorted something out by now themselves? Because the reservation wage of children is so very low it can’t be transaction costs which prevent them successfully preventing bullying themselves, it really is just uneconomical to do so. The bully rent is too damn low. Remember to bring this up in the next PTA meeting when someone suggests another anti-bullying campaign. Your terrible personality (and that of your demonic spawn) really will save everyone time and money. Don’t wait for any other business just shout out at the beginning of the meeting. Remember, you’re keeping bargaining costs low.
“Conclusion”
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Alongside internet atheism and men’s rights activism, the economic way of thinking is among the best ways of justifying your horrible personality. But until now these advantages have not been codified. I hope in this book, “Life Coasing: How The Economic Way Of Thinking Can Justify Your Horrible Personality”, we have explained how coasean bargains and the economic way of thinking can provide cover for your horrible personality.
