YouSaid · the spoken record

David Friedman

lines on the record: 96
first: 2021-08-09
most recent: 2021-08-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Some mixture of writing the programs myself for simple things and getting other people involved in such projects where the project requires more than one person for common. That's probably the activity that most strikes me as being fun. Now, I've also written a few novels, and it's possible that if I had started writing novels very early, I would have been good enough to sort of be able to support myself and do good stuff. But my guess is not that my impression is that the people who are really good at that have talents I don't have. And so I think I would only do that as I do it for my own fun. I write novels that some people enjoy, so it's worth doing. I sort of do it. By intuition, and he does it by some mixture of intuition and theories of how to write novels, he's much better than I am. Which is nice. I mean”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a whole lot easier with programming than it is with engineering. And I have ideas. I have ideas for computer programs to help teach economics, three of which went with my price theory textbook I actually wrote, but I've got lots of ideas for more. And I think what would be fun, assuming I could support myself doing it or maybe do it along with some other things, would be to be taking clever ideas like what I was saying before about how you ought to be running, things like that.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“many of the kind of people as it were. It wasn't as dense, so it was more likely that I was smart enough to say original and interesting things in that field. So again, the temptation, partly because computer programming is a lot of fun. I've done it, though not professionally. It would be tempting to go into computer programming and in effect, I guess the thing I would enjoy, the thing I like thinking about, and I don't know if I can pull it off or not, would be independent computer programming. to do the equivalent of inventing Tetris. And maybe to do something where you can carry it far enough so somebody will pay you a whole lot of money to take over your project and then doing it really right. Making machines that work is something that human beings really enjoy.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of what happened was that I was less enthusiastically interested in the subject than some of the other people, but I was smarter than the people I was interacting with as a graduate, even as a graduate student at Chicago. And that was enough of an advantage. Then I was a postdoc at Columbia Physics Department, and I wasn't smarter than the people I was interacting with. They were the professors, and they were much more interested. And it occurred to me that what had happened in theoretical physics was that because at the time I went into it, it was sort of the elite field that was being subsidized that everybody knew was the high status important thing, although it hasn't really produced as much since then as it was expected to, that therefore it was overpopulated with high IQ people. And that was one part of the reason that I eventually left that field and became an economist instead, because there are certainly some very smart people in economics, but there weren't”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure I'd be very good at starting up a successful company. I mean, the obvious interesting area at the moment is sort of encryption and stuff. Cryptocurrency and so forth. But the problem is, this is the usual problem because an interesting area, a whole lot of smart people go into it. So I started out. Getting a doctorate in theoretical physics.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Facebook to other SCA people, that if somebody was making jewelry actually based on medieval jewelry, I would donate gemstones for them. And again, it just felt more nearly right to me to do that as a donation than to say I will sell them to you. And I'm not quite sure why, but except in terms of my emotional feelings that having participated in gift cultures, it made it easier to have some feel for why people. But I still don't really understand economically. I mean, a very interesting question. Maybe someone else has looked at more carefully, why you sometimes have gift cultures and why you don't. Any”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, but also sort of the feel of it is that I feel as though it makes sense to do favors and not to do things for money. Now, it isn't entirely true. My wife and I have a medieval cookbook, and we sell that. But generally, when I, long before that, I put together a collection of source material on medieval cooking, which I reduction Xerox four pages to a page to make it really cheap. And I was sewing that for cost. And it somehow didn't seem appropriate in terms of my interaction with other people in the hobby to be doing it for money. And similarly, one of my hobbies is lapidary work, cutting semi-precious gemstones. And I do it for fun. I cut more stones. I also do some jewelry making, but not very much. I cut more stones than I have a use for. So quite a while ago, I put up an offer.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a gift culture embedded in our ordinary system. But certainly in the SCA, partly because I'm playing the role of a medieval person, and at least in some medieval cultures, you have the idea that nobles don't work for money, that”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've gotten a little bit more sympathetic attitude to gift cultures because now I also pick up that from reading Icelandic stuff that is medieval Icelandic stuff but it is I have, in a sense, I should have realized it earlier, even without that, because there are certain parts of our ordinary life which are gift cultures. And the standard example I give is that you have some friends over for dinner. And they feel as though they ought to have you over for dinner. And if they can't have you over for dinner, they should take you out to a restaurant. And it would never occur to them to say, well, you took them out for dinner. Why don't we pay you 20 bucks and we're even?”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The computer is not better at. People might like personal servants, and personal servants are, it's very hard to make a computer a real full substitute for personal service. They might like people to nannies for their kids. They might like live entertainment is something people value. It seems to me there are going to be an awful lot of things, even if like 80% or 90% of things computers can do much better. If there's 10 or 20% things they can't do, even they can do a little bit better. Better is a relative term, and you can then keep doing those things and trade them for the others.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I should think more about this question. But I'm certainly familiar with the kind of scenario people talk about. I don't know what the particular author you're talking about, but it does seem to me that Tuesday much more plausible that the poor people will be better off just not nearly as much better off because there have got to be things that”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's the pattern you would expect, except if what matters to you is relative income. If what matters to you is relative income, then it's the pattern you would expect. But if it's absolute income, it isn't impossible. But again, I don't see why can't the non-techies keep running a non-techie economy, as it were, for themselves, and then have that non-techie economy trade with the techie economy on much more profitable terms than it could have traded with anybody before because the techie economy, even if it's better at some things, it's much more better at some things than others. That seems to me the right first guess on that. I should write something.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can imagine stories where they can't, stories where somehow the people who can produce enormously more are no longer available to them to work with them in producing their things. But it's not obvious that you would expect that to happen. And at the same time, the usual sort of principle comparative advantage rule is that the more different the people you're trading with are, the greater the gains to both sides of trading. So if the result is that certain things individuals who can do them are a hundred times as productive and certain things only twice as productive, then someone who can't do those things can be the twice as productive ones and trade for the other stuff and get much more than they could before. So it doesn't seem to me.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't understand their jobs are useless Only in the sense that there is another way of doing the same thing. That other way Costs are relative, right? Why they can still do the same things as before in an hour of time. So, why can't they still produce the amount of stuff?”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's sort of smart techies will get a lot richer than other people. And that could easily be happening. And maybe what has been happening, I'm not just techie's doctors, lawyers, people, other people of that sort. So that may be what has been happening over the last 20 or 30 or 40 years. I'm not sure. And that could certainly keep happening.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's entirely plausible and may already have happened that technological change will result in some people being a lot better off and some people being a little better off. So if you think about there's evidence, I haven't really looked very carefully at the whole issue of whether wealth in the US is becoming more unequal. People claim it is it might be true, but it's sort of complicated because you've got to look at household versus individual and if households are getting smaller, then household income would go down even if individual income didn't and so forth. But putting that as supposing it's happening, one explanation is that technological progress means that the value of intelligence is increasing more than the value of strength. That's the sort of simplest way of putting it. And therefore, even if strength is still useful, it would then be the case that”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To begin with, is it detriment to other people or only that other people don't get the large gain? My first approximation response to all of these stories is why can't you have a subset of the population who are doing the same things they were doing before with the same technology trading with each other and are about as well fit as they were before? Now maybe you can't because maybe all the capital gets bit away from them, but they'll have whatever their own capital is. So it's hard to see how they are worse off than Hong Kong in 1950, then any society which doesn't have a lot of wealth but has people productive people. So I think it's...”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got a future. It's Other things you accumulate. And if people are too worried about that, you will then get a coalitions, you will get what you had with kinship in Iceland, you will get groups of people who agree, as in Somalia, that we will, if your rights are violated, we will help you fight, as it were, and we will then get a share of the compensation.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How well you are protected, partly depends on how much of whatever resources are used for conflict you can command. But at the same time, how much protection you need depends on how much stuff.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If in one hand, the poor is too narrow a statement. Whoever has less of the resources relevant for conflict, so that it might well be that a poor lawyer would be in a pretty good position because conflict in our society might well be lawsuits and his time is available for him, whereas a somewhat better off person with no expertise in law might not be. And after all, I discussed this in the context of the Icelandic system a thousand years ago. And then while money was useful, the main thing was how many of your kin were competent warriors, how many of your friends were. So it was really the relevant power in that was not mainly money. It was mainly alliances.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I like about it, of course, is not the kinship part, although that's very important in that society, but the fact that it is also by contract, by explicit contracts. So that you can have what they call a pile of shields, which is a coalition which is entirely by contract rather than by kinship. And apparently that was the term they used for NATO. because it wasn't like we were kin, but we had all agreed to.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's more even more complicated than scribing because it's a set of nested coalitions where if the group you're dealing with is too strong, you expand by taking in the set of people, the set of other such groups that are sort of part of your tree, as it were. It's quite a neat system. I have a chapter on that in the legal systems book, and it was a lot of fun.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain sense, this is how a private law system like a Somali system did work, that is to say, in the Somali, the traditional Somali system, you have coalitions which are formed partly by kinship and partly by explicit contract of a group of people. And part of the deal is if somebody wrongs one of us, everybody in the coalition will help him use feud basically use or threaten violence against the person who harmed him to get compensated. And when the compensation comes in, it gets divided among the members of the group, typically the victim gets a larger share, and it's more complicated than I'm describing. But the basic idea is that it is a group of people who are committed to defending Of them against wrongs by people who are members of other such groups.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each case, that's right. If you could find some way so that it only applied to 1%. Of what the agencies wanted to do, you might be able to pull it off. That would be an interesting project. What's the book?”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that if they weren't committed to do it for any victim, it could work, that is to say, I presume that regulatory agencies do actually look at how hard their target is going to fight. But given that they're committed for everybody, the regulatory agency is going to say to itself, if we give in here, we're not going to be able to do our assigned job assigned by Congress, and therefore we should, and after all, the federal government has an awful lot of money available to much more money than your group of wealthy people do.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basic conclusion is that the only defensible one is the belief that if they don't have the right catastrophic things will happen and he then spends the second half of the book arguing as I would that it isn't true.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that book he basically runs through all of the standard philosophical arguments for why governments have a right to do things the rest of us don't have a right to do.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I call myself an anarchist. The society I describe in machinery as an anarcho-capitalist society has mechanisms for enforcing law. It's not just that you can do anything you like. Why aren't those mechanisms a government? And that was the question I was starting with because some people said they are. You're not really an anarchist. And my answer is because those institutions are seen by people as having the same status as private individuals. that the rights enforcement agencies are not a government because if they try to extort you, you will in fact resist not an infinite cost, but a much larger cost than the issue seems to be worth, as would other people, whereas governments you don't. So that was my answer.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is sufficiently powerful, and if other people don't see giving in to it as the same thing as giving in to an ordinary person, then you know that if you tried to maintain that commitment strategy, you would die because the government's got a whole lot more power than you do, and therefore you don't. And so I think that's the basic interest. But I really got into that part of it because the question I was trying to answer is what makes something a government.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My definition of government is that organization against which we drop our commitment strategies. And if I drop my commitment, it depends on other people seeing the difference, seeing that a government is a different kind of thing. If I drop my commitment strategy against you, other people will observe that and say, look, he's a wimp, we can push him around too. This is my discussion of why the UK was willing to send their only aircraft carrier almost to Antarctica to fight Argentina over some barren islands that nobody cared about. Because if they didn't, it might be Gibraltar next. If it was clear that they were not committed to defend their territory even when it didn't seem worth doing. And on the other hand, if you have an organization”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anywhere you want. I can't draw the line and say, all right, the deal is I will fight as hard as I can if you don't pay me $50 a month in tribute because you won't believe me. And you, but I will believe you if you tell me try to make me pay you tribute and I will do whatever I have to to stop you. So that's sort of the basic idea people should read the article if they want the details.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What makes civil order, the reason we aren't in a hobby and anarchy where everybody's fighting everybody else is that we have reasonably consistent pictures of each other's commitment strategies so that I know that if I am your neighbor and I come and say I've decided to dump my trash over the fence onto your property and look doing anything about it legally would be more trouble than just dumping the disposing of the trash, you aren't going to accept that nor are you going to accept it if I say, look, instead of dumping my trash, pay me $10 a month. You're not going to do that either. And in terms of a simple cost-benefit calculation, it looks like you ought to surrender, but we all have a feeling for why it would be a mistake to surrender. So in that sense, you get a pattern in which people are mostly not fighting each other because each person knows here are the lines other people have drawn. And you can't just draw the line.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the lines such that if somebody else crosses them, I am willing to bear unreasonably large costs to fight them? That's the way of thinking about it. And that then gets into the idea of shelling points, the idea that you can't just set your boundary anywhere. You have to set your boundary at something which both sides will see as a natural division. So I talk about things like bank robbers who have to split the loot, and each one thinks he deserves more than half of it, but they don't want to keep arguing about it until the police show up, so they agree on 50-50, that 50-50 seems like a natural division, like what's called a shelling point. And I discussed that at some length, as I say, in both the article, which you can get from my webpage or the chapter in my third edition of Machinery. And that then...”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CLA economist who was, again, in a little bit like Robin in the sense of a very bright, very original kind of person and a lot of fun. And I discuss him on my blog a little bit and a little bit more in something I've been writing. But the idea of commitment strategies is really important. And you then say, well, what's the human equivalent? The human equivalent is mostly not geographical boundaries. It's boundaries in rights. It's what are the patterns of behavior that”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starts out with other species. It starts out with territorial behavior in animals, which is a well-established pattern of a fair number of different species. And the territorial behavior consists of an individual species somehow marking the territory he's claiming. And then somehow turning a switch in his brain so that he will fight more and more desperately against a trespasser of his own species and sex the farther into the territory he comes. And the critical fact is that unless the trespasser is much stronger, a fight to the death is a loss for both sides. And therefore, if one side can somehow commit himself to, I will do whatever it takes to fight you, then the other side backs off. And I should say this is something I ultimately got from interacting with Earl Thompson, who's no longer alive, but he was a youth.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because any individual who did that would be worse off as a result is the simple answer. But basically, what you're discussing is an article of mine called a positive account of property rights. And it was really about rights in general. I just happened to write it for a conference on property rights. And the same material appears in the third edition of Machinery of Freedom in somewhat slightly different form. And the basic argument is that”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I missed any. And then there are countries like India or a good deal of Africa, which were part of the British Empire. And in fact, India was affected quite a lot. I mean, as you, of course, know, one of the two official languages in India is English. But nonetheless, it had its own culture. And although it was to some extent maintained the British influence, it would not be astonishing if its legal system was quite different. And I think there are at least, I don't know a lot about Indian law, but I think there are significant ways in which it does not fit the Anglo-American pattern.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. That is, there are really two different kinds of countries dominated by England. There are the ones that ended up with a more or less English-speaking and to a significant degree English ethnic population. That's the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there, I think in those cases there's actually an effort by people who think that it's bad for young people to have sex more or less, or it happens under bad circumstances, and then push the idea and nobody else is all that interested in it. But I think the more general similarity things you were talking about, I think, are more a matter of a single global culture, as it were, among the people among law professors that I'm pretty sure that when I get messages telling me that people have been looking at something I wrote, a lot of them are people elsewhere in the people who are not in the US or not in England, and sometimes they're looking at something I wrote about law, sometimes it's something unrelated to that, of course.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at the situation even 50 years ago, I think, what the age of consent was varied a lot from country to country. And at this point, there are countries where it's different, but almost everybody, it's something between 16 and 18. And similarly for U.S. states. The U.S. states, I think Hawaii was the last one that conformed. I think it was 14 in Hawaii until maybe 20 years ago or something.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question is, is either of those very close to either criminal or tort law? In the US. And I don't know about those cases, but I wouldn't assume that it was because But I think it is probably true that the sort of ruling groups in all of the developed world know each other and talk to each other and not wholly unreasonably say, well, you know, that country's got this rule, seems to work for them. Maybe we should do it too. I mean, there are a number of cases where there's been a sort of a deliberate campaign to do that. The one that struck me partly because of some online discussions is age of consent to sexual intercourse.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too at least. So I think my guess is that if you were looking at non-state legal systems, you'd find a lot more diversity. But I could be wrong. And I suppose that it's certainly Jewish law, rabbinic law still exists not as a state system. Israel doesn't really have rabbinic law, but it exists for certain areas as a Enforced by people believing in their religion kind of system. And I suspect, again, that if you looked at those, you would find a good deal less uniformity.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Legal system. So, one of the interesting questions is if you look at non state legal systems, which there are lots in the modern world that if you think of a university's rules for its students, a large firm's rules and so forth, I wonder if you actually looked at those or to take an example. I should say there are two chapters in that book that I didn't write that friends of mine and their names are on the book, but basically I knew people who had written interesting books on other legal systems, so I asked each of them to do a chapter on it. And that's the book. It's a chapter by David Scarbeck is on prison gangs and the chapter by Peter Leeson, which is on 18th century pirates. And if you look at those systems, they aren't all that similar to the state ones. If I think about those,”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but it seems to me that Robin's answer sounds like a plausible answer. No, when I wrote the book, I normally, when people talk about comparative law, they're talking about Japanese versus European versus US, et cetera. And I was deliberately not doing that. That the closest I came to our system was 18th century English criminal law. And that was that I written an article on it. There was a bunch of really interesting stuff there, but that's really too close to our system for what I was trying to do in that book. So no, you're right, that the modern legal systems all look like variants on the same thing. And I guess there's some pressure for consistency in the sense that if you're going to be doing business with people in another country, you'd like their legal system and your legal system to be similar enough so you can make sense of them. But I think a lot of it has got to be ideology and a lot of that is because all of these are state-made.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Saudis are the closest, as far as I know, but mostly countries that talk about following Sharia have a government statutory legal system, some of whose rules are borrowed from Basharia. But Sharia, the real thing, it's not clear that Sharia is the right term for it, but the real traditional Islamic legal system was not legislated by the state. That was a system Sort of like common law in the Anglo-American system in which the legal rules were worked out by scholars based on religious sources and the judges were appointed by the state, but the judges didn't even have to be legal experts. It was a good thing if they were, but they could rely on the Muftis who were initially at least reputationally supported legal scholars to tell them what the law was. So in principle, that system had separation of state and law. Now, they always.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is nowhere in the Middle East with the possible exception of the Islamic State, which doesn't rule anything. Which actually follows Sharia.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least requiring all sorts of lengthy testing for medical treatments to stop aging, and maybe even trying to block them. Because after all, one of the effects of ending aging is that the social security system goes bankrupt. Right, very quickly, unless you are willing to stop paying Social Security, very old people or something. And there are going to be other respects in which there's going to be prejudice. So I could certainly imagine that some countries would see ending aging as a bad thing. Find it hard to believe that all of them would. And there are obviously a lot of politically powerful people and a lot of wealthy people who are old. Like not to die of old age. So, my guess is that can't be stopped. But as I say, I would have guessed that somebody would have done a better job on COVID than they did.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody will put it that way. But that's sort of disappointing to me that you didn't, you had one country which in other ways defied the rules, namely Sweden, and that was a good thing. That gives you some more information, although not as good information as you'd like. They didn't do very well, but we're not sure how many other differences there are among the countries that could explain it. They did much worse than the other Scandinavian countries, but not much worse than Italy or Spain, say. I can think a link better than Italy and Spain. I'm not sure. And then people have different explanations of the reasons for these different outcomes. But in a sense, I wish the world were less uniform in that sense And if I think about aging, for example, I can easily imagine the FDA.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you can keep getting better information as you go on, but that's enough. So that means that we could have had some of the vaccine in maybe two months instead of whatever it was, 10 months or 11 months, how fast they could expand production and how many people would be willing to risk it and such. I don't know. But the impressive thing is not just that the U.S. didn't do it. We know the FDA is crazy that way, but that nobody did. Now, I don't really know for certain what happened in China and Russia, but at least of the Western countries, none of them was willing to do challenge trials. That's, I think, a case of enough common cultural elements, one of which is better to have 100,000 people die from not doing something than to have 10 people die from doing something.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Healthy young adults. You give them the vaccine and you deliberately expose them to COVID. That'll tell you a month after if you believe that you may need two shots a month apart, that you wouldn't even have to do that in order to find out that it works just to find out the best way of doing it. So expose them and give your people the vaccine, expose them all to COVID. You have some rough idea of people who are exposed to COVID from external evidence, how likely they are to get it, if almost none of them get it, you know the vaccine works.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source