DISQUS

Surely this is inefficient overall, no?

Surely. But advantageous for the individual seller, who would unilaterally forfeit gains from price discrimination by offering fixed prices.

What's the nature of the commons here? More importantly, what's the mechanism economies with more formal pricing that keeps haggling out? I think the commons is something like widespread public knowledge of prices, as opposed to keeping them private and secret, and the mechanism probably has something to do with the share of a firm's business that is from one-off transactions as opposed to repeat customers.

A prediction: the more commodified a good or service is, the less haggling we observe; the more unique the product, the more haggling. So no haggling over everyday consumer items at Wal-Mart, more haggling over (rarely purchased) cars, even more over real estate, lots of haggling over large one-off commercial transactions.

"Or, if the robots are good enough, and numerous enough, maybe absolute GDP doesn’t shrink at all, and you get ever-fewer people dividing an ever-growing pie. Imagine the last Japanese family (declared endangered by the Institute for Human Biodiversity), hundreds of years hence, possessing the entire growth-compounded GDP of Japan. It could happen!"

That's sort of the jumping-off point for the excellent comic strip Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life.

I wouldn't want to get into defending Brooks as an author more generally, and I can see why the quoted passages rubbed you the wrong way, but isn't Brooks broadly right on the objective if not the normative question? My understanding is that indicators of civic involvement are up across the board for my generation. I don't think that it constitutes a denial of individual identity, but it's certainly happening, right?

Looking at you and Julian, I just always figured, "those professional libertarians must be a dapper sort." Who knows what Sanchez is up to, but Cato is certainly on to something with that dress code. Hope you didn't get in trouble for spilling the beans.

Why are you so quick to dismiss the looming Robot Gap! We need a new Manhattan Project to address it! And a Marshall Plan!