Cost and choice

Abstract

In the summer of 1954, CE (Ed.) Lindblom and I were invited as guest scholars to the then-flourishing Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Our assignment was to carry out a generalized overview of Rand’s research, particularly that done by its economists. It was soon apparent that these economists considered that their primary contribution was simply to elaborate, variously, the elementary notion of opportunity cost. TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch) was, and remains, as a first principle to be mastered on the way toward rudimentary economic understanding. Something of value can only be secured if something else of value that could be produced does not come into being. Naive and utopian notions that good things can be created from nothing must be dispelled.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 211 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.