The great contraction, 1929-1933 / with a new preface by Anna Jacobson Schwartz and a new introduction by Peter L. Bernstein ; [by] Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Friedman, Milton, 1912-2006.

Contributor:

Schwartz, Anna J. (Anna Jacobson), 1915-2012.

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Princeton classic editions.

Princeton classic editions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Money--United States--History.

Money.

Currency question--United States--History.

Currency question.

Monetary policy--United States--History.

Monetary policy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (338 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What does economics have to do with law? Suppose legislators propose that armed robbers receive life imprisonment. Editorial pages applaud them for getting tough on crime. Constitutional lawyers raise the issue of cruel and unusual punishment. Legal philosophers ponder questions of justness. An economist, on the other hand, observes that making the punishment for armed robbery the same as that for murder encourages muggers to kill their victims. This is the cut-to-the-chase quality that makes economics not only applicable to the interpretation of law, but beneficial to its crafting. Drawing on numerous commonsense examples, in addition to his extensive knowledge of Chicago-school economics, David D. Friedman offers a spirited defense of the economic view of law. He clarifies the relationship between law and economics in clear prose that is friendly to students, lawyers, and lay readers without sacrificing the intellectual heft of the ideas presented. Friedman is the ideal spokesman for an approach to law that is controversial not because it overturns the conclusions of traditional legal scholars--it can be used to advocate a surprising variety of political positions, including both sides of such contentious issues as capital punishment--but rather because it alters the very nature of their arguments. For example, rather than viewing landlord-tenant law as a matter of favoring landlords over tenants or tenants over landlords, an economic analysis makes clear that a bad law injures both groups in the long run. And unlike traditional legal doctrines, economics offers a unified approach, one that applies the same fundamental ideas to understand and evaluate legal rules in contract, property, crime, tort, and every other category of law, whether in modern day America or other times and places--and systems of non-legal rules, such as social norms, as well. This book will undoubtedly raise the discourse on the increasingly important topic of the economics of law, giving both supporters and critics of the economic perspective a place to organize their ideas.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. What Does Economics Have to Do with Law?

2. Efficiency and All That

3. What's Wrong with the World, Part 1

4. What's Wrong with the World, Part 2

5. Defining and Enforcing Rights: Property, Liability, and Spaghetti

6. Of Burning Houses and Exploding Coke Bottles

7. Coin Flips and Car Crashes: Ex Post versus Ex Ante

8. Games, Bargains, Bluffs, and Other Really Hard Stuff

9. As Much as Your Life Is Worth

Intermezzo. The American Legal System in Brief

10. Mine, Thine, and Ours: The Economics of Property Law

11. Clouds and Barbed Wire: The Economics of Intellectual Property

12. The Economics of Contract

13. Marriage, Sex, and Babies

14. Tort Law

15. Criminal Law

16. Antitrust

17. Other Paths

18. The Crime/Tort Puzzle

19. Is the Common Law Efficient?

Epilogue. What We Have Been Doing for the Past Nineteen Chapters, or a Rough Sketch of an Elephant

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

"A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research."

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

9781400802524

1400802520

9781299051133

1299051138

9781400823475

1400823471

9781400811663

140081166X

OCLC:

842997669