Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Embedded Economics

I have discussed in several earlier posts my project for a collection of short literary works that contain interesting economic insights. The current version is up for comments, with several pieces added, several comments added or expanded. 

My guess is that it will end up as a web page rather than a printed book. The reason is the copyright problem. Many of the works are still in copyright and getting permission on all of them would be a good deal of work, whether for me or a commercial publisher. 

All of the in-copyright works I am using, however, are webbed, I presume (but do not know) by or with the permission of the copyright holder (with the partial exception of a  story only part of which is webbed). I can link to the webbed version of a work without negotiating permissions, which makes a webbed version of the project a lot easier to create than a printed version.

And by maintaining it as a web page I can add additional works as people suggest them. 

Suggestions welcome. A description of what I am looking for and why.

4 comments:

Giles said...

This looks great! One slight problem -- the links to your comments for "Herodotus on the marriage market in Babylonia", "Two Hundred Dinars", and "Love, though for this you riddle me with darts" don't currently work.

Giles said...

Actually, the link for "Two Hundred Dinars" itself is also not working.

David Friedman said...

Many thanks. I think I have fixed them.

For anyone curious, the mistake is one I have made before. My HTML authoring program (SeaMonkey) gives me the option of making a link either absolute, to the location of the file I am linking to, or relative, to the file whose location is the same relative to the file I am linking from.

When I am editing a web page the file I am editing is sitting on my hard drive to be later uploaded to my web site. If I link to another file on my hard drive, say one in the same folder, an absolute link goes to my hard drive--which someone reading the webbed file has no access to. A relative link goes to the file, also uploaded, in the same subdirectory on my web site as the uploaded copy of the file I have just edited.

The broken links Giles pointed out were ones where I had forgotten to tell SeaMonkey that the link was relative.

Anonymous said...

Do you consider either utilitarian ethical tradeoffs, or public choice theory with utilitarian assumptions, to be part of "economics"? If so, Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" might count; it seems to be an intuition pump for a central problem with utilitarian theory.