Quoting "Fred C. Moulton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
(snip)
> See David Friedman's related essays:
>
> "A World of Strong Privacy: Promises and Perils of Encryption"
> http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Academic/Strong_Privacy/Strong_Privacy.html
>
> "Contracts in Cyberspace"
> http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Academic/contracts_in_%
20cyberspace/contracts_in_cyberspace.htm
>
> "Anarchy and Efficient Law"
>
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Academic/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law.html.
I read these essays: is this really representative of his best work? It seemed
awfully rudimentary. In fact, I did a search on the NBER website for any real
academic journal articles by (or even mentioning) him: nada. Now don't blow a
gasket on me, but if this is as good as it gets I'd have to say he strikes me
as more of a polemicizer/theorist than an analyst.
His 'reputational enforcement model' seemed more like a way to wow the
layperson than anything else: as presented here, it's kiddy stuff that tells me
absolutely nothing. This might pass for rigorous scholarship at Santa Clara,
but in a quality policy analysis program, even grad students couldn't get away
with turning it in.
Gotta love this quote: "This is not a full formal analysis of the dynamics of
the model: indeed it is hard to see in what sense one can talk rigorously of
dynamics in my simple model..." No shit. Where is it then. Where's the model
that really means something.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a shame: personally, I'd like nothing better
than for someone to show that for "contracts in cyberspace in the future,
public enforcement will work less well and private enforcement better than for
contracts in realspace at present." But this just isn't it, folks.
I'll keep on looking over his site since you people seem so sold on it. If you
don't think I have anything useful to say about Friedman till I read the
relevant books on Tim's list, fine. But if anyone wants to point me toward the
hard core analysis here, I'd be delighted.
Too bad I can't make it to Oakland tonight either, I'm sure it would have been
fun. Especially the Q & A. heh.
~Faustine.
****
'We live in a century in which obscurity protects better than the law--and
reassures more than innocence can.' Antoine Rivarol (1753-1801).
