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Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological
revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their
implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from
encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and
nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and
artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future
is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could
lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or
slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species,
and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and
play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely
to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it
now.
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.
Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological
revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their
implications and how to deal with them. Topics range from
encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and
nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality and
artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future
is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could
lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or
slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species,
and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work and
play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely
to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it
now.
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