There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

TANSTAAFL is an acronym for the English phrase " there is not no such thing as a free lunch", which was made by the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein 's novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress 1966 popular. The novel deals with the problems that arise from the uncritical acceptance of a unilateral economic policy. The phrase and the book are very popular in libertarian circles and the sentence is often cited in textbooks of economics. To avoid the double negative, the abbreviation TINSTAAFL is locally used, which is resolved as "there is no such thing as a free lunch".

The set can be mutatis mutandis with " nothing is free " Compile and is intended to illustrate the concept of opportunity cost. Greg Mankiw describes the concept as follows: " To get one thing that we like, we usually have to give up another thing that we like. To make decisions means weighing goals against each other. "

Origin and use

The sentence refers to the formerly widespread tradition of saloons in the United States, the guests a " Free Lunch ", ie a " free " lunch to offer, the guests were obligated to purchase at least one drink. Rudyard Kipling describes 1891 as he

" Came in a bar room full of bad Saloon pictures, snakes down in the men pushed to the back of the head hats eating a breakfast bar. It was the institution of the "free lunch ", to which I had come. You paid for a drink and got to eat as much as you wanted. For something less than a rupee a day a man in San Francisco may have enough to eat, even though he is broke. Remember, if you ever should be stuck there. "

TANSTAAFL means that for a person or company something can never be truly free. Even if it seems that something is free, there are always costs for the person or society as a whole, even though these costs can be hidden or distributed. Can you get in a bar, for example, free meals during the "Happy Hour", so the owner must bear the costs for it and will try to compensate for this in other ways. Some goods, such as wild fruit picked, while likely to be practically free, but usually always incur costs - in this case for the work of picking or by the loss of food for the animals in the environment.

The idea that there is nothing at the societal level in vain, is true only if all resources are used fully and adequately. When an individual or group gets something for free, you must bear the cost of someone else. If there seems to be no direct costs for an individual, there are instead social costs. Similarly, someone " free " from an external effect or a public good benefit, but this always means that another must bear the cost of producing these benefits.

In financial mathematics, the term is also used as an informal synonym for the principle of absence of arbitrage, which states that a combination of securities that yield the same profit must have such other security, the same net cost.

TANSTAAFL is sometimes used as a counter argument to the claimed benefits of free software. Proponents of free software keep countered that the term " free " in this context primarily for the lack of limitations ( "Freedom ") and not for the lack of cost ( " free ") stands. Richard Stallman has this described as "free as in free speech, not as in free beer ".

The prefix " TANSTAA " is also used in various other contexts to describe a fixed property of a system. Thus, in the English-speaking Electrical TANSTAANFS the acronym is used, which stands for " There Is not No Such Thing As A Noise Free System " ( "There is no noise-free system ").

For the scientist, TANSTAAFL means that a system is complete - there is no magic source of matter, energy, or light, which ultimately can not be consumed. In this respect, the TANSTAAFL argument can also be applied to physical processes. ( See also: Thermodynamics. )

References

• Already 1950 has attributed the phrase to economist and Army General Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Company, a columnist for the New York Times. " It seems that shortly before the death of General approached a group of reporters with a request to the General, he might let them send one of the immutable truisms, he has collected during the long years of his economic studies. It's a unalterable economic fact, ' said the general, that there is something like a ' does not exist. ' Free lunch ' "

• The book TANSTAAFL, the economic strategy for environmental crisis by Edwin G. Dolan, the 1971 is expected to contain the first use of the term in the economic literature.

• The title of Spider Robinson's 2001 novel The erschienenem Free Lunch refers to the TANSTAAFL concept.

• One of several responses of the authorities responsible for the topographic maps of Great Britain Ordnance Survey to the 2006 launched by the newspaper The Guardian Campaign Free Our ​​Data for the free and unrestricted access to his data material partially financed with public funds: "There is no such thing as free data. "

• TANSTAAFL is the name of a snack bar in Pierce dormitory of the University of Chicago. The name refers to the fact that the phrase was made popular by Milton Friedman, a former professor at the University of Chicago and Nobel laureate.

• The Café of IIM Ahmedabad is named Cafe TANSTAAFL.

• TANSTAGI is in the novel series Schrödinger's Cat by Robert Anton Wilson as abbreviation for " There Is not No Such Thing As Government Interference ", the motto of the Invisible Hand Society.