The not so wild, wild west
by Terry Lee Anderson, Peter J. Hill · first published 2004
80% recommend20% neutral
"Mention of the American West usually evokes images of rough and tumble cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. In contrast, The Not So Wild, Wild West casts America's frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. Rather than describing the frontier as a place where heroes met villains, this book argues that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West." "The authors emphasize that ownership of resources evolves as those resources become more valuable or as establ
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The "wild west" was really not as wild as people think. A nice book that explores a little how problems were actually solved in the wild west is: > The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier > https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748...
on “Privately Enforced and Punished Crime” ↗…West" societies in the US. Those societies were basically growing at an exponential rate at the time with an ongoing flow of immigrants, while managing to self-control and police themselves. The book "The Not so Wild Wild West" explains this point very well, if you are interested to read about this. One last thing. Obviously not every country has to follow either free market or end up like Cuba, however there is a clear trend:…
on “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine” ↗…Beautiful Tree - Tooley * Education and the State - West * The Machinery of Freedom - Friedman * Against Intellectual Monopoly - Boldrine & Levine * From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State - Beito * The Not So Wild, Wild West - Hill * More Guns, Less Crime - Lott * Race & Economics - Williams * Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men - Hummel
on “Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?” ↗…invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that. We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations…
on “We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't” ↗…as worker safety or environmental damage. Obviously, if it is done poorly (or disingenuously), the results will not go well. But we take for granted the times when it does go well. > The book "The Not so Wild Wild West" I'll look into this. I'm definitely a proponent of the social contract occurring at a more local level, where people are actually people instead of numbers in a database. But I'm skeptical that it is…
on “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine” ↗