Poorly argued...Laughlin is rather inconsistent, so it's not even very clear what he's arguing for. He fails to make several crucial distinctions, so that the freedom to think about certain subjects (say, nuclear physics) is not clearly distinguished from the freedom to act on one's knowledge (such as the freedom to sell nuclear secrets to North Korea if you feel like it). The basic problem running throughout the book is a moral-practical dichotomy, so that he argues for a sort of platonic ideal of intellectual freedom, while regularly being forced to recognize that it is not at all practical or even desirable in many cases. And his basic premise that information should be equally available to everyone isn't just false, it's impossible!

Surprisingly, the best chapter is probably the one on patent law, which he concludes: "This unhappy state of affairs has now led to loud cries for tort reform, both from concerned individuals and from businesses being bled dry by legal costs. Yet while legislatures may enact reforms soon, most people think they are unlikely to do what it takes to restore respect for technical law: ban patents for methods of reasoning, methods of communicating, discovery of things widely viewed as self-evident, and discovery of phenomena that occur on their own when humans are not present." That's more or less accurate, though it could stand to be more clear (it depends, for instance, on what exactly he means by "methods of communicating"), but this is about as clear and accurate as he gets. ( )

Stimulating and urbane, but hampered by Laughlin's desire to skate over topics from comparison of genes to computer code, to attitudes towards incest, to the kinds of conversation he apparently has at parties (p. 115), all with an inconsistent commitment to supportive referencing. I was left particularly unsure what he thinks morality consists in, except that he apparently thinks it involves rights and responsibilities. 'The ethical issues of protecting embryos... have fundamentally to do with the rights of emerging communities...' (p. 111). They do? '[S]elling... is the true purpose of fun' (p. 123). Is he dragging in some mysterious universal teleology or just being flippant? And so on.

It would have worked better, then, to use the later chapters to develop a more nuanced picture of economic activity and its implications. The early chapters are much more successful (though there are still some excessive generalisations), going some way to build up a picture of knowledge as it is deployed in society and particularly within scientific practice, and of the implications for that of political and legal regimes. What it fails to do, in a debate already supplied with some noteworthy legal and economic thinking, is to distinguish itself either on similar terms or specifically as the contribution of a Nobel-winning physicist.