David D. FriedmanReseñas

Provides manuscript recipes from original sources and many useful articles on medieval reenactment. Internet: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/miscellany_pdf/Miscellany.htm

If David Friedman wanted to convert me into anarcho-capitalism with this book he failed at his task.
I'm not only not convinced that it is a viable idea for a functioning society, but I believe in it less as a result of reading this book.
It's not all bad though. The author touches upon some interesting aspects of the an-cap society I haven't read about before.
The book is organized very poorly. The chapter order is very incoherent, different portions of the book feel like separate entities not connected to one another, like a random stack of excerpts from different books.
Overall, not impressed. In case you are an anarcho-capitalist and want to share your philosophy with someone, this is not the book to recommend to them.

Book is intended to be a friendly, easy intro to economics. It made a real attempt to be easy, and there was a sense of humor, but it was too hard for me to follow without putting in a lot more work than I was prepared to give. Read about 50 pages and it was clear it wasn’t gonna get any easier.

I’ve read a couple other of his books, and enjoyed them.

Very interesting subject matter, but the book is very rough around the edges - needed better editing I think.

An amazing book about a variety of legal systems from different places and times, and analysis by a brilliant professor of how they deal with certain universal challenges. Especially interesting when he proposes using some of these elements to solve problems in our current legal system - crimes committed by the government, malicious prosecution, certain crimes and torts which are expensive to prosecute, and patent trolls.

One area he didn’t touch much is the ability to use technology to make some of these ideas real — transferable torts would work great with cryptocurrency, and while he mentioned conventional video surveillance (via David Brin) he didn’t mention how structured agreements could include instrumentation and metrics to either self enforce or make judicial enforcement easier.

Builds on (morally and empirically) insane premises, but demonstrates some useful analytical tools. Friedman himself notes that it is intended as a 'how to think' rather than a 'what to think' book, and with some reservations I recommend it as such.

Law's Order is unapologetically written from the perspective of a near-strawman economist: hard-nosed, committed to logical rigour above all else, willing to shave off the awkward complications of reality in order to make it theoretically tractable, and (arguably) smuggling in some rather extreme moral foundations under the guise of sceptical neutrality. I think you have to be careful with this sort of thing, because even when you know and acknowledge that your conclusions are based on dubious premises and simplified models, it's easy to imbue them with more normative force than they deserve. I feel like Friedman falls into this trap himself: although he acknowledges that wealth maximisation != happiness maximisation, that real people are not actually perfectly rational and fully informed, that there are always relevant facts missing from any simple model, and so on, he sure does seem wedded to the pursuit of (a somewhat naive concepion of) economic efficiency, and to individual freedom (of the right-wing libertarian variety) as a kind of panacea.

My other criticism is that, although it is written in a fairly accessible style, it can be a bit of a slog -- sometimes because the pace or style of the explanation is (for me) a bit off, sometimes just because it's fairly dry stuff. It took me a long time to get through, and I often had to push myself to go back to it.

Still, Friedman is clearly a very smart guy who, despite his ideological biases, cares about the rigorous pursuit and honest communication of truth. So long as you take his caveats literally, and remember to actively apply them throughout, I think this is a really useful and interesting book.

Didn't read all of it (library fines got me once more), but this is a very enjoyable read about how various technologies may transform our world. Picked it up to get tips on writing science fiction (conclusion: writing science fiction is Hard), but very little of the content is really about robots taking over the world. Friedman does discuss the usual suspects like nanotechnology and designer babies, but he also analyzes more mundane technological changes like surveillance technology becoming ubiquitous and Internet privacy making firms like Murder Anonymous (hit-men you hire over the Internet without fear of being caught) being possible.

Friedman is an engaging and entertaining writer and did a good job of covering his subjects, especially the legal issues surrounding them. Occasionally some of his hypotheses are a bit out there, but he explains in the introduction that he's simply providing examples of technological revolutions that could come to pass, and not predicting anything.

My only complaint is that, either because the book was started several years ago, or because he didn't want it to seem obsolete too quickly, there are relatively few references to contemporary technologies that are the forerunners to some of the things he discusses, even though it was published in 2008. I felt the text lost some currency because of this - for instance, when discussing the possibility of anonymous independent e-cash, he eventually offered a few examples of why it could come into being, but never explicitly compared it to our current online cash service, Paypal.

I really thought I had put Harald in LT and reviewed it before - I guess I read it before I started reviewing everything. A good if weird story. There are quite a few points where I read a sentence, stop, try to figure out what the heck _that_ means...Harald and his various descendents tend to say things in ellipses, especially when making plans. The first two books are James being stupid and getting his nose rubbed in it. Then the second war, in which Harald and Cara are almost as careful of the enemy as they were in the civil war - the aim is, for some reason, again to immobilize rather than to slaughter. Leaves the Imperials with more men than otherwise, but none of those men are going to be interested in going against the Karls or the Vales again. The third war is pretty much the same, too, though they're less careful that time. I like the names - I get as confused as Kiron about personal names (especially the assorted Henrys), and the fact that most of them seem to be related to Harald doesn't help. But things like what the different groups call each other - from Karls to leatherbacks - make the world very solid and fleshed-out. Harald's a sneaky bastard and his kids are all turning out the same - I'd hate to want anything he was defending or be defending anything he wanted. The last scene leaves room for another book, though it would (probably) only be more of the same - different in detail, of course, but not at base. Oh and one of the other reviews complains about Harald's (and others') dialog - telegraphic sentences. That made me notice them as I don't think I had before. But it's funny - I know the author and while he doesn't talk like that normally, when he gets into a story his sentences become distinctly choppy. I can just see him sitting there telling the tale...

A great resource for the SCA cook interesting in historical recipes that have been successfully adapted for production in the modern kitchen.

I though this was another ”believe it or not” pop economics book, it is not. It is rather basic economic knowledge attempted dealt out with much sugar, and as such I think it is excellent½

(Alistair) A good little introduction to economics both micro- and macro-, for the intelligent layman. (It works quite well as a refresher, too, I claim from personal experience.)

I don't know if I'd specifically recommend everyone read it - the author does, after all, make considerable use of charts, graphs, and actual terminology, which in themselves appear to be offputting to a great many people, and does expect you to actually think about the concepts he's explaining to you, although without the usual mathematics - but everyone certainly ought to read something fairly similar to it. This is a good explanation of the amount of economics you ought to be familiar with before being turned loose in the world and expected to make sensible decisions.

(For those of you familiar with David Friedman's politics, be assured that Hidden Order concentrates on the core economics, and is by no means an ideological tract for it author's libertarian views. And I say that even though I incline that way myself, yes.)

Recommended for everyone in severe need of some economic ideas.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2008/12/hidden_order_david_friedman... )

This story is told largely in noun phrases and sentence fragments, and as such reads something like a movie being described - pictures, but one is unsure sometimes of who the actor is, and what the action. The elliptical sentences are echoed in sometimes elliptical plot elements, wherein this reader occasionally wondered what was really supposed to be happening. We also never get inside anyone's head - the story is told purely by observation.

The story takes place in a made-up medieval land, where there is a King, an Emperor, a leader of men, and an Order of fighting Ladies that somehow feel like Crusaders (since they are of a fighting Order). We follow Harald most of the time, but do not know what he plans, or what his goals might be. The book provides a good feel for the medieval passage of time - that is, one recovering from a wound is stuck someplace for awhile. He earns his keep by helping with chores, and with stories told. But he keeps his own council, and we do not know what he intends.

An unusually told medieval-style tale. Parts are excellent, but the extravagent use of sentence fragments makes me welcome a complete sentence where it occurs. And much of the time I was on the ragged edge of understanding what was happening.

Just full of good information! I only have a few of the articles but they are well researched and informative.

I expected another worthy introduction to Libertarianism, but that's not what this is. Friedman does lay out the usual arguments about use of force and individual freedom. He extends from there into two less typical lines of thought. First, he introduced me to the ideas underlying anarchism, and how it means self-organized, mutual decision-making rather than complete chaos. He also provides a very thoughtful grounding in political philosophy, exploring the connections between libertarianism, utilitarianism, and pragmatism. He cuts apart any chance at purist libertarianism, using examples that would lead to initiating force against someone as the moral choice. He also introduces some extreme ideas beyond anarchy, the primary example being self-liberation for any child age 9 or older.

To me, this is very stimulating but rarely credible. The author is a personal friend, and I have debated many of these issues with him withoput either of us convincing the other.

Declaration of bias -- I know the author, and I know that this affected how willing I was to keep reading. I greatly enjoyed the book, but it uses a very terse, elliptical style that took some time to get used to, and I think this will cause many readers to bounce off the prose. I would strongly suggest finding excerpts (I think there are some on the Baen website somewhere) and reading to see if you like the style.

That said, this is a solid first novel with an interesting story and some likeable characters. It's an alternative history book that's firmly grounded in reality -- with one minor exception, not obvious to the reader, everything is physically plausible. And I am impressed with the way Friedman has worked some of his liberatarian philosophy into the book without hitting the reader over the head with it. Too much political speculative fiction involves blatant sermons--this book uses a much more subtle showing-rather-than-telling approach and is so much better for it. It adds depth to the story rather than turning it into a political tract.

It's not going to be to everyone's taste, but if you can handle the elliptical prose style it's an enjoyable read.

Essentially a version of Friedman's intermediate micro text for the lay reader.

A refreshing approach to an intermediate micro text. I knew immediately that this was the text I wanted to use for my micro class when I read the example about equilibrium on the highway--something I'd been observing in my daily commute that summer.

Sample Audio Chapters: http://www.baen.com/audio/Harald/Harald.htm
Sample Chapters: http://webscriptions.net/chapters/1416520562/1416520562.htm

Sample Chapters: http://webscriptions.net/chapters/A1416520562/A1416520562.htm