Economic imperialism or pragmatism?

Greetings from Washington where we did two launches on ‘An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks’. The launches went very well, thanks for asking. Due to its success, the book has gone kindle.

I was just alerted to the video that UNSW put out on a discussion we had with Tim Harcourt (the ‘airport economist‘) on whether our attempt in this book to get at rough rules of thumb that include a spot for love, groups, power, etc., should be seen as an act of economic imperialism or rather an economic attempt to acknowledge the importance of these elements in understanding our societies by distilling them to simplified rules of thumb. Judge for yourself!

 

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Nicholas Gruen
Admin
11 years ago

Paul,

Do you know why you need to be successful to use the Kindle platform? You’d think it has such low transactions costs to put it up on Kindle that they needn’t concern themselves with sales. If you bore all the costs of posting it on their platform and then they took a cut of any sales – like iTunes – then why do they also need it to be successful to allow it to go up on the platform?

And it’s a pretty pricey book compared with most Kindle books. Suggests greed is getting the better of love ;)

Paul Frijters
Paul Frijters
11 years ago
Reply to  Nicholas Gruen

I am guessing that most of the pricing decisions are based on the fixed library market. Libraries care less about price but they can be selective in what they buy and I would guess quite a few of them buy a kindle copy too.