There ARE such things as free lunches, and the "no free lunch" quip is a meme that serves as propaganda for the idea that everything in life should have a price (and if it doesn't, it means the price is hidden). That's just not true. Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden.
https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/...
We have tons of examples of noise and bulk that needs curation that is the cause of people working to make yet more stuff when its not needed. People flood the market with junk trying to capture some of the value. There are tons of duplicate apps or websites each trying to get their money or attention-to-ads. But the greatest free-and-abundant stuff like Wikipedia with no limits and restrictions — that has the capacity to reduce the trends of people making duplicate stuff.
I mean, there's lots of examples of excessive production which takes more to sort through which is caused by things being locked-down. Whereas if the best stuff were just free, there would be less incentive for anyone to make and market duplicate products.
But I agree with your "complex resource management game" framing, I'm just saying that free and abundant is not the problem. One problem is that we aren't just having the best free and abundant stuff so that we can stop all the noise and duplication.
Or does "no free lunch" mean the drastically broader (and perhaps unfalsifiable) claim everything in the world has ramifications?
Maybe it depends on the context.
But like if someone who enjoys doing programming happens to find and fixe a bug in some software and then everyone can get the bugfix with the next update and the update was going to happen anyway, then the bugfix can be free. It can be 100% improvement, no compromise, no cost, nothing externalized. If you want to argue otherwise, you end up with the same form of argument that is the same logic as the reductio ad absurdem point that we had to have all the costs of the world existing in order for that programmer to be there and do the bugfix.
Citation needed. What are such things?
But like clean air is/was analogous to the abundant fruit tree in the comic I posted. And it TURNED INTO polluted air through people ruining it just like the fruit BECAME non-free when Og claimed it and made others work to get any.
"No free lunch" is an aphorism used by people who don't want to let there be free lunches. It's not inherently true.
Either "free" is effectively meaningless or our world is full of free things. Uncompromised free things. Sunlight, air, water, fruit on wild plants…
I mean this is just nature. You know why Birds of Paradise have unbelievably fancy plumage? It's partly sexual selection, but the reason they can afford to spend 99% of their time doing bizarre dances and pruning their plumes and setting up their special dance areas is because their FOOD IS FREE basically. They live in an abundant ecosystem where it's trivial enough for them to get food. It just grows or is around, and when they want to eat, they just go eat. If that's not "free" then you're just denying the concept of "free".
I mean, let's go further, if truly, literally nothing is "free" than the word "free" has no meaning.
"Food is a manifestation of our local fertility goddess"?
Here in the real world, food is produced by work. A lot of work - growing, transporting, preparing, and selling food accounts for about 10% of American employment.
Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?
That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism is supposed to fix
> why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?
They aren't? Many people divide the value in the final product.
The person who owns the land pays other people for farm equipment, fertilizer, weed killers, pest control, harvesting, etc, then they sell the product to other people who add value in various ways and each sells for a higher price.
If that were true, the less compassionite owners would set the pay to zero, so it's obviously more complicated than that.
Regardless, my issue is that the people who do the actual work do not get to determine how profits get distributed - power is held over them by the owner (who is only the owner by virtue of state enforcement of property rights), and this leads to accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. IE, capitalism.
When noone owns the land, this happens:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_...
You know, there's an unfair advantage if you get access to the best land and then that grows you the best crops and then profit and so on. So, everyone gets chances to farm different plots.
I agree with you about the problems with corporate land ownership.
They don't. Farming profits are razer thin. That value goes to the person who owns the land, the people who work the land, the people that ship the product, the manufacturers of equipment, shop owners, the list goes on.
Look, I'm a REAL person. You know how I get apples in apple season? I walk to a park near my house where there are decades-old apple trees. I don't know who planted them. Nobody today does anything to care for them. They just do what trees do. And the majority of the apples fall on the ground because nobody picked them. And I walk over to the park and I pick apples and eat them.
Oh, but I had to WALK there you say. And I had to WORK to have a home in this town. And we have to have a working society in order to pay the City to keep the park from being sold to a developer who would cut down all the trees. Or that I have to do the work of EATING the apple, like chewing it and so on.
I mean, this is just endless.
It's quite simple: Either "no such thing as a free lunch" is falsifiable and I've falsified it with real evidence OR it's unfalsifiable because you'll claim that any tangential aspect of existence that can be called "work" makes the apple not free. Either way, the aphorism is no good.
"Too good to be true" is a better aphorism because it isn't used to imply that everything good always has a catch. It doesn't say "Anything great is too good to be true", it just asserts that things that seem great can be too good to be true (they have some catch). And that's useful because we should think about all the catches and context of things. But that doesn't mean we should become cynics who just deny that anything great is ever possible.
Seeing the rather literal tone of the conversation, I responded with an equally literal interpretation of the comic. Of course I know that the "local fertility goddess" is a figurative expression for the abundance of nature, but "no such thing as a free lunch" is also figurative, and "the pot calling the kettle black" isn't actually about a talking pot.
Yes, there are a few free lunches. That doesn't make it bad expression, just not a literal one.
"The idea that everything in life should have a price", as you said, is hyperbole too. There are lots of things that no one is trying to put a price on, but let's not go down that road.
> Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden.
Yes, but food isn't one of them in a world with 7 billion people. Compared to the population, food isn't abundant, and managing to feed so many people is one of the greatest human achievements; it's all thanks to the work of hundreds of millions of people, not nature's abundance.