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The quotation of Greham's law to explain the very complex subject of
Kipple is from Phillip K. Dick, _Do androids dream of electric sheep?_
[1968]. The film was titled "Blade Runner", and now the novel is also
known as Blade Runner. Yuri Tulupenko should be considered in a
different league, he knows too much about these matters.
But I think in a very different way of most of the comments received.
The attractive of Gresham's law to non-economists relies on the fact
that it is the opposite of what you expect to occur: nobody would
accept bad money, and the good money should circulate. I am not at
all an expert in monetary theory, but I would say that Gresham's law
only applies while not everybody knows about how bad that money is.
At the end, only good money, or gold itself, is used for exchanges
when common money is corrupted.
And a similar thing occurs to theories, talk, and everything. Physicists
used to think, until 1648, that there really existed "horror vacui" in
nature. We social scientists have kept the expression and the meaning.
So we keep on using bad theories, bad talk, or bad whatever, until we
have something better. But at the end, we are willing to use the good
theory, be involved in the good talk, and so on, just because the good
theory explains facts, the good talk is interesting, and so on.
(Entropy is a much more complex matter. It is complex enough as a
topic on Physics, not to say about its economic implications).
So my opinion is that, in Phillip K Dick novel, Gresham's law as a
common expression is really properly used by Isidore, the one whose
IQ is not high enough (he is the one speaking in the paragraph quoted).
If one considers that "Gresham's law will apply only to different
money between which a fixed rate of exchange is enforced by law"
(Hayek, _Denationalisation of money_, chapter six), then the common
expression about Gresham's law is quite different from its technical
meaning.
Thank you very much to Alan Freeman, Ross Emmett, Bill Moore, and
Tom Walker for their suggestive comments. Yuri Tulupenko is a
special case, quite in a different sense than Isidore.
Manuel Santos
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