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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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