Thread: C. J. Cherryh has a new blog
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Old 04-23-2009, 08:14 PM   #15
sirbruce
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wayspooled View Post
Thanks for the linkie. I also missed the other thread. Lots of good info on that site. I found this tidbit I never knew..

"I'm told it was actually Jerry Pournelle who coined the phrase TANSTAAFL...which many people (including myself, thank you to the reader who wrote me pointing this out) mistakenly attribute to Robert Heinlein. TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) means that the universe at large doesn't give you a freebie pass on what comes due, including the laws of physics, the behavior of human beings, or longterm economics."
Someone needs to tell Jerry and CJ that Wikipedia disagrees:
Quote:
The earliest usage of the precise phrase and acronym for this concept is first seen in two 1949 sources; an article by Walter Morrow in the San Francisco News for 1st June 1949 and Pierre Dos Utt's monograph, "TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order"[6] which describes an oligarchic political system based on his conclusions from "no free lunch" principles.
Both sources relate to a fable of a king (Nebuchadrezzar in Dos Utt's retelling) seeking advice from his economic advisors. Morrow's retelling, which is claimed to have derived from an earlier editorial that research has found to be non-existent[7], differs from Dos Utt's in that the ruler asks for ever-simplified advice following their original "eighty-seven volumes of six hundred pages" as opposed to a simple failure to agree on "any major remedy". In both cases, the last surviving economist advises that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Now, Heinlein may easily have heard it from Jerry, but it seems unlikely that Pournelle invented it.
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