Economics of the Undead is featured this week on the Freakonomics Radio podcast. You can hear me and two other contributors (Steve Horwitz and Enrique Guerra-Pujol) talking about whether a zombie invasion could be good for the economy, how legalizing blood sales could reduce vampire violence, and how economics can improve your vampire-human and human-human mating strategy.
For Freakonomics listeners arriving here, welcome! In the right-hand column, you’ll find links to the table of contents, excerpts from the book, a course guide, and more. (That “more” includes links to the book on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites… hint hint.)
Economics of the Undead 
November 3rd, 2014 at 1:44 pm
Reblogged this on prior probability and commented:
Check out this “Freakonomics” podcast featuring our friends Steve Horwitz and Glen Whitman as well as yours truly. Enjoy!
November 27th, 2014 at 9:32 am
A quick update on the Freakonomics podcast. Some of the comments (particularly the comments by S Fowler and Davo) have really been bugging me for some time. Fowler, for example, notes that “Vampires ‘procreate’ via their bite,” while Davo writes: “Your guest makes a critical error: in most vampire lore, they are a different (more advanced) species.
Asking vampires to buy human blood is like asking humans to buy a ham hock off of a pig.”
The latter comment is easier to dismiss, since markets are generally win-win, the social status or innate biology of buyers and sellers really doesn’t matter. People (including ultra-advanced and snooty vampires) will engage in trade when it is mutually beneficial to do so.
Fowler’s comment, by contrast, implies that all vampires are rapists. After all, if vampires “procreate via their bite”, and if such bites are non-consensual, then what Fowler is really saying is that a vampire bite is analogous to rape. This can’t be right based on the various fictional portrayals of vampires I have seen. But even if Fowler’s analysis is correct, then my argument in favor of human-vampire markets is all the more stronger. In fact, assuming that some humans would like to become vampires (recall the first part of the Freakonomics podcast with Steven Levitt), perhaps vampires could actually charge us for the privilege of being bitten, for turning us into vampires!