DavidFriedman

I think large scale issues, such as global warming or air pollution, will be handled badly. I have a discussion in the new third edition of Machinery of market failure in the market for law, ways in which the law produced by the competitive market of an A-C society will be suboptimal, and that's one of them.

On the other hand, the conditions that lead to market failure are the exception on the private market, where in most cases the person who makes a decisions bears most of the costs and gets most of the benefit, the rule on the political market.

It's worth noting that in the case of global warming, the public good problem exists at the international level, so it isn't clear that, if AGW really is a big problem, states will solve it. I should probably add that although I think the fact of AGW is almost certainly true, I am skeptical of the claim that it can be expected to produce large net negative effects.

My three main characters (one of them currently sitting at 90 until I get back to him) are a mage, a DK, and a paladin. They are intended as different people, and I don't think I can say any of the classes is my favorite. Druid looks like fun, but my one druid is currently an auction house alt.

My most entertaining character is my gnome mage, who speaks only in rhymed verse and believes that juggling dynamite is no fun unless you light the fuses.

As best I understand it, his view was that legal philosophers would figure out what the law should be and all courts would follow it. In the system I describe, law is produced on a competitive market by arbitration agencies, each pair of private rights enforcement agencies agrees on an arbitration agency to settle disputes between their customers, so the arbitration agencies are trying to create the law that customers want to be under.

For a more complete description see my Machinery of Freedom. The third edition is available as a kindle:http://tinyurl.com/p6xjm46 and as hardcopy: http://tinyurl.com/osbpq4x

Adults do participate in it. Somewhere in an old blog post I have the figure for the average age, and I think it somewhere in the twenties, so although I'm at the high end of the age distribution a lot of people, probably a majority, are adults.

I expect the participants are biased towards younger ages for several reasons:

1. It's a new form of entertainment, and people form their tastes mostly young.

2. Adults are less likely than kids to have lots of leisure time for playing.

It's worth noting that there are lots of "play" activities that are popular with adults, such as bridge and tennis. I think I've discussed on my blog the question of why some activities seem real and worthwhile, others not. I would not feel good about my involvement in WoW if it was using most of my time and energy—I see it as recreation, close to what I classify as lotus eating, and I don't feel happy if most of my time goes to such activities.

But it's unclear to me why some other things I do don't feel that way—building replicas of Germanic lyres (early medieval musical instrument), for example, feels more like "doing something."

I do not keep up with physics.

I like to claim that the one advantage of having a doctorate in theoretical physics is that I can do non-mathematical work in economics without being suspected of being afraid of math.