F. Guillermo wrote:
Here some cute numbers
Title Amazon.com sales Rank Approx Price
The Communist Manifesto 3,955 $5
The Road to Serfdom 866$8
Wealth of Nations 1,782 $9
Essential Works of Lenin 40,222 $10
Monetary History of 51,607 $38
the United States
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I decided to venture over to Amazon.com to feed my addiction to the smell of new
paperbacks and bubblewrap (a rational act in my Stiglerian world) and to review the
cross-selling information accumulated by those nosy Washingtonians at Amazon.com for
each of the acclaimed works mentioned above. I chose to ignore my natural UofC
compulsion to look for a correlation between price and aggregate sales, instead
choosing to focus on that "People who ordered this book also ordered the following
books" section of the website. What I confirmed was that people generally buy Marx,
Smith, and Lenin in tandem . . .lest their bookshelves lean too far to one side or the
other. Hayek readers tend to read other Hayek works and other Austrian School dribble
("dribble" meant in its most endearing form) and I guess the Friedman/Schwartz work is
the paper weight of choice for those of us who as children were indoctrinated by the
Free To Choose video series and simply can't get enough MV=PQ.
I have all these works in my mammoth home library and that library was built in a very
price-insensitive addictive state of mind. I must truly be a sick puppie.
New York, NY
