Gresham's law of news. Gregory Bateson postulated an analogue to Gresham's Law operating in cultural evolution, in which "the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. And yet the beautiful persists." Gresham's law has been cited as "Silver currency will inevitably force gold currency out of circulation" (L. Pyenson, Servants of Nature (W.W. Norton, 1999) p. 21); this suggests a fundamental misinterpretation, cf. Mundell (above). Gresham's law In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money
Hard cases make bad law Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Its validity has since been questioned and dissenting variations include the phrase "Bad law makes hard cases", and even its opposite, "Hard cases make good law". The maxim dates at least to 1837, when a judge, ruling in favor of a parent against the maintenance of her children, said, "We have heard that hard cases make bad law." The judge's wording suggests that the phrase was not new then. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made a utilitarian argument for this in his judgment of "Northern Securities Co. v. United States" (1904): Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case,