What famed and Nobel prize winning economist, born on July 31, 1912, wrote books such as Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History and The Tyranny of the Status Quo, and a series of Newsweek articles entitled “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”?
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch are central to Robert Heinlein's 1966 science-fiction novel "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", which helped popularize it. The free-market economist Milton Friedman also increased its exposure and use by paraphrasing it as the title of a 1975 book, and it is used in economics literature to describe opportunity cost. Campbell McConnell writes that the idea is "at the core of economics". The "free lunch" refers to the once-common tradition of saloons in the United States providing a "free" lunch to patrons who had purchased at least one drink. Many foods on offer were high in salt (e.g., ham, cheese,
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch finita la cuccagna!", meaning "Cockaigne is finished" or, more loosely, "No more free lunch"; in this context "free lunch" refers to graft and corruption. The earliest known occurrence of the full phrase (except for the "a"), in the form "There ain't no such thing as free lunch", appears as the punchline of a joke related in an article in the "El Paso Herald-Post" of June 27, 1938 (and other Scripps-Howard newspapers about the same time), entitled "Economics in Eight Words". In 1945, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" appeared in the "Columbia Law Review", and "there is