TANSTAAFL
TANSTAAFL History and usage
"Free lunch"
The "free lunch" referred to in the acronym relates back to the once-common tradition of saloons in the United States providing a "free" lunch to patrons who had purchased at least one drink. Rudyard Kipling, writing in 1891, noted how he came upon a barroom full of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter.
Kipling wrote, “It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts.″
TANSTAAFL, on the other hand, indicates an acknowledgment that in reality a person or a society cannot get "something for nothing". Even if something appears to be free, there is always a cost to the person or to society as a whole even though that cost may be hidden or distributed.
TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order. (Pierre Dos Utt, 1949)
According to Robert Caro, Fiorello La Guardia, on becoming the mayor of New York in 1934, said "È finita la cuccagna!", meaning "No more free lunch"; in this context "free lunch" refers to graft and corruption. The earliest known occurrence of the full phrase, 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, 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 no free lunch" appeared in a 1942 article in the Oelwein Daily Register (in a quote attributed to economist Harley L. Lutz) and in a 1947 column by economist Merryle S. Rukeyser. In 1949 the phrase appeared in an article by Walter Morrow in the San Francisco News (published on 1st June) and in Pierre Dos Utt's monograph, "TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order", which describes an oligarchic political system based on his conclusions from "no free lunch" principles.
The 1938 and 1949 sources use the phrase in relating a fable about a king (Nebuchadrezzar in Dos Utt's retelling) seeking advice from his economic advisors. Morrow's retelling, which claims to derive from an earlier editorial reported to be non-existent,[12] but closely follows the story as related in the earlier article in the El Paso Herald-Post, differs from Dos Utt's in that the ruler asks for ever-simplified advice following their original "eighty-seven volumes of six hundred pages" as opposed to a simple failure to agree on "any major remedy". The last surviving economist advises that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
In 1950, a New York Times columnist ascribed the phrase to economist (and Army General) Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Company. "It seems that shortly before the General's death [in 1946]... a group of reporters approached the general with the request that perhaps he might give them one of several immutable economic truisms that he gathered from long years of economic study... 'It is an immutable economic fact,' said the general, 'that there is no such thing as a free lunch.'"
TANSTAAFL demonstrates opportunity cost. Dr. Gregory Mankiw described the concept as: "To get one thing that we like, we usually have to give up another thing that we like. Making decisions requires trading off one goal against another." The idea that there is no free lunch at the societal level applies only when all resources are being used completely and appropriately, i.e., when economic efficiency prevails. If not, a 'free lunch' can be had through a more efficient utilization of resources. If one individual or group gets something at no cost, somebody else ends up paying for it. If there appears to be no direct cost to any single individual, there is a social cost. Similarly, someone can benefit for "free" from an externality or from a public good, but someone has to pay the cost of producing these benefits.
