No such thing as a free lunch

The phrase and the acronym are central to Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which helped popularize it.

[3][4] The free-market economist Milton Friedman also increased its exposure and use[2] by paraphrasing it as the title of a 1975 book;[5] it is used in economics literature to describe opportunity cost.

Rudyard Kipling, writing in 1891, noted how he ...came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon pictures, in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter.

[13] The earliest known use of the phrase in its current sense is as the punchline of the article "Economics in Eight Words" by Walter Morrow,[14] published in the El Paso Herald-Post of June 27, 1938 (and other Scripps-Howard newspapers about the same time).

He asks for ever-simplified advice following their original "eighty-seven volumes of six hundred pages", executing half the economists each time.

[3][19] In 1949, the phrase appeared in Pierre Dos Utt's monograph TANSTAAFL: A Plan for a New Economic World Order,[20] which describes an oligarchic political system based on his conclusions from "no free lunch" principles.

'"[21] The September 8, 1961, issue of LIFE magazine has an editorial on page 4, "'TANSTAFL', It's the Truth", that closes with an anecdotal farmer explaining this slight variant of TANSTAAFL.

[22] In 1966, author Robert A. Heinlein published his novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, in which TANSTAAFL was a central, libertarian theme, mentioned by name and explained.

[3][4] Edwin G. Dolan used the phrase as the title of his 1971 book TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) – A Libertarian Perspective on Environmental Policy.

According to American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth "the universe is the ultimate free lunch", given that in the early stage of its expansion the total amount of energy available to make particles was very large.

"[25] 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.

That is, any model that claims to offer superior flexibility in analyzing data patterns usually does so at the cost of introducing extra assumptions, or by sacrificing generalizability in important situations.

[citation needed] Baseball Prospectus coined the abbreviation "TINSTAAPP", for "There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect",[27] as many young pitchers hurt their arms before they can be effective at a major league level.

As a post-socialist country, Hungary struggled with the illusion of the state as a caring and giving, independent entity, rather than being the embodiment of the community.

[28] It was argued in particular that metabolism evolved to take advantage of the free lunch provided by the Sun, which also triggers production of vital oxygen in plants.