Editing Gresham's law (section)

==Analogs in other fields==
The principles of Gresham's law can sometimes be applied to different fields of study. Gresham's law may be generally applied to any circumstance in which the true value of something is markedly different from the value people are required to accept, due to factors such as lack of information or governmental decree.

Vice President [[Spiro Agnew]] used Gresham's law in describing American [[news media]], stating that "Bad news drives out good news", although his argument was closer to that of a [[race to the bottom]] for higher ratings rather than over- and under-valuing certain kinds of news.<ref>[[Spiro Agnew|Agnew, Spiro Theodore]] (13 November 1969). [http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/spiroagnewtvnewscoverage.htm "Television News Coverage"]. Des Moines, Iowa – via American Rhetoric.</ref>

[[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."<ref>Gregory Bateson, ''Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity'' 6 (1979).</ref>

[[Cory Doctorow]] wrote that a similar effect to Gresham's law occurred in [[carbon offset]] trading. The alleged information asymmetry is that people find it difficult to distinguish just how effective credits purchased are, but can easily tell the price. As a result, cheap credits that are ineffective can displace expensive but worthwhile carbon credits.<ref>{{cite web| url = https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing| title = Carbon offsets are bullshit |last=Doctorow |first=Cory |work=Pluralistic |date=12 December 2020}}</ref> The example given was [[The Nature Conservancy]] offering cheap, yet "meaningless", carbon credits by purchasing cheap land unlikely to be logged anyway, rather than expensive and valuable land at risk of logging.<ref>{{cite news| url = https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-nature-conservancy-carbon-offsets-trees/| title = These Trees Are Not What They Seem: How the Nature Conservancy, the world's biggest environmental group, became a dealer of meaningless carbon offsets| newspaper = Bloomberg |first=Ben |last=Elgin
|date=9 December 2020}}</ref>

A corollary, Hughes' law, exists in moral philosophy, stating that, "The evil acts of bad men elicit from better men acts which, under better circumstances, would also be called evil."<ref>{{cite book| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=ugwYEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT77| title = Ethical Universe: the Vectors of Evil Vs. Good: Secular Ethics for the 21st Century|last=McAlister |first=John W. |work=ISBN : 9781665511919 |date=14 January 2021| publisher = AuthorHouse| isbn = 9781665511919}}</ref>

In the market for [[used car]]s, [[Lemon (automobile)|lemon automobiles]] (analogous to bad currency) will drive out the good cars.<ref>Phlips, Louis (1983). [https://archive.org/details/economicsofprice0000phli/page/239 ''The Economics of Price Discrimination'']. p. 239.</ref> The problem is one of asymmetry of information. Sellers have a strong financial incentive to pass all used cars off as good cars, especially lemons. This makes it difficult to buy a good car at a fair price, as the buyer risks overpaying for a lemon. The result is that buyers will only pay the fair price of a lemon, so at least they reduce the risk of overpaying. High-quality cars tend to be pushed out of the market, because there is no good way to establish that they really are worth more. [[Certified pre-owned]] programs are an attempt to mitigate this problem by providing a [[warranty]] and other guarantees of quality. ''[[The Market for Lemons]]'' is a work that examines this problem in more detail.