"There Ain't No Such Thing as Free Lunch" (1938)

[Shapiro, Fred]

After many years of trying to definitively push back the expression "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" to the 1930s, I finally succeeded through Newspaperarchive searching.  In my quotation column in the March/April 2009 Yale Alumni Magazine, I report that an article titled "Economics in Eight Words" in the El Paso Herald-Post, June 27, 1938, p. 4, used "There ain't no such thing as free lunch" as the punch line of an economics joke.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                                      Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and        YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press
Yale Law School                                     ISBN 0300107986
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu
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