April 3, 1998. He frames some important and thought-provocative questions in this essay, which is something of a general overview - and prescient, too.
Unfortunately it is in PDF. Maybe I'll be able to track down an electronic text version of it sometime.
Excerpt:
Behavior in the real world - this world, the world in which I am now speaking - is regulated by four sorts of constraints. Law is just one of those four constraints. Law regulates by sanctions imposed ex post - fail to pay your taxes, and you are likely to go to jail. Law is the prominent of regulators. But it is just one of four.Social norms are a second. They also regulate. Social norms - understandings or expectations about how I ought to behave, enforced not through some centralized norm enforcer, but rather through the understandings and expectations of just about everyone in a prticular community - direct and constrain my behavior in a far wider array of contexts than any law. Norms say what clothes I will wear - a suit, not a dress; they tell you to sit quietly, and politely, for at least forty minutes while I speak; they organize how we will interact after this talk is over. Norms guide behavior; in this sense, they function as a second regulatory constraint.
The market is a third constraint. It regulates by price. The market limits the amount I can spend on clothes; or the amount I can make from public speeches; it says I can command less from my writing than Madonna, or less from my singing than Pavarotti. Through the device of price, the market sets my opportunities, and through this range of opportunities, it regulates.
And finally, there is the constraint of what some might call nature, but which I want to call "architecture". This is the constraint of of the world as I find it, even if this world as I find it is a world that others have made.