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The Economist On The Economics of Sharing
RCulpepper writes "The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication, discusses the economics of sharing, from OSS programmers' sharing time, to P2P users' sharing disk space and bandwidth. " True indeed (about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription); one of the main supports for the article comes from Yochai Benkler latest piece, which is excellent.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but imagine if...
The CB App. What's your 20?
The Economist is a weekly magazine with hundreds of pages of world news. I had a subscription for a couple years before I realized I just could not keep up reading it. Before I stopped subscribing I even tried skipping over those things that held little interest for me. I found it far better to let other people find the interesting things (like this article) and have them eventually posted on Slashdot where I could then read them.
It's a very interesting magazine though if you can find the time to commit to it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Something that the article doesn't really mention, that helped explain a lot of things about corporate support of OSS, is a theory that (as far as I remember) Joel Spolsky wrote about. It's best explained by an analogy.
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we
expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
Sharing becomes prevalent only when it 1) close to free and 2) earns kudos/buying power for the sharer. Unfortunately, in today's global society of mass production and mass distribution, this is largely impossible. What we need for sharing to regain prevalence is the rejection of the idea that it's OK that almost everything we consume comes from far, far away.
I don't remember the last time the Economist attacked anything as "communistic excess" -- and they're not a "tool of international corporatism" because they actually like true free markets without competition. Notice their articles on excessive executive pay, underperforming corporations, etc.
I think that you probably haven't really read too much of it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The Economist, as someone else posted, certainly has their opinion of the world around them, like we all do. I do not always agree with their opinion, but rarely do I find what they have to say is grounded purely in ideology, without some decent reasoning and thought behind it. From what I have read, they tend to weigh each situation or leader, rather than stamping them "ok" or "not" according to whatever faction they belong to. For instance, despite being center-right in their politics, and despite supporting the war in Iraq (something I did not agree with myself), they have not spared the Bush administration criticism for making a mess of the situation.
As to the "right wing propagandistic tool of international corporatism". Wow, good line if it's some sort of attempt at ironic hip retro-sixties radical leftism, but it doesn't have much to do with...well, reality.
The Economist supported Kerry, after all, in the US elections. They have been quite positive about Linux for a long time. They are being sued by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right wing leader, because of their scathing attacks on his corruptness. This is hardly the sort of independant thoughts and writing that one would expect from a "propogandistic tool".
Even as a socialist, I think one can appreciate The Economist's slant towards liberty/freedom and individual responsibility. They might write about economic issues one week that would make an American Republican proud, yet in the same publication come out strongly in support of same-sex marriage. They often discuss our rights, but nearly always counter-balanced by our obligations - this isn't always popular with many people as it's common in modern society to demand one's rights, but ignore one's responsibilities. Personally I find it can be read from the point of view of a scientist: they seem to write things up in a clinical detached way whether or not the author actually believes it or not. I can then take the facts as presented and decide whether I want to agree or not with any opinions presented.
Well, the Lib Vs. Con battle is a faux war that is only destroying our collective sense of the death of objective AND investigative AND diverse journalism.
... which they are passing on to their kids, etc.
Journalism started to die off in great masses of professionals in the early 1990s. Today, I can hardly use the term "journalism" since that thing is essentially dead. Many important stories are simply ignored for purely political reasons by men who should know better. And another fat slice of the population finds itself being spoon-fed intellectual pap that leads to a greater fantasy view of the world
American journalism is now not liberal or conservative. It's corporate. More precisely, it's 90% corporate, 5% liberal, and 5% conservative. It's a triumph of American Imperialism. Each news outlet is a retail store that sells the viewpoint of the Empire constantly.
I can only refer to you to the book "Into the Buzzsaw" about the death of objective, investigative and diverse journalism. Combine that book with the economic and corporate criticisms in the books "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Perfectly Legal", and there's no way you'll exist afterward saying the word journalism without getting choked up and having tears spring up in your eyes.
It's not liberal, it's not conservative. It's just dead. Thank god for the Internet, or I'd be a completely ignorant person from what TV, radio and newspapers would deliver to me.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I can think of a lot of other examples of successful sharing in meatspace. Just a random off the top of my head list, not extensive:
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
I believe in freedom, human rights, personal accumulation of wealth, honesty and integrity. I demonstrate it in my personal and business affairs, and I have had a great deal of success. I further believe that people are evolved to live in our current generally mild ecology, and damaging it with pollution is bad for us. I believe that corporations are constructs that work against most of those principles, and mass media owned by them generally serve that agenda. That puts me in agreement with most Americans on the issues, and most people globally who've heard of them, or considered their own personal versions in their own lives. That's why it's called "common sense".
OK, you start off solicitous, then devolve into calling me a liar. Let's be frank: you've decided you disagree with me. Your approach is pretty typical of rightwing gamesters, who are totally committed to your foregone, selfserving conclusions, and engage in "discussion" with the strategy of discrediting their chosen opponent, regardless of the merit of the facts. Drop the pretense. Your corporate comrades have succeeded in coopting the mediasphere, even the language, flinging words like "elite" and "hate" at opponents like masters of newspeak. But it doesn't work on me. BTW, I note that I've had my fair share of capitalist success by harnessing the global banking/media industries. I'm no martyr to the truth, but I'm no liar. You should examine your own baseless position before you come out swinging at me.
--
make install -not war
Plus The Economist did endorse Kerry when it was all said and done...
Try the political compass. I think it's been noted on Slashdot before. It gives you two dimensions, anyway, and is -- I think -- slightly more useful than the conventional L-R classification.
If corporations are enemies of freedom and human rights, what would you propose? I also think you should define your use of "corporation" more finely. I don't think corporations as entities for conducting businesses are inherently evil. I know the small corp I created for consulting is certainly not evil. And on that note, when I think of a corporation like H-E-B (a small grocery store chain) or Linksys, I don't really think of them as being threats to freedom or human rights. If you are referring to specific corporations that you meet your claims (and we all know these companies exist) then you should limit your attacks to those.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies acquire at the least cost. The efficiency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software environment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best long-run interest is naive of them.
But Science is a non-rivalous good. (Credit isn't...so you guard your publication priority.)
Only when Science interfaces with Technology, patent laws turn it into a rivalous good...and the sharing stops. I'm not sure, e.g., that the current efforts to coerce the pharmacuetical companies to report all their trials and results will be successful. If it is, it will continuously require force and oversight, and bribery scadals, because that information has been turned into a rivalous good by the legal system.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Historical context:
In the days before canning armies would starve when on the move, unless they could steal food from villages that they passed. If they did, the villagers would starve.
So, three soldiers show up in a village... of course the villagers don't know that there are only three, and they don't know that they CAN'T just steal all their food. So they pretend that they've already been robbed, and don't have any left. The stone soup is a con game to allow people to safely contribute without being robbed blind.
One reason that potatoes were so valuable is that they could be left in the ground until you were ready to dig them up. This made it quite difficult for an army to just march through and steal your entire food supply, leaving you to starve to death. And to death is NOT a figure of speech, but rather a frequent fate of the villages that were robbed.
In this context the story makes perfect sense. The villagers had time to make sure that they were safe. The soldiers didn't have to split up into small(er) ambushable groups. The locations of the villagers food remained secret. Nobody was forced to contribute more than he could spare. Etc.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
While I agree wholeheartedly with your title (Communism is not equal to Socialism), you are quite wrong otherwise. I will also address a misconception in one of the child posts.
First, Communism is a form of Capitalism. The reason this probably sounds strange to the average person is because they have stopped thinking of Free Market Capitalism as a form of Capitalism, and think of it as the ONLY form.
Communism is State Capitalism. An economy of administrators and workers, hierarchical, with central control of economic planning, distribution, and consumption. In the "free world" these functions are less centralized, and we elect semi-democratic governments to oversee administration of the economy.
But really, at the heart of things, "Free Markets" and "Communism" are not incompatible. If you don't believe me, consider a factory worker or teacher in one economy being moved to the other. What adjustments must be made for them to be productive in their new environment? Hardly any (aside from cultural, that is). Their job complexes (their tasks, duties, and relationships to co-workers and bosses) are structured in very similar ways.
In a Socialist society, however, they would have to involve themselves in all sorts of domains that workers are not expected to participate in within a Capitalist framework. They would have to contribute to the management of their workplace, share work in a fair way with their peers, become politically active in order to help set strategic goals, and contribute to economic planning somehow.
A Capitalist society sees society as a resource to be sued to maximize economic processes. A Socialist society would see economic activity as a means to achieve social end.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.