Slashdot Mirror
Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry
artg writes "Ben Goldacre writes about invalid and misleading 'science' in the Guardian. Here's
his report on the statistics behind a recent press story that reported illegal downloading to involve 120 billion pounds worth of material."
That's a horrible approach to economics and simply isn't true.
Imagine you've a city of 100,000 or so where 90% of people earn their money working at a massive copper or supplying that copper mine. Imagine demand for copper falls by half and they have to cut production (and jobs) by half to remain profitable.
In terms of GDP copper mining may be something like 0.1% and it wouldn't seem like that would have a huge effect if it went down to 0.05% of GDP.
In that town though, there are now 45,000 out of work, people who've only ever known mining or who the mine was their main customer. There isn't any other industry to support these people, they're untrained in other areas and they can't afford to move as their house values have plummeted.
Poverty increases, Crime increases, kids start performing worse at school and the town, without massive external investment, would very quickly become either a ghost town or a slum. The cost to the economy becomes huge either way.
For a stable economy, you not only need the money to be spent, you need to money to be spent in the right areas so you can maintain the various local economies. Look what's happened when people have gone "lets cut back on how much we spend on cars". Sudden, drastic shifts in buying behaviour can have massive consequences, even if people are seemingly spending the same amount of money and it's often not possible for businesses to react fast enough to head these changes off.