Would he mind of people just went and pirated all of his e-books.
I think he addresses this point in the article: copying mp3s would be a serious problem "if that became the primary way music was published." So long as most who people who are willing to pay for a book prefer hard copies, then why would OSC care if you pirated his books? He's right on the money when he demolishes the "lost sales" argument:
First, most of the people who are getting those free MP3s would not be buying the CDs anyway. They're doing this in order to get far more music than they can actually afford. That means that if they weren't sharing MP3s online, they would simply have less music -- or share CDs hand to hand. It does not mean that they would have bought CDs to get the tunes they're downloading from Napster-like sharing schemes.
That's why I laugh at their estimates of "lost sales."
Presumably, or at least hopefully, he would apply the same logic to his own work.
I usually end up gnashing my teeth when reading articles about the economics of the internet, but this one was well thought out. It's interesting to contrast his argument that the web and other forms of technology that allow people to produce and distribute their own work will undermine micropayments with the overall trend towards a "winner take all society" or "blockbuster/bestseller society" where fame and fortune are increasingly concentrated on a small minority of winners. (Economist Robert Frank and co-author Phillip Cook outline the argument in their book The Winner Take All Society.)
The web shows the same pareto distribution that Frank & Cook discuss, with a few sites getting a huge number of hits and the vast majority getting just a few.
However, Shirky may still be right that the proliferation of free content will prevent even wildly popular sites from turning their fame into fortune. It's also possible that the continued emphasis on blockbusters is a flawed business model that causes publishers/producers to overlook vast markets for a greater variety of content. It's the unwillingness to see beyond the huge profits of a Britney Spears or Madonna album that leads the music industry to pursue shortsighted strategies of squelching online access to music.
I agree that NASA seems to be wandering rathering than striding forward. I personally think the primary cause is lack of a clear goal. I worked as a contractor at the NASA Ames Research Center for several years, and I had a look at NASA's 'mission statement' which came out in a very glossy 25 page booklet. (This was when Dan Goldin was Chief Admin.) It had a vision statement, key values, crosscutting procedures, about 10 significant questions, which all had subquestions, as well as some goals. My overall impression was "this could only have been produced by an organization that has no idea whatsoever what it's trying to do." A bit of an overstatement, but I think that the individual researchers and engineers (including myself) had plenty of drive but not enough direction.
Not to mention, NASA had its share of PHB type memos, particularly the ones Goldin used to send around about 'safety'. Worse was the requirement for each group to have a 'safety marshal' to give little talks on 'safety'. Alas, no shiny plastic badges or hats were issued with the job.
Public funding is nearly ALWAYS a bad thing. It distorts the market place and a distorted market place means inefficiently allocated recourses. That's economic 101. It's a BAD THING.
What's missing from this discussion is a definition of what a public good is:
...a public good is essentially a good that is difficult to exclude someone from using, and that one person's use does not deny someone else the use of that good. A public park or clean air are typical examples of public goods. (read
this article for typical incorrect definitions of public goods provided by econ 101 students)
Free software is indeed a public good because by definitoin it is difficult to exclude other people from using it and other than the cost of bandwidth to make the code available my using doesn't prevent anyone else using it. The problem with public goods is that most people want them, but no one has much of an incentive to provide them individually --- which is why public goods are typically provided by the government. Public funding of public goods does not "distort the market" because the non-excludability of public goods means there's not much of a market for them in the first place.
Anything that can be copied digitally becomes more and more like a public good everyday...
It also helps to practice the small talk. You feel stupid, shallow and fake at first.
Actually I've found it's quite entertaining and quite easy to talk about TV shows I've never seen, for example. I pick up one little factoid from one person, and then pass it on, pick up another, it's a game. Works for sports too, I've sat on airplanes trying hard not to laugh as my husband "talks about sports" just by throwing out one fact and responding to what the other person says. This works mainly because often people prefer to talk than to listen.
On a kinder note, you can learn something interesting from just about anyone, if you make an effort to find out what it is that really interests them. Hard to believe, but not everyone thinks that the really funny story I like to tell about the integral of secant^3 is funny. There's just no accounting for people's taste.
Actually, the US now has a pure fiat currency: backed by the full faith of the US government and nothing else. The gold in Fort Knox or wherever is just another government asset.
Both fiat and commodity currency typically have value mainly because people believe they will be able to trade it for goods that they want in the future, goods that have some sort of use or ownership value. Gold and diamonds, while they have some uses, would not be anywhere near as valuable if people didn't believe that they would be able to exchange them for something else in the future.
Ah, but the inhabitants of Yap have already figured this one out. Here's an anecdote that I picked up teaching macroeconomics:
At one time the island of Yap in the S. Pacific used large stones wheels as currency. Mostly ownership of the stones changed hands while the stones stayed put. During one attempt to move a stone by boat a storm blew up and the stone sank to the bottom of the ocean.
The Yap equivalent of the US Federal Reserve met and decided that because the money was lost accidentally, there was no reason that the person didn't still own it, and title to that stone continued to circulate as money. (Couldn't find a current reference, but the original story came with the instructor's notes to Mankiw's intermediate macroeconomic text.)
So all they really need are virtual titles to the virtual objects that no longer exist...
So let's see, the strategy is to repeat provably false assertions as often and in as many different venues as possible until a significant fraction of the population actually believe it.
Let me think. Where have I seen that strategy before?
Not a lot, other than if that spectrum were made unlicenced, there would be an internet-like explosion of communications tech in wireless.
In fact, that's already going on, with just a few tiny bands opened up.
Oddly, a reverse of that tragedy of the commons I spoke about above, because spectrum allows sharing very nicely with everybody doing their own thing.
In the 90's a whole bunch of economists, led by Hal Varian at Berkeley and J. MacKie-Mason (still at Michigan I think), churned out a whole bunch of papers about the impending and inevitable "tragedy of the commons" on the Internet --- the whole enterprise was going to come to a grinding halt if one of their pricing schemes wasn't implemented soon.
It still amazes me how little they understood about the incentives for innovation, and how little their incorrect predictions mattered to their careers/credibility. Not too surprisingly, many of these same economists have argued that a private licensing of spectrum through auctions will increase efficiency, even as it kills innovation.
but thousands of people - each acting independently in a common market - will distill some insight by their collective action. That is classical political-economic theory.
But is the theory correct? I very seriously doubt it. Is it the case that thousands of people have information about future terrorist events? The people who have information are going to be a small small part of this market, and well aware that large investments will attract attention.
Can I suggest a better solution? No. But bad information is far worse than none at all. Should US foreign policy be based on the same efficient information gathering that produced the dot com boom/bust?
The "efficient markets hypothesis" would better be called the "efficient markets assumption." Remember that solid economic theory claims that bubbles cannot occur in markets because rational investors would recognize that the bubble was bound to burst and choose not to invest in the first place.
Yeah, right.
Having said that, there have been some interesting experiments predicting political events at the Iowa Electronic Market. They are much more likely to gather dispersed information --- in an election everyone has at least one piece of private information --- who they are planning to vote for. In a 'terrorism market' the vast vast majority of people have no private information, they're going to relying on the media and the market itself for information, not unlike the dot com boom where most investors had no idea of the real state of the businesses they were investing in.
Even if insiders decide to bet they are unlikely to be large enough to move the market by themselves.
Okay, suppose I'm a member of a well-funded terrorist group and I think the US government takes the 'information' from this market seriously. My organization is planning a biological attack on Israel. I disperse money to people all over the world and have them all invest in the "hijacking in Jordan" option. The Feds ramp up their efforts to track down who placed the bets and redouble their efforts to catch hijackers in Jordan. Suddenly, everyone is talking about a possible hijacking in Jordan. The market for 'hijacking in Jordan' goes wild.
Meanwhile, the plans for a biological attack on Israel proceed apace.
It amazes me that anyone take the efficient markets hypothesis seriously after the dot com boom/bust. Bubbles are not compatible with the efficient markets hypothesis. Bubbles exist. Draw the obvious conclusion.
Interestingly, a large majority of the contributors to the Bush campaign contributed less than $200.
If you want to know whether or not a politician is beholden to large contributors it doesn't matter how many people donated small amounts of money, but what percentage of the total money raised came from the political interest groups in question. What we need to know, from both parties, is the distribution of "income from supporters", the same way that the distribution of income is measured. What percent of the money was raised from the smallest 20 percent of contributions? What percent came from the top 1 percent?
And most definitely, all contributions need to considered, not just donations from individuals.
SWITCHEROO: the original post said "Iran contra" but the reply list starts with "Iran Hostage Crisis".
The hostages were indeed taken under Carter, but the illegal unconstitutional deal that traded arms for hostages and used the revenue to fund the Contras (which Congress had repeatedly voted against) was 100% a Reagan/Bush Sr. affair.
I bought several little devices that suposedly emitted an inaudible tone to repel mosquitoes to take with me to Indonesia, which I ordered from a catalog of "environmentally sound" products (they were solar powered, if I recall). I chucked them after a week, after watching a mosquito land on one. I've heard similarly bad reviews of other "inaudible" products...
Of those surveyed, 60 percent of women said they played online and computer software-based games, compared with 40 percent of men. About the same number of men and women said they played video games on PlayStation, Xbox and other systems.
why can't auto makers put this kind of thing in a dash
The more autos it's installed in, the less effective it becomes. Giving people access to identical information about conditions can even increase traffic congestion, a phenomena we also observed in a computer model of decentralized agents learning to solve a simple coordination game. The paper has references to the transportation literature, where this result has been known for some time.
environmental degradation and other "negative externalities" that allow people to offload costs onto third parties without paying themselves
aggressive marketing of addictive and unhealthy substances, especially to children
marketing of tinned milk as infant formula in the third world (think nestle boycott) and other attempts to profit off the information gap between cultures
But really the issue is how to define "counter-productive for humanity" --- what about products or actions that benefit some people while harming others? Who gets to decide? Under the market, it's one dollar, one vote --- the smallest desire of a rich person will count for more than the life threatening need of a poor person.
"If we can send one man to the moon --- why not send them all?"
.
Re:Go for it anyway...
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
Ironically the same people who demand the "Precautionary Principle" be applied to everything have not demanded that new designs be put through rigorous testing of this known problem before deployment.
What evidence can you provide for this assertion? For example, can you name a specific person or organization that has publicly supported the precautionary principle but opposed rigorous testing of new windmill designs?
Or are you suggesting that supporters of the precautionary principle should make testing of new windmill designs a central platform issue? The latter strikes me as absurd from a practical point of view --- the amount of effort devoted to a particular issue, like calling for more tests of novel industrial chemical vrs. calling for more tests of windmill design, should be proportional to the likely harm associated with that particular issue. Like everyone else, supporters of the precautionary principle have limited time and resources and should choose actions that they believe will have the most benefits.
Re:What would they rather have?
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
I support efforts to make energy production cleaner, but coal burning plants should be judged by average practice, not best practice, unless there is a serious effort being made to ensure that the current best practice become the average practice of the future --an unlikely scenario under a Bush adminstration.
The plant's exhaust is 99.6% CO2 and H2O vapor
CO2 is not pollution? Reducing anthropogenic global warming will require reducing CO2 emissions.
Re:Get one for your wife??!
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Or if your wife is the kind of person who might not be inclined to fire a gun at someone who hasn't laid a hand on her yet --- for a gun to be an effective 'defensive weapon' the person carrying it has to be willing to fire at someone while they are still more than an arm's length away from you. Oh yeah, be willing to fire randomly behind then in case there's back there that they haven't seen.
I agree that this jacket isn't a first best solution, but it seems better to me than the alternative technologies: guns, mace, pepper spray.
What would stop some sociopath from donning one of these jackets and getting on the subway at rush hour?
The same thing that stops a sociopath with a gun from getting on the subway and opening fire.
It seems to me that this technology has far less offensive potential than the most common competing technologies for self-defense: guns, pepper spray, etc.
One cannot legally rig up a shotgun or some other dangerous device to automatically discharge upon the violation of a perimeter, how is this different?
You mean I can't legally rig up an electrically charged fence around the perimeter of my field? Anyway, this is different because crossing the perimeter of my yard is not the same as thing as touching a part of my body.
Unlike weapons and sprays, the jacket can't be grabbed from a woman and used against her. And it's not as lethal as a gun.
This addresses some important issues in self-defense, like the possibility of being grabbed from behind. More importantly, it overcomes the resistance that many many women have against taking direct action, especially against someone who hasn't actually harmed them (yet).
I remember that the first thing that we did in self-defense class was practice yelling "NO" loudly in a strong tone of voice --- just this was extremely difficult for about half the women in the class. This is why a gun is a poor defensive weapon for most women, you have to be willing to shoot someone who has not laid a hand on you, who is more than an arm's length away. All this device requires is that it be turned on, a clearly defensive action.
Slashdot Mirror
It's history has been plagued with problems, ones it has overcome
the human adventure is only beginning...
I think he addresses this point in the article: copying mp3s would be a serious problem "if that became the primary way music was published." So long as most who people who are willing to pay for a book prefer hard copies, then why would OSC care if you pirated his books? He's right on the money when he demolishes the "lost sales" argument:
Presumably, or at least hopefully, he would apply the same logic to his own work.The web shows the same pareto distribution that Frank & Cook discuss, with a few sites getting a huge number of hits and the vast majority getting just a few.
However, Shirky may still be right that the proliferation of free content will prevent even wildly popular sites from turning their fame into fortune. It's also possible that the continued emphasis on blockbusters is a flawed business model that causes publishers/producers to overlook vast markets for a greater variety of content. It's the unwillingness to see beyond the huge profits of a Britney Spears or Madonna album that leads the music industry to pursue shortsighted strategies of squelching online access to music.
I agree that NASA seems to be wandering rathering than striding forward. I personally think the primary cause is lack of a clear goal. I worked as a contractor at the NASA Ames Research Center for several years, and I had a look at NASA's 'mission statement' which came out in a very glossy 25 page booklet. (This was when Dan Goldin was Chief Admin.) It had a vision statement, key values, crosscutting procedures, about 10 significant questions, which all had subquestions, as well as some goals. My overall impression was "this could only have been produced by an organization that has no idea whatsoever what it's trying to do." A bit of an overstatement, but I think that the individual researchers and engineers (including myself) had plenty of drive but not enough direction.
Not to mention, NASA had its share of PHB type memos, particularly the ones Goldin used to send around about 'safety'. Worse was the requirement for each group to have a 'safety marshal' to give little talks on 'safety'. Alas, no shiny plastic badges or hats were issued with the job.
What's missing from this discussion is a definition of what a public good is:
Free software is indeed a public good because by definitoin it is difficult to exclude other people from using it and other than the cost of bandwidth to make the code available my using doesn't prevent anyone else using it. The problem with public goods is that most people want them, but no one has much of an incentive to provide them individually --- which is why public goods are typically provided by the government. Public funding of public goods does not "distort the market" because the non-excludability of public goods means there's not much of a market for them in the first place.Anything that can be copied digitally becomes more and more like a public good everyday...
It also helps to practice the small talk. You feel stupid, shallow and fake at first.
Actually I've found it's quite entertaining and quite easy to talk about TV shows I've never seen, for example. I pick up one little factoid from one person, and then pass it on, pick up another, it's a game. Works for sports too, I've sat on airplanes trying hard not to laugh as my husband "talks about sports" just by throwing out one fact and responding to what the other person says. This works mainly because often people prefer to talk than to listen.
On a kinder note, you can learn something interesting from just about anyone, if you make an effort to find out what it is that really interests them. Hard to believe, but not everyone thinks that the really funny story I like to tell about the integral of secant^3 is funny. There's just no accounting for people's taste.
Both fiat and commodity currency typically have value mainly because people believe they will be able to trade it for goods that they want in the future, goods that have some sort of use or ownership value. Gold and diamonds, while they have some uses, would not be anywhere near as valuable if people didn't believe that they would be able to exchange them for something else in the future.
At one time the island of Yap in the S. Pacific used large stones wheels as currency. Mostly ownership of the stones changed hands while the stones stayed put. During one attempt to move a stone by boat a storm blew up and the stone sank to the bottom of the ocean.
The Yap equivalent of the US Federal Reserve met and decided that because the money was lost accidentally, there was no reason that the person didn't still own it, and title to that stone continued to circulate as money. (Couldn't find a current reference, but the original story came with the instructor's notes to Mankiw's intermediate macroeconomic text.)
So all they really need are virtual titles to the virtual objects that no longer exist...
Let me think. Where have I seen that strategy before?
It still amazes me how little they understood about the incentives for innovation, and how little their incorrect predictions mattered to their careers/credibility. Not too surprisingly, many of these same economists have argued that a private licensing of spectrum through auctions will increase efficiency, even as it kills innovation.
But is the theory correct? I very seriously doubt it. Is it the case that thousands of people have information about future terrorist events? The people who have information are going to be a small small part of this market, and well aware that large investments will attract attention.
Can I suggest a better solution? No. But bad information is far worse than none at all. Should US foreign policy be based on the same efficient information gathering that produced the dot com boom/bust?
Yeah, right.
Having said that, there have been some interesting experiments predicting political events at the Iowa Electronic Market. They are much more likely to gather dispersed information --- in an election everyone has at least one piece of private information --- who they are planning to vote for. In a 'terrorism market' the vast vast majority of people have no private information, they're going to relying on the media and the market itself for information, not unlike the dot com boom where most investors had no idea of the real state of the businesses they were investing in.
Even if insiders decide to bet they are unlikely to be large enough to move the market by themselves.
Meanwhile, the plans for a biological attack on Israel proceed apace.
It amazes me that anyone take the efficient markets hypothesis seriously after the dot com boom/bust. Bubbles are not compatible with the efficient markets hypothesis. Bubbles exist. Draw the obvious conclusion.
If you want to know whether or not a politician is beholden to large contributors it doesn't matter how many people donated small amounts of money, but what percentage of the total money raised came from the political interest groups in question. What we need to know, from both parties, is the distribution of "income from supporters", the same way that the distribution of income is measured. What percent of the money was raised from the smallest 20 percent of contributions? What percent came from the top 1 percent?
And most definitely, all contributions need to considered, not just donations from individuals.
The hostages were indeed taken under Carter, but the illegal unconstitutional deal that traded arms for hostages and used the revenue to fund the Contras (which Congress had repeatedly voted against) was 100% a Reagan/Bush Sr. affair.
And yes, they both knew.
Of those surveyed, 60 percent of women said they played online and computer software-based games, compared with 40 percent of men. About the same number of men and women said they played video games on PlayStation, Xbox and other systems.
The more autos it's installed in, the less effective it becomes. Giving people access to identical information about conditions can even increase traffic congestion, a phenomena we also observed in a computer model of decentralized agents learning to solve a simple coordination game. The paper has references to the transportation literature, where this result has been known for some time.
Here's a link to .pdf of the paper
Coordination Failure as a Source of Congestion, the abstract is here.
environmental degradation and other "negative externalities" that allow people to offload costs onto third parties without paying themselves
aggressive marketing of addictive and unhealthy substances, especially to children
marketing of tinned milk as infant formula in the third world (think nestle boycott) and other attempts to profit off the information gap between cultures
But really the issue is how to define "counter-productive for humanity" --- what about products or actions that benefit some people while harming others? Who gets to decide? Under the market, it's one dollar, one vote --- the smallest desire of a rich person will count for more than the life threatening need of a poor person.
"If we can send one man to the moon --- why not send them all?"
.
What evidence can you provide for this assertion? For example, can you name a specific person or organization that has publicly supported the precautionary principle but opposed rigorous testing of new windmill designs?
Or are you suggesting that supporters of the precautionary principle should make testing of new windmill designs a central platform issue? The latter strikes me as absurd from a practical point of view --- the amount of effort devoted to a particular issue, like calling for more tests of novel industrial chemical vrs. calling for more tests of windmill design, should be proportional to the likely harm associated with that particular issue. Like everyone else, supporters of the precautionary principle have limited time and resources and should choose actions that they believe will have the most benefits.
The plant's exhaust is 99.6% CO2 and H2O vapor
CO2 is not pollution? Reducing anthropogenic global warming will require reducing CO2 emissions.
I agree that this jacket isn't a first best solution, but it seems better to me than the alternative technologies: guns, mace, pepper spray.
The same thing that stops a sociopath with a gun from getting on the subway and opening fire.
It seems to me that this technology has far less offensive potential than the most common competing technologies for self-defense: guns, pepper spray, etc.
One cannot legally rig up a shotgun or some other dangerous device to automatically discharge upon the violation of a perimeter, how is this different?
You mean I can't legally rig up an electrically charged fence around the perimeter of my field? Anyway, this is different because crossing the perimeter of my yard is not the same as thing as touching a part of my body.
This addresses some important issues in self-defense, like the possibility of being grabbed from behind. More importantly, it overcomes the resistance that many many women have against taking direct action, especially against someone who hasn't actually harmed them (yet).
I remember that the first thing that we did in self-defense class was practice yelling "NO" loudly in a strong tone of voice --- just this was extremely difficult for about half the women in the class. This is why a gun is a poor defensive weapon for most women, you have to be willing to shoot someone who has not laid a hand on you, who is more than an arm's length away. All this device requires is that it be turned on, a clearly defensive action.