You would think that at least a few of these Laureates would entertain the possibility that under the right conditions a community of technocratic professionals freely debating the merits of various policies could have a better answer than any single individual picked by a committee of Norwegians. It's almost like this is a free market of ideas, and you being downvoted is an invisible hand telling you to have better ideas if you want to make it.
Everything is politics. But reactionary free-market worship is too simplistic to be allowed here. Cato only exists because advocating private ownership of profit turns out to be profitable, not because they have any insightful analysis.
There's a difference between simple and simplistic. Simplistic is pretending the only incentive force at work in a national scale institution is the profit incentive.
Simple is acknowledging that a small institution with the mission statement to advocate for profit incentive as the singular organizing principle of our economy probably believes in its mission statement and operates for the purpose of the private profit of its owners.
I've seen a few _interesting_ notes from CATO, but nothing I would call subtle or anything but free market fundamentalism. They tend to pick up every single news story and view it through a free market, shrink govt, give an individual the profit lens. Which is why they can only write a short, generic paragraph of comment on an interesting story about Khan Academy. OP should have been a link to Wired.
I have serious problems with the policies that CATO advocates. I expect them to explain and justify their policies, not appeal to a committee of Norwegians for authority. I expect the same of you.
Unfortunately law seems to be one of the most conservative institutions (i.e. slow to change) in existence. It it set up to be an adversarial system between two parties, and most of the institutional structure depends upon that. Between the desire for an adversarial system and constitutional right to trial by jury, I'm not sure how you can really move away from my expert witness vs your expert witness when examining evidence for a jury. Any ideas? A "technical judge" that adjudicates evidence into more explainable forms to be explained to the jury?
Conservative (risk aversion) and slow to change are not the same thing. By being slow to change law and lawyers introduce excessive risk in their offerings which, ironically, makes them negligent at their stated purpose.
He is accused of stealing bandwidth from JSTOR, not the documents. "Theft of services" not theft of property. Theft of bandwidth is almost as absurd as theft via copying. JSTOR apparently isn't interested in free transmission of knowledge
If you read the indictment you'll see that they very much are not interested in free transmission of knowledge.
They charge >$50k/yr for access: " For a large research university, this annual subscription fee for JSTOR’s various collections of content can cost more than $50,000."
That price actually seems pretty reasonable for a large research university.
The real question is how much they charge individuals who want to get an article. My first google search (http://www.jstor.org/pss/27757488) results in $12/article. This is very steep when you're trying to do research and don't even know if the article is what you're looking for.
Well, you wouldn't want any old rabble getting access to valuable knowledge. Far better for that access to be safely controlled by the major research institutions, who can clearly be trusted to pursue knowledge in a responsible manner.
How is that reasonable? Sounds like Mr. Swartz was willing to host them for free! And he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling police.
But seriously, $12/article is ludicrous. That must be way above cost recovery or they're not doing a very efficient job of running JSTOR. Perhaps the co-founder of Reddit would do a better job...
Most public libraries have relationships with JSTOR that allow members to access the articles online. I use the Boston Public Library and look up articles via Google Scholar. All free.
I admit that I don't have statistics [edit: on libraries], but most libraries in the world are not large or in the US, and JSTOR's prices for a "small" library in "the rest of the world" are much, much larger than [edit: wrong — comparable to or perhaps a bit larger than, but not much, much larger than] their entire budget. Check out http://support.jstor.org/csp/PriceCalculator/. This code (for Chrome) gives me a yearly price of $81162.70, although it hangs the browser for a while first:
function mouseEvent() { var event = document.createEvent("MouseEvents"); event.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null); return event; }
function each(list, thunk) { list = Array.prototype.slice.call(list); for (var ii = 0; ii < list.length; ii++) { thunk(list[ii]); } }
each(document.getElementsByClassName('expand'), function(link) { link.dispatchEvent(mouseEvent()) })
each(document.getElementsByClassName('e-only'), function(link) { link.dispatchEvent(mouseEvent()) })
It's sad that you have to write javascript code to do that! (But also cool that you did. :)
"Complete Current Scholarship Collection" for 22751.90 is a duplicate of all the things above it. So I think some of the entries have been double counted.
The real price for most libraries may about 1/2 or less of your estimate (they won't be interested in everything). And 20,000 to 40,000 is (well, shouldn't) be a lot of money for a public library.
That's the salary for a single employee! I would expect a library to have at least 5 employees, plus a budget to buy books.
Also I would expect a small library to have only a subset of the papers, and for serious research you would need to "go into the city".
I think you're thinking very much of US salaries. $40,000 a year shouldn't be a lot of money for a public library in the US, because it's the salary for a single employee (or the total costs for half an employee!), and the wonderful public library system in the US does indeed have multiple libraries. But world GDP per person is about US$10k per year, compared to the US's US$47k — and the bulk of that GDP comes from a few rich countries with only a small fraction of the population. An average country is something like Jamaica, Thailand, or the Dominican Republic, where the per-capita GDP is something like US$8.8k.
So US$40k per year is the salary for almost five employees. Except that within Jamaica or Thailand (or, to a lesser extent, the US) the median salary is much lower. And it's probably not the prime minister's niece who's working the librarian job. So maybe it's more like eight to ten employees.
So, yeah, most libraries — even measured numerically, but especially measured by the number of people who rely on them — are a lot poorer than what you're used to.
I haven't checked yet to see if the National Library here in Buenos Aires has JSTOR access.
I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that if you contacted JSTOR from a low income country they may give a better deal.
BTW, if you really do need JSTOR, it's not hard to find a library card number from a US library and use that for access anywhere. (Well, I don't know JSTOR specifically, but all the other databases I've used from my library are available to me at home after I put in my library card number.)
Their price schedule divides "Public Library – Small" into "US", "Canada", and "Rest of the World". It's possible that someone phoning them up from Senegal or Paraguay would be able to negotiate a lower price, but it's not as if their existing price list doesn't recognize the existence of different countries. (Still, lumping Switzerland and Malawi into the same category might not represent a deep level of consideration of the issues.)
For what it's worth, I was using their web site from my house here in Argentina, which is usually classified as a "middle-income country," but where you can hire a full-time employee illegally for US$4000 per year.
I was rebutting a factual claim ("Most public libraries have relationships with JSTOR that allow members to access the articles online"), not a normative one. An analogous factual claim might be that most Zimbabweans drive Mercedes. Even without having access to Mercedes's sales figures by nation, that ought to appear unlikely to you?
Yes, let's agree on and further reason from the the premise that it is not currently true that most Zimbabweans drive Mercedeses ;)
My point was: your argument seems to be based on refuting the argument that the JSTOR subscription is not expensive for the average library because it is only about one yearly salary of the average rank-and-file employee, by saying that that only holds for the libraries in the US (maybe some parts of Europe, but let's say the US for the sake of this argument), and that in many other countries salaries are lower and therefor the relative cost of a JSTOR subscription higher.
So, my (perhaps naive) interpretation of this is that your ulterior argument is that JSTOR is too expensive for many libraries outside of the US, and that they therefore don't have access to its contents.
I further deduce from that, from the context in which you bring it up, is that you don't find it a problem that people take the content from JSTOR and redistribute it to people who don't have easy access to libraries who do have a subscription. Now I'll grant that this is a fairly big leap to make, and maybe you're not holding that position; but within the given context (of people arguing pro and con the actions of the Reddit guy what's-his-name), I think it's not unreasonable of me to assume so, either.
So, to close the circle, my 'question' was (but of course it is a 'question' that is, in the end, a way of stating my position in the discussion...) if it is reasonable to hold that when something is too expensive for people, it is OK to circumvent the rights holders' restrictions on the use of something. (I'm deliberately being vague on issues like 'moral ought' vs 'legal ought', if JSTOR really has a common-law variation of a database right on their collection, jurisdiction etc. - I don't really think they're important for the question at hand).
Agreed. Lets also make sure that these new businesses stay employee owned. If newly created small businesses find success -- only to be bought out by the paragons of the current economic model -- we will end up cycling back into the same negative externalities of the current economic model. If they are bought out we will be back to the same unemployment level, with more public debt that was transferred to the largest corporations and their shareholders.
Thanks for jumping in to pointlessly defend some giant institution. "they did good things too!" is so simplistic it makes me want to tear my hair out. Why spend time defending the Empire as some unquestionable whole? The point is to analyze institutional structure so you can tease out the rules that have positive consequences from the ones that have negative consequences.
Having a desire to spread sanitation and education: good. Binding the possibility of sanitation and education to an economic mode of production that leaves the newly sanitized and educated with underdeveloped infrastructure and in debt cycles: bad. I'm not interested in the illusion that they are inherently paired operations.
Oh, and we still have slave trade and the cult of england today, so your starry eyed tone is quite unearned.
> Thanks for jumping in to pointlessly defend some giant institution. ... your starry eyed tone is quite unearned.
First, up your civility a bit there. The snark is unnecessary and counterproductive to good discussion.
Second, my argument wasn't, "They did some good things too."
It was, "They were overwhelmingly the largest force for good in all of history."
Seriously, check out Heaven's Command. It's pretty balanced and covers every significant battle, controversy, and hypocrisy. And factoring all of that in, the Empire still comes out as the nation that's done more for humanity than anyone else.
I'm not asking you to continue to defend the Empire. I'm asking you to analyze the multitude of institutional forces that contributed to the structure Empire in a way that lets you causally analyze which forces produced which outcomes. This is a discussion of what the structure of our institutions ought to be. To answer that we need to be a little more subtle than evaluating the Empire as a singular, whole unit.
Keeping things just good enough that search users return is not the same set of incentives as delivering search that meets the comprehensive set of user wants.
Your instinctual reaction to frame this in the context of a market is faulty. ALL of the major search players operate under the conceptual mode of users as product, advertisers as customers. The same is true with other media companies (TV, newspaper, etc). That seems to be the only model the market will currently bear, as the existence of media giants is predicated on their ability to accelerate consumption
