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The Radicalism of Reading – Article by Eileen L. Wittig

The Radicalism of Reading – Article by Eileen L. Wittig

The New Renaissance Hat
Eileen L. Wittig
July 13, 2017
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It’s Peak Reading Season: too hot to go outside, too lethargic to do much inside, no holidays coming up for a while. Polls and anecdotes are probably telling you that reading is on the decline – people just don’t read like they used to! – but it turns out that depends on what demographic you’re looking at, and it’s a bit embarrassing for the old people shaking their heads over “kids these days.”

If you’re looking at people over the age of 65, your thought is right. Only 67 percent have read a book in the past year, regardless of format. But if you look at people age 18-29, a.k.a. the ones who supposedly do nothing but scroll through the internet all day, that number jumps up to 80 percent. Awkward.

Granted, that’s only talking about people who have read an actual book, and I’d argue that reading educational articles counts. If we include that, the reading statistic would jump even higher.

And that would’ve been horrible a century ago. And in the century before that. And all the way back to ancient Greece.

The modern obsession with reading is just that: a modern obsession, created by technology, new genres of literature, and advances in class, gender, and socioeconomic equality. It took about 2,500 years, but we made it.

Technological Advance, Copyrighted

You’d think the ancient Greeks would’ve been all about writing things down, but there was resistance from Socrates. He was a huge supporter of the previous technology: oral tradition, when knowledge was passed down through the generations by talking.

Thankfully Plato ignored him and recorded, for the millennia, that Socrates said writing would be terrible for society, causing “forgetfulness,” giving “not truth, but only the semblance of truth,” making everyone “appear to be omniscient, but knowing nothing,” creating nothing but “tiresome company.” Thus did literature have its first great irony.

For hundreds of years, we wrote things down. Most books were either religious or historical, regardless of country, culture, or religion of origin, and as the times changed, this general rule became alternately stricter and looser. Strict class structure, long work days, and the lack of publishing technology resulted in relatively low literacy rates.

The next big step forward was Gutenberg’s printing press. No more hand-writing everything! Suddenly books could be mass-produced, and with that ability came books in many different genres: poetry, technical knowledge, morality stories, and even sheet music. It took a while for people to realize they could start printing books in their own native languages and not only in the then-universal literary language of Latin, but it got there eventually.

Unfortunately, as happens now, with this new technology came new laws, particularly the Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing, issued in England in 1643. The Ordinance proclaimed that

Nor other Book, Pamphlet, paper, nor part of any such Book, Pamphlet, or paper shall from henceforth be printed, bound, stitched or put to sale by any person or persons whatsoever, unless the same be first approved of and licensed under the hands of such person or persons as both, or either of the said Houses shall appoint for the licensing of the same, and entred in the Register Book of the Company of Stationers, according to ancient custom, and the Printer thereof to put his name thereto.

In other words, you couldn’t print anything unless you had express permission from a government-appointed person. You couldn’t submit your book to the registry without government permission, either.

Needless to say, this didn’t help publishing progress. However, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 created the Declaration of Rights, which included the right to free speech, England’s society opened up, and the Ordinance was allowed to lapse in 1694. Free speech combined with less regulation resulted in many more printing presses and publication houses in both England and the American colonies, and publication of books, newspapers, and pamphlets started going up. With more things available, more people could start reading, and the literacy rate in the West went up.

And then a brand new literary genre was invented, and the literary world changed forever (not even hyperbolically).

But the Women!

Up to this point, “the literacy rate went up” has referred more to men than to women. Some women could read, of course, but it was a male-dominated sphere until the end of the 19th century. Women didn’t work outside the home as much, and they were still considered to be inferior to men, so they often did not have comparable educations. The rise of female literacy came when the novel was spreading across the world, but the genre was not welcomed like it is today.

There’s disagreement over what the first novel was – most people say it’s Don Quixote, published all the way back in 1605, but others say it’s Pamela, published in 1740 – no matter which author was responsible for it, there was a lot of antagonism, even from the medical world. Novels were considered to be evil, destroying not only the morality but also the physical health of their “susceptible” female readers. Even in 1899, people were still warning against the “evils of reading” for women.

The problem was that they couldn’t actually agree on the details. One doctor wrote that novels would detrimentally accelerate a girl’s physical maturity, while another wrote that reading, and education in general, would cause of the opposite problem by preventing women from being able to have children. Reading novels could even make a woman uppity and encourage her to disrupt the status quo – the horror! Some went even further, warning that reading novels would cause insanity and even death.

Other people were more subtle in their predictions, believing novels would merely blur the line between fact and fiction. Authors themselves were torn: Gustave Flaubert ironically wrote a novel about this idea in Madame Bovary, while Jane Austen sensibly wrote against it in Northanger Abbey.

As more and more novels were written, and as women themselves entered the writing world, the hostility and sexism eventually died away. Today, we’ve progressed far beyond the old sexism: women now read more books than men, and the best-selling book series in history is a set of novels written by a woman: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.

Lowering the Threshold

Even with the lapsing copyright laws and the increased demand for books thanks to women’s literacy, publication was expensive, so books were expensive too. Reading was generally reserved for the higher classes who were, first off, educated, but could actually afford the money and time to read. Even Benjamin Franklin’s library required a subscription only a few tradesmen could afford. But that trend started changing when Charles Dickens and New York entered the sphere, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.

New York’s publishing houses – including Harper Bros. – were big enough to afford both large-scale publications, which made the books cheaper to publish and buy, and the vast expanse of the American West opened by the creation of the Erie Canal in 1825. The invention of the paperback book lowered the cost of books even further, giving people the “dime novel.” Publishers also took advantage of the lax international copyright laws and published whatever they wanted, including the works of one of the world’s first celebrity authors, Charles Dickens.

Over in England, Dickens was doing a strange thing and successfully writing about the poor. Taking from his own experiences growing up, Dickens used his talents and popularity to promote equality among the classes, greater education, and sympathy for people historically ignored. But he was also creating a new medium of publication: the magazine serialization, which ultimately became the standard form of novel-printing for the era all over the world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and Harriet Beecher Stowe all published serial works. Printing in magazines allowed a greater audience to enjoy literature that would otherwise be reserved only for the people who could afford the time and money to read them in book format.

Speaking of Stowe, the literacy gap in America between whites and all minorities was huge for the first 200 years of our history. Just after the Civil War, in 1870, 79.9 percent of blacks and minorities were illiterate. That rate dropped steadily until 1910, at which point the illiteracy rate among minorities was 30.5 percent. The literacy rate continued growing, albeit slower than before, until the race gap was finally closed in 1980.

21st-Century Reading

All the technological, social, and economic advances made during the explosive 18th and 19th centuries carried through into the modern era, spreading literacy and dispelling weird rumors until the world literacy rate went from 12% in 1800 to 85% in 2014. With the internet, e-readers, and all our smart devices, people are reading more now than ever; and the availability and variety of content is unlike anything even imagined just a century ago.

So when a relative or stranger tells you to put your phone down, ask them when they last read a book, and then quote something smart from the article you’re reading on your phone.

Eileen Wittig is an Associate Editor and author of the Lazy Millennial column at FEE. You can follow the Lazy Millennial Twitter here.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Little Free Libraries: A Love Letter – Article by Sarah Skwire

Little Free Libraries: A Love Letter – Article by Sarah Skwire

The New Renaissance Hat
Sarah Skwire
February 14, 2015
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Still falling for the written word, despite America’s killjoys

The Little Free Library movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol built a miniature model schoolhouse, put it on a post in his front yard, filled it with books, and put up a sign stating, “Free Books.” It was a way to honor his mom — a former school teacher — and to share his love of reading with his neighborhood. The idea took off, and now there are thousands of Little Free Libraries.

The idea is simple. You put a small book box up on a post in your front yard, stock it with books, and people who are passing by on the way to the park, or the mailbox, or the ice cream store, or the coffee shop grab a book, read it, and return it later. Or maybe they keep it and replace it with one of their own. It’s a quiet way of building community and of sharing the pleasure of books with your neighbors. It’s simple. It’s something one person can do to make a difference.

So, naturally, people want to shut it down.

Shreveport, Louisiana, recently declared Little Free Libraries to be “commercial enterprises,” which cannot operate in residential zones. Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, told citizens that Little Free Libraries could only be put in backyards — which completely destroys the whole idea of offering books to casual passers-by. Leawood, Kansas, made a nine-year-old take down his Little Free Library until the town council managed to pass an emergency moratorium that allowed him to return it to his yard. As soon as the Little Free Libraries go up, it seems, some killjoy finds them annoying and wants them taken down.

I know a lot of words. I’m not sure I have any that are harsh enough for people who want to stop others from making it easy and pleasant and fun and free to bring a book into your life.

Maybe that’s because I remember almost nothing that happened before the day I learned to read. But I do remember the day I learned. I was 3 1/2. My brother had just started kindergarten and was learning how to read. In the grand tradition of annoying little sisters everywhere, I immediately insisted on doing the same. So my earliest clear memories are of sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor while Mom loaded the dishwasher and listened to me sound out Arnold Lobel’s Small Pig one slow and painstaking phoneme at a time.

Vacuum.

Cement.

The words were difficult. But I was stubborn, and Mom was patient.

Over the course of two weeks or so, I read the whole book. By myself.

Having figured out the general principle, I assumed I could read anything and everything. And so I did. I stayed up past midnight to finish the Wizard of Oz because I had to make sure that Dorothy got home okay. I sat on the sidelines at recess, reading. I walked into more than a few walls, reading. And the local library should probably have named a wing after me because I racked up so many late fees on books I just couldn’t bear to give back.

Miserable and lonely middle school years were leavened by friends in books and by fantasy novels about escapes to other worlds. Heartbreaks in high school were softened by Jane Austen’s wit and by the greater tragedies in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Well-thumbed, borrowed paperbacks of Interview with the Vampire and Forever Amber provided another kind of education. And college? And graduate school? Orgies of the written word.

I loved all of it. I still love all of it. From the most erudite and complex poetry to comic books and genre fiction to (when I’m really stuck) the text on the back of the cereal box, my first and best and longest-lasting romance has been with the written word.

It started with Small Pig. It started on the kitchen floor. I fell in love, and I have never stopped falling.

And because I am so smitten, I want everyone else to be. I write this column and post on Facebook and annoy my friends by evangelizing about my latest book obsessions because I want a world of people whose minds and lives and hearts are changed by reading. I want a world of people who have the chance to have the experience that Quilliam founder Maajid Nawaz had when he read Orwell. Reading, he realized that if the jihadis with whom he was allied ever achieved their goals, “they would be the Islamist equivalent of Animal Farm.” I want a world of people who find books that overturn everything they think is true and that challenge them to become better.

I want a world of people who do what Yeon-mi Park did. After escaping North Korea, she “read and read and read, even when I didn’t know what I was reading.” She read Orwell, too, and found that “it made complete sense to me. I was still so angry and hateful at this time because of the way I’d been treated.” Reading Gandhi and Mandela, she says, taught her compassion to balance that anger.

And because I want that world — a world where we exchange books and ideas peacefully and productively — the people who began and spread the Little Free Library movement are some of my heroes.

So I thought I’d write them a love letter.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Sarah Skwire is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis.
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This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Reading, Fast and Slow – Article by Bradley Doucet

Reading, Fast and Slow – Article by Bradley Doucet

The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
January 13, 2015
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When a book has a lot to offer—meaty ideas, well-crafted language, a plot that sings, characters that move me—I want to take my time with it. I want to savour it and make it last. On the other hand, there are some books that I want to have read, but that I’m not really looking forward to reading. Also, there are just a lot of books out there, and only so many hours to devote to reading in a given day, year, or lifetime. What if I could savour the best and speed through the rest?

Thanks to a Boston-based start-up named Spritz, I should soon be able to do just that. The company has developed a text-streaming technology that apparently allows readers to increase their reading speeds dramatically without loss of comprehension or retention, and with no special training required. Normal reading is like walking, in that you do it at your own pace. In contrast, “spritzing” is like being on a treadmill, with words coming at you one at a time at a pre-determined (but adjustable) rate. It also takes advantage of what the company calls the “Optimal Recognition Point” in each word. That may sound a bit hokey, but a quick trip around the Spritz website, where you can test out the tech for yourself, should dispel your doubts.

One possible use is quickly finishing a book that started out promising but is proving somewhat disappointing. I hate to abandon a book, and I’ll only do so if it feels like a complete waste of time. But I would have been happy, for instance, to step on the gas about halfway through The Luminaries, which won both the Governor General’s Award and the Man Booker Prize last year. What began as an intriguing tale of murder and mystery set during the 1860s New Zealand gold rush, packed with lots of well-defined characters, was not ultimately very fulfilling, in my opinion. Satisfying endings are not terribly common, but in this case, I found myself caring less and less about the characters as the story dragged on. With a really good novel, the opposite happens.

If this technology pans out, I’ll have more time to spend with higher quality books, which is reason enough to be excited. But as the cost of reading (in terms of time) falls, simple economics suggests that most people will probably read more, which frankly would be great. Just think: A wiser, more knowledgeable, more empathetic world may be right around the corner.

Bradley Doucet is Le Québécois Libre‘s English Editor and the author of the blog Spark This: Musings on Reason, Liberty, and Joy. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness.

Price Fixers of the World, Unite! – Article by Bradley Doucet

Price Fixers of the World, Unite! – Article by Bradley Doucet

The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
December 4, 2013
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Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has never met a price control he didn’t like. The latest news is that he will regulate the price of new and used cars in order to fight inflation, which hit 54% in October. This is a lot like using leeches to balance the four humours: It’s discredited nonsense that does more harm than good (and shame on Bloomberg.com for its uncritical report on the matter, though I’m sure many other news outlets are just as bad).

As Matt McCaffrey and Carmen Dorobat pointed out in the International Business Times last month, inflation in Venezuela (and elsewhere) is quite simply the result of monetary expansion. The government prints money like a lunatic, which makes each single unit of currency worth less (and eventually worthless). More units of the debased currency are therefore needed to purchase goods and services, which is just another way of saying that prices go up.

Imposing controls to stop nominal prices from rising therefore actually lowers real prices below market rates. This leads to shortages, something long-suffering Venezuelans know a thing or two about. Their country is tragically being gutted of its accumulated capital by disastrously wrongheaded economic policies.

Equally mistaken, though not quite as harmful, is the Quebec government’s plan to control the price of books in order to keep sellers from selling them too cheaply. Pauline Marois’s Parti Québécois wants to cap discounts on new books at 10% to protect small booksellers from competition from online and big-box retailers. Whereas Maduro imposes price ceilings, Marois wants to impose a price floor, which will keep books above their market rate. As my Québécois Libre colleague Larry Deck quipped, “Surely nobody would buy fewer books just because they cost more, right?”

Ceilings or floors, fixing prices by diktat distorts market signals and makes most everyone worse off. Depending on their pervasiveness, price controls can lead to a little—or a lot—of hardship. Quebec’s politicians would do well to think twice before emulating an economic basket case like Venezuela.

Bradley Doucet is Le Québécois Libre‘s English Editor and the author of the blog Spark This: Musings on Reason, Liberty, and Joy. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.

This Isn’t the Way To Do Business: Review of John O’Hara’s “From the Terrace” – Article by Sarah Skwire

This Isn’t the Way To Do Business: Review of John O’Hara’s “From the Terrace” – Article by Sarah Skwire

The New Renaissance Hat
Sarah Skwire
October 6, 2013
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John O’Hara. From the Terrace. New York: Carroll and Graff, [1959] 1999. 897 pages.

John O’Hara’s From the Terrace, a sprawling novel of business and politics, traces the career of Alfred Eaton from his boyhood in small-town Pennsylvania to his work in business, banking, D.C. politics, and, finally, to his retirement in California. As Howard Thompson observed in his New York Times review of the 1960 film adaptation, its director “logically . . . settled for about fifteen years” of the story. And I’d like to focus in even more closely—on a single conversation.

After college and World War I, Alfred and his friend Lex Porter decide to start an aviation company. Lex and his family will contribute the funding, Alfred will serve as the business manager, and they will hire an outside designer. Their goal is to do for airplanes what Ford, Dodge, and others have done for cars. As Alfred explains in a conversation with his father:

“We’re not deceiving ourselves. All we know is that aviation is the coming industry in this country. In ten years everybody’s going to want aeroplanes.”

“Personally, I’d rather have some Dodge Brothers, common or preferred.”

“Who wouldn’t? That’s a sure thing, for those who like sure things, and I like sure things, too. But we’re hoping to be Dodges.”

With the perfect hindsight the 21st century offers, we know the enterprise is doomed from the moment we hear about it. Personal planes still haven’t replaced the car and aren’t likely to. But from the standpoint of an entrepreneur in 1920, it’s a pretty good idea.

It’s a pretty good idea, that is, until Alfred, Lex, and their designer Von Elm try to get down to business. While they begin with a fairly clear plan to “build a small aeroplane of up-to-the-minute design and highest quality workmanship, built to sell to men who could afford Rolls-Royce automobiles,” they rapidly move away from this plan into a deadlock between the demands of practicality and the desire for perfect design. Lex, who wants to experiment and constantly change designs, argues, “If we sell an aeroplane in, say, November 1921, and another one in December 1921, the December one may be so different that you wouldn’t recognize it as coming from the same maker.”

Alfred quite rightly protests that this is no way to do business:

Let’s not think we’re going to build custom-made aeroplanes. I don’t care how much we charge for the aeroplane, we’re not going to start making money until we can produce it in some quantity. We ought to build next November’s aeroplane and manufacture it, produce it, till we have, say, fifty sold. And a year later we manufacture the new model, with all those refinements you speak of. We don’t sit around waiting for some guy to come and ask us to build a special ship for him. We make fifty and sell them.

As he later points out, all this chopping and changing requires only one thing—and that isn’t entrepreneurship or business acumen. It’s an “inexhaustible bank account.” Lex’s response to such critiques is telling: “Jesus H. Christ! Are we going to build Dodges? I thought we were going to build a fine aeroplane.”

This criticism of the very company that Alfred calls a “sure thing” and that he takes as his model, along with the conflict the criticism suggests, are at the very center of their business. It leads to Lex and Von Elm buying expensive engines without Alfred’s approval. It leads to a rift in their perceptions of the business and their plans for its future, and it leads to the company’s eventual collapse.

In my last column I praised the entrepreneurial spirit. And I am an enormous fan of the guts and drive, the expertise and steadfastness necessary in order to start and run one’s own company. But not everyone should do it. Lex shouldn’t do it. He wants to build planes. He wants to design planes. He doesn’t care if he sells them.

We’ve heard a lot lately in the media about how everyone doesn’t need to go to college, and how the ever-growing burden of student loan debt sometimes turns out to have been a bad risk for students, particularly in our sluggish economy. But while I am deeply concerned about that, I am equally concerned about glossing over the rigors of starting, running, and maintaining a business. It would be irresponsible, no matter how much we love entrepreneurship, to let students think that it is somehow a sure road to success, or a straight line to the top, or easier and more certain than a college education. And not only is it irresponsible, it’s insulting to the entrepreneurs who know exactly how much work it takes to get to the top—or even the middle—of an industry.

Expertise in entrepreneurship, like expertise in metaphysical poetry or string theory, is hard to come by. You have to study it, work at it, fail at it, and then do it some more until you get it right. It is a great road for those who are drawn to it. But like metaphysical poetry or string theory, it’s not a road for everyone.

Sarah Skwire is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis.
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This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Bookstore Wars: Creativity versus Scale – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Bookstore Wars: Creativity versus Scale – Article by Sanford Ikeda

The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
August 22, 2013
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Independent bookstores appear to be making a comeback after several years of decline. As reported by MSNBC, the number of independent bookstores has risen significantly.

Some 1,000 independent bookstores went out of business between 2000 and 2007, according to the American Booksellers Association (ABA), as consumers turned to online buying, downloading e-books, or flocking to Barnes & Noble and (now defunct) Borders. But the ABA said that since 2009, the number of independent bookstores has risen 19 percent, to 1,971.

If my arithmetic is right, that still means the industry hasn’t rebounded to where it was in 2000 (about 2,600 stores), but it’s not bad. Meanwhile e-book sales, which had been rising at triple-digit rates, have evidently lost a bit of steam, last year growing at about 5 percent overall.

These facts perhaps illustrate two important lessons:  First, the scale of a business’s operations is not the same thing as its competitiveness; and second, the kind of competition that counts in free markets has much less to do with efficiency than with creativity.  Selling books and digital media in massive volume seems to make firms sluggish in addressing customer preferences for more personalized service and responsiveness.

Efficiency and Scale Are Important

Free-market economists are typically painted by friends and foes alike as cheerleaders for efficiency. Indeed, many economists do tout efficiency as the prime virtue of the free market, keeping prices low and employment high. In standard economics, efficiency refers to using the lowest-cost means to reach a given end.

If Jack is in New York and wants to be in Philadelphia, then among the alternative means available to him—walking, boating, flying, driving, or taking the train—efficiency implies that Jack chooses the one that minimizes the cost to him of getting to Philadelphia. In manufacturing, the production process that, other things equal, produces a given rate of output at the lowest cost is the efficient one.

(Note:  Cost, like benefit, always refers to the cost to someone of doing something.  Sometimes the chooser experiences the costs, sometimes someone else does, but neither costs nor benefits are ever disembodied.)

One form of efficiency is economies of scale. Economies of scale occur when using more of all inputs (scaling up) increases output so much that the cost per unit of output falls. (In econ-speak that’s when the long-run average-cost curve slopes downward.) Critics pick up on this and argue that the free market therefore necessarily favors big businesses over small businesses because the bigger a firm is, the more efficient in terms of unit costs it tend to be, and that allows it to charge lower prices and drive smaller firms out of the market.

But Not as Important as Competition

That story, however, only looks at the relative efficiencies of existing firms and markets. If the fundamental goal is to improve the well-being of people as they see it, then you have to pay more attention to competition, particularly entrepreneurial competition. In that sense, competition trumps efficiency (as Israel M. Kirzner has explained).

That’s because, again, efficiency means choosing from among given alternatives the one that achieves a given goal at the lowest cost. Where the standard economic concept of efficiency falls short is that in the real world neither ends nor means are simply given to anyone. Ends and means, outputs and inputs, have at some point to be discovered by someone. Yes, efficiency is a good thing, like having a clean and orderly workplace, but it’s entrepreneurship in the competitive process that does the heavy lifting of finding the work to be done and putting you in a position to do it.

The resurgence of independent bookshops in the face of book megastores, I think, is an example of how creative competition overcomes the scale efficiency of providing a particular product. There’s nothing inherently wrong or uncompetitive about megastores or inherently virtuous about small businesses. Big and small businesses have their niches, whether online or in brick-and-mortar shops. But central to the competitive process is the ability, whatever your size, to be aware of changing circumstances and to adjust appropriately to them. The MSNBC article quotes an independent bookseller as saying, “We learned how to get books that people couldn’t find online, and to cater as much as we could to the customer. When a customer walks in, we try to make them feel wanted and at home.”

Scale economies in both the online and brick-and-mortar parts of the industry do little to win over customers who prefer personalized service or the intangibles of local businesses. Independent bookstores are more flexible, for example, at staging readings of local authors and other neighborhood events. The giant bookseller Borders Books, one of the pioneers of book retailing, apparently didn’t do a good job adjusting and closed a couple of years ago (I wrote about it here). Today Barnes & Noble scrambles to cope with competition from the e-book, Amazon.com, and, it seems, local bookshops.

While the diminished growth of e-book sales is hardly a harbinger of decline—5 percent is nothing to sneeze at—it does suggest that sometimes the demand side of the market doesn’t change quite as fast as the supply side—that is, a lot of innovation is just discovering better ways to satisfy fairly stable tastes. Still, it’s competition—for new markets, new techniques, new resources, and yes, new tastes—and not efficiency that drives, and is driven by, the creative discovery of ends and of means.

The Lesson Applied

The other day a friend told me that, when she told her fiancé she couldn’t understand why a mildly alcoholic beverage called “Chu-hi,” which is very popular in Japan, isn’t sold in stores here, his response was something like, “If there were a demand for it, it would be.” Knowing that I write this column she then said to me, “That’s the free market, right?”

Okay, class, what do you say?

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
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This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Longevity Appreciation Quiz and Badge – First in TRA’s Educational Series on Indefinite Life Extension

Longevity Appreciation Quiz and Badge – First in TRA’s Educational Series on Indefinite Life Extension

Longevity Appreciation Badge

G. Stolyarov II
March 19, 2013
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The Rational Argumentator is proud to announce the first in its planned series of quizzes on indefinite life extension, a companion activity to the Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) page.

Read “Life is Worth Living – Forever” by G. Stolyarov II and answer the questions in the quiz below, in accordance with the essay. If you get 100% of the questions correct, you will earn the Longevity Appreciation badge, the first badge in The Rational Argumentator’s interactive educational series on indefinite life extension.  You would need a free account with Mozilla Backpack to receive the badge.

This badge was designed by Wendy Stolyarov, whose art you can see here, here, and here.

 

Longevity Appreciation Quiz

Read “Life is Worth Living – Forever” by G. Stolyarov II and answer the questions in this quiz in accordance with the essay. If you get 100% of the questions correct, you will earn the Longevity Appreciation badge, the first badge in The Rational Argumentator’s interactive educational series on indefinite life extension.  You would need a free account with Mozilla Backpack to receive the badge.

Leaderboard: Longevity Appreciation Quiz

maximum of 7 points
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Dead-Tree Luddites – Article by Genevieve LaGreca

Dead-Tree Luddites – Article by Genevieve LaGreca

The New Renaissance Hat
Genevieve LaGreca
May 28, 2012
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Imagine you’re living in the 15th century. You’re witnessing a revolution that will profoundly change the world. This revolution doesn’t involve swords and cannons but rather words and books. The cause of this upheaval is the most important invention in more than a thousand years: the printing press, by Johannes Gutenberg.

Within a few decades of its launch, you see the printing press transform the field of bookmaking in ways previously unimaginable. Printed books are far easier, faster, and less costly to produce than the books that had preceded them, which had to be laboriously copied, one page at a time, by hand. In the time it takes to copy one page by hand, the printing press can turn out hundreds or thousands of copies of that same page, thereby making it possible for the first time in history for almost anyone to own books.

Within a century of its creation, the printing press will spread throughout western Europe, producing millions of books, spurring the economic development of industries related to it, such as papermaking, and spreading literacy and knowledge around the world. The printing press will make possible the rapid development of education, science, art, culture — and the rise of mankind from the medieval period to the early-modern age.

Let us further imagine that not everyone in the 15th century is happy about this innovation. Unable to match the benefits of the printing press, the producers of hand-copied books are outraged. The scribes are being put out of business. The penmanship schools that train the scribes, the quill makers that supply their pens, and the manufacturers of the stools and drafting tables that literally support them are seeing a drop in sales. The hand-copied books are now priced too high to compete with the Gutenberg press, so their publishers are experiencing no growth, with no new capital coming into their industry. The sales force for the hand-copied books is also in despair, with their customers now ordering the new printed books from the Gutenberg people, and their lost income being money they can no longer put into their communities. Alas, the monopolistic monster, the printing press, is taking over.

The hand-copied-book interests complain bitterly to the Great Sages at their Hallowed Council of Justice. “Sires,” they cry, “you must stop the predatory pricing and scorched-earth policies of the Gutenberg press. It’s wiping out the competition. How can this be in the public interest?”

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and we see another revolution that is turning the book industry topsy-turvy — the transformation from printed books to electronic ones. This revolution is spearheaded by a modern-day Gutenberg, Amazon.com, the pioneer of the ebook, the Kindle device for reading it, and the online marketplace for publishing and selling it.

What Amazon has accomplished is truly amazing. With Kindle, it has eliminated the industry middlemen who come between the writer and reader of a book — from agents to publishers to distributors to wholesalers to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Kindle has also eliminated the need for a physical inventory of books, with its high printing, warehousing, and shipping costs. These innovations have resulted in far less expensive books now available to consumers. And the new marketplace of ebooks has been especially advantageous for self-publishers unable to get their books accepted through the traditional channels, who now have an avenue open to them for reaching customers directly.

The popularity of these ground-breaking innovations is enormous, with Kindle books now outselling the combined total of all paperback and hardcover books purchased from Amazon.

Without any middlemen or gatekeepers, with virtually no costs involved, and with self-marketing possible through social media and other Internet channels, electronic publishing is creating a robust market for new writers and books. For example, one novelist who was unable to find an agent or publisher has self-published two of her novels on Kindle. With her books priced at $2.99 and with a 70 percent royalty from Kindle, she earns approximately $2 per book. She is selling 55 books per day, or 20,000 books per year, which amounts to sales of $60,000 and royalties to her of $40,000. (As a simple comparison, without getting into the complexities of book contracts, this author might earn a royalty of approximately 10 percent from a traditional publisher, which would require her to achieve sales of $400,000 to earn as much money as she does self-publishing on Kindle.) Other authors are doing even better, including two self-published novelists who have become members of the Kindle Million Club in copies sold. These writers started with nothing — they were not among the favored few selected by agents and trade publishers, and they had no publicists or book tours — yet, thanks to electronic publishing, they are making a living, with some achieving stunning success.

The low pricing of ebooks, scorned by the traditional publishing interests, is the emerging writer’s new ticket of admission into the book industry. While readers may be highly reluctant to risk $25 in a bookstore to try a new writer’s hardcover work, they are buying the ebooks of new writers priced at or around $2.99 on Kindle. Writers are finding their fans and making money at these prices, and readers, judging by Amazon’s “customer reviews,” are happy with these low-cost books.

The writer-publisher in America dates back to our founding, promoting vigorous free speech and intellectual entrepreneurship. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, both bestsellers in their day, were self-published. If the American dream is to start with nothing but one’s own talent, motivation, and hard work, and from that achieve success, then in recent times this dream was essentially closed to writers who failed to win the favor of the agents and trade publishers. Prior to the ebook revolution and online marketing spurred by Amazon, there was a stigma attached to self-publishing, despite its long and distinguished tradition in America. The major trade reviewers would not consider a self-published book, which meant that libraries and bookstores, which order based on the reviews, would not carry it. Now, ebooks are not only taking the stigma out of self-publishing but arguably making it the preferred route. Amazon has opened the avenue to pursuing the intellectual’s American dream once again.

Yet the same medieval attacks projected above against the printing press are now being launched against Amazon, with the attackers imploring the modern-day “sages” at the Justice Department to stop the new menace called Amazon.

Leading the charge back to the Middle Ages is the New York Times. Two articles appearing on the front page of its business section on April 16, 2012, illustrate what happens when the Luddites (i.e., those hostile to technological development) meet the statists (i.e., those who look to achieve their ends through government force).

“Daring to Cut Off Amazon” by David Streitfeld praises a publisher-distributor for pulling its printed books out of Amazon. (Amazon discounts not only ebooks but also the printed books it so successfully sells.) The company is Educational Development Corporation, whose CEO, Randall White, laments, “Amazon is squeezing everyone out of the business.… They’re a predator. We’re better off without them.”

One of Mr. White’s concerns was that his sales people were losing business because their customers were buying the company’s books cheaper from Amazon. Sales consultant Christy Reed comments about her local customers, “Yes they got the books for less [from Amazon]. But my earnings go back into our community. Amazon’s do not.” It apparently didn’t occur to her that by buying books cheaper on Amazon, her former customers have more money to spend in her community, and the Amazon staff who replaced her have more money to spend in their communities. But where spending does or doesn’t take place is not the main economic point. The real point is that for the same total spending in the economic system as a whole, people now obtain more books and have money left over to buy more of other things.

“Book Publishing’s Real Nemesis” by David Carr cites the recent antitrust suit brought by the Justice Department against five publishers and Apple, charging they engaged in the price-fixing of ebooks. Instead of condemning this police action against production and trade, Mr. Carr bemoans the fact that the strong arm of the law didn’t go far enough to grip the “monopolistic monolith” Amazon, which “has used its market power to bully and dictate.” Mr. Carr considers it bullying and dictating when a private company (Amazon) sets its terms, and other players (the publishers) are free to do business with it or not. But it’s not bullying and dictating when the compulsory power of the state intervenes to set economic terms and punish businesses arbitrarily?

Mr. Carr quotes Authors Guild president and best-selling author Scott Turow, who worries that the club of authors and publishers will shrink. (Really?) “It is breathtaking to stand back and look at this and believe that this is in the public interest,” complains Mr. Turow about Amazon’s success. He also wonders if Amazon will drive the price of books so low that there will be “no one left to compete with them.” Apparently the “public interest” doesn’t include the millions of customers who choose to buy the mother lode of affordable ebooks from Amazon and who may not welcome his solicitous concern over the low prices they’re paying. And apparently the “public interest” doesn’t include the fresh crop of new authors now sprouting through ebooks, without the benefit of the major publishers and lucky breaks that he had.

The Luddite tone of the attacks against Amazon rings like the following: The electric light will replace the candle. The car will replace the horse and buggy. The cure for tuberculosis will put the sanatoriums out of business. The computer will replace the typewriter.

The statist element lies in the attackers’ desire to enlist the police power of the state to stifle the competition and artificially prop up their businesses.

Granted, it may be disappointing and painful for those whose jobs are thinning out or becoming obsolete due to technological advancements, but that can’t justify government intrusion. Morality is on the side of the people engaged in voluntary trade and against those who urge the Justice Department’s encroachment into their industry. The charges levied against Amazon — as a predator, monopolist, bully, etc. — actually do not apply to a company engaged in voluntary trade, no matter how big its market share, but rather to those trying to preserve their interests through government action.

In the case of Amazon, the ones trying to restrain trade are the attackers themselves. Moreover, not only is morality on the side of Amazon, but so too are the long-run material self-interests of everyone in the economic system. Everyone working will earn money, but, thanks to Amazon and every other innovator of better products or more efficient methods of production, the buying power of the money he earns will be greater. The enemies of productive innovators are, by the same token, antisocial enemies of the general buying public.

The complaints lodged against Amazon would be harmless if the complainers could not use the government to advance their cause. But they can, through antitrust laws. These laws give the state the power to evaluate the price of a company’s product in relation to its competition and to punish companies — severely and arbitrarily — for prices deemed to be unacceptable. If a company’s price for its goods is deemed to be too low, it can be punished for being predatory and destructive of competition. If the price is deemed to be the same as its competitors, it can be punished for collusion and price-fixing. If the price is deemed to be too high, it can be punished for being monopolistic.

Using antitrust laws against the book industry poses an additional grave danger over and above their use against other industries. Because the book industry represents the dissemination of knowledge and ideas, an attempt to regulate the price of books abridges the free flow of ideas and violates our First Amendment right to freedom of the press.

Anyone interested in the survival of a robust book industry — or any other industry — with the free flow of products, the creativity of new business methods, and the preservation of economic freedom and property rights, must support the repeal of these oppressive laws.

The market — comprising the voluntary decisions of millions of free people — determines the pricing of books, the form a book will take, the device it will be read on, the winners and the losers of the competition. If the market chooses an innovative technology and a new direction, then so be it. Let the medieval bookmakers copying their books by hand and their contemporary counterparts using needless paper and ink, warehouses, delivery trucks, and bookstores, adopt the advances or quit!

Totally unlike competition in the animal kingdom, in which the losers are eaten or die of starvation, the losers of an economic competition do not die. At worst, they must relocate in the economic system at a lower level. But in an economic system free enough rapidly to progress, as ours has been for most of the last two and a half centuries, even the lowest-paid workers enjoy a standard of living that surpasses that of the kings and emperors of earlier ages. This is why the Gutenbergs of the world must be left free to dream, to create, and to trade without fear of punishment.

Gen LaGreca is the author of Noble Vision, a novel that won a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year Award and was a finalist in the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards. After being rejected by dozens of agents and unable to find a trade publisher, it now enjoys steady ranking in the Top 100 Best Sellers in medical and political genre fiction on Kindle. Send her mail. See Genevieve LaGreca’s article archives.

Economist George Reisman contributed to this article.

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Copyright © 2012 by Genevieve LaGreca. Permission to reproduce is granted with attribution.