TECHNOLOGY 24 Authors: Beware of Copyright

January 21, 2009

When an author signs a publication contract, insofar as it contains strict and traditional copyright notices, he is pretty much signing his life away. It used to be that the publisher would maintain control only so long as the book is in print. Today, with digital printing, this means forever: your lifetime plus 70 years.

During this time, you can’t even quote significant portions of your own writing without permission from the publisher, and you could find yourself paying the publisher for the rights. You can’t read your own book aloud and sell the results. You certainly can’t give a journal a chapter.

You could try to be sneaky and change the text a bit, right? Wrong. They’ve thought of that. You will own and control new matter but the old matter is still the private possession of The Man.

What if the publisher isn’t marketing your book? You can yell and scream but they don’t have to answer. In fact, most publishers have a system for dealings with authors. It’s called voice mail. Emails go unanswered.

You are done for. You sold your soul and you can’t get it back. Not within your lifetime. Your creation, which copyright is designed to protect, is now the possession of someone else. This follows the trajectory as laid out in Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s smashing new book Against Intellectual Monopoly.

As they explain, this racket began in the 17th century when government instituted the idea of ownership of ideas, precisely so that the government could crush ideas it didn’t like. Only approved authors got the stamp of approval. Same with art. But then the authors and creators rose up and demand their rights in the 18th century, and the copyright idea was transferred from government to private parties, who were then in a position to crush competitors. In the 20th century, this changed again, when the right was transferred from individuals to corporations.

In the digital age that exists simultaneous to the most tyrannical copyright laws ever, this is creating an intolerable situation that amounts to a form of involuntary servitude. Creators write and paint and watch corporate interlopers doom their work to obscurity. The creator hoped to make a dent in the universe but only sees his material land in the recycle bin of history.

Yes, it is done by contract—contract backed by the power of the state. So why do authors put up with it? Mostly because it is a convention, and they haven’t known about alternatives. Also, they are bribed by the ego-exploiting promise of royalties which never arrive.

The practical effects can be devastating. There is, for example, a book on Austrian business cycles that was published some years ago, and it is in print from an academic house, but in print only in the most technical sense. It is essentially unaffordable for anyone but a state-funded library with an inelastic demand curve.

The Mises Institute wants to bring it back in paperback and make it affordable. Nope, can’t happen. The publisher says that it will do it for us, at a very high price with virtually no discount. They are in their legal rights to do this.

Of course it makes the whole project completely unviable. No deal. The authors are cornered. There is nothing they can do. There is nothing we can do. A great Austrian book, written over the course of ten years, is consigned to the dusty shelves of a handful of libraries, for at least another 70 years.

This is only one case of a hundred that I’ve seen. It is even worse when the author is dead. The publisher may or may not have handed back the rights to the manuscript. Those rights may or may not have been transferred. They may or may not have been handed on in the will or perhaps they are in probate.

Yes, a potential new publisher can hunt this down to find out who among six billion potential owners actually controls rights to this manuscript. A lawyer is always glad to spend vast amounts of your money doing research. He may or may not come up with an answer you can trust. Meanwhile, you have spent the equivalent of a first print run.

Most potential publishers will say: to heck with it. Again, you have failed to be immortalized by your work. This goes for art and musical compositions and even recordings of your band or voice. Thanks to federal law since the 1980s, all this material is bound up in a thicket of law, and this thicket will not evaporate for more than one hundred years.

This is what the “intellectual property” of copyright has wrought.

So I say to all authors: please look at your contracts. Don’t sign your life away. Publish on the condition of Creative Commons. Claim your rights back as a creator and an author.

How does this work? You have to copyright your work, if only to prevent others from claiming copyright and thereby binding all other living persons, including you, from publishing it. Once you claim copyright, add that it is published under the Creative Commons License 3.0. This rids your manuscript or song or painting of copyright’s provision of doom: the requirement that only one institution can control it.

In other words, it makes your creation part of the free market. It can be posted, recorded, shown, photographed, celebrated by one and all forever. Isn’t this why you create in the first place? Isn’t this what drives you to write, paint, photograph, sing, or whatever? You want to make a difference. You want credit for your work. This permits this.

Old-fashioned copyright is nothing but a form of modern tyranny in the digital age. It has no future. Bail out of this wicked institution and make sure that your work has a future too.

25

If You Believe in IP,
How Do You Teach Others?

November 16, 2009

Some Harvard professors are taking very seriously their “intellectual property rights” and have claimed copyright to the ideas that they spread in their classrooms. What prompted this was a website in which students posted their notes to help other students.

The professors have cracked down. It might have been enough to legislate against this behavior in particular. Instead, they wrapped their objection in the great fallacy of our age: the professor owns his ideas and they may not be spread without his permission.

This action has opened up a can of worms, and now other universities have taken up the puzzling question: how do you at once enforce intellectual property and uphold the ideal of a university, which is, after all, about teaching and spreading ideas to others?

The problem is a serious one that highlights the absurdity of the notion that an idea—infinitely reproducible and thereby not scarce, and also taught with the overt purpose of gaining adherents among students—can be somehow contained and restrained once it is unleashed. The only way to retain exclusive possession of an idea is never to share it with anyone. But of course that not only cuts against the grain of teaching; it is contrary to the human impulse for bouncing ideas off others and still claiming some credit for innovation.

There are two possible ways out of this problem in a digital age: open source or IP. The open-source model has been adopted by MIT, which has made its entire curriculum open source and freely available online. This is a fairly straightforward approach, which finally gets down to the reality that what MIT is charging for is not so much the education but the degree itself. Clarity at last.

Another approach is the one taken by Harvard and, most explicitly, by the University of Texas, which has suggested that professors make the following contract with students:

My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. They are my own original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver them in order to secure protection. Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class thereby creating a derivative work from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other use. You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me.

You can make “no other use” of what you learn? Really? That sort of smashes the whole point of education, doesn’t it?

The goal of the university is to spread knowledge, not to grant a one-time use for what you learn in the classroom. The aim of an individual student is to gain knowledge that is used in every possible way for a lifetime—and to pass the ideas on to others.

In fact, what the contract requires is impossible. It is not as if our bodies are equipped with hard drives that can be wiped clean after the semester is over. In any case, even if we were so equipped, that would defeat the whole point of taking classes and paying universities for offering them.

I don’t find this struggle ridiculous in the slightest. Once you posit the ownership of ideas already made public, this problem becomes inevitable. Of course the institution of teaching has been around since the ancient world, and yet this issue has never really presented itself before. But since the publishing mercantilists first asserted that property rights could be applied to ideas, the problem of what to do about teaching has been waiting in the wings. The advent of digital media forces the issue, because ideas, once stated, can spread globally in an instant.

I’m further struck by this problem in light of a fantastic new book on Ayn Rand called Goddess of the Market, by Jennifer Burns. The author isn’t quite zeroed in on this issue as such, but she provides enough information to document the fact that for Rand the issue of her intellectual property became increasingly important throughout her life. She documents how Rand’s royalties from her work Night of January 16th gave her the first taste of financial independence, and how she later came to believe that she had not received enough. With each successive negotiation for book royalties and film rights, her terms became ever higher and ever more strict.

Now, in a free market, there is nothing wrong with an upfront payment for first-run rights to a book or movie. It is by being first past the post that profits are made. This was how artists were paid in the Renaissance: not through royalties, as if the artists owns the image or work, but through a payment that comes with granting some third party the opportunity to be the first to reveal the work. In the 19th century, for example, British authors would sell their manuscripts to American publishers, who could not copyright the work (there was no such thing as international copyright in those days). It turned out that the authors made more money through this means of payment than through royalties in their own country.

So on this score, Rand had perfectly sound instincts (a person should charge as much as he or she can for first run) but Rand’s rationale was rooted in this modern notion of intellectual property, a theory, shared by nearly all her contemporaries, on which she was never once challenged. In fact, to a great extent, her philosophy exalted the role and rights of the creator more than any, probably, in the history of ideas. This is a great contribution, but she took the notion too far—for Rand, intellectual rights trumped real rights.

This comes through not only in her writings (The Fountainhead can be given a property-rights spin but ultimately it is about intellectual rights) but also in her personal relationships. Here, property in her ideas became a source of conflict with friends such as Isabel Paterson, with whom Rand was friends for many years. Tensions entered into the friendship when Rand accused Paterson of taking her ideas in the writing of God of the Machine. Paterson responded that Rand’s contribution to the ideas in this book was minimal. They wrote back and forth and argued over specific instances of who said what to whom. They sorted through events in their associations, attempting to reconstruct them and divvy the ideas.

In truth, what had happened to Rand and Paterson is called a “conversation.” One person says something, and another elaborates, which prompts new thoughts, new directions, new comments—a consensus—which then gets interrupted by new thoughts, points of departure, new elaborations, a new consensus, and so on. And if you know how Rand was, staying up all night in these detailed discussions of theory, you know that it would be simply impossible to sort out who owned what.

You can try this yourself with a friend. Talk for 15 minutes and then attempt to draw an ownership map of ideas. See if you can come to a consensus. Then see what the attempt does to your friendship.

Reading through the history of Rand’s relationships with people, we find that this dynamic was pervasive—again, I’m not saying this as accusation but merely observing that it as an extension of her theory concerning the ownership of ideas.

This is particularly a problem for a theory of life that exalts independent thinking and creativity. What if the idea that one should be independent and creative itself actually came from someone else? One must constantly acknowledge one’s debts. And, moreover, one should be cautious about remixing the ideas, lest the property right in the idea of being creative be stained and marred.

Marrying the idea of intellectual property to the notion of being independent generates extreme dependence and mandatory intellectual compliance.

The famed role of Nathaniel Branden in the Rand circle was to be not only a teacher of her theories but also an enforcer of Rand’s intellectual property rights, which involved excluding people as much as it did including people. He was caught on the horns of a dilemma in many ways. On the one hand, he was seeking followers for Rand’s ideas. On the other hand, he wanted to protect her ideas from being stolen (he probably wanted to maintain his own monopolistic possession of them).

What kind of person, then, are you willing to tolerate as part of the inner circle? It would have to be a person who would repeat the ideas of Rand exactly, without alteration, and constantly cite Rand for her innovation—and assert her right to the idea. Taken far enough, one can imagine the result: a drone army of people who footnoted nearly every phrase coming out of their mouths.

It was in the pursuit of intellectual property that Nathaniel intervened in Objectivist clubs to prevent them from using the word Objectivist, to prevent them from using quotes from John Galt, to prevent them even from advertising lectures on the topic by students of her ideas. As Burns demonstrates—but without clarity of causal explanation—the movement for Rand’s ideas only really took off after Nathaniel Branden had been cast out of the inner circle. The monopoly on her ideas could no longer be maintained. They were set free (not fully open source, but at least far less restricted), and so they flourished.

Rand was not entirely happy about this transition. Her impression was not entirely invalid that people were “robbing” her of her thoughts: Rand was having a huge influence. Like the professors discussed above, however, she turned away from an open-source model and towards IP enforcement. Of the Libertarian Party, for example, she wrote, “it’s a bad sign for an allegedly pro-capitalist party to start by stealing ideas.” But this raises the question, Would it have been better had the libertarians not been influenced by Rand? From her perspective, yes: it was even worse when ideas were stolen and then mixed with ideas with which she disagreed.

The rest of the story played out as we might expect. She ended up feeling robbed and looted by everyone who was influenced by her. My own reading of her biography is that her belief that her ideas were property, led to her experiencing unnecessary grief. After all, it didn’t have to be this way. She might have been proud of her role as one of the most influential intellectual forces in the second half of the 20th century.

Lacking a university position and a professorship, she actually managed to make the whole of the English-speaking world her classroom. But rather than be thrilled at what she had done, she had the opposite reaction, which is exactly what one might expect from a deeply flawed conception of intellectual property.

What Rand went through is precisely what these Harvard professors are going through: deep ambiguity concerning the application of property rights to their thoughts. Eventually, they will have to come to terms with it: it is the MIT model, or retirement from teaching, or a lifetime of bitterness. The MIT model is the model of the ancient world and every university environment ever since, and it is the only way to deal with a digital society in which every thought becomes globalized upon utterance.

26

Is Intellectual Property
the Key to Success?

July 5, 2007

One of the greatest tragedies of intellectual property law is how it generates intellectual confusion among successful businesspeople. Many are under the impression, even when it is not true, that they owe their wealth to copyrights, trademarks, and patents, and not necessarily to their business savvy.

For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.

Certainly there is no shortage of narratives ready to back up this misimpression. Countless business histories of the U.S. observe how profits come in the wake of patents, and thereby assume a causal relationship. Under this assumption, the history of American enterprise is less a story of heroic risk and reward and more a story of the decisions of patent clerks and copyright attorneys.

As a result, many people think that the reason the United States grew so quickly in the 19th century was due to its intellectual property protection, and they assume that protecting ideas is no different from protecting real property (which, in fact, is completely different).

A clue to the copyright fallacy should be obvious from wandering through a typical bookstore chain. You will see racks and racks of classic books, presented with beautiful covers, fancy bindings, and in a variety of sizes and shapes. The texts therein are “public domain,” which isn’t a legal category as such: it only means the absence of copyright protection.

But they sell. They sell well. And no, the authors are not misidentified on them. The Brontë sisters are still the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Victor Hugo still wrote Les Miserables. Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. The much-predicted disaster of an anti-IP world is nowhere in evidence: there are still profits, gains from trade, and credit is given where credit is due.

Why is this? Quite simply, the bookstore has gone to the trouble of bringing the book to market. It paid the producer for the book and made an entrepreneurial decision to take a risk that people will buy it. Sure, anyone could have done it, but the fact is that not everyone has: the company made the good available in a manner that suits consumer tastes. In other words, with enterprise comes success. It is no more or less simple than that. IP has nothing to do with it.

So it would be in a completely free market, which is to say, a world without IP. But sometimes businessmen themselves get confused.

Let’s consider the case of an ice-cream entrepreneur with a hypothetical brand name Georgia Cream. The company enjoys some degree of success and then decides to trademark its brand name, meaning that it now enjoys the monopoly on the use of the name Georgia Cream. And let’s say that the company creates a flavor called Peach Pizzazz, which is a great success, so it copyrights the recipe such so that no one can publish it without the company’s permission. It then realizes that the special quality of its ice cream is due to its mixing technique, so it applies for and recieves a patent on that.

So this company now has three monopolies all sewn up. Is that enough to ensure success? Of course not. It must do good business, meaning that it must economize, innovate, distribute, and advertise. The company does all these things and then goes from success to success.

If you suggest to the founder and CEO that we should get rid of intellectual property law, you will elicit a sense of panic. “That would completely destroy my business!” How so? “Anyone could just come along and claim to be Georgia Cream, steal our recipe for Peach Pizzazz, duplicate our mixing technique, and then we’d be sunk.”

Do you see what is happening here? A small change that would not threaten the very life of the business is indirectly being credited, by implication, for being the very life of the business. If that were true, then it would not be business prowess that made this company, but government privilege, and that is emphatically not true in this case. The repeal of intellectual property legislation would do nothing to remove from the business its capacity to create, innovate, advertise, market, and distribute.

The repeal of IP might create for it an additional cost of doing business, namely efforts to ensure that consumers are aware of the difference between the genuine product and impersonators. This is a cost of business that every enterprise has to bear. Patents and trademarks have done nothing to keep Gucci and Prada and Rolex impersonators at bay. But neither have the impersonators killed the main business. If anything, they might have helped, since imitation is the best form of flattery.

In any case, the cost associated with keeping an eye on imitators exists whether IP is legally protected or not. To be sure, some businesses owe their existing profits to patents, which they then use to beat their competitors over the head. But there are costs involved in this process as well, such as millions in legal fees.

Big companies spend millions building up war chests of patents that they use to fight off or forestall lawsuits from other companies, then agree to back down and cross-license to each other after spending millions on attorneys. And no surprise, just as with minimum wage or pro-union legislation, the IP laws don’t really hurt the larger companies but rather the smaller businesses, who can’t afford million-dollar patent suit defenses.

The Internet age has taught that it is ultimately impossible to enforce IP. It is akin to the attempt to ban alcohol or tobacco. It can’t work. It only succeeds in creating criminality where none really need exist. By granting exclusive rights to the first firm to jump through the hoops, it ends up harming rather than promoting competition.

But some may object that protecting IP is no different from protecting regular property. That is not so. Real property is scarce. The subjects of IP are not scarce, as Stephan Kinsella explains. Images, ideas, sounds, arrangements of letters on a page: these can be reproduced infinitely. For that reason, they can’t be considered to be owned.

Merchants are free to attempt to create artificial scarcity, and that is what happens when a company keeps it codes private or photographers put watermarks on their images online. Proprietary and “open-source” products can live and prosper side-by-side, as we learn from any drug store that offers both branded and generic goods inches apart on the shelves.

But what you are not permitted to do in a free market is use violence in the attempt to create an artificial scarcity, which is all that IP legislation really does. Benjamin Tucker said in the 19th century that if you want your invention to yourself, the only way is to keep it off the market. That remains true today.

So consider a world without trademark, copyright, or patents. It would still be a world with innovation—perhaps far more of it. And yes, there would still be profits due to those who are entrepreneurial. Perhaps there would be a bit less profit for litigators and IP lawyers—but is this a bad thing?

27

Books, Online and Off

March 22, 2004

Many people find themselves mystified as to why the Mises Institute puts books online for free that it is also trying to sell. For example, here is Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.’s Speaking of Liberty. Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s The Myth of National Defense (which you can also purchase). And the most accessed of all: Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action, in many different formats with an interactive index, even as the offline Scholar’s Edition remains a bestseller on Mises.org.

Below is a detailed account of how we arrived at the policy that as many books as possible should be made available online and offline—and why we think it would be a good idea for all publishers to do the same. Of course Amazon.com has slowly come to this policy as well, and no one watches the relationship between information and sales as closely. At this point, they are limited only by a publisher’s reluctance to let go. And here we are speaking of new books and issues of marketing and sales. The case for making older volumes fully available for purposes of education is even more obvious.

The point is to expand the market and not assume a fixed number of consumers. Books online and offline reinforce the viability of each other, just as movies in theaters boost movies in rental, and free radio helps the market for CDs for purchase. It takes some thought and entrepreneurial judgement to understand why, but the history of technological development informs the case. As one commentator put it on the Mises blog: “Nor did ideas written down in scrolls or illuminated manuscripts undermine the teacher/guru. Nor did knowledge in mass-printed books undermine schools/colleges.”

The topic comes up because two weeks ago the Mises Institute released Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market—by far our most time-consuming and expensive publication project in our 22-year history. At $50, this hardbound, 1,550-page treatise on economics is an incredible bargain, but still expensive for any book. At the same time, the Mises Institute released a page with the full text of the book and Table of Contents in PDF to accomplish the step-by-step development of the full text in HTML. A number of readers commented that they believed this policy was generous but essentially nuts, and helpfully advised us that if we knew what was good for sales, we would take down this page immediately!!

Rather than take it down, it is our hope that people will put it in their favorites list and forward it far and wide. As a nonprofit dedicated to getting the word out about Austrian economics, and serving many people in the world who are interested in learning, it only makes sense that we pursue every viable means of doing so. To have the means of providing something as powerful as this book for free and not do so would amount to deliberately withholding the product pending payment from people who may or may not have the means of paying.

That prospect of withholding ideas when it would be easy to make them available has to make every nonprofit that cares about its mission somewhat squeamish. There is nothing wrong with making a profit but if that were the sole purpose and if doing so was financially viable, there would be no point in the non-profit structure that has existed since the ancient world. (For more on nonprofits as market institutions, see Rothbard’s “The Myth of Neutral Taxation”). We gladly offer these texts at no charge simply because we believe that this is part of our core mission.

If that sounds implausibly high-minded, there are other considerations at work. There was much confusion in the early days of the web about whether online viewing would displace books. It didn’t happen. In fact, the broad development of the web as a vehicle for commercial search and delivery has actually led to a boom in books sales, both new and used.

Also, experience suggests that online and offline books are different goods that serve different purposes (quick reference versus deep reading; quote checking versus extended study; etc.). What’s more, these different purposes are complementary. On and offline books are complements (like bacon and eggs) not substitutes (like bacon and sausage).

All of this means that one does not necessarily cut into one’s sales by offering the book online for free. By showing people what is inside the book, it is possible to increase sales of the offline book. The very existence of the online version means that the offline version becomes more valuable because now one can copy and paste quotations, easily refer back to the passage even when the book is not in hand, or send URLs around to friends or post them on the blog to make points. These days, if a book is not online, it faces an additional hurdle that it otherwise would not face (not substitutes or complements but tied goods, like piano strings and keys).

Here is a case in point. For some years, Misesians have worried about the status of Mises’s wonderful book Omnipotent Government (1944). It was the first and still remains the most masterful study of the economics and politics of German National Socialism, perhaps the most anti-Nazi book published in its time. It demonstrates that the Nazi ideology was a species of orthodox socialist theory, and thereby corrects one of the most pervasive political errors of our time (that Nazism and Communism represent opposite ends of an ideological continuum.).

In any case, the point is that the book has long deserved far more attention than it has received. When it first appeared in 1944, from Yale University Press, reviewers saw it as a classic and expected it to have a huge impact. But many on the left and right had every reason to make sure Mises’s book did not achieve a wider readership. For years, we’ve wanted to do something to correct for this.

Meanwhile, however, the current publisher would not allow the text to be put online through the Mises Institute. Many of Mises’s books have been online and, as a result, were being referred to and quoted and discussed (and purchased) as never before. But not Omnipotent Government. It was not getting the attention it deserved, and, indeed, faced the prospect of forever living in the shadows of those books that are online.

After three years of letters, emails, and phone calls, we finally persuaded the publisher to let us go ahead, but we could only do so on the condition that we compensate the publisher in advance for all the lost sales they were sure that they would absorb. Their attitude is somewhat understandable. They figured: why would anyone buy the book now that it is being given away for free? They demanded an upfront payment. And so we paid, essentially leasing the book from the publisher. And, after lots of formatting and proofing work, we put it online here.

What happened was precisely the reverse of what the publisher expected. Instead of lost sales, the sales of the book shot up. In the few weeks since the text went online, more copies of this book left our warehouse than during the whole of the last decade. Omnipotent Government is now a top seller in the Mises.org catalog. The publisher not only obtained the leasing fee from our offices but suddenly enjoyed a flood of new orders for the book from us.

Most gratifying is how quickly ideas are disseminated in these times. Already commentators and bloggers have noted the parallel between the modern protectionist argument about outsourcing and the same arguments made by Nazi protectionists in the 1930s—citing Mises’s study in particular. In only two weeks of being made available, the book and its arguments went from being invisible to being part of the circulating body of ideas that animate public debate. This experience illustrates the point very nicely that those who cling to copyright as a way of denying people knowledge are just wrong.

The same events repeated themselves with Mises’s book Bureaucracy. Here is a book that offers a tremendously revealing analytical framework for understanding the public sector. Mises explains why government is inefficient, why it never seems to have enough money, why budget cuts seem arbitrary, and why there is no real way to know whether government is doing anything socially valuable or not. His analysis applies whether the bureaucrats in question are public-spirited or not. It is a very powerful work and yet it has long been obscured by the public-choice school’s insights on the public sector—which, however valid, are not as foundational as Mises’s.

In any case, the book no longer lives in obscurity. It can again be part of the living debate of our times. Why isn’t the case for making these texts available more obvious? Part of the error at work here is having an unnecessarily restricted view of the potential market for these books. If you believe that they are bought only by a small group of libertarians or Misesians whom you have known from various conferences in the past, or you believe that the number of Misesians will always be restricted to a tiny remnant, you might believe that you must configure offerings in a way that somehow traps these people into purchasing a product.

But when you realize that the market for libertarian/Misesian books has been vastly underestimated and artificially restricted due to technological considerations, it is easy to see that an online text does great good on its own as an educational tool. The market for Misesian theory, delivered via whatever means one can conjure up, is not fixed but rather potentially enormous: it is just a matter of getting the word out.

We are hard at work doing this to other Mises texts as well, and putting up as many books as we can manage on a daily and weekly basis: Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, Frank Fetter, Fritz Machlup, Frank Chodorov, George Reisman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Gordon, among many others. When possible, we like to offer full text, and a searchable and copyable PDF (which means more than just pumping the text through a scanner). Of course time and resources constrain us; making a searchable PDF is not a snap. A quality HTML, driven by a database, takes even more time—and money to pay for server space.

In any case, we try to make texts available whether the book was published yesterday or whether it is long out of print, and insofar as rights holders cooperate. This strategy makes sense to us both in terms of our educational obligations as well as our fiduciary responsibilities: doing good and doing well (or at least not going broke tomorrow). As with all exchanges undertaken on a voluntary basis, everyone wins.

28

Mises.org in the Context of Publishing History

October 26, 2009

[This speech was given on October 24, 2009, at the Birthplace of Economic Theory conference in Salamanca, Spain.]

Standup comedian Louis C.K. has a routine called “everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy.” The gag has people on an airplane, sitting on comfy chairs and flying through clouds. They are complaining that the wireless connection is too slow.

There is truth here. Capitalism has made everything amazing, and yet everyone these days seems to hate capitalism.

Let’s leave aside the problem that it takes economic understanding to see cause and effect. There is a more general tendency to take whatever material goods surround us as something granted by fate, our own personal state of nature, and a human right that is ours by a grant of justice. We fail to see our current wealth for what it is: a historical contingency that came about through the sweat and toil of generations that preceded us.

Its permanence is presumed. The goods are ours to redistribute by force if necessary. The services and the tools they require belong not to individuals but to all, so they can be taxed at will. Nothing can harm them or reduce their number.

I fear that the same is true with publishing. For only 500 years have books been copied by machines, after several millennia in which handwork was the only way to spread the written word. For only 150 years have books been available to all classes of society. Every innovation in publishing has meant greater distribution at ever-lower prices, culminating in today’s print-on-demand methods and universal access. Digital methods have set the written word free as never before.

Kids today ask their parents, Were you born before the internet? They are vaguely aware that there was life before the web, but they conglomerate it with the days before automobiles and running water. There is something to this. The advent of digital media has meant a complete revolution in publishing, which makes Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type appear as a mere stage of progress.

And yet, do we appreciate what this means for us? I don’t think we do, not fully. And I worry that, failing to appreciate this, liberals in the Misesian tradition will not fully comprehend what it means to push the literature of our tradition into digital form.

If we could understand this meaning, we would be far more optimistic about the future, provided only that we believe in the power of ideas. So I would like to take a step back and have a look at the role of digital media in the history of publication generally.

Looking at the sweep of publishing history, the goal of all innovation has been the same:

• Lower the cost

• Widen the distribution

• Make the result permanent

There is no success for anyone who attempts to resist these three motivating forces.

There were sometimes tradeoffs between the goals. For example, the early scribes chose parchment over papyrus. Papyrus was less expensive, but parchment was seen as more durable and therefore the scribes’ work would be preserved.

The work of a scribe was largely unchanged from the beginning of recorded history to the middle of the 15th century. The scribe in a monastery such as Salamanca would work every day for up to 8 hours, breaking for Psalm singing and Mass, and working with a whole team of other specialists in graphics and ink to produce perhaps one book per year.

Until this point in history, it might have been easy to believe that the book and all that it represents fell within the economic classification of a scarce good. This is to say that by its nature, a book cannot satisfy existing demand, must be rationed by price, and is radically finite, capable of being duplicated only with time and sweat.

It might have been easy to conflate the work that went into making the book, and the physical properties of the book, with the message and the signs in the book itself. In fact, these are really two different things, and all of the progress since has worked to delineate the difference between what is scarce by its nature (paper, binding, time) versus what is potentially capable of infinite duplication (the ideas and formulations in the book itself).

It was out of the institution of the scribe that the invention of printing came; not all at once, but over the hundred years preceding movable type, using leather and wood cuts and a variety of other techniques. The innovations began in monasteries. But with commercial printing came the most remarkable thing of all, a phenomenon that took books out of their scarce state toward their potential of being a completely nonscarce good. That phenomenon is known as the mechanized copy.

We can understand this by reference to the parable of the loaves and fishes. An apostle attending a sermon by Jesus had brought only enough food for himself. When the crowd became hungry, Jesus was able to copy his lunch infinitely and feed the entire multitude. The Gospels are careful to add that there was still more left over at the end.

This is precisely what printing made possible. The work on the ideas and the preparation of the first manuscript required time and labor on a scale few of us can even imagine today. But once the tools for printing were in place, an approximate copy of the original could be made.

Aside from paper and machines, there was nothing that limited the number of copies that could be made. The text itself was a nonscarce thing. To realize the unlimited potential of print became the dream of anyone with an idea to spread, whether it was in philosophy, music, law, or theology.

When movable-type printing appeared with the Mainz Psalter in 1457, it seemed that the institution of the scribe would be no more, and monks all over Europe debated what to do. On the one hand, the religious communities had the strongest interest in printing advances. On the other hand, the class of professional scribes associated with monasteries of course opposed the advance, in order to protect the high status of their specialized services.

After the development of printing, and then movable type, German abbot Johannes Trithemius exhorted his monks to continue to copy books. He claimed that printing had a shorter life, and that the automated printing technique denied monks the discipline associated with hand scribing. He worried too that the monks would have idle hands if printing became more fashionable.

But this concern didn’t last longer than a few decades. By the late 15th century, the printing houses were working almost exclusively for monasteries, and monasteries themselves had established printing houses. Far from having taken away work for the monks, it became obvious that the new tool made their work more efficient. Their work could be made ever more valuable. The works of Trithemius himself, on a variety of topics, would eventually be printed in many editions.

Movable type made possible an unprecedented explosion in literary works. Michael Clapham says in his three-volume work on the history of printing technology,

A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 336.

Other experts suggest that Gutenberg’s commercial innovations led to an increase of book production by a factor of a thousand. About 115 books are attributed to the early movable-type printers. About 30,000 editions are attributed to the later half of the 15th century.

This increase is astonishing by the standards of the time but it is a blip on the screen in ours. After all, looking at Mises.org data, we can estimate to have sent some 100 million editions of our articles and books flying around the world. And keep in mind that this measures only the work of our servers, and doesn’t include the thousands of servers around the world that host versions of our content.

Since we are in Spain, I would like to say a few words about the printing entrepreneurs from this country’s 16th century. Their role in pushing history forward is not noted often enough.

Lambert Palmart (1440–1493) was the first printer in Spain. He worked from Valencia, the headquarters of commerce. He printed some 15 books in his career, which was an incredible accomplishment, the first in 1475. In Saragossa, there was also Matthew of Flanders, who printed four additional books. Seville was the third most prominent city for the expansion of printing in Spain. Here lived Antonio Martinez, Alonso del Puerto, and Bartolomme Segura, all of whom printed throughout the 1480s.

Tortosa was home to what became a vibrant and organized printing firm, which printed fully 28 books by 1500. Burgos was host to the firm of Frederick of Basel who was in business with Michael Wenssler, and they made 35 books. Another addition to the list of Spanish printing heroes is Arnaldo Guillen de Brocar, one of many so-called wandering printers who set up shop at Logrono, Alcala, and Valladolid. He, like the others, printed mainly Bibles and theological works.

Finally, our list would not be complete without mention of John and Jacob Kromberger, who set up shop in Seville with some partners and local workers and eventually came to print some 239 books of theology, law, medicine, and music. It was this firm that printed missionary tracts in Spanish to be sent to the New World, and Mexico in particular. They did even more than that: in 1539, they put together a full printing outfit and sent it directly to Mexico, where it printed eight books. This was the first printing press to appear in the New World.

So on behalf of the New World, I say thank you to Spain not only for the economic thought that made free enterprise thrive in the Western hemisphere but also for the first printing press to ever come to our shores.

For anyone in love with free markets, the 16th and 17th centuries was a time to witness that wonderful beauty of ordered production. New capital combined with new skills to bring the world more of what it needed and wanted. The rush into the book market by printers of all shapes and sizes, and in all countries of Europe, was a wonderful thing to behold.

But there was a threat on the horizon: mercantilism, the theory that producers needed special protection by government in order to remain healthy in an atmosphere of extreme competitive pressure. Producers were beginning to discover then what every business knows today: namely, that one aspect of free enterprise is that it denies long-run profits to producers.

The market process is always driving profits to zero, as profitable companies are imitated by innovative upstarts using cheaper and more efficient methods. Society benefits from this process, but in order for an established firm to stay on top, it can never stop innovating and striving for excellence.

The answer to this reality in many trades was to seek government protection from competition abroad and to ask favors from the prince to be the only and favored producer. This served both as a guarantee that people would continue to be provided with the goods and services they needed, and as a guarantee that the producer would be protected against the distraction of competitive pressure from others. That’s the theory and practice of mercantilism, and it’s a perfect recipe for hobbling progress.

Just as the printers had driven the scribes out of business, the printers were facing extreme competition by the 18th century. They sought protection from more efficient upstarts, often called pirates, who were making life hard for this very profitable industry.

These pirate firms were publishing older works and distributing them very cheaply and widely. The dominant firms claimed that this practice was undermining their ability to fund new works and was thus inhibiting innovation.

The established printers tapped into the mercantilist spirit, but with a special twist. They claimed that words on the page constituted a special form of property. When they were copied by a firm other than the current publisher, they claimed, their property rights were being invaded. Their “intellectual property” was being stolen.

Now, on its face, this is a preposterous claim. Once ideas are known by others, they are copied. They cannot be owned in the conventional sense. Another way of putting this is that the ownership of the ideas becomes multiplied without end. The only way to possess an idea as exclusive property is to never share it with another person. Once shared, the idea takes flight.

What’s more, the entire industry had been born in the world of copying, not in making original work. Most famously, the most profitable text to publish was the Bible itself and its most ancient transcriptions and translations. In fact, this had been the driving motivation of the invention of the press in the beginning, just as it had been the driving motivation of the scribes.

For this reason, it is crucial to understand the appearance of copyright as nothing other than an aspect of the mercantilist principle. The claims about “intellectual property” were nothing but a ruse offered up by printers as a way of seeking legal protection from competition.

On the Continent, no one bought into this gibberish, seeing it for exactly what it was: a sop to producers, which would have inhibited the whole engine of publishing from the ancient world to the present. They saw that copyright does the opposite of the long-established goals. It raises costs. It limits distribution. And it dooms works to a short life, given the uncertainties of the industry.

This was a terrible direction to go, and in only one place in the world did it take hold: England, which was undergoing a terrible religious struggle. Copyright became useful to the crown in order to suppress works incompatible with the official religion, whatever it happened to be at the time. And so in the 18th century, there were endless fights in England over this matter.

Meanwhile, on the Continent, publishing remained competitive and free for the hundred years after the first copyright statute was imposed on England. Even given England’s laws, copyright statutes were largely ineffective at hobbling the market process until the imposition of international copyright law in the late 19th century. Laws have grown tighter and tighter in the 20th century, until we have reached the point of absurdity since 1995 in the United States, with laws that have pretty well doomed a half century of scholarship to ruin.

If you leave the state and state-protected industries in charge long enough, they will strangle progress to the point that civilization completely stagnates. In the publishing industry, digital media couldn’t have come at a better time. It is saving what the state and the dominant publishers are trying to kill.

The web and digital media are to the establishment what the printers were to the scribes, and what the pamphleteers were to the established book makers. Digital media threatens what they believe to be the core of their existence right now—namely the restriction of what should be completely free, and the imposition of scarcities on what should really should be nonscarce.

Let us return now to the three principles that drive progress in publishing: low costs, wide distribution, permanent results. The web has achieved all three in the most spectacular way. The marginal cost of downloads is approaching zero. The access is approaching universal. The capacity for copying is infinite. And the results are everlasting.

As you know, the Mises Institute is furiously posting as many works in the Austroliberal tradition as we can scan, and we are working at a pace and with a discipline that is on the order of the older scribes. Our entire literature archive is completely open-source, meaning that anyone in the world is free to simultaneously host our results. These editions are like fire. A spark can create a roaring blaze stretching hundreds of miles. This is the power of digital media. It has achieved the dream of every publishing innovation in all of human history.

When a new edition goes up on Mises.org, even before it is publicly linked, it is sent out via torrent to servers worldwide and immediately achieves immortality. It is archived on the site, and thus available to researchers and students all over the world. We have thousands of works available and the number grows daily. We are limited right now by copyright restrictions, but these are being chipped away steadily, and we push the envelope as far as we can.

One of the works that had been copied for hundreds of years, both before and after the printing press, was the Etymologiae, by the 7th-century, Spanish archbishop St. Isidore of Seville. The book summarized all knowledge up to the time it was written, including that of the ancient philosophers, and it somehow still had great notoriety in the 15th century.

Many of the Spanish printers of the 15th and 16th centuries busily printed Isidore of Seville’s works. He not only was a brilliant intellectual; he had a passion for two great tasks: the preservation of knowledge through writing and the spreading of knowledge through copying and distribution. It is for this reason that St. Isidore was proposed as the patron saint of the Internet.

I think too of Mises himself, who labored for the six years between 1934 and 1940 to write Human Action, only to have it published in German in Geneva and have it vanish down a memory hole in the midst of ghastly war and global upheaval. He emigrated to the United States, where he started over again with an English translation, which was published in 1949 after much internal debate at Yale University Press.

After we became conscious of the power of the web, Human Action was our first giant project. Now we have it out in epub format, in which it can be downloaded an infinite number of times and fly around the planet at the speed of light. Seventy years ago, this work had a very unpromising start. It is now immortal. May we someday say the same of human liberty itself. With Mises.org and its supporters around the world, I do think that day will eventually come.

29

The Myth of the Cell-Phone Addiction

June 17, 2005

Pundits and bloggers are addicted to decrying the supposed cell-phone addiction of Americans. Calls for government to do something about it can’t be far behind, especially considering the other claims that cell phones give us tumors, gut our memories, and jackhammer our brains. There are even reports of second-hand damage from others’ cell phone use.

These articles go beyond merely claiming that cell phones are annoying—and truly people could learn some manners here, as in many other aspects of life. As regards this supposed “addiction,” this is a word attached to any habitual behaviors of others we do not like.

What’s interesting here are those who offer something like a Marxian-style critique of cell-phone use. We are alienated from society, we are told, and obviously tormented by loneliness, and thereby seek solidarity and community. But rather than seek out genuine connection to others, we reach for technology, the very thing that alienated us to begin with. We grow ever more dependent on our gizmos but they ultimately disappoint because they only cause addiction to machines and thereby increase alienation.

Also, we the oppressed long for empowerment and the ego-boost generated by the sense of importance granted by the idea of receiving and sending cell-phone calls. We can’t stop using our cell-phones and yet they only further entangle us in an artificial world of machines created via the money matrix.

Oh just look at the cell-phone people everywhere! Surely this is the final stage of capitalism in which we ignore our brothers and sisters walking next to us but instead talk through electronic means to some distant party. And talk about what? About nothing: “It’s, like, so cool to be on the phone!”

You can make this sort of critique up about anything, pepper the essay with references to Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and, to stay in good with conservatives, the insufferable T.S. Eliot, finish it off with a hymn to primitivism—even a wish to return to the Garden of Eden without the taint of technological sin—and you have a winning piece of commentary.

It’s all nonsense.

There is plenty wrong with this genre of criticism, as Tibor Machan points out (he found someone who regretted the invention of the mirror!). But let us address the cell phone in particular, because many people seem to have bought into the idea that it represents some sort of grave danger to the culture and an ominous sign of something or other.

Of course property owners are free to ban them or not. Burger King wouldn’t, but a five-star restaurant probably would. Whatever is profitable. Private property solves whatever “problems” arise, but these are not any different from other problems of what dress, speech, and behavior is right for the time and place. Certainly there is no reason to ban cell phones on flights, as the FCC is considering; leave it up to enterprise itself to decide.

The critics, however, are not satisfied. They say cell phone addiction is a broader concern. To be sure, it’s easy to defend the cell phone on grounds of its emergency services. With cell phones, people have never felt more safe and secure when driving or being out and about in potentially dangerous places. The critics will concede that. What drives them nuts is casual use, the whole middle-class casual culture of the cell phone, which seems to them wholly disgusting.

And yet it is the casual use of technology that makes its emergency use ever more economically viable. It is the demand for gab that has driven up the number of providers, driven down the prices, and made amazing technologies available to all, which then provides the spill-over benefit of making the emergency use of the same technology affordable and ubiquitous. A market of emergency-only cell service would not have become the mass phenom that it is today.

The appearance of addiction reflects a change in the use of public space made possibly by a new technology that was born into the marketplace only in 1994. Ten years ago, talking on the phone was a behavior that was tied to place, namely the home or the work station. Or there was the now-anachronistic phone booth.

In retrospect, it is obvious that a vast amount of productivity was being wasted by the requirement that we be strapped to a chair, or a room in our homes, or in a glass booth, in order to keep up with work duties, friends, and family.

Suddenly and almost like magic that changed. The cell phone made it possible to speak to anyone anywhere from any place. Think of it: what a dramatic transformation. For the first time in the history of everything, anyone can have direct personal contact with anyone anytime.

No more hiding out in the home, whiling away the hours with friends, or at the office, which used to be all about the phone but which is now all about email and instant messaging. Professional and personal uses of phone calls can take place anywhere. We can bluetooth our way through all informal life settings and get the most out of every minute.

Not only that: it seems obvious in retrospect that audio communications are an individual and not a community affair. When the telephone first came along, you had to walk to the post office or town market to use it. What a pain. Then there were lines shared by several homes. How tedious! Then there was one phone per household—owned and maintained by the government. Please!

The ability to completely privatize audible communication had been possessed by the private sector since at least 1947, but the government hogged too much of the radio spectrum to make it possible. It wasn’t until 1994 that the government deigned to provide private enterprise what it needed to create a revolution in communication.

For this reason it is useful to think of the cell phone as a freedom technology along the lines of the world wide web. Both were developed by the private sector for the private sector. Both represent institutional revolts against the state’s presumption to own and control the “command posts” of society. Cells and the web are the mode and means of liberation that the state will forever resent.

But back to the supposed addiction we all have. We are only making the best use of our time. What better time to talk on the phone than when other tasks are prohibited to us? You can turn driving into a multitasked operation. Same with walking to and from places. So too with shopping at the mall. These are the very times to pull out the cell phone, not as an addiction but as a means of making the most productive use of a period of time. It is a simple matter of economizing, that is, directing resources toward their highest-valued use.

But because our eyes see something new, something we haven’t been socialized to expect, and because the market is expanding and democratizing so rapidly, it creates the illusion of something having gone oddly wrong. Instead of seeking to understand it, the temptation is to reach into pop culture’s bag of ideological bromides and decry it as some sort of pathology.

The oddity of public phone use first dawned on the academic class several years ago when they would walk through campus and see throngs of students yammering away on the phone. Cell-phone addiction! Can these kids unplug themselves even for a minute to enjoy the scenery or talk to real people? Why should they be so very interested in their pathetic little materialist existence even after all the assigned readings from Veblen, Marx, and Derrida?

We need to realize something: these kids are walking to and from classes in which they must sit and listen and take notes for an hour or two. They are headed to another class where they will do the same. Or they might be headed to a library study session. Or they might be headed to the pool to meet friends.

In any of these cases, a phone call is not possible or desirable. But traveling from one spot to another? Shopping? Driving? It’s just the time to call, even if only to leave a message.

Now, you might respond that these kids are not actually saying anything useful. They are engaged in conversational junk, punctuated by grunts of nothing. Well, productivity is a subjective concept. Meeting social obligations, making another person feel connected, letting someone know you care—these are all productive activities as understood by the individual speaking. Who are we to say what constitutes valuable or valueless conversations?

The pundit class has a penchant for judging the culture of freedom harshly. If, ten years ago, these same critics had walked up and down the block peering into people’s windows, they might have spied people on the phone in every home. They might have decried this as a phone addiction but nobody would have taken them seriously. In fact, the response would have been readily at hand: mind your own business, bud, and get a life.

Actually that’s not a bad response to most everything that comes out of the carping class of intellectuals who try to make us feel guilty and oppressed for using products that improve our lot in life. Modern technology has us all talking to each other again. That can’t be a bad thing.

30

Another Central Plan Fails

December 31, 2002

For at least two decades, the conservative wing of education experts has touted one magic bullet (apart from vouchers): high-stakes testing. The idea is to subject students (and teachers too) to a standardized test that would create incentives to learn the basics, compel curriculum committees to toss out the fluff, yield reliable data for assessing performance, and inspire students and teachers to keep their noses to the grindstone.

In state after state for the last ten years, these tests have become the leading avenue for education reform. The trend began in Texas and spread. Now millions of students begin their first day of classes with a profound awareness of the impending make-or-break tests, to be taken at regular intervals from the first to the twelfth grade. On the face of it, it seemed to work. Curriculum committees threw up their arms in despair, teachers started teaching math and stopped teaching so much fluff, and everyone had a sudden sense of accountability.

A conservative victory? The Bush administration thinks so, which is why it is working toward the supposed dream of a national testing system. New data, officials say, can be generated that allow for a comparison between states, build proof of success, and otherwise allow for a better national system of education. The “No Child Left Behind” legislation uses carrots and sticks to impose high-stakes testing on states that do not currently use the system.

While the plan seemed sound on the face of it, the reformers forgot one thing: we are dealing with public school, which lacks any real means of operating in a sound economic (which is to say resourceful and rational) manner. Think of it this way. Let’s say that Soviet grain production had been down for 3 years straight and some clique came up with the idea that the workers and managers needed clearer rules for daily operations. The plan may look good on paper, but in the end it doesn’t address the underlying problem: the fact of central planning itself.

Central planning has several universal features. It is coercive. It bypasses the needs of the consumers for the sake of politics. It relies on edicts which may or may not reflect reality. It does not take advantage of the price system, profit, or loss. It is impervious to change. It ignores local conditions. It does not permit flexibility according to circumstance. It robs those who know the most of the ability of make decisions and innovate. It creates incentives to obey the plan but diverts attention from the real goal, whatever it may be (and it may be the wrong goal). It ends up overutilizing material resources, underutilizing human ones, and not generating the intended results.

All of these features have doomed the testing movement, at least if you take seriously the results of a new study from Arizona State University (http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/epru_2002_Research_Writing.htm), the first to examine the issue nationally. The researchers have found an inverse relationship between the ability to pass the tests and the scores on independent assessment tools like the SAT and ACT. The latter come up with a measure of the student’s mastery of the ability to think and solve problems. The school exams, on the other hand, only measure whether students have mastered the material on the tests, which are not thought-based but curriculum based.

It turns out that even as students have shown consistent improvement on state tests, the opposite is true with regard to performance on outside tests. After adopting these exams, twice as many states slipped against the national average on the SAT and ACT as gained on it. This turns out to be true across the board, even on math scores (with the exception of middle-school math). And the trend on Advanced Placement tests was also worse in states that had adopted tests.

What’s the story? Well, the tests themselves have become the curriculum. That’s all that teachers focus on, and they do so at the expense of teaching valuable learning and thinking skills. The one goal of passing the tests has replaced the goal of producing good thinkers, students, learners. The students are being trained narrowly (the school tests measure that) but not broadly (as is shown by SAT/ACT data) and hence the whole point of education is being lost.

Just as strikingly, the study also found an increase in drop-out rates. In fact, it is likely that the study underestimates drop-out rates because it relied exclusively on reported data, while most everyone agrees that there are more drop outs than are typically reported. Now, the conservative response to this bit of news might be: good! If a student isn’t there to learn, better that he leave the classroom and cease to hold back those who do want to learn. And, in some way, there’s a valid point here.

Yet, I think back to the story once told to me by former Soviet economist Yuri Maltsev. When the Soviet government became alarmed at the high death rate in hospitals, an edict was issued from Moscow that gave a quota on the number of people who could die under official care. The result was hospitals hurling people on their deathbeds out the front door and down the steps to die. They complied with the plan but missed the larger point.

Something similar may be happening with the high dropout rates. Teachers and administrators are probably encouraging failing students to leave school rather than drag down the aggregate numbers. One public school teacher revealed to me her tactic for dealing with the mandatory 90 percent pass rate. When she enters a class of 30, she identifies the three students she can ignore and otherwise write off as obvious failures. Now, this is not a cruel woman, just a person who knows what’s necessary to survive in the new environment. She said all her colleagues do the same.

So while the results seem at first counterintuitive—how can testing lead to lower scores and more failures?—when you think about it, the results make perfect sense. Students are being run through a cruel gauntlet of narrow examinations produced by the politicians, while teachers are robbed of the ability to deal with the students as individual learners. This system might appear fine for the average student but the data can be deceptive. High-end and low-end learners are being neglected and those who ostensibly benefit are only given the tools necessary to master exams.

How do conservatives respond? They first point out that a lead researcher in the study, David Berliner, is a critic of school vouchers, and that the study was underwritten by an affiliate of the National Education Association, which opposes do-or-die tests. In other words, they are saying the people opposing this central plan are partisans of another central plan.

Granted. But what about the substance of the results? Chester Finn, an education official under Reagan, had this to say to the New York Times: “You almost never have a pure cause-and-effect relationship. Yes, you’re introducing high-stakes tests, but maybe you’re also changing the way you license teachers, or extending the school day, or changing textbooks. There’s always a lot of things going on concurrently, so you really cannot peg everything to the high-stakes tests.”

Aside from observing that his critique applies to all social-science research, which always and everywhere involves human volition and infinite variables, Finn’s argument misses the point. The case for the tests was in part driven by the desire to be able to measure results in precisely the way the Arizona study has done. If you live by the data sword, you have to be willing to die by it too, and it is hard to argue against the reality that the new data has produced some very deep cuts.

Most compelling about the study is how it comports with anecdotal evidence. Teachers and students these days are obsessed with the tests, way beyond anything that anyone over the age of 30 knows anything about. The basics—reading, writing, math, science—are hammered home like never before. Preparation for tests has become the sum total of all public-school education. Advanced students are bored out of their minds, while weak students are relentlessly frustrated. Teachers wonder why they spent so much time learning how to teach, when all they end up doing is drilling for exams.

This new system is unsustainable, especially now that it turns out that the results produce the opposite of what it intended. Now, that is not to say that the alternative of left-liberal education policies—with no tests and no focus on basics or accountability—is the answer. The problem with education is more fundamental: it is run according to a central plan, so it has all the classic failures of central planning, including vast expense, vast waste of material and human resources, and results that are always disappointing.

The whole subject of education and the institutions that support it needs to be rethought, away from the still-surviving Deweyite-Progressivist model and toward the ancient tradition of private tutoring now being revived in homeschools across America. All schools can learn from the experience of homeschools, with their attention to individual needs, the flexibility that allows students to develop in unique ways, their privately run and funded character, their employment of localized knowledge and resources. These are the elements that make for good institutions of all sorts, whether it is commercial businesses, charities, civic institutions, or schools.

In short, the answer is not to adopt yet another central plan. It is to disempower the planners altogether, and restore decision-making power back to the parents, the teachers they employ, and the students. Testing and better data will not save education in America. A wholesale repudiation of all educational centralized planning will.

31

Department of Computer Security? It’s a Joke

January 20, 2006

If you want to make a geek laugh derisively, suggest that responsibility for computer security be turned over to the government. This reaction is guaranteed, regardless of ideology. Everyone knows that this is not possible, but rarely are the implications for political economy noted.

Now, keep in mind that geeks know that producing fabulous looking and acting things for the web is only part of the job. These are people who spend a fantastic amount of time dealing with security issues, which change every season, day, hour, and even minute.

People know about viruses. Spyware and adware, meanwhile, are incredible threats to people’s home computers. A new computer can be slowed to a crawl in a few days of quick browsing without good security against hijackings. And a huge industry has sprung up promising solutions, some good and some almost as dangerous as the thing they allegedly stop. Some of these are free, and some quite expensive, and the typical geek must work to discover what’s what.

Other threats are less well known, such as the possibility that your own computer can be hijacked and controlled by other people who want to use it to store files or scan for other hijackable ports. This is mainly a threat faced by servers running large websites—huge magnets for hijackings and hacks—but it even affects home computers.

For example: I was recently talking to a technical administrator of a prestigious host of thousands of servers. He was amazed by the number of root-level compromises that had been taking place in recent months. The possible holes in people’s systems are without limit. Software must be constantly upgraded. Even one small mistake can lead to data loss and disaster.

He tried a little experiment. He installed a new operating system on a new laptop, and disabled the firewall. He then hooked it up to a non-secure wireless network in an urban area. The first attack came in six minutes. In 12 minutes, the computer had already been hacked and was under the control of somebody or something else. All data on the computer was rendered vulnerable, available for looting or selling. In a few minutes more, it would have become a work station for more port scanning, denial-of-service attacks, or some other menacing behavior, and been added to the empire of servers being controlled by some of the world’s smartest criminal minds.

Not that a good firewall and secure connection are infallible solutions. There is always a way in for someone with high-level skills and the will to take the risk. To keep threats away involves the technical equivalent of street fights between hackers and security professionals.

The fighters have similar skills; it’s just that one group wears the black hats and one wears white hats. Some are criminals, some are saviors. The battle never stops. And yes, some of them change hats depending on their career prospects. The fight involves deploying skills that are far beyond what most any normal person could conceive of possessing. They can run circles around most computer science professors and even run-of-the-mill webmasters.

Some will rant and rave against the security holes in proprietary products such as those offered by Microsoft. And users of Internet Explorer would be likely to agree. The thing hasn’t been properly updated in many years. It has not kept pace with the times, and so attracts web-based evil like a landfill attracts flies. Other products, however, are different. Server-level software is constantly monitored for holes, with updates sent out automatically and often (though not always as often as the people might like).

Still, open-source advocates say that this proprietary stuff is expensive and dangerous. The companies don’t respond soon enough to threats, and no one but company employees can view the underlying code. That means that improvements come more slowly. With open source, the world community of programmers have access and work constantly to improve the product. To be sure, hackers too have access to the same code. So here too you have a battle between good and evil.

Among the good guys, there is a debate: should software holes be announced publicly (full disclosure) in the hope that the firms that work on open source will fix it before the hackers find out? But between the announcement and the fix, there is a gap that hackers can exploit. Perhaps, then, the hole should only be revealed to the firm or individuals who manage the open-source product (limited disclosure). The downside here is that the people responsible will lack the frantic sense of urgency that generates a quick hot-fix. Geeks thrive in emergencies, while non-emergencies fail to inspire.

So the debate over security rages furiously: open source or proprietary code, public security announcements or quiet revelations, development or risk? At any one time, all solutions are being used, with bulletin boards filling up thousands and thousands of pages of debate based on experience. Ideology can play a part here but, in the end, it comes down to what works best. And all the while, the war continues, pushed onward by the relentless pace of development and progress towards better living standards.

We haven’t even touched on the war between the virus makers and the virus killers. The competition here is also intense. When a new virus is unleashed, the first firm to produce the fix wins new levels of consumer devotion and attention. A nothing company can become the next big thing by producing a fix for two or three viruses in a row, and doing it before the established firms get there. An established firm can lose its market edge in a month by failing to update its virus definitions in time. The difference between winners and losers in this struggle comes down to minutes, not days or weeks.

In this never-ending struggle, there are always tradeoffs between the pace of development and its security risks. No software is perfect. They all have bugs. But people demand development. The market never rests. We must all take some risk. How much is acceptable?

Competition prevails here too. A bad choice in favor of security over development can leave a company eating other companies’ dust. A bad choice in favor of development over security can lead to bankruptcy in the face of a high-stakes security compromise. Geek personalities reflect this trade-off: some develop on live servers and deploy every beta the hour it appears, while others test and test and prefer only the tried and true.

All these fascinating details aside, keep in mind that the terrain on which these wars rage is wholly market based. The idea that any public bureaucracy could oversee the process is unthinkable. So let us ask the question again, so that the reader may join in the derisive laughter: in a world populated by black hats, should the government be the sole wearer of the white hat?

Actually, is there any point at all in giving a white hat to the state? It has no incentive to join the struggle. It lacks the calculational means to assess the trade-off between security and development. It lacks the entrepreneurial drive to produce either. The nature of the bureaucratic organization is to stay put, protect itself, and only move when kicked good and hard by political bosses.

As for the power to do good, how can anyone guarantee that it won’t quickly become the power to do evil? If experience is our guide, the government in a position of authority is more likely to be creating viruses and spyware rather than stopping them. As for the impact of the law, I vaguely seem to recall some legislation passed a few years ago that made spam illegal.

Government can’t produce software that can outsmart every hacker. Not now, not ever. But the government can violate liberty and waste vast resources in the attempt.

As important as computers have become, there are interesting implications here. On a day-by-day basis the security of these machines is a far bigger matter than the threat of terrorism. Whether we like it or not, and regardless of ideology, we all depend on market competition to bring us not only innovation but also to protect us in our dealings with information technology. It is not a perfect solution. It can be messy and fallible. But the market is the strongest and best hope for security, and the alternative is unthinkable.

How interesting that we have been told for, oh, some 400 years that government is the agency we need to give us the security that markets cannot give us. There are a thousand rationales why intellectuals have believed this, but none of them seem very robust by comparison to the experience of our times.