The Mises Institute and the Techno-Revolution

0:00Earlier today I was afraid I was going to have to get up and tell you that Mises Org is available all over the world except in this room. But I think we've got it going now. And I'm about to undertake the riskiest thing that any speaker about websites could ever do, which is try to run a live website in front of you. If that any sense at all, I'd be showing a PowerPoint program. For all I know, we'll get the blue screen of death or something like that.

0:30Now you get to see my extremely geeky Alienware computer here. All right. There we go. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Mises Org. So this is the current incarnation of Mises Org. This is about Mises Org 11.0 or 110.0. I don't know what you want to name it, but the darn thing changes just constantly. It's the only way we know how to do any work. Relentless change. In 1995, well, let me just back up a little bit. It's very implausible that I should be the advocate of all this stuff, because actually I was very early on very much the debunker of the World Wide Web.

1:27I made an elementary error back in those days. I confused the unchangingness of principles with the unchangingness of technology. That way you should be attached to old principles and not change them, you know, there's certain things that are permanent in life and somehow I thought that WordStar 5.0 was one of those principles. So I don't know if you ever, if any of you learned WordStar when it was out, but learning WordStar is something like learning to play the Fringe Horn, you know, it's something you just, it takes years and once you do it, you do it very well and nobody wants to back away from things once you've learned them that well. So I was attached to the unchangingness of technology in those days, but fortunately actually it was worse by 3.0, not 5.0, it was even more primitive.

2:14In those days Peter Klein had been hanging around our offices, he was, I guess he wasn't on the job market yet or he was about to become so, and the first web browser was invented, well I should say became available for users of Bill Gates' operating system, and he put up the first Mises Org site, which you can still look at to this day if you go to the internet archive, you can look at our first website and it was very much like all the websites in those days, just a billboard, you know, we exist and here's our address in the real world, you know, that was it and I remember thinking at the time, well you don't get a chance to promote Mises Org, why not, but you know, what good is this crazy electronic contraption, I mean nobody can even see it, you know, so whatever but actually there's a funny story even behind that I remember when the email first came out my friend Tom Bethel called me up and said Jeffrey I

3:10used to meet with this thing called e-mail and I don't know what is that you know and he said well and he explained the way it works and so I called up Lew Rockwell and at the time we had been sending we were in different places at the time and we had been sending files back and forth using the old phone you know hookup the The Modem, you know, boop-boop-boop-boop-boop, shh, boop-boop-boop-boop-boop. Do you remember the sounds? Yeah, young people thought, no, I did that for my daughter. She said, what is the strange noise? She had never heard that before. But, so, we enjoyed using the Modem, and I said, ah, Lou, there seems to be this thing called email. What do you think of it? He said, well, how does it work? I said, well, it seems as if I would, for example, send you a message. But you don't have to be online at that time to get it.

3:57You would, at your sort of leisure, wait, and at some point you would dial out yourself and then you would be able to pull down that message that I sent. And then you could do the same thing for me. And so this is a long pause. He spoke. Where does it go in the meantime? And I said, you know, I didn't actually know. And he said, you know, it doesn't sound like anything we're going to need. I said, no, not really. So, all these years later, we still don't know where email goes in the same way. Nonetheless, we did kind of get up to speed, and the first website opened up in 1995, and we were one of the earliest sites of any non-profit to use it.

4:47And as I say, I was a debunker. I remember Judy Thomason going around the office. She used to take these computer magazines and she would read them and she came into me one day and she said, you know, Jessica, World Wide Web really is the future, you know, it's just an infancy, you know. And I remember thinking, I can't believe she's calling for all this now. It's ridiculous, you know, all these kind of collapse, you know. Anyway, somehow I got dragged into this world and I'll tell you why. We began to put some files up there and I think one of the very first things that went online was the Austrian Study Guide which we had been building since about 1982 and it's just a list of bibliography, bibliographic reference for Austrian works on a variety of topics and I was sitting in my chair and the Austrian study guide was about five feet across the room in my bookshelf but that was required so I had to get out of my chair and go over there and pick it up and bring it back to my desk and read it and then I realized so it's online so I'll just look at it that way and I did, it took a couple of seconds and I didn't have to get out of my chair to go across the room

5:50I had the same information, and I had something like a eureka moment. I thought, ah, you know, students are some of the laziest people in the world. If we can give them what they need on their desktops, then they will take that and use it. And if they can finish their research projects using our material, rather than having to go to the library and dig through a dusty old book, they would do it. And so, everything began. A crazed frenzy to get everything online that started back in those days, and it hasn't stopped, and it goes on every day. A remarkable frenzy to get everything conceivable online. Everything, possibly, we can online. And, you know, we have a store that sells a fantastic amount of books, and we have conferences and all the rest of it, but if there's any way that we can get the same thing to everybody who wants it for free, we will do that.

6:44And we've done this with every kind of thing you can think of, and we're still working for a way to get these Misesor power bands deliverable online for free. We haven't achieved that yet, but I wish everybody had one. We'll do the same thing with t-shirts if that ever comes to town. But in the meantime, we can do it with all text files, audio files, media files, and everything else. So let me just kind of go through a little bit about what we have. Well, let me talk first about traffic. This is the data that I can never remember when you ask me, between sessions, how much traffic does Mises or get? Well, I can't remember. It's always changing. So I'm going to read off all these things to you so you can get a good sense of where we are. Daily visitors, last track was, last we counted was 16,159 daily visitors to the site.

7:33A daily article is emailed out, just like for example this article. You can subscribe very easily and get this article delivered to your inbox every day. and we have 21,341 subscribers to that. We have monthly visitors of 469,953, monthly page views of 966,000, close to a million. Percent of visitors who are new, 60%, very interesting, bandwidth downloaded per day, we're being looted every day, 60 gigs of bandwidth downloaded per day. We have to throttle that to some extent. Back when we were being hosted with was that company that used to hold YouTube. They had un-throttle bandwidth. We were getting hit with some of the overtures. We had to stop it.

8:25We moved and we'd get more gigs downloaded per day, but it throttled at some point. Number of audio files on the site, 1,142. This is to make it possible. Lots of people are very much attached to audio. I've run into many people at this conference who have come up to me and said, This has changed my commuting life. I listen to Mises lectures every day. The number of video files, 236 video files online. So insofar as we have the time and the chance, we take anything we video and put it online. You'll notice we don't always use YouTube. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. This mainly has to do with the length of the program. Most of our video files are longer than an hour, so they don't work well on YouTube.

9:391939. Now this is a very interesting case because we have the complete run of the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, a free market, a music review, the Old Review of Austrian Economics and the Austrian Economics Newsletter, the Libertarian Forum. I wish Murray could see this. Left and right, imagine that. Also all of our working papers and essays in political economy. of Economy, recent papers, we didn't publish it, we don't publish it, but they needed a host, so we volunteered. Now, it's an interesting case, because regular academic journals are sort of penurious with who gets to view their content or not. This is the difference between Mises's work and regular outfits, you know. I mean, in my view, if somebody wants to read an article from the in the World Journal of Austrian Economics.

10:35They shouldn't have to be a currently matriculating student in a university that subscribes to some journal service for, you know, $80,000 a year. It's absurd. We put everything online for free. So everybody can get to it. And like I say, if our research...

10:56If students can get what they need from our material, they'll use us first. There's been a wonderful source of citations. That's why the quarterly journal is so well cited in literature. Okay, moving on. Number of daily articles. We were just looking at this. Let's go back. Number of daily articles. 2,577. And what's fun about this is, this is like a neat little thing, you notice this little orange thing here? RSS feeds? You know, not everybody, actually young people don't go to websites anymore, they just read everything through their readers. And you know, through their iPhones or BlackBerry's or whatever.

11:42And so you have to have a feed that makes this possible. And we used to have four feeds and then we had five feeds and then sixteen feeds and then sixty feeds. Now we've got a feed for every single author on the entire website. I'm trying to ask David Bexler, who's the real magician behind all this stuff. He's the webmaster and codemaster behind everything. I said, how many feeds do we have to suggest? The answer is infinite, because they're dynamically created. So there you go, infinite. That's how many feeds we have. So you saw how I just clicked on the author and all of them. Henry Hazlitt's articles that we currently have up in the daily article section of the site immediately display. But of course we also have all Hazlitt's books available on PDF, PDF down below too.

12:28Okay, let me go back to where we were. Additional HTML documents, 1393, these are just documents that, you know, we see a great article somewhere we think just ought to be available to the world, we put it up and there it is. The total size of the Mises org site is 47.8 gigs. That's how big the site is. And it's a lot to pack up and move. And we've moved several times to various servers to try to get the best price. The total size of the Mises org database is 11 gigs. The total size of the Mises org backup is 105 gigs. And speaking of statistics, I'm particularly struck by this on Wikipedia, which students just love. Don't use Wikipedia. We have 591 links out from Wikipedia to Mises Org.

13:18We want to talk about how do we compare to other people. Alright, this is Compete.com. Now, all these site ranking things, none of them are accurate, of course, and the first thing everybody will tell you about Alexa or Compete or any of these things as well, that's not true. You know, what says it's not really accurate? Well, it's true that it's not. The only thing that's really accurate is things like Google Analytics, and that generated the data I gave you earlier. Nonetheless, since they use the same standard to evaluate every website, you get some sense of how you can compare it with other people. Compete.com gets this data from ISPs, I believe, so you get a reasonable look at what's going on.

14:03So, let's just type in Mises work here.

14:10Okay, can you see that? Yeah, oh, that looks nice up there, yeah. So you can see that, I had several people come up to me and say, you know, I can't stand the redesign, it's just dreadful. Well, okay, we redesigned it in June and look at what's happening to our traffic in the meantime. So what we did in the redesign was try to figure out, we did a long analysis of precisely how people use the site and tried to maximize in placing things on the page and what not and how people use the site to help people use it better and it's actually benefited us. Let's just play this little wicked game that they have here and compare it to others. So, why don't we first try our favorite institution, the Federal Reserve? And what about the center of the warfare state?

15:00That's American Economic Institute. No, American Union Presidency, right? What about the ruling class of the Council of Foreign Relations? Yes, they're still around. They're still running their lives. Okay, what about the lovely institution that Keynes created, the IMF, the World Central Plan Act? So if web traffic were a good measure of influence, which I don't know, it's hard to say, but nonetheless we're doing very, very well.

15:50I know of no non-profit in the world that you can, welcome to refute this letter, you can go to compete.com and compare with all your friends. I know what everyone of you is thinking, you're thinking, well, what about, how do you compare to So-and-So or this or that? You know, why don't you check it out on your own? I think you'd be very impressed. I'll just show you a little trick that we've now learned. This is our new system for allowing customized, New Media, Best Sellers, The Best Sellers in the Store, 319 Products, I have 19 products in the store now, most of them all unique to Mises Org. What you have here underneath that is forum posts. These are all content created by outside users who are contributing so much.

16:59And let me just say, incidentally, that I've met some of you at this conference this week, five minutes. And you've come up to me and said, you know, I'm the guy who wrote you and said, you know, I really wish you would get such and such book online. And you were so nice and we went back and forth about it and went up there. You know, so much of what Mises Orde does is held along by your suggestions and your ideas, which we feel, you know, every single day. The whole thing is, there's many ways in which we don't actually do anything on Mises, or we respond to the needs of others. And this goes back to, by the way this is our markets and data, if you ever want to be depressed about the state of the world, have a look at this.

17:52Okay, now that I only have a few minutes left, I was really hoping to get to some questions. I know you all have lots of questions about this stuff, questions such as, where does email go between the time it's delivered anyway? But let me just mention what we think of as being our ideals on Mises or of our principles. The first is an attachment to Misesian principles. That's more important than anything else, that we say the right thing. You know, our goal isn't to maximize traffic. That's not the purpose. There are other ways to do that besides talking about the Austrian theory of the business cycle. But we want to stay on topic. We want to talk about economics. We want to talk about Misesian economics and do it in a way that's compelling and draws people to those ideals. That's the most important thing. It's more important than anything else. More important than technology or anything.

18:39We always assume then that we have an infinite market. That's an underlying principle. We don't assume that everybody who's ever going to read Human Action is already read Human Action. We deliver it in every format you can possibly imagine. A PDF, an HTML, we have it available for every way you can imagine. We always assume that there's an infinite market, that there's more people that need to learn. The third principle that we use is generosity. We are not curious about material. We don't have a big obsession with our intellectual property, I get emails every day, we all get emails every day that say, well, I'm living in Brazil and I would like to translate such and such article into so that people here can read it. Is it okay to say yes?

19:26And somebody else says, well, here's a lovely book, is it possible we could do a translation? Yes. Can I reprint this? Yes. Yeah. On and on. And my view is truly, and we all feel this way, if people wanted to post daily articles on windshields all over Manhattan, that's great. If you want to broadcast an audio file wherever you are, it's fabulous. The more attention we can get, the better. So, generosity, that's just absolutely most important. We don't charge for any of the content on the site at all. And the things we do charge for, like books, we also provide for free. An interesting theory. Now we also have to assume, in fact, we always know that the site is imperfect. Every day we arrive at work and we aspire to create improvements on the site.

20:17So if we get out of the day and there's been, you know, five or six improvements on the site that make it easier to use, make more content available, we've done a good job. It's always imperfect. The only perfect software was created in like 1982, you know, and it's got no bugs, but you wouldn't want to use it. So, in many ways websites are like the market. They're always developing and they're always imperfect. And all you can do, how do you go about creating a Mises org? Well, you need to get a group of fanatics together. They work relentlessly hard every single day for about 12 years, and you'll have a Mises org. That's how you do it. There's no such thing as just spending one of these things out in the day or two, you know, constant relentlessness. And by the way, if you have any suggestions on the site, you know, we take all these very, very seriously.

21:03I'm going to just click on this. I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to talk about this. This is our network. This is our new. This is just fabulous. This is mostly our user-created content from the site. You can create your own blog and blog every day. We've got a forum that is getting something like a hundred new members every single day. And the posts are fantastic. and very high quality stuff. We've got a live chat that's also known as Mises Org's Second Life, you know, I dare you to go in there, there'll be some fascinating discussion that you can get involved with for hours and hours and see your life waste away. And these are all the bloggers you can see here. These are all people who have started their own blogs on Mises Org.

21:55on Mises Org. So this network is a very exciting way that we can draw in all the people that Mises Org has educated around the world into creating content for us. And I afraid I'm out of time. There's so much I wanted to say. But between sessions, please come up to me and we can talk about it if you have any additional questions. I'd love to be able to help. Thank Thank you very much.