Month: October 2003
Will the current lawsuits against file-sharers work?
Lawrence Solum tells us no.
Here is an early part of his insightful, multi-tiered post:
On the one hand, the RIAA simply cannot bring enough lawsuits to create a real deterrent effect. First, the number of suits is so small that the actual risk of becoming a defendant times the cost of settlement equals a miniscule amount. Second, the perception among users of P2P programs is that one can avoid any risk of suit by keeping the number of files shared on any one service below a threshold (usually thought to be 1000 files). On the other hand, there is no evidence that the RIAA is changing copynorms.
His recommendation?
When the RIAA sends the message, “copying is theft,” they are fighting the norms. No one believes that copying is the moral equivalent of theft, because everyone thinks that private, noncommercial copying is just fine. Even the RIAA seems to have thought that when they agreed to the provisions of the Audio Home Recording Act that permit noncommercial analog copying. And the fact that copynorms diverge from norms about theft is rooted in the underlying economic reality–consumption of intellectual property is nonrivalrous, whereas consumption of tangible property is rivalrous.
So here is an alternative message that the RIAA could try:
Share with your friends, not with strangers!
In other words, the RIAA could try to get the public to see that P2P programs are the moral equivalent of giving away hundreds of videotapes or compilation tapes. Those activities are not socially acceptable. They may not be socially unacceptable either. Mass giveaways are rarely a social problem, because the cost is high enough to deter the behavior without either legal or social sanction. That is what the P2P technology changed. P2P enables the low cost mass gift.
It is worth reading Solum’s whole post, I might add he is one of the smartest bloggers out there.
Big objects in two places at once
Why do so many economists (or is it just me?) have an avid fascination with quantum mechanics? Read this article from Nature.com about a bacterium-sized mirror in two places at once. Here is the original piece of research.
The Politician and the Mechanic Conspire to Rip Me Off
Virginia requires yearly “safety” inspections of automobiles. Yesterday, it was my turn – it cost me $15 bucks and an hour of my time. What a pain. Merrell, Poitras and Sutter (MPS) (summary here, reference below) estimate that nationally inspection programs cost in excess of a billion dollars a year (I think this is a serious underestimate – see below). What do we get for our time and effort? Not much. MPS find that mandatory inspections do not reduce highway fatalities or injuries. Not surprising really since there are already good incentives to maintain one’s car and accidents are most often caused by factors, primarily driver behaviour, that are not inspected. (By the way, yes there is an externality but if self-interest alone causes you to replace a broken headlight then on the margin the externality is irrelevant – economists often forget this point.)
MPS arrive at the billion plus figure by summing inspection fees and travel time. But the major cost of the inspection system, in my opinion, is unnecessary repairs. Mechanics have an incentive to indicate a car needs repairs and it is difficult to know when they are speaking the truth. This problem is bad enough when you have brought your car to the mechanic voluntarily – at least then you know the car has a problem. But the potential for opportunistic behaviour is worse when you are required to take your car in for inspection and if you don’t follow the mechanic’s advice you fail. The mechanics know they have you over a barrel and act accordingly.
The citation for the MPS study is Merrell, D. Poitras, M and Daniel Sutter. 1999. The Effectiveness of Vehicle Safety Inspections: An Analysis Using Panel Data,” Southern Economic Journal, Volume 65, pp.571-583.
Is the academy biased against conservatives?
Daniel Drezner provides numerous links to this recent heated discussion in the blogosphere. Bruce Bartlett summarizes the data on bias in academia. My perspective is closest to that of Jacob Levy, who offers the following advice to budding academic conservatives and libertarians:
[I will tell you] The same thing I tell everyone else. If you love it, do it; and do it well, and honestly, and in good faith. Don’t do it to advance a partisan mission; you won’t get away with it. But if you want to do it for its own sake, you should– and enjoy it.
How much homework does a child do?
On average, daily time spent on homework in the United States increased from 16 minutes in 1981 to slightly more than 19 minutes in 1997, Brookings Institution researchers found, and little appears to have changed since then. Only 34 percent of 282,000 college freshmen surveyed nationwide last year by scholars at UCLA, for example, reported spending more than an hour each weekday on homework during their senior year of high school — the lowest percentage since the question was first asked in 1987.
A recent critique has suggested that homework disrupts families and overburdens children, to me this charge appears hard to sustain. Here is an interview with one of the authors of that charge.
Other bits: 64 percent of parents feel that the assigned amount of homework is “about right.” There was an increase in homework for high school students after the launching of Sputnik. For 9 to 12 year olds, television viewing fell by more than 20 percent from 1981 to 1997.
From today’s Washington Post.
Addendum: Comment from my (Russian) wife: “Kiska, you should have added to your entry on homework, that while 64% of American parents are satisfied with the amount of homework their children do, 100% of European parents living here think that it’s way too insufficient and ridiculous.”
Eating Apes
1. Bushmeat hunters in Africa typically earn in the range of $250 to $1050 a year.
2. In one sampled African market, ape meat cost about twice as much as beef or pork.
3. “In the big cities of Central Africa, it seems relatively easy to find a gorilla head or some hands, or perhaps a chimpanzee hand or two or four, for sale in the medicinal and fetish markets…In a Brazzaville fetish market, a dealer once offered me a gorilla head for the equivalent of $40 and a hand for about $10.”
4. Hunters of ape meat often rely on the trails cut by loggers
5. Ape meat supply has largely gone underground in recent years, although in a given market most people know whom to ask to get the meat.
6. Many village and hunter-gatherer societies have a special word for “meat-hunger.”
7. Central Africans eat at least as much meat per person as Americans or Europeans do.
8. Hunters claim that if a champanzee is wounded and cornered and about to meet his death, that he will beg for his life with the same expressions that a human being would use.
9. One hunter wrote: “It is this lurking reminiscence of humanity, indeed, which makes one of the chief ingredients of the hunter’s excitement in his attack of the gorilla.”
All of these bits are from Eating Apes, by Dale Peterson. This is a remarkably intelligent and disturbing book, the photos are unforgettable. The author is sympathetic to the plight of the great apes but he also understands how markets work, what the life of the poor is like, and why a naive ban on hunting is unlikely to succeed.
By the way, today’s Cnn.com reports that the Orangutan may be extinct within 10 to 20 years.