Artists and intellectuals bemoan markets for ruining art in so many ways – one could write all day about all the ways markets allegedly corrupt art. But here’s a great, perhaps indisputable, fact about art and market economies – any person can have a masterpiece in their own home, or at least a decent copy.

Consider the following: For a few dollars, any person can download pictures of their favorite Picasso from the Internet at minimal cost and print out color copies at Kinko’s. For about $40, anybody can buy a book, magazine or gallery catalogue with a full color reproduction of your favorite fish tank basketballs. If you want it on the wall, for a few hundred bucks, you could easily buy a nice poster and have it framed. For a few thousand bucks, you could probably hire an artist to make you an uncanny reproduction of the original work. And of course, if you have a few hundred thousand bucks to spend, or millions, you could have Gerhard Richter come to your house and paint a nice blurry portrait of you and your family. Not a bad deal when you think about it.

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber has an insightful article on Barack Obama, an Illinois state senator who has just won the Democratic senatorial primary. Leading in the polls, the election is now his to lose. Scheiber’s question is the one many have had about Obama’s victory: how did Obama avoid the pitfalls that have ensnared so many African-American politicians?

The challenge African-American politicians must overcome is this: if you appeal too much the African-American base, you’ll alienate moderate whites; if you appeal too much to moderate whites, your opponent will claim that you aren’t “black enough.” Witness Cory Booker’s difficult campaign for mayor of Newark, when the Yale educated councilman was tarred by the incumbent.

Scheiber appeals to research showing that white Americans routinely make distinctions between “good” and “bad” blacks. Once advertising showed to voters he was of Kenyan ancestry, as opposed to African-American, Schebier believes, the voters reframed Obama as different than traditional black politicians. Scheiber concludes that Obama’s act is tough to follow – how many self-deprecating half-Kenyan Harvard Law Review editors are there?

On the contrary, if successful, Obama could be in the position to establish a new brand name in national politics. It’s easy to imagine Obama establishing a sort of “DLC” for the African-American community, much in the same way Clinton tried pulling his party towards more moderate positions on trade and social programs. A congressional caucus under such a banner would powerfully reshape debates over race relations in this country.

On Monday, I described a controversial auction by William Tozier of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The highest bidder would win the chance to collaborate and write an academic article with him.

A number of readers sent interesting comments. Some, like Davis King, pointed out that collaboration for pay already exists and is quite common in some fields like computer science. He also pointed out a lot of de facto collaboration for pay, such as when undergraduates pay tuition and get the opportunity to co-author papers with professors.

Two readers noted that at least one scientist, Miriam Rothschild – a noted bug scientist, was independently wealthy and funded a long string of collaborations in fields that weren’t receiving much attention. The resulting work is well accepted in biology and her self-funding didn’t seem to raise suspicions about her work.

One reader noted that pay for collaboration might be hard to distinguish from research assistance. This is a good point, but I think there is a simple response – research assistants merely carry out the instructions of the researchers while paid collaborators are compensated for original, creative work.

Mr. Tozier himself wrote to me and told me about his current project, an online forum that would facilitate collaboration among non-academic researchers. I think the future probably holds a continuum of possibilities – universities will probably sponsor only “altruistic” research while scientists outside the academy will probably work together in more varied contexts.

Steven Landsburg has a clever column (click here) pointing out that the economic damage prevented by executing a murderer is less than damage caused by the author of a wildly successful computer virus. If we’re willing to fry Jack the Ripper, why not send Urkel to the chair?

Landsburg notes that governments provide goods markets won’t, such as crime prevention. The implication is that cost-benefit analysis would dictate that people would be more willing to pay for prevention of property crime rather than personal safety.

For me, Landsburg misses a simple point: human beings are probably hard wired to care about concentrated damages (like murder of a person) rather than diffuse damages (like screwing up everybody’s email for an hour). No cost-benefit analysis will likely persuade people to go against this intuition.

It’s pretty well known that Rousseau thought that the public was always right. But while reading On the Social Contract translated by Donald A. Cress, I came upon this less frequently discussed quote:

“The former [‘will of all’] considers private interest and is merely the sum of private wills. But remove from these [private] wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out, and what remains as the sum of differences is the general will,” which Rousseau claims in the previous paragraph is “always right” and tends towards the “public utility.”

This is an interesting public opinion theory. It assumes that aggregate public opinion has two components – a selfish and biased component and a component that produces the “right” public policy. The difference between the optimal policy and the median voter’s policy is due not to ignorance or systemic error, but to selfish desires that undermine the provision of public goods. If readers know of a published formal model of this theory, or applications of this theory, feel free to email me.

Paco Underhill has made a career of studying shopping malls. In two well known books (click here) , he lays out a wealth of findings on the world of the mall, and describes how retailers lose sales by ignoring how people actually use malls and shops. For example:

– people tend to buy stuff that’s placed away from the door, stuff near the door sells poorly
– people tend to walk through the mall with the shops on their right hand side, so place your products facing in that direction; displays facing the wrong direction rarely get people to buy stuff
– chairs in stores are great, because impatient family members who are seated will wait longer while you shop

Who would’ve thought that malls provide such nice examples of systematic biases in consumer behavior and the market inefficiencies they create?

One of my favorite theories in sociology has been Ron Burt’s “structural holes” theory (click here to read about the book). Burt says that individual success often comes from taking advantage of “holes” in your personal network – gaps between two groups which represent opportunities. For example, if somebody in the marketing department discovers that consumers want X, then that person could go to research and development and ask for X. In other words, creativity is about crossing boundaries.

The NY Times has a nice article on Burt’s latest research showing that managers in a large engineering firm (Raytheon) are more likely to come up with new ideas when they cross group boundaries in the firm. Managers at Raytheon who didn’t have “holes” in their networks were much less likely to come up with ideas deemed as innovative. Burt concludes that creativity is all about combining ideas and closing gaps.

My big criticism of the idea is that holes may be great for creativity, but lousy for the mundane daily operations of corporations. Most organizational life is not about coming up with dazzling new ideas, but it’s about efficiently accomplishing routine tasks. This is probably best done when networks are dense – people will share the same goals and have the same knowledge because they are in constant contact with each other. It’s probably the case that corporations that depend on innovation for their success have separate think tanks where individuals are encouraged to experiment and span boundaries, such as the famed Bell Laboratories.