How bestsellers have changed
Here are some basic facts:
The popularity of religious titles has soared. Books such as Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the first in a popular series and No. 61 for the decade, used to be sold primarily in Christian bookstores. Now they’re stacked thigh-high at discount stores such as Wal-Mart.
Self-help, always a fixture of best-seller lists, is shifting the focus from improving people’s lives to improving their health as many baby boomers pass 50. [Diet books, most of all Atkins-related, have become especially popular.]
Brand-name series grabbed a growing share of the list. Chicken Soup for the Soul begat Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul, which begat Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. All were among the decade’s 100 most popular titles.
With 12 novels on the list of 100, John Grisham staked out a nearly permanent spot on the weekly best-seller list. Only the titles changed. But if the familiar was popular, there were a few surprises. Previously unknown novelists such as Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) and Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones) ended up among the decade’s best sellers.
Fiction, led by thrillers, staged a comeback, accounting for 72% of last year’s weekly best sellers, compared with 59% in 1998.
Here are other facts of import:
1. Never have so many books been published: in the U.S. more than 1,000 new titles a week, nearly double the rate in 1993.
2. Aggregate book sales are flat.
3. “last year the average American spent more time on the Internet (about three hours a week) than reading books (about two hours a week). And…the average American adult spent more money last year on movies, videos and DVDs ($166) than on books ($90).”
4. Bestsellers (top ten in the major categories) account for only 4% of book sales.
5. Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com and BookSense.com account for 8% of U.S. book sales.
6. Discount stores and price clubs account for 11% of U.S. book sales.
7. Humor books have fallen from 5.3% of the bestsellers market in 1995 to 0.6% today.
8. The Cliff Notes version of The Scarlet Letter outsells the real thing by 3 to 1.
9. In August dictionaries are 77% of all reference book sales. Otherwise they run less than five percent of the total.
Here is the the full story, noting that some of the facts are found in the paper edition only.
The bottom line? The book market works wonderfully. If you have any complaint, it should be with the quality of public taste.
USA Today (from Thursday) offers a list of the 100 best-selling books of the last ten years (not on-line). Once you get past Tolkien and Harry Potter, there is little to interest me. That being said, I find it easy to walk into my public libraries and every week find numerous good new books to read.
Who is the best-selling artist of all time?
Charles Schulz would be a better guess than Picasso, but both are wrong. Click here to read one plausible answer and see some images.
They should have blogged
In Dry Holes in Economic Research (Kyklos subscription required) David Laband and Robert Tollison find that a large fraction of economics papers (26%) are never cited and despite large increases in resources devoted to publication this percentage has not changed in decades.
Between 1974 and 1996, there was a substantial increase in the emphasis on academic research in universities located in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. This increased emphasis was, and continues to be, reflected in a variety of increased incentives for faculty to produce research, including higher salaries, reduced teaching loads, increased money for travel, on so on. Yet, as we report in this paper, during this time period the rate of uncitedness of economics papers remained constant (at 26 percent). Clearly, universities and taxpayers/supporters of universities are obtaining no enhancement of research output (in terms of citations) from the increased subsidy to faculty research. We discuss the implications of this result for the publication and organization of economic research. In particular, we discuss the fact that resources devoted to up-front screening of papers by authors and journals have risen substantially over this period, but to no avail with respect to reducing the incidence of dry holes.
Copyright protection for folklore?
Two days ago I asked whether we should extend copyright protection to folklore. Thank you all for your interesting and informative replies.
Here are some possible answers which I don’t find sufficiently forcing:
1. Folklore has already been produced. TC: Of course you could say the same for a good deal of music. Why treat folklore differently?
2. Most folklore is very old and copyright protection would have expired by now anyway. TC: Folklore is not so old and musty; rather it evolves frequently and changes rapidly. Here is one source on contemporary folklore, here is another. Here is a brief account of contemporary Haitian folklore.
3. Folklore could never have evolved in the first place, had much earlier folklore received copyright protection. TC: This point is true, but you still could have copyright protection against for-profit uses of folklore. Author Edwidge Danticat can publish and copyright a processed version of folklore. Since those books bring in money, the law could stipulate that some royalties go back to the folklore creators.
4. Copyright is an incentive for future production, and we’re not going to have much future folklore anyway. TC: Hard to disprove a claim of this kind, but I don’t believe it. Arguably folklore has never been more vital than in today’s world.
So we are left with the following:
5. With folklore it is harder to define a clear line between copying and independent discovery. Similarly it is hard to draw a clear line between general inspiration and outright borrowing. Borrowing in general is harder to trace, a given derived story could have come from numerous sources. TC: This argument carries real force with me, although how different is music, consider George Harrison.
6. A culture is better off if other cultures can borrow its tales and “memes” without restriction. TC: Copyright holders could always waive their rights if that were beneficial, though admittedly there is an externalities problem for a culture as a whole. And again, you could apply the same argument to music.
7. Folklore is collectively produced, ownership is hard to assign, and there are no relevant corporate entities in most cases. Entrusting copyright ownership to “tribes” will encourage politicization and rent-seeking behavior. TC: Hard to argue here.
8. Folklore rarely offers a final, set, canonical, or well-defined final product. TC: I wonder if digital technologies will move other art forms in this same direction.
All interesting hypotheses. Many of them might be true, I still can’t get past “I don’t trust the courts in these other countries to enforce copyright in folklore, it will just lead to rent-seeking.” See my earlier post, at the first link, for further clarification.
I hope to soon consider other angles on related problems, such as whether there is a right to cultural privacy.
Markets in everything, in the subjunctive…
Here is a new way of organizing peer groups and your Friday evening out:
The ability to track the locations of people has a lot of other applications of course. As the tracking devices become smaller and cheaper expect to see parents putting them in their children both to protect their children from kidnapping and also simply to find out what trouble the kids are getting themselves into.
Another possible interesting application would be to manage affinity groups. Imagine a traveller who is cruising down a road trying to decide which night club to try out. If people registered with an affinity tracking service then a traveller could choose a club or restaurant whose currently present patrons fit some desired demographic profile. One obvious problem with such a service is that just because one person likes a particular type of person doesn’t mean that most who fit a desired profile will like that person in return. Look at celebrities for example. They are loved by all sorts of people who the celebrities would very much like to avoid. So a service would need to develop eligibility criteria that require matching of preferences in both directions before that person driving down the street would get a flashing light on their car LCD pointing them to a particular bar or night club.
That’s from Randall Parker, read his longer discussion, which focuses on GPS monitoring of criminals.
The costs of corruption
More corrupt states have lower credit ratings, even after adjusting for other determinants of creditworthiness. What is the economic impact of a one standard deviation increase in the public corruption index above the national mean? Over half (0.58) of a Moody’s credit rating.
Here is the original research. Here is an earlier MR discussion on which is the most corrupt state.
Hot potatoes
I am delighted that I can now buy irradiated beef at my local supermarket. It’s safer than regular beef but I would buy it just to spite the anti-science hysterics who kept this technology off-the-shelf for decades. Irradiation has recently been approved for Hawaiian sweet potatoes – the expense of the previous technology, methyl bromide fumigation kept these purple spuds out of mainland markets.
Of course, the mainland-based U.S. Sweet Potato Council is worried about competition. Mainland growers produce 1.3 billion pounds annually and Hawaiian output is only 1.8 million pounds leading the Potato Council to a unique argument for protectionism, “Hawaiian production is a mere pittance . . . and therefore, Hawaii should be able to consume every sweet potato they produce and then some.”
Road to Serfdom, 60th anniversay
BBC informs us that this is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. In memoriam, here is a fact sheet about the book.
I have always seen huge pluses and minuses in the work. On the down side, mixed economies did not lead to fascism, communism, or totalitarianism, as Hayek had feared. On the plus side, Hayek offers his strongest and clearest case for liberty. Only rarely is political decision-making about trying to do the right thing. His analysis of the dynamics of political power remains a “public choice” classic to this day.
Thanks to Ray Squitieri for the pointer.
A rant against Gateway service
I’m off to the North Carolina beach so expect reduced blogging from me. Ordinarily, I would holiday-blog when my wife wasn’t looking but my portable refused to boot more than two weeks ago. It was obviously a hardware problem so I knew the otherwise capable techs at GMU couldn’t fix it but before taking it to Gateway I needed their authorization. That took a few days. After a week of sitting on the bench, the Gateway store in Fairfax ran a diagnostic and realized that they couldn’t fix it either. They promised to expedite it to the main service center. A week later I found out they were still waiting for, get this, a box to be sent to them so they could send the portable to the service center. A box#$*! (Worse yet, I gave it to them in the original box it came in – foam included.) So finally the computer makes it to the main service center and now I am told it is waiting for a part!##!@! Now, wouldn’t you put your service center and parts warehouse close together like say in the same phrelling place?
How to control federal spending
Read this piece for the nuts and bolts. I would quibble with some of the details, but this is a good start.
Markets in everything, yet again…
Now you can get paid to hear ads and take telemarketing calls:
Adnoodle has signed up 15,000 consumers who have agreed to listen to recorded telemarketing pitches, speak with telemarketers and respond to e-mail solicitations — for a price. He says 500 to 1,000 people are enrolling daily, and he is planning a promotion campaign on college campuses this month before he “hard-launches” the program this spring.
“It’s all about getting value for the consumer — because consumers have value, right?” says Shifrin, 35, whose other company, AutoWraps, pays consumers to put advertising on their cars.
To enroll, consumers go to adnoodle.com and decide the minimum per-minute payment they would accept — generally, the lower the payment, the more companies will contact the consumer. The recommended range is 10 cents to $1.20, but registrants are advised that “bids” of 10 to 50 cents are likely to draw more ad calls. Participants also have the option of being paid in entries to a $5,000 Adnoodle sweepstakes.
Registrants also choose the ad vehicles — telemarketing, e-mails, or both — and they can choose the window times they’ll receive the ads. They complete a survey that asks gender, age, number of children, interests and consumer behavior, so companies can target products and services.
The typical Adnoodle sales call is a recording and states upfront its cash offer for listening. Not enough coin? Too busy right now? You can accept or decline — no obligation. Each ad runs a minute or more. The consumer must correctly answer a multiple-choice question at the end to get paid. “Knowing that the person who heard that message understands the content is really a leap in advertising,” says Shifrin [emphasis added].
At the end of the call, consumers can opt to receive a coupon for the advertised product or talk to a live representative — or hang up. Payment is via PayPal, the online payment company.
“For 2 1/2 minutes a day, if your average price is $1 a minute, you make $80 to $100 a month,” says Shifrin. “Not bad, right?” Actually, it’s more like $75.
In other words, it pays better than blogging. Here is the full story. Here is the website, if you want to sign up.
My take: If you think the idea can work, you have a very cynical view of human nature. You must think that people, listening to ads only to earn some money, nonetheless cannot resist buying the product. On second thought, does that sound so wrong? On the plus side, pricing ads and customer time has long been a theoretical dream of economists. That being said, I’ll bet against this project lasting, especially once word gets round and the pool of applicants changes. A sufficiently hardened idiot or curmudgeon can’t be convinced by anything. Or how about outsourcing the receipt of the phone call? And you will recall that pay-to-surf web sites bombed in the 1990s.
Haitian fact of the day
Mr. Charles must also rebuild a force corrupted by Colombian drug traffickers, who pay millions of dollars a year to Haitian officials to ship cocaine through Haiti to the United States, the State Department says.
The United States government estimates that the value of bribes paid in Haiti by cocaine kingpins is nearly three times the government’s spending on police, courts and justice, and that nearly a quarter of the Colombian cocaine reaching the United States flows through Haiti – almost 80 tons a year [emphasis added].
Here is the full story.
And by the way:
Haiti has seen 15 governments and army juntas in the past 18 years. Throughout those years, even under Mr. Aristide, who was democratically elected, “a small economic elite has supported a predatory state” shored up by “pervasive repression through army, police and paramilitary groups,” the World Bank said in a 2002 study.
Here is my earlier public choice account of Haiti.
Adam Smith’s grave
Take a look and think reverently on a great mind and scholar. Thanks to the Adam Smith Institute blog for pointing to the link.
Addendum: You needn’t feel sorry for the guy, yes he is dead, but Smith himself wrote the following:
We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose. The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case. It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.
Teenage pregnancy
Since 1991 the teenage pregnancy rate has fallen by about 22 percent, reversing a 40 year trend. In a lengthy story, the NYTimes suggests that learning from the hard experience of others is the explanation for the drop without explaining why it should take 40 years for this learning to take effect. They do note “teenage pregnancy had already begun its decline in 1991, well before welfare changes and the economic boom, and well after the first round of sex education programs.” The Times, however, does not examine the most controversial but well-supported explanation, the introduction of legalized abortion in the 1970s.
If this explanation rings familiar it should. In a very controversial paper, Steve Levitt and John Donohue provided evidence that legalized abortion in the 1970s reduced crime some 18 years later. The theory is simple. Abortion rates are higher among the poor, the unmarried, teenagers, and African Americans than among other groups and children born to mothers with several of the preceeding characteristics are at increased risk for becoming involved in crime. Legalized abortion gave these mothers an option and thus reduced the number of at-risk children who might otherwise have grown up to become criminals (note that abortion doesn’t mean fewer children per-se, it may simply delay childbearing to when the mother is not poor, a teenager or unmarried which works just as well.)
In brief, the evidence for the Levitt-Donohue theory is a) the timing is consistent, b) states that legalized earlier had earlier drops in crimes, c) there is a dose-response effect i.e. states that had more abortions had bigger drops in crime, d) the drop in crime in the 1990s occured among those cohorts who were potentially affected by abortion policy in the 1970s (and not among say 40 years olds.)
Joined by co-author Jeff Grogger, Levitt and Donohue apply the same idea to teenage pregnancy and find very similar results – thus reinforcing their earlier story. They write:
Parents who are least able or willing to begin caring for a newborn are most likely to make use of abortion. The abortion rates for teens, the unmarried, and the poor are substantially higher than for the general population. Children who are born unwanted are subjected to poorer care both during pregnancy and the early years of life. With the legalization of abortion, mothers with unwanted pregnancies suddenly had a new recourse. Consequently, the number of children raised in adverse environments dropped substantially. Donohue and Levitt [2001] showed how this change reduced crime among the subsequent generation by 15-25 percent. As teen childbearing is a closely associate social pathogen, the magnitude of the drop should be similar.
Our empirical evidence suggests that birth rates as teens are strongly negatively associated with being born in a state and time period in which abortion rates were high. Our results suggest that teen birth rates today may be 20 percent lower as a consequence of legalized abortion in the 1970’s.
Why not property rights in folklore?
Recent UNESCO/WIPO proposals have called for the creation of copyright in folklore and oral culture. In other words, if a corporation drew from the native stories of a tribe, it would owe royalties or could face legal sanctions.
We all know that U.S. copyright typically protects the expression of an idea, and not the idea itself. But hey, native tales and folklore are expressions of sorts, just not durable ones in the way we are accustomed to protecting. I don’t see any principle in the pure theory of copyright itself that should rule out such an extension.
So why don’t we do protect folklore by copyright? First of all, whose courts do we trust to get it right? Presumably Ghanaian courts should decide when Disney has borrowed too much from native folklore, the incentive problems are obvious. The difficulties multiply if the “victimized” tribe crosses national boundaries.
And how does this sound, noting that the Hague Convention allows for the enforcement of “sui generis” copyright laws as well?
…if Cuba enacted a sui generis regime and declared that the Cuban “beat” was intellectual property, it could get a judgment in Cuba against US record companies that were engaged in cultural “piracy,” and demand for example, 5 percent of the revenues from global sales of music that use the Cuban beat. Other countries could do the same thing. These judgments would be enforceable globally, under the [Hague] Convention. So too would bio-piracy judgments against US and European biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, for “stealing” traditional knowledge, or exploiting without benefit sharing a variety of biological and genetic resources. The motion picture industry could be hit with new sui generis IPR liabilities by countries that give rights in history. Countries like China, which is a member of the Hague Conference, could use this to limit who could actually make films about China. The Hague convention would instantly create a legal framework to legitimatize all of these new IPR claims, and it would not even matter if the “infringing” party did business in the country at all, since the judgments would be enforceable globally, in any Hague member country, and the claims could be based upon shares to global (rather than local) revenues of products.
By the way, three Maori tribes are threatening to sue Lego for using Maori and Polynesian words in a computer game. Some countries are already establishing copyright protection for folklore, though not always in a Hague-consistent fashion.
OK, OK, I’ve been talked out of the idea of copyright protection for folklore. But when you boil down the criticisms, what do they really amount to? Is it much more than “we don’t trust other peoples’ courts to enforce the decisions that we enforce on other countries all the time”?
Where to go from here: Copyright is enormously useful, but its boundaries are morally arbitrary to a considerable degree. Unfortunately a too-public recognition of this arbitrariness interferes with its usefulness. By asking for copyright protection for folklore, the poorer countries are pushing on this tension in copyright law.
If you can think of a good economic reason for not allowing copyright protection for folklore, let me know, I will offer your proposals in a future post. Don’t send in “we can’t trust their courts,” I’ve already cited that argument.
Thanks to Daljit Dhadwal for the pointer to the topic and the Cuba quotation.