Author: Adam Gurri

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

–John Adams

Think of the market as a set of magnets, pulling people into dense clusters. 80 percent of the population of the US lives in a large city’s metropolitan area, and the top 10 metropolitan areas alone account for a quarter of the population. Cities like Chicago and New York pull people not only from all over the country, but from all over the world. As new people are born and raised in each metropolitan area, the market sorts out where their skills would best be put to use. If it’s somewhere other than where they are, the magnet is engaged to pull them to the new destination.

People are not only pulled towards locations, but towards careers and towards investing in particular skillsets.

The actual mechanism in the place of the figurative magnets is not always as straightforward as offering more money to live in one place than another, or to take one career track over another, but it often is. There are other things, too, such as what professional development courses and training your current employer is willing to pay for you to take.

Taking as my inspiration the John Adams quote at the top of this post, I’m going to argue that the mechanisms the market uses to pull people into particular locations and career paths grow weaker as a population grows wealthier.

Where Have All the STEM Majors Gone?

It’s a disconcerting question for many an analyst of education in the US–why are we graduating so few majors in science, technology, engineering, and math? Alex Tabarrok has the numbers:

Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

Anyone can see that the average computer science major is going to make more money than the average visual arts major. The market has engaged the magnets and students aren’t budging.

Education isn’t the only area where the magnets’ strength are waning. According to the New York Times:

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit.

What is going on?

Lower Stakes, Greater Sacrifice

Let’s compare two hypothetical individuals, Tom and Harry. Tom is a 20 year old living 50 years ago, and Harry is a 20 year old today. My general hypothesis is that there are lower stakes for Harry’s decisions than for Tom’s, and that anything which requires a great deal of time and effort requires Harry to give up more than Tom had to.

Let’s consider Harry first. In the immediate term, he has an enormous amount of options for how to spend his time. There’s cable TV, the internet, video games; a whole myriad of stuff. Any field of study that takes up a lot of his time means giving up time doing any of that. As Tabarrok described, the average individual like Harry today chooses majors that not only demand less of his time–thus giving him more time to play video games–but are also enjoyable in themselves, such as the visual arts. After college, if he can’t get a job in anything resembling what he majored in, he can probably live with his parents, where he’ll still be able to enjoy many of the things he was already doing with his free time.

Now consider Tom. Sure, he probably had access to TV, but it wasn’t as pervasive as it is today, and it had like three channels. There were no video games, there was no internet or web; there weren’t even personal computers. If he picked a major that was a dud in the marketplace, maybe he could live with his parents–though he was less likely on average than Harry to be able to, as parents today are much wealthier than parents were fifty years ago–but what would he do there? Fifty years ago you needed more money to be able to get anything approaching the level of options that Harry has available almost by default.

Consider the different stakes: if Tom doesn’t get his career going, he becomes a burden on a family that might not be able to afford it, and he is also probably bored out of his mind and increasingly isolated. Harry, on the other hand, is much more likely to have parents who can afford that burden, and he has much more to do while he lives with them. He can entertain himself, and he can talk to people online; you may argue that the latter isn’t as fulfilling as in-person socializing, but it’s far less lonely than having no one to talk to.

Now consider what each has to give up by pursuing a STEM career: Harry loses out on hours of gaming, movies, TV, browsing the web, talking to people on Twitter, and so on. Tom doesn’t have any of that to lose.

The decline in the portion of men who are employed has been a secular trend for decades.

It has been hidden in the general population employment ratio because of the entering of women into the workforce. Note, however, that though the portion of women who are employed has grown, it still has never reached the level that men have fallen to now, during a soft labor market.

The good news is that we are so wealthy as a society that fewer men need to work than they used to. The bad news is that our wealth is making it harder to convince people to do the difficult work required to make the kinds of material breakthroughs that people in the STEM fields are able to make. It has likewise grown harder to convince them to move away from their friends and family in order to go to the city where their particular skillset might have the greatest impact.

Studying Porcelain

John Adams was right–the mathematical, architectural, and commercial know-how of our ancestors has made it possible for more of us to study poetry and comparative literature. When people are bemoaning the lack of STEM majors and labor mobility, they should remember that the whole point of wealth is to provide us with more options. If someone is more satisfied spending their time reading and writing fiction rather than learning statistics or trigonometry, there is nothing wrong with that. They can increase our overall wealth just as much as a scientist can, if they produce things that are valued by a lot of other people.

On the other hand, it takes STEM skillsets to cure cancer or build self-driving cars, and the per-capita amount of people with those skillsets continues to fall in this country.

Still, I’m not too concerned. The vast majority of the world is nowhere near as wealthy as we are. Engineers, programmers, and chemists are being trained in unprecedented numbers in countries like China and India, and for the most part the whole world will benefit from their advances. As those countries grow wealthier, they’ll experience the same phenomena, but we’ll still be talking about enormous numbers of people with STEM skillsets. And we’re a long ways off from the developing world reaching a level of wealth comparable to the US or Western Europe.

Semi-Related Reading:

• Have Your College and Eat it Too: Consuming Education
  
• Apocalypse Later?
• College has been oversold

Ultimately it comes down to common sense. When you’re abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that’s ipso facto evidence you’re using a definition of property that doesn’t work.

-Paul Graham, Defining Property

According to the RIAA, our current failure to enforce copyright has cost us $12.5 billion per year in economic losses, and over 70,000 jobs a year. The message: piracy makes us poorer and leaves tens of thousands of people per year unemployed.

I don’t think I can do a better job of responding to that sort of estimate than Rob Reid did recently with his short Ted Talk.

Putting aside the methodologically questionable cost calculations, some have argued that unless a mechanism exists for rewarding creators whose creations we value, we won’t get those creations at all–or at least, not very many of them.

I believe that this is the only question that matters.

Priorities

I don’t care how many jobs are created or how much revenue the IP rights-holders make in a given year, or even if they make any revenue at all. All that matters is how much value ends up being created for consumers.

When I put out this idea on Twitter, Eli disagreed.

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A discussion ensued.

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And the answer, in my opinion, is that we want them to do that in a way that maximizes the value to consumers in the long run. Along the way, this will inevitably provide value to producers, but that value will be fleeting, as we find increasingly efficient ways to do what they do. The important thing is to consider the value provided to consumers, for as Bastiat said, “the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.”

In our role as consumers, it is in our interest for everything to be plentiful. In our role as producers, it is in our interest for whatever we produce to be scarce. Scarcity is poverty, abundance is wealth.

In short, our priority should be to arrive at the arrangement that provides consumers with the maximum amount of value from intellectual products. If we could provide exponentially more value to consumers from intellectual products but their producers were unable to make a dime, that would be a net improvement. That’s not the situation, but I think it’s clarifying to keep that extreme scenario in mind.

Trade-Offs

To us it seems pretty obvious that people always want to treat it as a pricing issue, that people are doing this because they can get it for free and so we just need to create these draconian DRM systems or ani-piracy systems, and that just really doesn’t match up with the data. If you do a good job of providing a great service giving people… as a customer I want to be able to access my stuff wherever I am, and if you put in place a system that makes me wonder if I’ll be able to get it then you’ve significantly decreased the value of it.

–Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve

What does not help is when consumers are pushed into something by reducing their options elsewhere. When Americans pay a premium above the global price for steel or sugar, it isn’t because they value those commodities that much more than their international counterparts; it is because policy has restricted the number of alternatives available to them. This approach destroys wealth rather than creates it, leaving only a handful of producers better off at our expense.

Every policy that the big content lobbies have pursued have been of this nature. From the copyright extensions to bills like SOPA; they have sought to extract more value for themselves individually by shrinking the pie for the rest of us. All while telling us that it’s for our own good.

Their efforts always come at the expense of the honest customer who isn’t trying to game the system. Meanwhile, they have done nothing to curb piracy, which remains trivially easy.

Eli recently wrote out a thought experiment where we were in a world in which enforcing laws against murder became as hard as it currently is to enforce intellectual property laws. His argument:

Suppose a new technology were introduced that made it easy to get away with murder (e.g., David Friedman’s plan for Murder Incorporated). This technology makes it extremely costly, though, say, not impossible, to stop murders from occurring. What happens to the optimal amount of murder enforcement? The amount that must be spent to deter each murder has gone up, so the price of deterrence has gone up. Consequently, society should aim to deter fewer murders.

I was a little skeptical of where he was coming from…

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But he elaborated that what he was trying to say was that “if even laws against murder should be sensitive to enforcement costs, then it makes sense to also make copyright law sensitive to enforcement costs.”

Here’s what makes sense to an economist but sounds horrifying to most non-economists:

If we are looking at Eli’s scenario from the point of view of the objective goal of maximizing the number of lives we save, then logically, we must accept his conclusion.

Say his murder technology made it so that it would take $80 billion in order to save a single person from being murdered. Say, in theory, that we could have spent that $80 billion on buying enough penicillin to save 8,000 people’s lives. Clearly, it makes more sense to spend it on those vaccines–if saving lives is really your goal.

All of this is to say that there are always trade-offs, and while the goal you have in mind may itself be subjectively chosen, the trade-offs themselves are absolutely objective. We can’t always know what they are, but they’re not something you can just wish away.

And really, that’s what the IP lobby’s strategy so far has come down to–trying to wish digital technology and the Internet away. But they are not going anywhere.

The New Balance

There is going to be more piracy than there used to be. That is the new reality that we are all going to have to live with.

Fortunately for us, we’re not living in Eli’s nightmare murder scenario–this technological shift brings with it benefits as well as challenges. In fact, I would argue that the benefits dramatically exceed the downside, from the perspective of value being made available. For example, you get a kind of “production as consumption” that occurs–people who like to write or illustrate or take pictures and share them online with an audience of uncertain but probably limited size. This very post is an example of that. I value the ability to share my writing with others, however few they may be in number.

More to the point, you get near costless replication of digital content, and near costless distribution around the world. Has the rhetoric around IP protection reached a point where I really need to actively argue that those are very good things?

Alarmism aside, the big IP rights-holders are not exactly hurting for money. Services like iTunes, Cable TV, and Netflix are making money hand over fist for them. Apple has paid billions to developers of apps alone–who are also producers of intellectual products. Then there are services like Kickstarter which allow consumers to pitch in for the up-front costs of creating intellectual products, and services like Paypal which make it easy to donate.

So the mechanisms to reward creators in the new digital landscape already exist, and new ones are being built all the time. Consumers have demonstrated that they are willing to open up their pocketbooks and use those mechanisms when it’s for something that they genuinely value.

So how should we be rethinking intellectual property enforcement, and intellectual property law itself, moving forward? I turn again to Eli:

In fact, the cost of deterrence has increased so much that we should begin to rethink copyright law. We could increase the benefits of deterrence if we targeted only high-value infringements. This means that we should shorten the term of copyright, since high-value IP tends to be newer IP (in fact, copyright terms have increased in recent decades, a move in the wrong direction). We might consider expanding “fair use” copyright exemptions to include more non-commercial uses, since commercial infringements are more likely to diminish the value of a copyright. Most importantly, we should withdraw public resources from the enforcement of IP violations. Private enforcement through the tort system has a built-in safety valve: when the cost of enforcement rises, people will do less of it. But the criminal system is essentially a public subsidy for enforcement; no wonder that pro-copyright factions are attempting to criminalize copyright infringement through SOPA and other legislation.

The bottom line is that recent expansions of copyright terms and enforcement powers get the comparative statics exactly backwards. In an age of costly enforcement, it’s time to give up, at least at the margin, on copyright. And at the margin, content creators should just be more polite to content consumers.

We need to loosen, but not eliminate, IP law and IP enforcement.

In the long tail, creators are already doing what needs to be done–focusing on creating value rather than on fighting against technological destiny. Witness Scott Sigler, who has built up enough of a fan base to make a living doing what he loves. Or the numerous webcomic artists who have managed to support themselves while still giving away their primary product for free.

I think that eventually, the big IP rights-holders will adapt to the latest technological shift just as they adapted to VHS, cassettes, and vinyl records in the past. For instance, big publishers are starting to reduce the uncertainty of their investments by waiting for people to make it big online before drafting them to the major leagues, so to speak.

We are simply in a transitional moment. Eventually our institutional arrangements will make full use of the advantages that digital technology and the Internet provide for creating value.