What We’re Reading

Knowing I was going to be trapped on an airplane for a considerable time on my way to Asia, I indulged in the 32 CD set from the Teaching Company, “From Yao to Mao, Five Thousand Years of Chinese History.” I’m through the first three thousand years.

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Jonathan’s article is here.

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So I recently sat down and quickly read through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This has gotten some good reviews and I generally like this type of history–history of the downtrodden, economic history more than wars and such.

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I spent part of my weekend attacking the big stack of reading material I’ve been accumulating recently, and I wanted to (rather belatedly) plug two excellent papers.

The first is Yochai Benkler’s “Coase’s Penguin”, which is a few years old now but every bit as relevant today as it was when it came out in 2002. It offers a framework for analyzing peer-production processes (such as the development of open source software) that puts it on par with the firm and the market as methods for organizing cooperative ventures.

His central insight is that many types of information-processing tasks are characterized by enormous variations in motivation, knowledge, and talents of potential producers, and that this information often cannot be efficiently standardized in a manner necessary to transmission via prices (for markets) or hierarchical decision-making (in firms). Because firms and markets segregate people and resources into many private fiefdoms, it’s unlikely that the person best suited to perform a particular task will be found in the firm that needs the task to be performed. And if the tasks are granular enough (say, fixing a bug in the Linux kernel) the search and transaction costs of finding the right person and negotiating a contract with him or her might be too large to justify it. In contrast, because peer production allows people to self-select into the projects that interest them most, people can often be allocated to projects at very low cost.

I found this argument particularly compelling because it fits with my experiences trying to find people to do work for the Show-Me Institute. It’s very difficult to judge from a resume whether a particular individual would make a good intern, research assistant, write a good paper, etc. One of the best ways of improving your chances of getting a job in a think tank or a public policy magazine like Reason is to start a blog. In the first place, a blog allows a potential employer to peruse real-world examples of your work and judge whether you’re a good writer without having to ask you to do writing samples specifically for him or her. In the second place, the blogosphere has some built-in mechanisms to aid potential employers to sift through the potential candidates. Particularly talented bloggers can catch the attention of other bloggers, who add them to their blogrolls. Finally, (and this is the part where Benkler’s argument is particularly relevant) starting a blog might help you to find opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have even known about. If you write a blog about foreign policy, for example, there might be people out there looking for foreign policy writers who you wouldn’t have been able to find via other means.

So I highly recommend Benkler’s paper if you haven’t read it yet.

The other paper, ironically enough, is largely a critique of one of Benkler’s other pet issues, instituting a spectrum commons. It’s by my friend and co-blogger Jerry Brito. It’s titled The Spectrum Commons in Theory and Practice.

This isn’t an issue I’d really looked at in any detail before I read Jerry’s paper. I’d read various people claim that you could manage spectrum as a commons, and I was always suspicious of the argument. Jerry’s paper confirmed my suspicions. He argues that in a world of scarcity, a commons pre-supposes a manager whose job it is to set ground rules that can prevent over-grazing of the commons. A spectrum commons can theoretically be managed either by a private company or by the government, but in practice, spectrum commons end up being managed by the government. And as Jerry shows in an extended example on the history of the FCC’s decision making concerning the 3650 MHz frequency band, the FCC’s first experiment in creating a spectrum commons was far from ideal. First, the proceedings generated a lot of rent-seeking by those lobbying for competing uses of the spectrum. And second, it’s not clear that the rules the FCC ultimately imposed will lead to efficient utilization of the spectrum.

Jerry concludes that a spectrum commons is not a “third way” between command-and-control and markets. A commons requires a regulator, and the issue is still who regulates, the government or a private actor? Jerry makes a persuasive argument that creating property rights in spectrum and allowing private actors to deploy it for their highest-valued use is likely to lead to the most efficient utilization.

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An excerpt from David’s excellent paper on property rights. He’s got to win the award for most awesome former mailman:

According to Martin Bailey (this volume), the pattern observed by Rose and Ellickson also was common among aboriginal tribes. That is, tribes that practiced agriculture treated the land as private during the growing season, and often treated it as a commons after the crops were in. Hunter-gatherer societies did not practice agriculture, but they too tended to leave the land in the commons during the summer when game was plentiful. It was during the winter, when food was most scarce, that they privatized. The rule among hunter-gatherers is that where group hunting’s advantages are considerable, that factor dominates (Bailey, this volume). But in the winter, small game is relatively more abundant, less migratory, and evenly spread. There was no “feast or famine” pattern of the sort one expects to see with big-game hunting. Rather, families tended to gather enough during the course of the day to get themselves through the day, day after day, with little to spare.

Even though this pattern corroborates my own general thesis, I confess to being a bit surprised. I might have predicted that it would be during the harshest part of the year that families would band together and throw everything into the common pot in order to pull through. Not so. It was when the land was nearest its carrying capacity that they recognized the imperative to privatize.

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A couple of people have suggested that I should stop bombarding y’all with rants against the DMCA and focus on something else for a change. To that end, I’ve begun reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, a book about the coming technological super-race that got a lot of buzz last fall, and has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read since then. Over the next few weeks, I will instead bombard you with rants (and possibly raves) about that.

I’m skeptical of his basic claim (which I won’t re-hash here–check out the Amazon link above if you want a good summary) both because I’m suspicious of utopian claims in general, and because strong AI is a problem that has consistently bedeviled computer scientists. Since the 1960s, computer scientists have been predicting that human-level artificial intelligence is just two or three decades away, and so far the goal seems to be getting further away as we learn more about the difficulties involved. Which isn’t to say we’ll never get there, but I don’t think you can simply extrapolate Moore’s law out to the point where computer chips have as many transistors as brains have neural connections, and assume that at that point we’ll have human-scale intelligence.

But I’d like to start with a more specific nitpick, which I’ll give below the fold…

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All eyes have been on the House Commerce Committee the past few days, as reports have floated about regarding a draft telecom reform bill being hammered out by the members. Committee chairman Joe Barton mooted two earlier proposals last year, both of which attempted to comprehensively reform telecom laws. Both–especially the first–were stillborn–because of complaints that they imposed new regulation, rather than just free up this now-competitive market.

This time around, Barton has tried a more targeted approach–instead of all-inclusive reform, the legislation would be focused on eliminating local cable television franchise regulations, which have been slowing the advent of competition in cable TV. A smart move–a rifleshot reform, and one that that would significantly help consumers.

But it now looks like even this bill is being bogged down with new regulation. Although no copy of the proposed bill is yet public, reports are that the plan would keep the old regulations in place for a some time for existing cable firms, and even impose new price controls on them.

Worst of all, however, there are indications that “net neutrality” regulations may be soldered on to this bill. Such regulation–which would prohibit network owners from differentiating among different types of content–would place the FCC squarely in the business of regulating the Internet. (see here and here for more about problems with net neutrality rules).

Such provisions would turn Barton’s original deregulatory intent on its head. Rather than eliminating obsolete and unneeded regulations of telecommunications, the bill would introduce new and equally unneeded regulations on the Internet. Lawmaking may be like sausage-making, but such a result would be particularly hard to digest.

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We policy wonks think of ourselves as taking the long view of things, but have we been thinking ahead enough?
In the category of far future threats to liberty–from the New York Times:

In his new book, “How to Survive a Robot Uprising,” Dr. Wilson offers detailed … advice on evading hostile swarms of robot insects (don’t try to fight–“loss of an individual robot is inconsequential to the swarm”); outsmarting your “smart” house (be suspicious if the house suggests you test the microwave by putting your head in it); escaping unmanned ground vehicles (drive in circles–they’ll have a harder time tracking you); and surviving hand-to-hand combat with a humanoid (smear yourself with mud to disguise your distinctive human thermal signature and go for the “eyes”–its cameras).

I so want a Rhoomba and a Scooba, if only to watch them interact with the cats, but my husband says we have to buy this book first.

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Cato Unbound is the Cato Institute’s new quasi-blog Web magazine. Their recently released January issue is right up TLF’s alley. The topic this month is “Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead?” It leads off with a “step-outside-the-box-burn-the-box-grow-tea-with-the-ashes-and-read-the-tea-leaves” big-think essay by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. Today, they posted a crisp litany of criticisms from open source guru Eric Raymond. Replies from Glenn Reynolds, John Perry Barlow, and David Gelernter will roll out over the next week. Recommended reading!

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