The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

Author:Dean Baker [Baker, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic Conditions, Economics, Macroeconomics, History, General
ISBN: 9781411693951
Google: i_jyKcVbCw0C
Amazon: 1411693957
Publisher: LULU
Published: 2006-07-15T07:00:00+00:00

13 These data are taken from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2006, Table 11).

14 This estimate is derived in Baker (2005a).

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would eliminate the incentive to make duplicative programs and applications

that were not qualitatively better than existing programs and applications.

Textbooks present another situation in which the mechanism of copyright

financed production does not seem to be leading to good results. Textbook

prices have been rising at the rate of 6 percent a year since the late eighties, approximately 3 percentage points more rapidly that the overall rate of inflation.

The incentives created by copyright monopolies encourage textbook publishers to constantly adapt their books to persuade faculty to use new editions, even when the research in the area provides little reason to change a textbook. This

quickly makes used editions obsolete.

In addition, textbook publishers practice the same sort of price

discrimination as pharmaceutical companies, charging lower prices in Europe

and developing countries than they do in the United States. To preserve this type of price discrimination, the textbook publishers, like the drug companies, rely on the nanny state to police their marketing arrangements. They want the government to arrest people who sell their books at the wrong price in the

wrong place, since large price differences cannot persist in a truly free market.

It would be a simple matter to establish a small pool of public money to

contract with publishers to produce textbooks. As with prescription drugs, all the textbooks produced with public funds would be in the public domain and

freely available over the Internet.15 A pool of $300 million a year would be sufficient to produce 3,000 textbooks a year, assuming an average cost of

$100,000 each. (Presumably, some textbooks would cost considerably more than $100,000 to produce, and some would cost less, depending on their length, subject matter, and quality.) Since all of these textbooks would be available over the Internet, college students could save the $12 billion they currently spend on textbooks, minus whatever amount they spend printing out segments of the

books in hardcopy. This alternative mechanism would also have the benefit of allowing professors to mix and match sections from different textbooks, instead of being largely bound to rely on a single textbook for an entire course.

Of course, this alternative system could exist side-by-side with the existing copyright financed system. If professors felt that the publicly financed system was not producing worthwhile textbooks, then they would be free to assign a

textbook supported by copyright, and sold at copyright protected prices, just as they do now.16 There is no reason not to experiment with various paths.

Certainly pluralistic solutions pose no problem for publicly financed research and creative work.

Using Vouchers to Combat Copyright Monopolies

When it comes to music, movies, books, and other forms of creative work,

most of us do not want some government czar of culture and information

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