Au Courant

The current issue of The Economist has a leader supporting the Google settlement and an article in the business section that quotes me in the course of discussing the issue. I am described, with my enthusiastic consent, as running an orphanage. The more I think of it the better the orphan metaphor works. Orphan works […]

Suppose that there were a major fire, and that in order to put out the fire you would need, say, a trillion gallons of water.  Can you imagine a city council that would say, “oh no, we can only afford 734 billion gallons of water, so let’s leave out about a quarter of the neighborhoods.  […]

Robert Darnton recently published an essay in the New York Review of Books on the Google settlement. There has been much commentary in blogs, listserves, and print media. Below I reproduce a letter that I sent to the New York Review of Books, that they found to be far too long to publish. It is […]

I recently changed the Creative Commons license on this blog from Attribution-Non Commercial to Attribution, for a number of reasons. My reasons are all related to a general point of view about commerce, one that is highly unoriginal (having, famously, been well articulated by Adam Smith in 1776) but powerful nonetheless. The profit motive often […]

In this post, I get to be both an economist and a librarian. I want to argue that recessions pose at least two kinds of problems for academic libraries, one of them quite obvious, the other one less so. The obvious problem is that recessions bring with them reductions in income – the stuff that […]