Talk:Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government

The stated hypothesis of this resource is (verbatim) "information is a public good". To show this, one must demonstrate that information is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. These two conditions, which are together necessary and sufficient to support the hypothesis, are only mentioned in passing within an endnote. The resource should be edited and reorganized so that it substantiates its hypothesis, or if "public good" is intended to mean something other than the definition on wikipedia, the hypothesis should be restated or made more specific. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 01:18, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

You are correct. I have that in draft and should have it here within the next couple of weeks. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 01:30, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Certainly information is non-rivalrous but at face value it hardly seems non-excludable. I look forward to reading what you have in mind. Since the article already had over seven thousand words after the hypothesis, you'll have to forgive me for assuming that a supportive argument was not forthcoming. One more comment in the meantime. Confirmation bias seems a rather facile explanation for political polarization. I've written about this dubious presumption before, and I think I also had a conversation with you. I'm sure it can be reproduced under certain conditions, but to take it for granted as an unqualified axiom of human psychology does not seem to jibe with other psychological models such as bayesian integration. It is essentially an assumption of abject willful ignorance. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 19:24, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

I might as well just give my counterargument now. Consider non-disclosure agreements and copyright law. If information were non-excludable in practical terms then hollywood and the music industry would having gone bankrupt at least a decade ago. Empirically, the idea that people can't be prevented from sharing information seems not to hold water. If you think information should be a "public good", then the essay ought to say as much. It is an entirely different thing to say that information is a public good. But let's suppose that you had said that information should be a public good. In that case, it would be necessary to repeal copyright law and enact law that prohibits non-disclosure contracts (or however you say it legalese). That would be pretty interesting. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:25, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

You can NOT copyright information: You can copyright expression.

Thanks for your input. I will modify this article to reflect that.

However, I disagree with your claim that "hollywood and the music industry would having gone bankrupt at least a decade ago" without modern copyright law. Your argument may be accurate for copyright terms of 10 years or less, but not for the current copyright terms.

The wikipedia article on "w:History of copyright law of the United States" says that the first US copyright law was enacted in 1790, two years before the US Postal Service Act of 1792. That 1790 act provided a copyright term of 14 years, which could be renewed for at most one more 14-year term. It's not at all clear how vigorously that was enforced. Under the Postal Service Act of 1792, newspapers were carried between publishers for free. It seems likely that whole articles were copied without paying royalties, though I do not have a reference for that. If you do, I'd be interested.

Beyond that, Lawrence Lessig in w:Free Culture (book) says that the Japanese may have the most vibrant comic book industry in the world, because they blatantly ignore the provisions for "derivative works" in Japanese copyright law, copied from the US and codified in WTO provisions.

What can you tell me about rates of return routinely expected for risky products like things that are copyrighted? I have not done serous research on this, but I believe that almost no one would invest in a product based on return beyond 14 years or so: People who invest in new product development expect a rate of return substantially exceeding 10 percent per year for several years. At interest rates that high, the value of returns beyond 14 years are too low to justify any investment.

What do you know about the real justification for copyright periods longer than 14 years? It it my impression that all the changes in US copyright law since 1970 are monuments to political corruption. They were enacted, because the major media have a conflict of interest in honestly reporting on them, the politicians get major campaign contributions from people who make money from copyrights, and the politicians also know that their political futures can be destroyed through biased reporting.

I claim that longer copyright terms are obstacles to the progress of science and the useful arts in violation of the w:Copyright Clause of the US Constitution. Those longer copyright terms unnecessarily and dramatically increase the cost for people like me to do research for work like this. You may have access to an excellent university library and can easily get anything you want. I do not have such access, and relatively few people do.

This point is specially true for copyrights and paywalls on refereed academic journals: No one submits articles to refereed academic journals with the expectation of earning a penny from copyright royalties on such articles. With the Internet and the availability of open access journals, paywalls on academic journals are justified because the copyright owners have bought the laws that allow them to do that. Those paywalls are monuments to political corruption, as noted by Spencer Graves; Douglas A. Samuelson (March 2022). "Externalities, public goods, and infectious diseases". Real-world economics review (99): 25-56. Wikidata Q111367750. ISSN 1755-9472. http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue99/whole99.pdf. 

I should probably stop here, but I feel a need to make one more point: Multiple economists have said that the industrial revolution began in Great Britain, because the Brits were the first to successfully restrict the power of the government to grant monopoly privileges. Acemoglu and Robinson in (2012) w:Why Nations Fail claim that the industrial revolution began after the English w:Bill of Rights 1689 successfully limited the power of the government to grant monopoly privileges. A plot of UK GDP per capita from Measuring Worth makes it clear that Acemoglu and Robinson were off by 50 years: The growth in UK GDP per capita began around 1649, when the English chopped the head off of King Charles I.

If I am wrong about any of this, please help me understand how I am wrong. I am wrong about many things, and I appreciate your efforts to disabuse me of some of my errors.

Thanks again for your input. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 03:47, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

You've stated that you disagree, but you haven't made a counterargument. You've also put words in my mouth. I've never said anything about the length of copyright terms. Hollywood's business model would be completely untenable without copyright law. They cannot spend millions to produce/advertise a movie and then rent/sell it to people for X dollars if anyone can just copy the movie and then distribute it at a price of X-1 dollars. This is common sense. Broadband, dvd burners and P2P software were all well-developed and readily available by 2010. Nothing except copyright law prevented Hollywood from bankruptcy. Well-deserved bankruptcy in my opinion. I agree that it should be a public good, at least in a more general sense. It is something I've thought about for a long time. Yet the problem is not law per se, but subversive media that impresses poor communication habits and bizarre expectations upon the public. I try to get to the root of the problem in Socialism/Bipartisan fraud and my other essays. It's not finished and I plan on adding a section on rhetorical advice, but you're welcome to offer comments or suggestions. This essay must be as compact and direct as possible. All that said, I really do not understand your reply or your resource. Your reply has virtually nothing to do with my comment, it almost reads like the output of a large language model. I'm sometimes too verbose myself, but I always try to stay on point. Don't you agree with the boldface text I wrote above? If you disagree, please say why. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 03:59, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

I suppose it wasn't too expensive to reproduce and distribute movies with VHS either, nor presumably to have a film reel duplicated. But if that wouldn't have killed Hollywood's film industry in the absence of copyright laws, then cheap broadband and free p2p software definitely would have. I don't know what made you think I was talking about copyright terms though. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:20, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article on w:copyright says, "Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. ... Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed." DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 05:36, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

So what? The Wikipedia article on excludability says "Excludability is defined as the degree to which a good, service or resource can be limited to only paying customers [...] ". Do copyright laws not help the film industry do exactly that? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 05:51, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

To summarize, it seems like you believe information should be a public good. The assertion that "information is a public good" is not empirically sustainable. With certain law/policy changes (e.g. repealing or rewriting copyright laws) it's possible that information could be a public good. Considering this, it seems the natural way to develop this resource is to replace the hypothesis "information is a public good" with the statement "information should be a public good" and work off of that. I remember saying myself once that "information should be regulated as a public good". (Though I didn't mean "public good" in the specific meaning we're working off of here.) Obviously the excludability of any given good depends on the extent to which policy and law enable it. I think it's important to recognize that the statement "information should be a public good" is really a moral position and not a scientific hypothesis in and of itself, but there's nothing wrong with that. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 09:10, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Text and images in a video or movie, book, newspaper, web site, etc, are not "information": They are "expression", as established by numerous rulings in US courts.

Governments try to censor information, with varying degrees of success. For a discussion of problems from excessive government secrecy, see Matthew Connelly (14 February 2023). The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets (in en). Pantheon Books. Wikidata Q116786691. ISBN 978-1-101-87158-4.  and Spencer Graves (18 July 2014), Restrict secrecy more than data collection, San José Peace & Justice Center, Wikidata Q106512569 and w:Dreyfus affair. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 13:48, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

I knew that you could only save your argument through some bizarre, idiosyncratic and completely non-standard interpretation of terms, but I was certain that you'd dig up something on excludability or non-rivalry. So according to you and the courts, books and movies and newspapers do not in fact contain information? Who knew? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:07, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

books, movies, newspapers, etc., distribute information (or misinformation or disinformation), but that's not what's protected by copyright law. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 14:12, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

A law does not have to directly address the good in question in order to enable excludability of that good. I'll repeat my earlier point, and I hope you'll answer the question at the end. The Wikipedia article on excludability says "Excludability is defined as the degree to which a good, service or resource can be limited to only paying customers [...] ". Do copyright laws not help the film industry do exactly that? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:27, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on this point. At least in some instances, information more closely fits the definition of a club good. You say in the resource "Copyright law does not apply to information: It applies to expression". Yet if one can't communicate information for others to use then others cannot use it. Copyright law enables de-facto excludability. That aside, there are larger problems to address if one's goal is better government and economy. Namely those involved with our monetary system. The concept of public government is subverted entirely with debt-based commercial money like the USD and fractional reserve banking. There is many times more debt than money. An economy needs currency to function but USD is created as a loan (and potentially loaned out many times over) rather than issued as public money. Can there even be any such thing as a public servant when a government does not even retain the right to issue its own currency? It gives private central banks carte blanche control over a nation's credit, economy, and politics. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:24, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: The sentence "Between around 1975 and 2000, the major commercial broadcasters in the US fired nearly all their investigative journalists[49] and replaced them with the police blotter. It's easy and cheap to repeat what the police say.[50] " catches my eye. It's a good point and I skimmed the source very quickly. It doesn't seem particularly remarkable. What is so often implied by various critiques of mass media but hardly ever said explicitly is that control/influence over public opinion is by far and away the most valuable 'asset' of mass media. Ergo, no media company should ever be implicitly "trusted" or considered a "trusted source". The idea that so many media organizations are trusted sources, reliable source, etc. is impressed upon the public ad nauseam, and rarely ever challenged directly. Wikipedia even maintains a list of such sources which users are expected to defer to and encouraged to use, while primary sources aren't even allowed. Shouldn't this provoke at least a few questions? Isn't this largely part of the problem right here, that we are encouraged to take honesty for granted even though it's widely acknowledged that these companies have ulterior motives? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:11, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

It's funny, Wikipedia's list is here wikipedia:Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. The first sentence reads "The following presents a non-exhaustive list of sources whose reliability and use on Wikipedia are frequently discussed." Despite this and other clumsy doublespeak, the list is essentially an endorsement of mass media, thinly camouflaged with a partisan skew so that the reader isn't quite in an objective frame of mind as they browse it. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 02:42, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

In short, it seems impossible to reconcile the idea that government and media should be trusted with the well-proven fact that they are frequently dishonest and profit from it not only in the form of money or other income, but also by avoiding accountability to the public and the law, in some cases even for serious, long-running criminal behavior. These people can't be brought to account if we're still using phrases like "reliable source" in reference to any given major media network. I hope you'll consider this and let me know what you think. Despite our disagreement about what constitutes a "public good", I certainly agree with the sentiment that there are large problems with mass media and government. You can't address this issue without first saying, in no uncertain terms, "mass media should not be trusted". Dissent is necessary, but so many people aren't prepared to even offer it lip service in the form of such a statement. Instead they beat around the bush, hemming and hawing about what's to be done to 'fix' mass media and encourage honesty. It's amusing to consider hypothetical conversations like the following "Joe: The media often lie, they have strong incentive to lie, it's not even clear how to make them stop lying. Bob: Maybe we shouldn't trust mass media. Joe: Well that's a bit paranoid, don't you think?" Clearly absurd. Nobody can really call you an idiot for distrusting the media, despite how strongly we're encouraged to think otherwise. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 09:09, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: Organizations like the world bank don't earn money, they create it and loan it out. They are the status quo and already have enormous influence. Having the world bank act as a sponsor for local news is the antithesis of free and independent press. This must have struck you. I hope that you'll address these points or at least let me know what you think. As it is right now, the resource would likely give the reader a very distorted understanding of these social problems, which are very serious and deserve more attention than they presently receive. I suppose I'll leave it at that for now though I could go on if you're interested. You've invited others to contribute to the resource but I won't edit it unless we're on the same page. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 10:39, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

@AP295: Why do you care where the money comes from as long as the system does not allow the funders to control editorial policy?

McChesney's research suggests that the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today is due in part to postal subsidies that began in 1792 and were distributed with no consideration of content ... until President Wilson denied postal subsidies to the Communist party newspaper, which made it easier for the remaining media to stampede the US public into supporting US entry into World War I.

We could also fund experiments from philanthropies. If the experiments produce the results I expect, it should be relatively easy to convince taxpayers to continue the subsidies with a solid firewall preventing political interference in the content.

Besides, you do not have to be perfect to succeed at anything: You only have to be better than the alternatives. The perfect is the enemy of the good ;-) DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 14:07, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

You can't seriously suggest that we shouldn't anticipate major sponsors to exert influence one way or another, and without that your sentence becomes Why do you care where the money comes from? Do I really have to say more? AP295 (discuss • contribs) 14:46, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

But what about my earlier point? Again, why should any big news network be labeled a "trusted source"? Trusted by whom? And why must we be told they are trusted if they act in a trustworthy manner and would therefore earn the public's trust? Just say it. "Mass media should not be trusted." AP295 (discuss • contribs) 15:07, 26 November 2023 (UTC)