Why I Self-Publish

Today, Independent Judgment and Introspection, my third self-published book, goes on sale. Why do I self-publish?

In 1981, I bought and read a book titled the Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter. I was intrigued but at the time had nothing to publish!

In 1993, I submitted to five publishers a proposal and three chapters of a book I had titled “Advertising: Beacon of Capitalism.” One called me and offered a contract. Flattered beyond belief, I said, “Where do I sign?” In the course of talking to my editor, he said my title was “too flag wavy” and suggested the current one, In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism.

The editor also made a casual remark that made me a little uneasy, but I did not think too much about it. He said, “With the advent of electronic publishing, books may never go out of print.” In later years, I realized the message was, “Good luck getting your rights back!” I did not know about print on demand (today’s technology of printing one book at a time) and I doubt that my editor knew about it. I was aware that I had signed away all rights, which is what all but the highly successful best-selling authors must do to get a book published. Best-selling authors can negotiate with publishers and even receive a lucrative advance against royalties. The rest of us must take what the publisher offers, which may include copyright in the publisher’s name, not yours.

In 1994, In Defense of Advertising was published by Quorum Books, an imprint of the Greenwood Publishing Group in Westport, Connecticut.* Price was $45, hardcover only, and a lot of money in those years with similar books today going for $180-200 plus. Target market was “scholarly/professional,” which meant college libraries and motivated professors or individuals  who might be willing to pay that kind of money. The book did respectably. Sales in the hundreds, not thousands.

By the early 2000s the book’s sales trickled to almost nothing and I was interested in seeing it in paperback, even if I had to publish it myself. I joined the Author’s Guild, an organization mainly for the Stephen King’s of the world, but one benefit is that members can ask questions of the Guild’s lawyers. I asked for, and got, advice on how to ask for my rights back. I also got a stern sermon on why I shouldn’t have signed away all rights! The advice was to offer to buy all books in the warehouse at cost. There weren’t many, so the publisher accepted and I got the rights back in 2006. I self-published the paperback in 2007.

With the ease of print on demand (lack of need to carry inventory) and electronic publishing, I doubt that publishers today would be so generous in returning rights. In 1992 the same publisher (now under the Praeger imprint) published a scholarly collection that included one of my papers. I was asked recently to include the same paper in a new collection, but the 1992 book is still in print in Kindle and print-on-demand versions. The publisher wanted $1500 for the “privilege” of reprinting the paper. I once again joined the Author’s Guild to ask about my rights. The lawyer said I did sign away everything, but he also thought the publisher was unethical in “ransoming” my paper. He also gave me references to a statutory right of termination for papers in collections. It says I can get my rights back in 2026. If the publisher doesn’t play lawyerly games with me! (Permission to reprint academic papers is always free as long as credit is given—except in this case.)

For two or three years, I submitted my second book, Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, to about fifteen publishers, getting wonderful peer review comments (from a university press) such as “I don’t consider Ayn Rand to be a reference for anything.” (See my comment on the ethics and epistemology of peer review, Applying Principles, pp. 130-32). One publisher was willing to publish the book as is, but the copyright was to be in their name and I had to provide my own typeset page proofs (in Microsoft Word), copy editing (which most publishers provide for authors), and an index (which publishers do not provide). And, of course, I had to sign away all rights. I did attempt to negotiate but only got as far as, “I guess you can have the copyright in your name.” At that point, I exclusively became a self-publisher. Here are my reasons why.

The business model of publishers is much like that of the Hollywood movie studios. They make their money on hits, the best sellers, but it is difficult to predict which books will be runaway best sellers. So they accept as many books as they can handle, spend about three months on each one before publication date and three months after, then move on to the next. If the book doesn’t continue to sell well, it is thrown in the back pages of the publisher’s catalog.

Most of the publishing work, which includes production and marketing of the book, falls on the author. Typically, publishers will copy edit and typeset the manuscript, design a cover, list the book with top wholesalers (which gets the books listed online at retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble). They will send the book to some pre- and post-publication reviewers and put the book in their catalog that is mailed or emailed to the “house list,” an amalgam of past buyers and interested readers. If your book looks like it may sell well, you may be offered a book tour and some ads may be placed. There are no guarantees that your book will end up in a retail store. (Retailers require discounts of 40-60%  and if the books don’t move off the shelf, they are returned for refund and shipped at your cost. Refunds and shipping are deducted from royalties.)

The author must do and provide everything else. The author is asked to provide lists of contacts that might buy the book and possible review outlets. The author must provide an index, which if hired by a professional indexer can cost one or two thousand dollars. (This is the reason many books have no index or a poor one. The author does not want to pay for an index or want or know how to do one.) The author must proofread the typeset page proofs and return them in a short turnaround time, usually within two or three days. Advertising? Book tour? Convincing local retailers to carry your book? The publisher won’t stop you from spending your time and money on any of these ventures, though your contract probably has a veto or approval clause about the advertising!

So how many books actually get sold? Nielsen Bookscan in 2004 tracked 1.2 million books. Ten books sold more than a million copies, 500 more than 100,000, and two percent (or 24,000) more than 5000. Ninety-seven percent, however, sold fewer than 1000 and 80% fewer than 99.** The numbers are sobering and I doubt that they would be much different today, perhaps worse considering how many self-published books are on the market now.

The advantage of self-publishing is, in one word, control. I have total control of my books and my heirs can keep them in print after I’m gone. In the old days traditional publishers would just let books go out of print, often with excess copies destroyed (“pulped,” in the publishing lingo). Now they probably will never let them go out of print, making it difficult, if not impossible, to get your rights back. The drawback to self-publishing is that you have to do all the work yourself, although there are many advisors and consultants willing to do the work for you and gladly take your money, which can quickly add up to thousands of dollars that probably cannot be made back in sales. Self-publishing is work and you must enjoy doing it. Otherwise, the traditional path is the way to go, with a membership in the Author’s Guild and/or a good lawyer.

Scholarly books, which mine are, may not make the bestseller lists, but they can be discovered by graduate students and professors while browsing the stacks of a library or by noticing them in the bibliographies and footnotes of other books and papers or just by doing a “books-in-print” search on our modern day books-in-print (and not-in-print) database, Amazon.com.

Years ago, I was impressed by the lesson of Hermann Gossen whose book in 1854 was nearly wiped out of existence (most copies destroyed), until discovered in 1878 by a colleague of William Stanley Jevons. Gossen had anticipated the law of marginal utility, as later elaborated by Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras. (See Mises on Gossen, p. 331.)

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, pp. 41-44), I expressed optimism about the future of “good—meaning rational—ideas” (though the leftists have challenged this premise a bit in the past two or three years). I related how in the eighth century BC the Greeks came out of their Dark Age and immediately wrote down their entire oral tradition, which led eventually to the Greek Golden Age. And I noted how Europe in the fifteenth century, with the invention of moveable type, published within a hundred years all extant written work, which gave us the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, and the standard of living we all enjoy today.

In the twenty-first century, the move is toward digitization of all of the world’s literature. Does this mean there will be a new Renaissance?

“Good—meaning rational—ideas” do eventually seem to be discovered and advanced, if they are available in permanent form.


* “Imprint” is the publishing industry’s substitute for brand name. Most publishers, who likely were English majors in college, prefer not to be associated with the Procter and Gamble’s of the world.

** This and other data from the early 2000s can be found in a thinly disguised business case at jkirkpatrick.net/jstpress.pdfhttps://jkirkpatrick.net/jstpress.pdf. It is a thin disguise of yours truly’s experiences at self-publishing. More recent data: brick-and-mortar book store sales, now only 39% of total book sales, peaked in 2008 and are declining slowly. The number of Barnes & Noble stores also peaked in 2008 and have also been declining slowly (1, 2). Independent book stores, interestingly, have grown almost 40% since 2009.

(Cross posted on the books' website.)

The Flawed Environment of Academic Research

My previous post discussed how mistaken thinking about research evidence in nutrition has led to a misleading or even false understanding of how we should approach and maintain our health. A broader question than the argument-from-uncertainty fallacy arises: what is it in the nature of scientific investigation that makes these kinds of errors possible? The short answer is that there is no free market in science that would facilitate the quick awareness of both innovation and error. What we have today is government domination of research that deflects attention away from concern for the constituents the science is intended to serve, for example, doctors and their patients in medicine, to compliance with the rules of grantsmanship and peer review the ultimate aim of which is publication for tenure and promotion in the cloistered academic world.*

Though data fabrication and other frauds do occur, the most important cause of flawed research is the “what do we have to do to get the money and then the publication” attitude. This expedient in the protected environment of academia leads to conventional, uninspired, and sometimes substandard, politically biased, and irrelevant work, much of it amounting to useless minutia. I don’t mean to imply that there is a willful disregard for truth or facts on the part of researchers, though again that sometimes does occur, but that the system in which academics compete for money and accolades predisposes them to pursue conventional lines of inquiry.

“The problem in science,” states the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, “is that the way you get ahead is by staying within narrow parameters and doing what other people are doing. No one wants to fund wild new ideas.” Except profit-making private companies like Revlon. And peer review does not encourage originality or novelty. As British medical researcher David Horrobin pointed out in 1995, the acceptance of eighteen medical innovations was either delayed or thwarted by the process. The system is also notorious for not publishing findings that are negative, that is, studies that do not produce significant findings, on the alleged assumption that what works is more important and interesting than what does not.

In my 2007 posts (1, 2) on peer review I argued that fear of the new governs and that the process is no guarantee of objectivity. This last has been demonstrated by studies retrospectively analyzing the results of published work. How so? “Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis,” in the words of Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz. The pressures of publication cause sloppiness and cherry picking of the data—data mining or data massaging, as researchers call it, to find something publishable. (Selection bias was the term used in last month’s post.) All of this then brings about a recurrent lack of replication of the original study. Failure to replicate puts the science  back to square one. Often it is the private, profit-making companies, using the double-blind research technique, who cannot replicate the work of the academics, because academics frequently fail to double-blind their experiments.

Horrobin’s solution to the screening and gatekeeping process of peer review was to divide the research money equally among researchers, then let the researchers be guided by their own interests in choosing what to study. This would remove the rule-bound, paper pushing requirements of the bureaucracy and free scientists to do what they do best, namely research. Horrobin pointed out that research money was distributed in precisely this way prior to 1960 in Great Britain and resulted in more medical innovations then than since. Of course, the grant money Horrobin was talking about was from the government. Remove government involvement in research and let more retained earnings of profit-making businesses be made available and you will see more responsiveness to the market, that is, to the consumers of the research.

Bureaucrats—anyone who works for or is excessively regulated by the government, including college professors who are most of the researchers I am talking about—answer only to the requirements of the bureaucracy. Profit-making businesses, on the other hand, have a huge incentive to innovate, to increase their profits; if they make mistakes, they pay dearly, and not just in lost sales or return on investment. The bureaucrat’s response to anyone who complains about the conventionality or mistakes of present-day research is to say, “I just follow the rules. We have a process to follow if the rules need to be changed. It may take time, but that’s the way it is.”

Entrepreneurial innovators and innovative researchers don’t hesitate to go outside the conventional box, which means they don’t follow rules. Their attitude is, “What can we do to push back the frontiers of business or science?” To do that, they break rules.



*Two-thirds of the roughly $58 billion spent each year on research in universities is financed by the federal, state, and local governments, 59% by the US government alone.

The Ethics and Epistemology of Peer Review

In a previous post, I argued that academic peer review is a gatekeeping process brought about by the post-World War II growth of government involvement in research and scholarship. Though it may control quality in a narrow, conventional sense, one significant consequence of this process is the suppression of innovation. The present post takes a look at the underlying ethics and epistemology of peer review.

Medical researcher David Horrobin, whom I quoted in the previous post, says that critics of peer review “are almost always dismissed in pejorative terms such as ‘maverick,’ ‘failure,’ and ‘driven by failure.’” Lest those epithets be ascribed to me, I hasten to say that I have had some success in the process and that I am not denigrating anyone who uses it to advance his or her career. The process nonetheless does have serious flaws.

Most significant of its flaws is the view that peer review must be blind in order to maintain objectivity, that is, to prevent bias from entering the process. However, as the British Medical Journal, which has not used blind peer review since 1999, points out, “A court with an unidentified judge makes us think immediately of totalitarian states and the world of Franz Kafka.” Objectivity is the fallacy-free perception and communication of what the object of cognition is, and bias means that some other factor, such as irrelevant preconceived notions, whether formed by emotion or by reason, interferes with this perception and communication. Lack of objectivity stems from a failure to perceive reality accurately.

Neither blind nor open peer review can guarantee this accuracy. Indeed, anonymity removes the need for care and responsibility when commenting on someone else’s work. How many ill-mannered or ill-thought-out remarks would be made about submitted papers if reviewers knew that the papers’ authors will know their names and how to contact them? Being allowed to hide behind anonymity is an invitation to scurrilous behavior. This is why the objectivity of legal systems in free societies demands that witnesses, whether supporters, accusers, or expert testifiers, be identified. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of peer review, objectivity requires at minimum that the process be open.

Objectivity, at root, is an epistemological concept and the failure to perceive and communicate accurately is a function of how one uses one’s mind in the processes of perceiving and communicating. Neither anonymity nor openness will improve this. The most important requirement of objectivity while reviewing someone else’s work is a constant awareness of one’s preconceived notions. The most significant one to watch out for is “This is not how I would have written the paper; it should therefore be changed to . . .”

As one journal editor said, no doubt with some exaggeration, all of his reviewers of so-called empirical papers recommend rejection and those of theoretical papers insist that the papers be “recreated in the reviewers’ own images.” And another editor complained that reviewers have turned into wannabe co-authors, requiring extensive revisions and writing comments that are sometimes as long or longer than the original articles. Clearly, decentering, to use Piaget’s term, meaning the ability to consider other points of view or to appreciate the perspectives of others, is needed by some, perhaps many, reviewers.

Once it has been established that a paper meets a journal’s editorial guidelines and philosophy, that is, that the topic of the paper is appropriate for the journal, then it is the author’s objective that should guide evaluation. Decentering in reviewing, or editing or criticism, means accepting the premises of the author and recommending improvements in execution. The reviewer’s personal preferences on the topic, including agreement or disagreement with the author’s basic premises, should be set aside. The author’s paper is the reality to be adhered to in the reviewing process; interference from irrelevant, previously formed emotional associations and intellectual beliefs destroys the objectivity of the process.

A reviewer, of course, may strongly disagree with the editorial guidelines and philosophy of a journal or with the objective of a paper, but then such a reviewer should either decline to be a reviewer or come to terms with the principle of objectivity. Much suppression of innovation in the peer review process probably stems from the failure of reviewers to distinguish their personal philosophies and preferences from those of the authors they are reviewing. When reviewer and author disagree, the reviewer either demands conformity or recommends rejection.

The issue of objectivity in reviewing (or editing or criticizing) is similar to the so-called problem of taste in art. Is this work of art bad art or is my reaction to it just my taste? Artists have an aim for their art and their execution of that aim makes it either good or bad art. Whether one likes a particular work of art, though, depends on many other factors, including emotional associations and intellectual beliefs. Therefore, as Ayn Rand points out, it is not a contradiction to say “This is a good work of art, but I don’t like it,” and vice versa. The same can be said in reviewing scholarly work, namely, “I don’t like or agree with this paper, but it is well done.”

The reviewer, editor, or critic who can make this last statement is one who exhibits objectivity. When looked at from the standpoint of epistemology, whether the process is blind or open is beside the point.

Privilege, Peer Review, and Piracy: Q & A

Three recent posts produced several questions and comments.

Follow the Government Intervention. In “The Market Gives Privilege to No One” I stated that certain groups of professionals do not usually work weekends and that the computer industry’s “24/7” indicates the ultimate in free-market service. “But I work weekends,” protested one doctor and one professor and shock was expressed that I was asking them to work around the clock!

Concerning the latter, no one person that I know of in the computer industry works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The designation “24/7” means that customers can get service whenever they need it; the 24/7 company covers the entire week, around the clock, with service workers. Educational services on Saturdays and Sundays are scarce. Medical services are nonexistent, unless you are willing to subject yourself to waiting six hours or more in a socialized hospital emergency room. Government intervention, especially restriction of the supply of doctors and hospitals in the medical market, creates these service distortions and gives the professors and doctors a privileged life. On the medical market, see "100 Years of Medical Robbery" and "Real Medical Freedom" by Dale Steinreich.

One professor recited a common view that some academics hold: students are not customers, but products to be sold to businesses, that is, students are “work in progress” that become “finished goods” upon graduation. At best, this description of students is metaphor, at worst it is profound insult. The product of education is the knowledge the professor is supposed to be conveying to students and knowledge is what students are buying with their tuition payments. If professors view students as products in a production line, is it any wonder that students feel like numbers on a roster? Why do professors view them this way? Follow the government intervention: because that is precisely how the bureaucracy views students.

Playing the Game. In “Drop Errors and the Trouble with Peer Review” I said that peer reviewers are gatekeepers that prevent or delay the acceptance of innovative ideas. One reader wrote that entrepreneurs are getting around the gatekeepers by establishing online journals.

True. Technological innovation, such as the Internet, has made it easier for writers to get into print without having to jump through the usual hoops and there has been a proliferation of academic journals, many of them online. Much of the proliferation, however, is driven by the publish-or-perish atmosphere of academic life, which is expanding beyond research universities to what used to be called teaching schools. Accreditation requirements for “academic qualification,” usually defined as a certain number of peer-reviewed journal articles—books don't count or, at most, count only as equivalent to one article—have created the need for more outlets to accommodate this increased “original research.”

University administrators have become bean counters and professors plan strategies for getting around the peer-review gatekeepers. Hallway discussion among faculty is about how to play the game.

Is Unauthorized Copying Theft? In “The Market Function of Piracy” I said that pirated goods may function as a free sample in accelerating the acceptance of new products. The question arises, am I defending theft? No, I’m trying to recast the intellectual property debate; I addressed the issue to some extent in a comment I made to my post on the Mises blog. See comment below.

As Siva Vaidnyanathan said in Copyrights and Copywrongs, “You cannot argue for theft” (p. 253). Neither Vaidnyanathan nor Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture are against intellectual property but both are attempting to rein in the lunacy of recent trends, such as the war against peer-to-peer file sharing and the push for perpetuity in copyrights. Their focus is on reforming intellectual property law to foster creativity, not stifle it. Roll it back, perhaps, to fourteen or twenty-eight years for copyrights.

The problem I have with their discussions, and others, is that interest-group and collectivist terminology dominate. Beginning with the Constitution, the aim of patents and copyrights is “to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Why not promote business in general? The aim of intellectual property legislation, they say, is to balance the needs of society with the rights of creators and the public good should dictate when property should go into the public domain. Etc.

When some advocates of intellectual property rights, on the other hand, make a case for the perpetuity, they have the collectivist and utilitarian defenders in a bind. Rights do not expire, they say. Why should my patent or copyright expire? Time limits are arbitrary, justified only on grounds of the public good. It is the failure to answer this argument, I think, that today is causing the continued lengthening of copyright, and to a lesser extent, patent terms.

The fundamental question to be answered in intellectual property debates is, where does your property end and my rights begin? How is it that you can come into my house and tell me that I cannot copy something I already paid you for? Or, to put it in historical context, is intellectual property really property or is it an instance of monopoly power and privilege? Historically, until the mid-nineteenth century, patents and copyrights were considered monopolies granted by the government; that’s why time limits were put on them. And many economists in the nineteenth century considered patents just another form of protectionism.

My knowledge of marketing theory adds an additional perspective to this debate. There are actions creators can take—mainly the relentless search for customers—to market their innovations without resort to patents and copyrights. Clothing designs, for example, are largely unprotected, but some designers, despite the rapid availability of knock-offs, do quite well. By initiating lawsuits, especially the kind that occur today, creators’ actions begin to look like monopoly protectionism cloaked in the self-righteous guise of property rights. Add to this the mind/body dichotomy—namely that creators do not like, and some even despise, having to aggressively market their wares—and you have a case for concluding that patents and copyrights are more about monopoly and less about property.

Property or monopoly. That is the issue. I’m not 100% certain that patents and copyrights are monopolies, but I’m no longer convinced that intellectual property is property. More research on my part must be done. I will have more to say about this topic at some other time.

Drop Errors and the Trouble with Peer Review

In product development there are two kinds of errors. A “go” error occurs when the green light is given to a product that eventually fails. The Edsel, a $250 million write-off by the Ford Motor Company in 1959, is one example. The “drop” error occurs when an idea that could have been highly profitable is eliminated from further consideration. How do we know that the idea could have been profitable? In a free market dropped ideas have the habit of being picked up by someone else. Chester Carlson’s invention was dropped by such notables as General Electric, 3M, Kodak, RCA, and IBM, but picked up by the small Haloid Company. In 1961 Haloid changed its name to Xerox. Even go errors in a free market often get corrected; just a few years after the Edsel fiasco, Ford rolled out a better idea called the Mustang.

Peer review is the process by which millions of dollars of government money are handed out to researchers in medicine and the physical sciences; the process by which recognition, promotion, and tenure are determined for professors, especially those in the “softer” sciences who do not need or use grants for their research; and one of the criteria—numbers of peer-reviewed journal articles, for example—used to determine accreditation for universities.

Peer review, a “blind” process in which the names of author and evaluator are concealed from each other, requires two or three so-called peers to read a paper or proposal to judge the quality of actual or proposed research before acceptance. As such, peer review is a product development process that protects only against go errors. It is at best quality control that insures accuracy and reliability of research done. At worst it holds back innovation through drop errors. Since there is no free market in scholarly research—today’s government-university-science complex is a severely hampered market—dropped ideas either never get a hearing or take many more years than they otherwise should to surface.

Medical researcher and long-time critic of peer review, David Horrobin, argued that the peer-review process, which developed in its current form largely as a screening device after World War II, has perhaps improved the accuracy and reliability of conventional research published in medicine, but it has done so at the price of innovation. Prior to World War II, unknown researchers could submit papers to journals only with the endorsement of a published author. The editor would then decide whether or not to publish. Peer review was ad hoc and not common. It was the growth of government involvement in education and, especially, the government’s lavishing of money on research that called for the blind-review screening process.

In a paper titled “The Philosophical Basis of Peer Review and the Suppression of Innovation” Horrobin urged that more unconventional and innovative research be encouraged by journal editors. When a reviewer questioned the need for such a statement, Horrobin produced eighteen incidences of medical innovations rejected by the peer-review process. In 1995 Horrobin’s paper was cited by the US Supreme Court as support for the argument that some “well-grounded but innovative theories” may not be published in peer-reviewed outlets.

Horrobin’s solution to divvying up grant money was to give funds equally to all researchers and let each work on whatever his or her interests indicated. Prior to 1960, said Horrobin, this interest-as-guide process was essentially how funding was distributed in the UK and more innovation in medicine resulted in those years than in the years since 1960. Horrobin approved of government involvement in and funding of research, but the analogy to free markets in his solution—bottom-up, self-interested choice by researchers—versus central planning—top-down, “expert” direction by peer reviewers—cannot be escaped.

Never mind that Socrates and Galileo were badly treated by their peer reviewers or that frauds and hoaxes sometimes dodge the quality controllers or, further, that you may want to cite Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises but can’t figure out how to get past your peer-review gatekeepers, the real problem of peer review is the severely hampered market in scholarly research. What would a truly free market in scholarly research be like?

First, publishers of journals and scholarly books would have to earn a profit from their buyers and not live off the donations of their authors or other benefactors. Some university presses, for example, are now publishing what are called “supported books,” which means someone, usually the author’s department, must contribute one or two thousand dollars to the publication of the author’s book. And at least one commercial press requires authors to do their own copy edit and provide camera-ready typeset text; this can add up to two thousand dollars or more that authors must fund. Twenty-five dollars per page, charged to authors or their departments, has long been the going rate for published papers in some fields. (In some quarters today this method of getting into print would be called subsidy or vanity publishing.)

In addition, the so-called nonprofits, which finance a portion of today’s research and journals, are in fact creatures of the tax system and must, despite their descriptive name, show an excess of donations over expenses lest their organization become some philanthropist’s very expensive hobby. Under laissez-faire, in the absence of tax write-offs and the guilt and ignorance of economics that wealthy business people tend to exhibit, there probably would be far fewer such organizations than exist today.

Second, there would be no government money to dangle in front of researchers and no government-owned or -regulated universities filled with bureaucratized product lines (curricula designed by committee), bureaucratized sales reps (the professors), or bureaucratized performance evaluations (those mounds of paper, which include lists of published research, that must be produced for promotion, tenure, and most every other consideration). All of this distorts the market and probably encourages the overabundance of pretentious minutia that fills today’s overabundance of academic journals.

Under laissez-faire, only the market would decide who produces what and who gets what in scholarly output. Indeed, the market for this research might not differ much from the product development market in automobiles. Private, profit-making firms, both traditional businesses and universities, would finance the work and effectively and efficiently produce market-satisfying results. Portions of the results might be published in profit-making journals and books, much of it perhaps not.

Yes, there might be some Edsels created by this free-market development process and there might still be some delayed acceptances of Xeroxes, but there also might be a lot more Mustangs! Absent the government-encouraged gatekeepers and other hurdles that must be jumped in order to get into the market, researchers who cannot find an outlet will be free to start their own journals, publishing companies, businesses, or even universities. The hampered market today, which includes the “golden handcuffs” of tenure, makes this quite difficult.


See related posts on the Mises blog: 1, 2.