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.

The Market Gives Privilege to No One

“Bankers’ hours” is an old phrase that actually reflects monopolistic privilege. The 10AM to 3PM that banks formerly were open to serve customers was made possible by government regulation and the consequent lack of competition to force bankers to be more available when customers needed them. With modest deregulation (and the electronic bookkeeping that deregulation encouraged) banks today are open a little longer than the former hours and some are even open on Saturdays.

Doctors, dentists, lawyers, and professors, however—a distinguished group that enjoy government-granted privileges in the form of licensing and other regulatory protections—still do not usually work weekends. Free-market service firms must be open and available when their customers need them. Why should medical or educational services only be available Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM? The significantly unregulated computer industry’s “24/7” indicates the ultimate in service. The free market gives privilege to no one.

Privilege is a remnant of aristocratic life, special enjoyments granted due to birth or rank in society. Today, the rank stems directly from bureaucratic intrusions into the marketplace. Its key trait is that it is unearned, making the holder of the rank exempt from competition. Regulations restrict a portion of the market to the exclusive enjoyment of those protected at the expense of those who are not so protected. Sometimes, those enjoying this rank exhibit aristocratic arrogance, such as the professor who says to a student, during the professor’s posted office hours: “I can’t talk now. I have a meeting.” The meeting is with other professors and the message conveyed is that other professors are more important than paying customers.*

Robert Fuller, former president of Oberlin College, has coined a word that actually is broader than the monopolistic privileges I am talking about here. (And Fuller, who is a social liberal, would certainly not agree with my application of his term.) Fuller recognizes that there is legitimate rank that can be earned, so he coined the term “rankism” to mean “the abuse of rank.” Rankism, he says, describes a concept similar to, but broader than, racism, sexism, and bullying in general:

Rankism insults the dignity of subordinates by treating them as invisible, as nobodies. Nobody is another n-word and, like the original, it is used to justify denigration and inequity (Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank, p. 5).

Fuller argues that equality means “equal dignity” and everyone has a right to it; equality does not mean equal wealth or equal rank. As a social liberal, he thinks the government, as in the case of race and gender inequities, must step in. My interpretation is that the government was a cause or magnifier of these particular inequities.

Despite his social liberalism, Fuller’s concept provides valuable insight into the psychological underpinnings of the abuse of rank by those in higher or privileged authority. Earned rank does exist naturally in society—parents hold rank over children, teachers over students, and employers over employees—and more earned rank would exist in a truly free-market economy because bureaucrats would have to get jobs in business and compete for their positions of authority.

From the standpoint of psychology, though, as Fuller demonstrates, “lording it over” one’s subordinates derives from defensive anxiety and the necessity of setting oneself up as special or superior to others. Sometimes this necessity is made manifest through regulatory privilege.

Rankism, says Fuller, is the last “vestige of aristocratic class” that must be eliminated from the home, school, workplace, and social order before we can achieve a just society based on equal dignity. The first step, in contrast to what Fuller would say, involves removing the last semblance of regulatory privilege by getting government out of our lives and economy.

Fuller’s web site is called Breaking Ranks.


*Oops! Did I say students were paying customers? I realize that many professors—a privileged group I know well—object strenuously to this characterization. Yet students in a state-financed university, such as mine, often work thirty or more hours per week to pay for their education. This means they are paying substantial taxes to pay for their professors’ meal tickets. And this doesn’t count the taxes the students’ parents have paid over the years. So, yes, I do believe it is correct to call my students paying customers.