Bottom-up

Yet another fantastic post from Clay Shirky about the decline of old media:

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

As I’ve written before, corporations are not large people. They are inflexible institutions that change how they do business very slowly. And so it’s quite possible (I suspect likely) that they’re simply incapable of adapting to a change like the Internet. Instead, they’ll continue to collapse, and gradually be replaced by new, “Internet native” companies with much flatter cost structures.

Shirky explains all this better than I could, so I encourage you to read his whole post.

The New York Times has an article on how digital cameras and the Internet are transforming the photography business. The striking thing about the article is that it focuses almost entirely on the losers—incumbent professional photographers who are seeing increased competition push down their incomes—and only obliquely acknowledges the big picture, which is that what’s bad news for a small cadre of professional photographers is good news for almost everyone else. We’re informed that “amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options.”

Professionals might sneer at amateurs with their pictures of children and sunsets, but a better way of putting the same point is that the Internet has vastly increased the number of photographers who enjoy the satisfaction of finding non-trivial audiences for their work. And although I don’t doubt that professionals do better work than the average amateur, the reality is that 99 percent of the time amateur work is good enough. I try to illustrate each of my posts with a picture, and I typically find those photos by searching Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed images. My budget for illustrations is $0, so if I had to pay the photographers who provide me with images, this blog would be image-free. Fortunately, there are amateur photographers who are willing to provide their photos for free to me, an amateur blogger.

My point is not to dance on the grave of the photography profession. It’s obviously frightening for the average professional photographer to see his livelihood suddenly thrown in doubt, and I certainly think there’s value in having a certain number of people honing the craft of photography as a full-time job. But given that I wrote a professional photographer a 4-figure check to do our wedding, I don’t think we’re in any danger of a future without professional photographers.

Moreover, I think that some professional photographers (like professionals in almost any field) have a tendency to overstate their own importance. Like these folks, for example:

“The important thing that a photojournalist does is they know how to tell the story — they know they’re not there to skew, interpret or bias,” said Katrin Eismann, chairwoman of the Masters in Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “A photographer can go to a rally or demonstration, and they can make it look as though 10 people showed up, or 1,000 people showed up, and that’s a big difference. I’m not sure I’m going to trust an amateur to understand how important that visual communication is.”

“Can an amateur take a picture as good as a professional? Sure,” Ms. Eismann said. “Can they do it on demand? Can they do it again? Can they do it over and over? Can they do it when a scene isn’t that interesting?”

There are a couple of things to note here. First, it’s not clear what is meant by an “unbiased” photograph here. A rally can be photographed from many different angles, and it’s not clear that one of those angles is the objectively correct one. Choosing photographs of events like political rallies (and, for that matter, which rallies to cover at all) is an inherently political process, and there’s no particular reason to think that a guy with a deep understanding of camera lenses and shutter speeds is also going to have a sophisticated understanding of which shots might be journalistically important. For example, one of the most famous photographs of the “tea party” movement is this shot that I believe was taken by my friend Dave Weigel:

Dave isn’t a professional photographer and I doubt this image will win any photography awards. But Dave is a talented reporter at the Washington Independent (soon to be moving to the Washington Post), and he has a knack for capturing compelling photos from political events. It’s safe to say that if the Washington Independent had dispatched a professional photographer to cover that rally, that they would have gotten images that are superior by the standards of professional photographers. But I don’t think it’s obvious that the result would have been better for journalistic purposes: helping people to understand what transpired at the rally.

Moreover, the great thing about the digital revolution is that we can take vastly more pictures than we ever could with film. Which means we don’t have to trust any particular individual’s claims about what an event looks like. We can have dozens of people take thousands of shots, upload them all to the Internet, and then using crowd-sourcing techniques to sift through them. If you care, you’re always free to look at a lot of images from a lot of different sources and form your own judgement about which photographs most fairly represent what actually happened.

There’s a parallel here to the other examples of disruptive innovation I’ve written about. The amateur photographer stands in relation to the professional as the Apple ][ microcomputer stood in relationship to the PDP-11 minicomputer: the PDP-11 was superior in almost every respect, but the Apple ][ was a lot cheaper and was “good enough” to be useful to millions of people. The difference is that the PDP-11 doesn’t have a family to feed, and you didn’t have to worry about hurting the PDP-11’s feelings. People are understandably reticent about stating too bluntly that for the vast majority of photography tasks a professional just isn’t worth the money. We don’t want to be seen as badmouthing the skills of some very talented people, nor do we want to contemplate the prospect of thousands of photographers becoming unable to earn a living. But on the other hand, it’s important to be clear about what’s at stake here: the growth of Internet-enabled digital photography may be bad news for professionals (although I think it’s far from clear how it will affect the long-term demand for professionals’ services) but it’s unmitigated good news for almost everyone else.

A great bottom-up conversation between Reihan Salam and Chris Hayes:

The key parts:

Reihan Salam:That’s what I find most vivid and exciting, and it’s also what I find most important, because it also involves going beyond the nation state. It involves goes beyond these conventional categories of who matters, and whose narratives of suffering matter. When I look at inequality statistics, they mask the fact that boy, how many of these folks have middle-class families with one kid who is bipolar, or who is addicted to heroin, or any number of things. The real map of the world is actually a billion times more complicated than the wonkosphere map of the world. I think the poverty of that map, on the right and the left, is actually an urgent moral problem. And that’s why I want to encourage people to think outside of it.

Chris Hayes:This is something you encounter as a journalist all the time. You go out into the world and there are an infinite amount of facts. And when you write a feature piece, you say “I’m going to basically take this lasso and throw it out there, and pull in this set of facts.” That’s going to be the story about whatever–if I do a story about MoveOn, that’s the relevant set of facts. And that’s how you shape the world” …

Reihan Salam: What speaks to me is freako-weirdo-American individualists. I deeply want this to be a site of experimentation for the world. I’m not a big American exceptionalism guy, but I believe there needs to be a space. I think our relative prosperity and our relative weirdness–this sounds silly, and it sounds like I’m goofing off, but I really think it’s urgently important. That’s why any effort to rigidify and centralize, that’s what really worries me.

Chris Hayes: Your slogan then, if I had to boil down the very complicated, un-boil-downable core of Reihanism I think it would be “keep America weird.”

I would join Reihan’s “Keep America Weird” movement. So, I suspect, would Paul Graham.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes a strong case against the startup visa:

Investors already have too much power in the investor-entrepreneur relationship. If this act is passed, fundraising won’t just affect an entrepreneur’s company, but his or her life. You have to raise that round, or you’ll get deported!

How many terms can a wily investor wring from this new leverage? How much liquidation? How much liquidation preference? What kind of super pro rata rights?

Brad Feld and other Startup Visa supporters like Fred Wilson would doubtlessly argue that they wouldn’t do these kind of dirty things. I believe them, because they realize it’s in their long-term interest to be good to startup founders. But, sadly, people like Brad and Fred are a small minority.

The Startup Visa Act entrenches the idea that entrepreneurs depend on investors and not the other way around. It makes a mockery of the dozens of successful companies that got started and grew successfully without outside institutional investment. Attracting investors shouldn’t be the prerequisite for starting a successful company, it should be a consequence of it.

Another big problem with the Startup Visa Act is that it increases, rather than decreases, risk for the entrepreneurs. Launching a startup by definition means taking on a lot of risk: financial, reputational, you name it. The Startup Visa would increase risk for the entrepreneur by making the stakes so much bigger, by making literally everything depend on success — and not business success, but success how Congress defines it.

Part of the reason why Silicon Valley, and America more generally, is so great for starting companies, is the low cost of failure: if your company fails, people won’t think you’re a loser, and you’ll still be able to get a job. So it’s less daunting to get started. The Startup Visa magically makes the high cost of failure even higher: if you get started and you fail, not only will your dream get crushed, but we’ll kick you out of the country you so desperately wanted to join in the first place.

Pascal is, like me, pro-immigration and pro-startup. But it’s important to look at the fine print. Encouraging more people to come to the US and start companies is a great concept, but the execution is terrible.

Arnold Kling has posted his list of influential books. The first one is The Best and the Brightest, the book I’ve been blogging about the last few weeks:

My take-away from that book might be described as “The Exclusive Country Club Theory.” He makes foreign policy in the 1950’s and early 1960’s in the United States sound as if it was the province of an exclusive country club of people with a certain temperament and background. Wall Street lawyers, mostly. I have to say that I have carried this model with me for a long time. To this day, I view the relationship among Treasury, the Fed, the New York Fed, and large financial institutions in Exclusive Country Club terms. These people vet one another, agree with one another, and support one another. They do not question whether their interests coincide with those of the rest of the country–they just assume that the country depends on their institutions and their class leadership.

I plan to steal this analogy for a future post, because I think there are interesting parallels between the Vietnam fiasco of the 1960s and the Wall Street fiasco of the present day. But I want to make a few more observations about Vietnam first.

Matt and Will are tough acts to follow, but here is my list of books that have most influenced me, in roughly chronological order:

1. Free to Choose: My father had this on his bookshelf, and it’s the first serious book I read about public policy, probably in my sophomore year of high school. In retrospect, I think that Capitalism and Freedom is a better and more important book, but I didn’t read it until later and so it didn’t influence me personally as much.

   

2. The Virtue of Selfishness: I’m using this as a stand-in for the entire Ayn Rand canon. I read almost all of Rand’s published work my last two years of high school and it had a huge influence on how I looked at the world. I never called myself an Objectivist, but in my freshman philosophy class I was that annoying kid who’d raise his hand at every opportunity to push the Objectivist line on whatever topic was being discussed. I spent my college years un-learning some of the bad intellectual habits I picked up from Rand, and at this point I have a love-hate relationship with her work. On the one hand, she was a deeply intolerant woman with a painfully cramped view of the world. On the other hand, she had an incredible talent for writing fiction that dramatized the importance of freedom and individualism.
3. Philosophy and Social Hope: I first heard about Rorty from a recovering Objectivist acquaintance who found it a useful antidote to Rand’s dogmatism. Rorty is a pragmatist. Rorty’s major effect on me (like Matt) was to convince me that I should take philosophy less seriously, because many of the “deep” philosophical problems we wrestle with in college are rooted in clever word games more than real puzzles about the nature of the universe. This is also the only book on my list that I didn’t actually finish. It’s broken into three roughly equal pieces. The first third, which lays out Rorty’s key ideas, had a huge effect on my thinking.The middle third involved literary criticism of writers I’d never heard of, and I wound up skipping most of it. The final part was Rorty’s application of his ideas to contemporary politics, which I found cartoonish (For example, it includes a “looking backwards” essay from 2096 analogizing high executive pay with slavery). Later, when I was living with Julian, I borrowed his copy of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which I discovered does a much better job of laying out Rorty’s key ideas in a clear and approachable fashion with a lot less baggage. So if you’re going to read some Rorty, I would encourage you to start there.

   

4. Freedom Evolves: Dennett made me comfortable with the evolutionary account of the mind. I still rely on his analytical framework when thinking about the subject. In particular, Dennett’s discussion of the “Cartesian Theater” convinced me that many of the objections to materialist explanations for consciousness are the result of confusions introduced by early theories about the nature of the mind rather than serious challenges to evolutionary biology.
5. Free Culture: I was already an activist for copyright reform before Lessig published Free Culture. But Lessig persuaded me that the fights over the DMCA and the CTEA were two skirmishes in a larger cultural fight about creativity and freedom. I also regard Lessig as a role model for my own writing about public policy. In Free Culture he does a brilliant job of weaving engaging stories about individuals together to form a compelling policy argument.

   

6. The Constitution of Liberty I read a lot of libertarian books in my early 20s, and I learned a lot from them. But I wouldn’t say most of them influenced me very much because most of them just confirmed beliefs I already held. Two things set The Constitution of Liberty apart. First, Hayek thinks more deeply than any other libertarian I’ve read about the nature of individual rights and coercion. This allows him to provide a strong argument for limited government without the question-begging reliance on the non-aggression axiom employed by Rand and Rothbard. Second, Hayek has a much richer understanding of the history of liberal ideas than anyone else I’ve read. Ayn Rand believed (more or less literally) that her ideas were wholly original to herself. Hayek acknowledged that he stood on the shoulders of four centuries of liberal giants, and he explained who they were. I’ve read Constitution of Liberty three of four times, and each time I feel like I gain more insight from it.
7. Hackers and Painters: I’m cheating a little bit because what actually influenced me was reading Paul Graham’s essays over the last 8 years or so. Probably my favorite single essay is “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, which resonated with my own experience as a high school nerd. But the more important contribution to my thinking is the series of essays I’ve featured in past posts, which explores why innovative ideas so often come from startups. I think his arguments have broad implications, and part of what I’m doing with this blog is trying to figure out the broader implications of Graham’s arguments in this area.
8. The Mystery of Capital: Hernando de Soto won the Friedman Prize in 2004, and it was well-deserved. The Mystery of Capital is ostensibly a book about fighting poverty in the contemporary developing world, but I think it’s really a book about the institutional foundations of the free market. In particular, the section on the evolution of American property law profoundly shaped my own thinking on the nature of property rights.

   

9. The Death and Life of Great American Cities: I’ve got a forthcoming series of blog posts talking about Jacobs’s ideas in detail, so at this point I’ll just say that this is probably the only book I’ve read that’s had a big influence on me both intellectually and in my everyday life. When we were looking at apartments in Philadelphia, Jacobs’ observations about what makes urban neighborhoods work (including high density) powerfully influenced the South Philly neighborhood we chose.
10. Here Comes Everybody: Published in 2008, this is Clay Shirky’s instant classic about how the Internet is transforming our society. As with Graham, I was being influenced by Shirky online long before he wrote his first book. It’s depressing how often I write something about the Internet and then realize that I’m paraphrasing an argument Shirky first made a decade ago.

No, there’s no fiction on the list. Yes, that’s probably a character flaw on my part.

Reader Bob Hawkins left a really excellent comment that I’m going to quote in full:

There’s also the fact that the civilian departments don’t take their war responsibilities seriously. The military ends up doing jobs that are theoretically the responsibility of State, Justice, etc., because if they don’t the jobs won’t get done. The civilian departments don’t staff for it, don’t budget for it, and don’t organize for it. What little they do is ad hoc.

The fact that State doesn’t hire enough ex-military so they maintain their own pool of expertise, is another way they don’t take their responsibilities seriously.

I want to be clear that the point of my last post is not an anti-military one. When our elected officials decide to go to war, it’s important that we have smart, competent officers who can carry out the military objectives chosen by our civilian leaders. Men like Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Taylor are focused on winning the wars their civilian leadership have told them to win.

Moreover, as Bob says here, effectively carrying out a long-term project like a war in a fickle bureaucracy requires commanders to play politics to some degree. If our troops in the field get attacked, the military can’t afford to sit around while bureaucrats at State or in the White House debate how to respond. A good commander learns quickly that to do his job, he sometimes has to play bureaucratic games to get the resources and the authority he needs to keep his troops alive and complete the mission. And Bob is absolutely right that people outside the chain of command—who don’t have the lives of thousands of troops resting on their shoulders—often don’t appreciate the magnitude and complexity of the task the military is asked to perform.

But once you’ve started a military engagement, it becomes difficult to separate the question of how to employ military force from the question of whether to apply military force. The military’s job is to kill people and destroy things. They do this very effectively. Sometimes, as in World War II, that’s exactly what we want and we’re grateful we have a military that does it so effectively. But in other cases, killing people and destroying things is not the best solution to the problem at hand. And it’s vitally important that in those cases we avoid killing people and breaking things unnecessarily.

The question of whether to go to war, and the related questions about strategic objectives, are not questions that the military brass are uniquely qualified to answer. In fact, in most cases it’s not a question you even want your military officials to be thinking about very much. It wouldn’t have been helpful for Gen. Eisenhower, say, to spend his nights wondering if the D-Day invasion was really a good idea.

The problem in Vietnam was that the methods of the military were a poor fit to the job at hand. The military did the job it does in every war: it destroyed things and killed people it believed were supporting the enemy. But killing people and destroying things didn’t actually help the Vietnamese people or slow the spread of communism. To the contrary, every innocent Vietnamese person we killed (and there were a lot of them) helped the Viet Cong with recruiting.

It wasn’t the military’s job to decide that we’re pursuing the wrong high-level strategy. That was the job of the civilian leaders. The fundamental problem was the huge distance—both geographic and bureaucratic—between the people making the decisions and the people carrying them out. The people who knew the policy was working poorly didn’t have the authority to change it. And the people who changed the policy didn’t know how badly the current policy was working. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but my goal isn’t to apportion blame. Rather, my broader point is that this kind of disconnect is a near-inevitable consequence of bureaucratic management.

To effectively oversee a massive, complex institution like the US military, you need a massive, hierarchical institution composed of people whose job it is to understand that institution. The military itself has an officer’s corps that performs this function. No other institution, inside or outside the government, has the capacity to understand military operations in anything close to their full detail.

One part of the government that’s supposed to provide a counterweight to the military is the State Department. State had (and still has) thousands of career civil service personnel whose job it is to acquire deep expertise about the culture and politics of specific foreign countries. Many of them had spent years or even decades overseas. And because they weren’t in the military chain of command, they enjoyed relative freedom to express views at odds with the military line.

And indeed, the “doves” in the Vietnam debate—which is to say the people who understood how badly the war was going—mostly came from the State Department. But while State Department officials could (and did) raise objections to the military’s proposals, they found themselves consistently outgunned by military bureaucrats who had access to far more detailed information about military operations:

State would see grays, the military blacks and whites; State would see doubts, the military certitudes. And State would always end up being conciliatory; its terms were not as firm and hard and sure as the military’s. INR [the State Department’s intelligence bureau] could never be sure of what it was saying, and somehow the military always seemed sure; they had facts and they had military expertise. Yet at the same time the military was constantly poaching on State’s territory. There was, for example, a major argument over whether or not explosives could close the Mu Ghia Pass. The State people argued that rather than closing it, explosives would widen it (which is exactly what happened). The military was sure explosives could close it. They were experts on explosives, this was their trade, so how could State know—what did State know about bombing?

It’s conceivable that a better-led State Department could have argued its case more effectively. Certainly Halberstam’s portrays Secretary of State Dean Rusk as a weak and indecisive manager. But I don’t think there was that much Rusk could have done. The bureaucracy in charge of actually executing a given policy is always going to have a tactical advantage in debates over what the policy should be, because it controls the flow of information on which all the other players depend. State department officials tried to point out that indiscriminate bombing would damage our reputation and undermine the war effort. But an argument like that sounds academic if you can’t point to specific examples. And to get specific examples you needed operational information that only the military had.

I promised to resist Afghanistan analogies, but let me just note that you see a somewhat similar dynamic at work today. The military was able to exert significant political pressure on Pres. Obama as he was deliberating about whether to escalate the Afghan War. And I suspect that when historians write about the Afghan war, they’ll find that McChrystal and his fellow generals had even greater influence behind the scenes, as they were the primary source for the information Obama used to evaluate the conflicting options in Afghanistan.

Now, McChrystal might have been right that more troops were needed. At a minimum, I think it’s too easy to say that just because the military was wrong in 1962 that it’s wrong in 2010. But what we can say, I think, is that Pres. Obama needs to always keep in mind that the information he gets is going to be skewed in favor of whatever policy the military brass prefer. He also needs to keep in mind that if things start to go sour, the generals are not likely to tell him about it until it’s too late.

You see the same dynamic at work in the broader national security debate. As Matt Yglesias pointed out a few months ago, the people doing the most in-depth work on military strategy tend to be people with strong ties to the Pentagon and/or defense contractors. Matt focuses on their funding, which is an important consideration, but access to information is also important. Think tankers who are seen as “team players” by the Pentagon are going to find it much easier to get the information they need to flesh out their policy arguments. And this will make analysts making Pentagon-approved arguments seem systematically better-informed than people making arguments the Pentagon doesn’t like.

Similarly, last year the New York Times documented that the “military analysts” you see on cable TV programs tend to have close (and almost always undisclosed) ties to the Pentagon. The tricky thing about this is that it may very well be true that these folks are the most knowledgeable about military strategy. What better way to become an expert than to work in the military for decades? But at the same time, if you want impartial analysis of current policy, you don’t want all of your experts to be people with close ties to the people running that policy.

In the last few posts in my Vietnam series, I argued that American foreign policy was crippled by the fact that senior officials were fed a steady stream of misinformation. Positive news about the war flowed easily up the chain of command and reached the Secretary of Defense and the President. Negative information, in contrast, was systematically filtered out by the official reporting channels. As a consequence, senior officials were working with a limited and distorted view of the “facts on the ground.”

An obvious question is why the senior leadership didn’t anticipate this problem and take steps to correct it by seeking information from outside the chain of command. To some extent they did. In 1962, for example, Pres. Kennedy asked Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to visit Vietnam and give him an independent assessment of the situation (p. 208):

Mansfield skipped some of the official briefings provided for him and had instead spent a four-hour lunch with American reporters, a lunch which confirmed his own doubts. The next day at the airport, as he prepared to leave, he was handed a statement drafted for him by the embassy (a small courtesy on the part of the ambassador in case the Senate Majority Leader did not know what to say. Mansfield, however, rejected it; and his own farewell speech, by its absence of enthusiasm, reflected his disenchantment. When he returned to Washington he gave Kennedy a report of mild caution for public consumption, but in addition he gave him a private account that was blunt and pessimistic about the future of it all. Kennedy had summoned Mansfield to his yacht, the Honey Fitz, where there was a party going on, and when the President read the report his face grew redder and redder and his anger mounted. Finally, he turned to Mansfield, just about the closest friend he had in the Senate, and snapped, “Do you expect me to take this at face value?” Mansfield answered, “You asked me to go out there.” Kennedy looked at him again, icily now, and said “Well, I’ll read it again.” It was an important conversation because it showed that if the policy had not fooled anyone else, it had deceived the deceivers.

Knowing that the war is going poorly in general is one thing. But if you want to change policy, you have to craft a credible alternative, and that requires a lot of information. During internal debates over Vietnam policy, war skeptics found themselves systematically outmaneuvered by the military bureaucracy, which kept tight control over information that could have been used to build an argument for alternative policies:

In September [1963], with the bureaucracy as divided as ever, Kennedy decided to try and get information from both Lodge and Harkins on a long list of specific questions.

The [Henry Cabot] Lodge [Jr.] report was thoroughly pessimistic, while the [Paul] Harkins report was markedly upbeat, filled with assurance, but also bewildering because it seemed to be based on the debate in Washington rather than the situation in Saigon. In it, the puzzled White House aides found a reference by Harkins to an outgoing cable of [Maxwell] Taylor’s. They checked out the number of the Taylor cable, but could find no record of it in the White House. Sensing that something was wrong, one of the White House aides called over to the Pentagon for a copy of the Taylor cable, giving the number, though being careful to call a low-ranking clerk, not someone in the Chairman’s office who might have understood the play. The young corporal was very co-operative and came up with the answer the aides wanted, a remarkably revealing cable from Taylor to Harkins explaining just how divided the bureaucracy was, what the struggle was about… and then outlining which questions to answer and precisely how to answer them.

The cable had been unearthed just before a key National Security Council meeting. The White House staff was very angry and felt that Taylor had been completely disloyal, although Kennedy himself was more fatalistic than upset, perhaps being more aware of the conflicting pulls on Taylor’s loyalty… In the intensity of the debate the incident quickly passed, although it did convince some of the White House staff members of what they had suspected all along, that Harkins’ response and attitudes were being almost completely controlled by Taylor, with Krulak acting as something of a messenger between them, and with [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara’s own position thus limited by his necessity of going along with what were deemed to be military facts. Later the civilians asked to have a set of cable machines in the White House so this sort of thing could be monitored, and the military readily agreed. The next day some fourteen machines were moved into the White House basement, grinding out millions of routine words per day, and the civilians knew that they were beaten by the sheer volume, that it was impossible to monitor it all. They surrendered and the machines were moved out, almost as quickly as they had been moved in.

Theoretically, the military provides objective reports to the president and dutifully carries out his orders. In practice, the president and his staff are deeply dependent on the military for the information they need to craft the orders in the first place, and at least in the 1960s they used that power aggressively. In my next post I’ll look at the role of the State Department, which is supposed to serve as an alternative source of expertise about foreign affairs, but failed to avert disaster in Vietnam.

Cord Blomquist did a good post over at TLF about the USTR/open source software issue. It set off a lively debate in the comments that, I think, reflected a common misconception about what free software is and why it’s valuable.

Before digging into that, I should be clear that I don’t generally think it’s a good idea for government software procurement decisions to be dictated from the top down. I’ve had first-hand experience with working at the bottom of large IT hierarchies, and so I know it’s incredibly annoying to have distant bureaucrats constrain the tools you’re allows to use. I wouldn’t endorse a proposal for the federal CTO to mandate that all federal agencies use free software.

But a some people, including a significant number of libertarians, make the stronger claim that government agencies at all levels have an obligation to be neutral between proprietary and free software. This is generally phrased as saying that the government shouldn’t “distort the market” or “pick winners and losers.” On this view, the government has an obligation to make its decision based on the characteristics of the software, without discriminating based on licensing or business models.

To see why this is wrong, consider the following hypothetical. Suppose federal agencies had a long-standing practice of obtaining their care fleets by renting them from companies like Enterprise and Hertz (or, more likely, government contractors that charged ten times as much as Enterprise and Hertz would). Now suppose the GSA did a study and found that the government would save hundreds of millions of dollars by purchasing automobiles rather than renting them. Suppose further that many agencies were finding that the limitations of their rental contracts (mileage limits, reporting requirements, slow repair service, whatever) were making it harder for them to do their jobs. So the GSA issues new guidelines saying that government agencies should henceforth prefer buying to renting.

Now, there are all sorts of good arguments on both sides of the renting-vs-owning decision. But one argument that doesn’t make sense is to say that government would be “distorting the market” if it decided to buy cars rather than leasing them. A purchased car is a different kind of product than a leased car. If car ownership serves the government’s needs better than car rental, the government is entitled to purchase cars without worrying about how this affects companies in the business of renting cars.

The same point applies to software. The difference between Windows Server 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux isn’t just that one was produced by humorless suits in Redmond and the other was produced by dirty hippies in Raleigh. It’s not even that one costs a lot of money and the other one is free. (Support costs will often dwarf licensing fees anyway).

The key difference is that proprietary software comes with a lot of restrictions about how it may be used—restrictions that don’t apply to free software. Probably the most important freedom free software gives provides is the freedom to switch vendors. If a government agency chooses a proprietary software package, the agency is likely to find itself with serious lock-in problems down the road. Switching vendors will mean switching software platforms, which will involve large conversion and training costs. In contrast, if an agency chooses a free software-based solution, the lock-in problems will be less severe. The agency can easily bring in a new firm to provide support for the existing software. Or it may not need to hire outside contractors at all—the internal IT staff may be capable of fully supporting the system internally.

The freeness of free software is not an esoteric detail about how software was produced, nor is it primarily a matter of ideology. Rather, free software provides direct and tangible benefits to their users. If property rights is a bundle of sticks, free software vendors give you all the sticks up front, whereas proprietary vendors give you only some of the sticks so they can charge you later for the others. And some of the missing sticks are things that actually matter to government agencies. So it strikes me as a no-brainer that the government would—all else being equal—prefer the type of software that comes with fewer strings attached.

It’s absurd to say that the government has an obligation to be indifferent between firms that attach strings to their products and firms that don’t do so. Obviously, there are circumstances where a firm makes such a great product that it’s worth putting up with the associated strings. But it should be equally obvious that software freedom is a factor to weigh in software purchase decisions. And I don’t anything wrong with reminding government IT workers to keep this factor in mind when they make software purchasing decisions..