Aaron Swartz: A Lesson

Aaron Swartz was the 26-year-old Internet freedom activist who committed suicide on Friday, as the date approached for his trial on federal charges. Swartz was charged on several counts after he allegedly downloaded a bunch of scientific papers from JSTOR via a connection he established in an MIT wiring closet. It was a peculiar act --- Swartz was a fellow at Harvard and could have accessed the papers in an authorized way. I leave it to others to speculate on the symbolic significance, but it's pretty clear he wasn't accessing anything he wasn't already authorized to have, and he wasn't planning to make any money by doing it.

I didn't know Swartz well, but it was a privilege to know him at all (we were in a meeting together at Charlie Nesson's house, strategizing about the Google Books settlement).  The New York Times has a good obituary---not easy to write, and it must have been written in haste. A memorial site has been set up to gather reminiscences and emotions. Aaron's partner has written a heart-wrenching remembrance.

I feel I know him better than I really do because I have known others who, in certain ways, resembled him: brilliant, intense, sleepless, idealistic, principled, ready to test the edges of conventional behavior. Aaron Greenspan seems to be right when he considers himself, in some ways, a kindred spirit. 

Greenspan shares with two of my other students, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, the distinction of having Harvard hassle them because of what some at the university regarded as sketchy behavior with information resources. Gates famously used Harvard's PDP-10 to write the original BASIC interpreter; there were those at Harvard who took a dim view of that, since the machine was funded by the Defense Department for government-sponsored research. A version of the Zuckerberg story is told in the Social Network movie; it was in fact reported in the Crimson at the time. That report suggests that Zuckerberg got off without any serious penalty. In all these cases, the hotter heads at Harvard did not prevail, and the students wound up perhaps annoyed at Harvard, but not seriously punished. (Of course, they also may have done nothing wrong, but that is never a guarantee that some vague rule will not be stretched to fit the facts of a case.)

Then there is the case of Robert Tappan Morris, Jr., who let loose the Internet Worm in 1987, while he was a Cornell graduate student. At the time the anger directed at Morris was intense, and he wound up with a felony conviction, and was fined, served probation, and had to do community service. Today many experts think even that was excessive punishment, given Morris's benign intent. After Cornell expelled him, he earned his PhD at Harvard, and he too has gone onto a successful career--he is a professor at MIT.

I thought of all these people when I read Larry Lessig's angry post about Aaron Swartz, Prosecutor as Bully.

I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you. 

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.” 

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it. 

Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.One word, and endless tears.

Swartz's family released its own statement, calling out not just the federal prosecutors but MIT:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

 

What is it that leads those with prosecutorial authority to abuse it? In the case of the federal government in the Aaron Swartz case, there was almost certainly some score-settling; the feds decided to drop an earlier case against Swartz involving downloaded government documents once they realized that Swartz had done nothing illegal. But what was MIT's rationale for going after Swartz for exactly the kind of hack at which the Institute has traditionally winked?

I don't know, but I wonder if it isn't a phenomenon related to the unconscionable over-prosecution of the Gov 1310 "cheating case" at Harvard. (See Why Harvard Mishandled Its Cheating Scandal for a cogent analysis by Richard Levick, a Forbes blogger.)

Decisions like these about charging and disciplining young people should be informed by the fact that they are growing up, learning the ropes, and testing the limits. They may be operating in a zone where the rules are unclear, or have been interpreted differently in different circumstances. Context and intent should be important considerations. The very fact that the statutes allow a range of responses, including none at all, implies that superficially similar cases need not get the same response. As Lessig says, I get wrong. But I also get proportionality.

There is a lot of action on the Web about how to respond to Swartz's death. There is a petition to pardon him for the crime for which he was to stand trial. There is another petition to remove the US Attorney responsible for prosecuting his case. There is a paper-posting protest on Twitter, in honor of Swartz's JSTOR-liberating hack.

But I hope authorities everywhere, in college and in the state, remember the rewards to society of restraint in prosecuting young people in cases like these, where malicious intent and even the profit motive are entirely missing. Put yourself in the shoes of the alleged criminals, and don't try to build your career by showing how harsh you can be. Hounding a young person may cost a career, or a life.

Gentle hands, I beg you all.

Unlearning Liberty

Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, by Greg Lukianoff, draws on the files of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to document the infringement of free speech at American colleges. It's an exhaustive catalog -- at least I hope it is exhaustive; I'd hate to think that misguided administrators somewhere could come up with any forms of censorship beyond those enumerated. It's also a very readable account, with chapters on freshman orientation, student groups, the campus judiciary, and so on, each illustrated by examples. A large number of the case studies are such blatant abuses that they would be silly if they were not so sad: Rules outlawing "offensive" or "hurtful" speech, or even worse, speech that is perceived as offensive or hurtful. The only way a speaker could be sure not to violate such a standard would b not to speak at all!

Really, some of the prohibitions are so remarkably stupid that there were times as I started to read the book that I wondered whether the subject was worth an entire book. For example, Lukianoff points out that a prohibition of speech that would offend any religion, or be considered blasphemous, would send any latter day Martin Luther off campus to post his 95 theses. Don't the people who draft and promulgate such rules see how inconsistent that is with the basic idea of a university, where ideas can be freely stated and discussed?

But Lukianoff does not stop with the laugh lines. He takes us through the real problems with these tendencies, and they are not ultimately about political correctness or the suppression of conservative ideas, for example, though that is what one most often hears from critics of campus speech codes and the like.

The book's analysis has two special merits. First, Lukianoff manages to avoid making the right wing the source of all the complaints. A number of cases are politically neutral, and many are simply confused, where both left and right have tied themselves in protective knots in which they find themselves trapped.

And second, Lukianoff takes the time to go back to first principles. The reason free speech is important is because debate is important, and the reason debate is important is that it is the key tool of deliberative democracies. If we don't train our students to argue with each other, without crying foul every time one side hurts the other's feelings, we will wind up with … a dysfunctional Congress, maybe?

So the book's mission is fundamentally civic, and I applaud it for that reason. Let's hope that university administrators will remember that our form of government relies on an educated citizenry. If everyone simply votes their immediate self-interests, we won't survive as an enlightened, prosperous nation. All the great figures in American politics, from Jefferson on down, seem to have understood this in ways it is very hard to find today, when education is seen mostly as a tool for economic advancement. (See my Harvard Magazine piece with Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Renewing Civic Education.)

The root cause

Lukianoff identifies a root cause of campus censorship, a particular way in which good intentions have gone completely out of control. It is the growth of the student-service bureaucracy, the large number of non-academic staff whose job it is to make students feel good about attending their institution.

Multiculturalism, feminism, and so on often get the blame, but, like them or not, these cultural forces were not the problem in themselves. What happened was that as colleges diversified their student bodies, the faculty did not bear the burden of deciding what concomitant changes needed to happen. The administrative fix was to staff up with experts: People who allegedly knew what black students needed, what women needed, what gay students needed, and so on. These folks, many of them fine people, are not for the most part academic professionals, and do not instinctively think of academic freedom or the civic function of debate as core to their jobs. It is perfectly natural for student service deans to conclude that a key to making students feel comfortable on campus is to discourage their fellow students from saying things that will make them uncomfortable.

We are going through the same cycle now with social class and income level as the parameter.

A second force supporting the creation of a student-service bureaucracy whose values are not primarily academic or civic is the shift of colleges toward competitive entities vying for students as consumers. The costs of this trend in rock climbing walls and lavish student centers has been well documented, but it also means the creation of offices and deans and subdeans for "student life." That never used to be a concept at Harvard---student life used to mean the Houses ("a social device for a moral purpose," as Lowell called them) and student organizations (about which the College itself used to be, for the most part, benignly indulgent but not heavily involved, except for athletic teams and large musical groups).

Most recently, the student service bureaucracy is being called on in the battle for mental health. An unhappy student is a potentially suicidal student, goes the reasoning, so we need to do more to see to it that students are happy. So Harvard now has a committee to examine stress. I hope the committee recognizes that teaching students to cope with stress will in the long run serve them much better than trying to create a less stressful environment.

Now all these threads tend to bolster the self-sustaining bureaucracy in which academic values and faculty input are of very little relevance. This is the argument of another excellent book, The Fall of the Faculty. There are large parts of student life in which the faculty is not involved at all, and so there are many meetings planning freshman orientation and rules for residence life where there is no professor present who might say, "Well, perhaps, but isn't that something the students should debate and discuss, rather than being told?" (Among the funnier passages in Lukianoff's book are where he documents debate being avoided because it is so time-consuming and the outcome so uncertain; more efficient, given all the other demands on time, just to tell students the correct answer.)

Once the student service bureaucracy became large and empowered, it began to have its own conferences, its own handbooks of best practices, and so on. It began to have some of the characteristics of a profession, with its own standards for protecting itself, its own consultants, who left their universities to establish themselves as hired guns to tell other universities how to set up the best programs, and so on. Perverse financial incentives arose, for example, having regional accreditation boards consider the three threads and the extent to which an institution had staffed up for them a criterion in determining how well the institution was being run. Meanwhile, the faculty orbit became more and more disconnected from all these matters.

In other words, there is no longer an active, routinely present voice for free speech at most of the places where plans that abridge free speech are being formulated. It is my belief that until the faculty reasserts control of student affairs from the student affairs bureaucracy, nothing will happen to change this basic reality. So wherever you are, look at the juncture of the faculty to the student service deans and ask if the former has any influence over the latter. In most places the answer is no, and that is the way all parties prefer it---the faculty are happy to interact with students mainly via the classroom, library, and laboratory, and the deans prefer not to have the faculty looking over their shoulder---but that is, ultimately, why howlers such as Lukianoff documents come about.

The Harvard cases

I struggled with these issues when I was dean, and have continued to encounter them in the subsequent years. My only real criticism of Lukianoff's book is to wonder whether "censorship" is really the right label for all the cases he discusses. Because I was close to some of these cases, perhaps I am too sensitive to their subtleties. (Lukianoff presents some horrifying cases from the Harvard professional schools, in particular a couple from the Law School where they really should know better, but I can't comment on those from any first hand experience.)

I don't think either Lukianoff or I am wrong about the Freshman Pledge that Harvard floated in the fall of 2011 (p. 91 of the book). Though nobody ever said that students would be punished for not signing, the plan to list the names of those who had signed it and omit those who had not was so coercive as to count as abusive. The fact that the pledge itself was philosophically naive and semantically peculiar only made matters worse. It was basically an amateur job. One of the enduring mysteries to me is, where was the voice of the faculty when this idea was being hatched?

I think I also agree with Lukianoff about the de-listing of the Harvard Summer School courses of Subramanian Swamy, in the course of a routine faculty vote approving the course catalog (p. 90). Swamy had written an offensive article in an Indian newspaper; it had nothing to do with his teaching introductory economics in the Harvard Summer School. I wish the Economics Department had not re-hired him after he had excited such antipathy the previous summer for no good reason (there was no reason to have a debate at Harvard about whether India should annex Bangladeshi territory). But I thought it was a dangerous precedent for the rest of the faculty to peremptorily cancel Swamy's courses, and I had a friendly debate about the merits of the case on WBUR with my colleague Diana Eck. (Just as I feared, a few days later some undergraduates proposed that Harvey Mansfield should get the same treatment as Swamy, for his anti-feminist sentiments.)

The thing that makes the Swamy case a little more complicated in my mind is that it was very nearly a hiring decision. Swamy seems to be a crony of the Harvard economists and his position was renewed annually, but he had no contractual expectation that he would be rehired from year to year. So just to change the circumstances a bit, let's suppose that Swamy had never worked at Harvard before and was one of several comparable candidates for an assistant professorship. Would it be "censorship" if the Economics department did not hire him because of his inflammatory (though in the US, perfectly lawful) writings on political matters in India? It is certainly a defensible position to say that only teaching and research in the candidate's area of professional expertise should count. But in fact we want faculty also to fill a variety of collegial and citizenship roles, and we inevitably try to peer into their character and understand their values since we expect that our students will learn more from them than their technical subjects. When candidates come to campus for interviews, we chat informally with them one on one, and take them out for nice, relaxed dinners. Is all that inappropriate and irrelevant? There is a good argument to be made for that---someone once told me that the Math Department thought such interviews were a waste of time since the senior faculty had read all the candidates' papers, and their quality was the only legitimate basis for hiring decisions. But it doesn't seem to me wrong to try to figure out if future faculty will be people we will respect for more than their scholarship and teaching.

The Larry Summers case (p. 92) presents a different set of complexities. Though in fact Summers lost the confidence of the faculty for many other reasons---and in particular, because he lied to the faculty when asked if he had a view about the Andrei Shleifer affair---in the popular re-telling, the faculty ran him out of town on a rail because of his speculations about female intelligence in remarks to the National Bureau of Economic Research. I have always thought that the dominance of this tale, over the Shleifer affair, as the basis for the faculty no-confidence vote was in no small measure the work of Summers himself and his allies. That is, there is a kind of heroism in being dissed for speaking unpopular speculations, and exciting over-reactions; there is no dignity at all in defending a self-dealing protege and then misrepresenting your role in protecting his reputation.

The vote the faculty took was a simple no-confidence statement; each individual who voted could choose his or her own reasons for lacking confidence in the president. So the vote, as a binary classifier, made very strange bedfellows. I personally thought the Shleifer affair was disqualifying. But I also thought the NBER speech was part of a pattern that made Summers unsuitable to be president---though not unsuitable to be an economics professor, to be sure. That is because I do not think that the free-speech guarantees that protect citizens and professors apply to presidents or deans. You sacrifice, out of respect for the welfare of the institution, some of your free speech rights when you take such a job. The job of the president is to represent the institution's best interests, and it was not in Harvard's best interests for the president to piss off a lot of people unnecessarily. This was not the first time he had done it, and he plainly never would accept my characterization of his responsibilities. But IMHO he was simply wrong to say, as he did at the beginning of the NBER speech, that he was not speaking as president. When the president of Harvard speaks publicly (and this was public for all intents and purposes), he cannot shed his presidential role.

So bottom line---though it wasn't the main thing on my mind, and I agree with those who say it wasn't that outrageous (or even that original---a lot of what he said is in Pinker's Blank Slate), it seemed to me one more reason to lack confidence in his presidential qualities, and I voted accordingly. I don't consider that censorious because I thing presidents sacrifice some of their freedom of speech when they take the job.

Finally, the Christian groups. Lukianoff does not specifically discuss a Harvard case, but there was one of the kind he discusses on p. 169. I'm probably closer to his view now than I was then, but at least in this case the rationale for Harvard insisting on nondiscriminatory membership on the basis of creed was not the one Lukianoff cites (sympathy for gay rights). It was instead Harvard's nasty history with anti-Semitism. I was reluctant to grant an exception (a constitution stating that you have to be Christian to join this group) that might be exploited to exclude Jews from other groups (you can't join this group if you are Jewish). Though the exception was ultimately made and peace reigned, without FIRE being called down on me, the right thing to have done would probably have been to have carved out a special category of religious groups, with some neutral committee to decide whether a group was pulling our leg about its religious purposes in order to achieve some exclusionary membership agenda. But that was long ago and I haven't looked at the language for student groups in a long time.

A final question

There is one category about which I remain confused, and it is typified by my interaction with President Faust about Professor Michael Porter's having dubbed the Libyan government of Ghaddafi a "democracy" and being paid handsomely for doing so. I thought that sullied the reputation of Harvard and suggested that any of us could be bought for a price. It seemed to me important for the university to say---without threatening to punish Porter---that what Porter did was inconsistent with truth-telling and other basic values of the university. The president's response was that her job was to protect Porter's right of free speech, and mine, but not to pick sides. (See my write up on this blog for more details.)

This did not and still does not seem right to me. But I wonder what Lukianoff thinks. Is it ever right for a president to criticize or chastise a professor for what the professor says? If not, can the university really be said to represent any values at all? If so, what of the argument (made by people I respect) that criticism, even with no punitive force, will unacceptably chill free speech on campus, and make other faculty, especially untenured faculty, reluctant to say what they really think?

Great job, Greg Lukianoff. Congratulations!

The Gun Owner Next Door

A couple of observations about the Journal News publishing online a map of gun ownership, and all the high drama that has followed (now the newspaper is hiring armed guards).

First, if there is a problem, isn't the problem with the law that makes the names and addresses of licensed gun owners public information, not with the newspaper that decides to publish public information?

Now it is a favorite theme of mine that what used to be "public," in the sense that you could go to town hall and make an individual query about it, is very much more "public" today when someone can sit in Islamabad and look at the information on a Google map. But still -- there was a reason for the provision that this information be public. What were those reasons? Do they still hold? Does the difference in scale really matter? Why not fix the law if that is the problem?

And second, even the gun owner map is a replay of an old story. In 2008 a Memphis, TN newspaper published exactly the same map for its neighborhoods. All the same arguments were put forward: Gun owners would be endangered. No, they wouldn't; if you are going to commit a burglary the last place you want to break into is a house with a gun in it. Well then the house next door will be endangered (I am not sure the gun owners who advanced this argument ever got the support of their next door neighbors in their claim). And so on.

Two CMU computer scientists noted that if they waited a few months they could study the crime data and maybe draw some conclusions on the basis of actual numbers rather than speculations. 

“… despite activism on the part of gun owners against the publication of such databases, we found no evidence that publishing the identities of gun permit holders led to an increase in crimes aimed at stealing their weapons, relative to other forms of theft or burglaries. If anything, the loss of privacy seemed to carry a positive, but short-lived, externality for both those whose identities were published on the database, and for some of those living near them.”
Guns, Privacy, and Crime, by Aquisti and Tucker.

In other words, the attendant publicity made burglars with wits tend to stay away from neighborhoods with a lot of guns. The effect wasn't that strong and it faded fairly quickly with the passage of time, but if anything, experience would support the hypothesis that when there is publicity about a neighborhood having a lot of guns, and even exactly where they are, burglars tend to burgle elsewhere. Until they forget or a new crop of burglars arrive. And of course a lot of burglars don't read the newspapers and their behavior wouldn't be affected at all. 

Am I the only guy who remembers this study? Have the authors or anyone else done more?

More importantly, does the gun lobby know this study? Probably. They keep good track of what is being said about them.

But after weeks of mourning over the six-year-old victims in Sandy Hook, they feel a desperate need to be victims again, to recapture their status as the freedom loving folks the government hates. For the gun lobby to act victimized by the publication of these maps, in spite of the fact that the science points in the opposite direction, is contemptible.

Why I Will Not Be Going To See "The Impossible" This Holiday Weekend

I don't usually use this blog for personal stuff, but I think it might be helpful to others if I told my holiday travel story. No movies about tropical vacations interrupted by typhoons, please.

When my children were younger, we went to Aruba several times over winter break. We love the island --- easy to get to, reliable sun, sea, and sand, safe, friendly, and neither too large nor too small. So we decided to go back for Christmas this year, with my wife and younger daughter.

We stayed at the Divi golf resort, a few steps from the beautiful beach. (Great place.) My wife and I went in for a swim. She had a little trouble getting out of the water -- the swells had started to get pretty heavy, and when they broke on the shore, the receding water was hard to walk against. I decided to float around for a few minutes more.

By the time I tried to get out, I couldn't. It turned out there was a storm at sea --- an hour later there were very heavy rains --- and the swells were quite huge. I managed to get myself standing in a position where huge waves were breaking over my head but I also could not walk out of the water at all because of the undertow. I took 3 or 4 waves, timing my inhalations, and then a really big one knocked me off my feet and swept me under.

I smashed my head on an submerged rock, came back to the surface, tried to right myself, got knocked down again, and very quickly some people spotted me and pulled me out. They supported me while I walked up to a place I could sit down while they sought medical attention. Within a few minutes my wife and daughter found me, so I was relieved of any decision making. I was taken by ambulance to the Aruba hospital --- only one on the island but only a block from the beach.

I spent the afternoon in the ER, getting complete head and spine CT scans, X rays, blood tests, etc. Diagnosis: First rib on the left fractured; fissure of transverse process of first thoracic vertebra. 6 cm gash in my scalp required stitching. (Lots of blood I gather, but the stitching was almost an afterthought.) Sundry lacerations on my back, and various limbs probably stretched in ways they were not intended to move. But no concussion, never lost consciousness, never aspirated any seawater, neurological, circulatory, and pulmonary function normal. (Well, as normal as they ever were -- I am a Type I diabetic, so that added a little extra drama during the work-up but made no real difference.) Spent overnight under observation and was discharged the next morning. We spent another 3 nights on the island as planned, not partying quite as hard as intended, and returned home on schedule.

So the bottom line is that I have the privilege of sitting here with the Alamo Bowl on TV in the background telling you how much I hurt all over, but there is actually nothing to do about any of my aches and pains except wait for that rib and whatnot to heal themselves. I have been through this business of fractured ribs twice before, and I hate it. (For those of you haven't had the pleasure, the problem is that almost everything you do with any part of your body, breathing for example, involves contracting your rib cage, and that is extremely uncomfortable.)

On the other hand there are things I would have hated worse than complaining about the pain while watching football games on TV, like breaking my neck and being paralyzed, or smashing my face in rather than needing a few scalp stitches, or drowning of course, which could easily have happened. Cardiac arrest might have been another likely failure mode; I was seriously hyperventilating when I was pulled out of the water and I am, as a waitress kindly reminded me the next night, not as young as I once was. (It is nice to be able to tell myself that those endless hours on the treadmill and ellipse every morning for the past 3 or 4 decades were actually well invested. If you think it's monotonous when you do it, keep it up -- you never know when your heart may need to be able to handle extreme stress.)

So I am very, very lucky.

The hospitalization was great, except for when the big guys transferred my overweight, banged-up body off and on the imaging tables. The doctors all seemed to be Dutch (and they tended to be young female, good-looking, and skilled with needle and suture). A thoroughly professional experience. Total cost, including the ambulance, was about $3000. So thanks to everyone at the hospital, and the overnight nursing staff that watched me closely. You were great.

Thanks of course the the folks who pulled me out of the water, whoever you are. I appreciate it, and it should not go without saying, as we all know that there are those of our species who would not want to get involved.

Thanks to Marlyn and Annie for nursing me, and for putting up with my grumpiness when I want everything put just a little closer so I don't have to stretch! Not the romantic get-away I had in mind.

And finally, in the hope it will do someone some good: Even if there are lots of people swimming and you are on a pristine sandy beach, if the surf looks too big when it breaks, get out of the water. The line between fun and catastrophe is pretty narrow.

Now: more Tylenol, please.

Jell-O and US Broadband Inferiority

As you drive from east to west across the US, there is a meridian in the breadbasket, somewhere in the eastern Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, where gelatin salads start to appear in the supermarket deli cases. In the prairies it is not only acceptable but fashionable to serve molded, multicolored Jell-O with grapes, pineapple, and heaven knows what else arranged inside it. Once you get over the Continental Divide the fashion fades out. It's not a thing on either coast.

How did this get started? It's not an ethnic fashion. The folks who settled the Great Plains were Norwegians and Swedes and Germans, and gelatin is not an ethnic treat anywhere in Europe. Or anywhere else, as far as I know!

No, it's because there was a time when only rich folks could make Jello on their farms in the summer. People who were rich enough to have their farms electrified. Once Jell-O got imprinted as a luxury item, it remained fashionable even when everybody could have it.

You see, electricity itself was a luxury in the early 20th century, and gelatin salads were a proxy for being rich enough to have electric power delivered to your place. In her brilliantly troubling new book Captive Audience, Susan Crawford quotes this 1905 dismissal of government interference with the electricity market.

The ownership and operation of municipal light plants stands upon a different basis from that of the ownership of water works, which it is so often compared. Water is a necessity to the health and life of every individual member of a community … It must be supplied in order to preserve the public health, whether it can be done proitably or not, and must be furnished, not to a few individuals, but to every individual.
Electric lights are different. Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation.

This is exactly the argument being used today against government involvement in broadband. It is why children even in such hardly remote locales as western Massachusetts have to go to public libraries to do their homework. Comcast and Verizon just don't find it profitable to run cables and fibers into rural locales.

Those profits are maximized by managing scarcity. with the cooperation of a deregulatory-minded Congress, always hungry for campaign contributions from big corporations. As a result, what the FCC laughably calls its broadband plan of 2010 would have every American household getting 4 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload by 2020 --- with 100 million households getting up to 100 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload. The South Korean plan, by contrast, is for every household to get 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) right now!

I recommend this book to everyone. It explains why my ophthalmologist can't send my retinal scans from his Boston to his Cambridge office electronically (that example explains why symmetric channels, with comparable upload and download speeds, are essential for economic development). Why the backup service Mozy will use postal mail to send you your backed up files on disk if your computer crashes -- the files were uploaded incrementally but to download them all at once would take a week or more.

The US is going to be a second-rate economy if we don't wake up to the simple fact that some regulation in communication technologies is needed to create universal service, and ensuring that service is one of the functions of government. Broadband Internet service is like electricity really turned out to be, and not as the privately owned electric utilities wanted the public to see it at the turn of the 20th century.

Educational Wisdom from Another Age department

Continuing an old series.

…[E]ven if we sacrifice the letter of the old Bachelor of Arts degree, we should strive to preserve its spirit. This spirit is threatened at present in manifold ways,---by the upward push of utilitarianism and kindergarten methods, by the downward push of professionalism and specialization, by the almost irresistible pressure of commercial and industrial influences. … The time is above all one for careful thinking and accurate definition. This, it is to be feared, will prove unwelcome doctrine to the ears of an age that hopes to accomplish its main ends by the appointment of committees, and has developed, in lieu of real communion among men, nearly every form of gregariousness. -- Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (1908).

He would have loved Facebook.

Decline of Civilization Department (Part II)

I just filled out a recommendation web form for a student applying to a PhD program at Stanford. The form informed me: "The applicant has waived their right to view this recommendation."

I don't mean to pick on Stanford -- I bet those from other top schools have adopted this convenient barbarism also. I will watch.