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My observations on the Decay of Language have made it to the Independent, albeit in a somewhat truncated and mysterious form, ie leaving out the bits about No 10's spelling incompetence and not making it clear that the opening passages were not by me but from a reader.

Still, the main point is conveyed to the Indy's erudite army of readers.

Fame. At last.

Perhaps written English is going to mutate into three streams.

A 'high' stream written by an elite able to master English vocabulary and grammar to the level currently seen in eg the Independent.

A 'medium' stream used by people writing formal messages to each other (eg a Prime Minister writing to Parliament), full of what we now would see as mistakes but clear enough for the job.

And a 'low' stream of text speech and general linguistic anarchy for SMS-ers, Twits and Facebookers and all the other armies of people communicating online, who just want to say it in as few key-strokes as poss where prcsn doesnt matter  ROTFLMAO.

Ooops. It's happened already.

The question is, how much emphasis and effort are to be put into learning High English at schools? If none, how will it survive? 

And will there be anyone around to teach it?  

IWBAPTAKYAIYSTA

Most regular readers of this site are familiar with the immortal line from The Inimitable Jeeves: when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primaeval swamps…

 

Anyway, that’s what it’s been like behind the scenes of Britblog Roundup this week – the various hosts and hostesses bellowing primaevally among themselves about what and how the Roundup should round up. Only one death so far…

 

BBRU hosts are supposed to track down lively examples of the blogging genre. But there is a lot of blogging out there to choose from, not least corners of the Internet teeming with allegedly English nationalism which spirals off into anti-semitism, ‘islamophobia’, xenophobia and strident intolerance of pretty much everything.

 

BBRU’s policy is to give all that a wide berth and focus instead on other stuff.

 

So, getting on with it…

 

* * * * *

Let’s start with Climate Change (Or Not). A good week for so-called Sceptics as the mainstream media finally have started to look at bad science, exaggerations and conflicts of interest which all have infiltrated governments' environmental/climate policies in recent years.

 

Whatever one thinks about climate issues (which are fiendishly complex), a small but unrelenting part of the blogosphere has used spontaneous mass networking to look hard at tough technical questions and leap ahead of the mainstream media, shooting yawning holes in the credibility of British/EU/US and wider climate policy. This profoundly democratic development exemplifies the waning power of governments and legacy media to shape public opinion.

 

EU Referendum has done a startling job in rummaging around in the myriad commercial and other activities of IPCC leader Dr Rajendra Pachauri, to the point of making it on to TV in India. See his latest piece on how climate change may usefully be making for greater rainfall in the Sahara, plus his argument that the truth is being served best by networks of free bloggers:

 

In the free (and rapid) exchange of information and ideas (and mutual criticism), it is us working as a loose community who most closely approach the scientific ideal. This is, of course, why we are winning the intellectual argument. The political battle, though, has yet to come.

 

Devil’s Kitchen hammers away at this subject from a libertarian angle. He lambasts those who such as Sunny Hundal who still defend the core Climate Change/IPCC position:

 

What Sunny hasn't grasped—or, rather, wilfully refuses to grasp—is that if one or more claims are suspect, then they are all suspect.

 

Quite. And it’s having results. Talking Clock points out that UK public opinion is now changing fast.

 

Bishop Hill likewise has achieved planetary reknown by hitting plenty of fat lazy climate targets. Here he is again, drilling down into the data.

 

* * * * *

From one wise Prelate effortlessly to another, and the realms of ‘religio-political’ agendas.

 

Archbishop Cranmer gives us a Conservative Creed.

 

Wantage Pastor Neil Townsend loves to blog about the excitement of his faith! And he uses exclamation marks! Lots of them!

 

The Heresiarch pores over Mrs Blair, religion and a punch in the mouth.

 

Penny Red rails against Simon Jenkins’s views about the Pope from her exciting socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer, journalist, tea-drinking, smoking, toast-eating perspective, helpfully giving her work a coarse title to make sure we won’t want to read it: Does Simon Jenkins shit in the woods?

 

Over in central Europe Odessablog is doing his best to explain to us Ukraine’s elections. A dirty job but someone has to do it.

 

Nourishing Obscurity boasts of his Russian and Serbian (Боже Боже) and French girlfriends. Having wallowed in some of the deepest, lushest European integration on offer, he remains pro-Europe but anti-EU: down with Euro-Quislings, down.

 

Witterings from Witney laments the fact that Dover is being hived off from England as part of a new European region. (Nifty map.) By contrast councillor Philip Booth (Green) is striving to give Stroud the nocturnal profile of North Korea.

 

Up in Stroud Green ward (no relation) in Haringey, Green Party candidate Sarah Cope is being driven witless by local housing socialism:

 

As a council flat resident, I have long battled with the powers that be to get even the simplest repair job done – and had to suffer a lot of ill-will and sometimes staggering levels of rudeness from staff…

 

… A resident in a council block is terrified of the mice that run amok in her abode. She cannot sleep and is having to stay with friends. Other residents complain but the Housing Manager says that unless EVERY resident in the large block complains, the interior of the flats cannot be treated. (I checked whether this is in fact the council’s rule, and it isn’t).

 

Two Conservative parliamentary candidates are blogging furiously. Dominic Raab is down the boozer in Stoke D’Abernon. Robert Buckland has some very brainy stuff about Legal Aid – is that really going to wow voters in Swindon South?

 

Labour Party stalwart Brian Barder has made it his life’s work painstakingly to damn Tony Blair for war crimes. Hey, Brian, how many times (if any) did you vote for him?

 

Two (Green) Doctors look at scandalous SNP abuses of Scottish parliamentary hospitality but make a wise suggestion:

 

… please let's not give it a "-gate" suffix. They're a dead horse in general, but Parliament's already had Piegate and Burgergate. We couldn't handle "blade of Scottish beef with roast onion mash and winter greens-gate".

 

* * * * *

And on to Writing. Good. And Bad.

 

Samuel Pepys reminds us how he helped invent elegant English.

 

The Top 100 Scottish Blogs are proclaimed. The winner is SNP Tactical Voting.

 

But who would want to miss No 97, namely Hythlodaeus who is another one looking closely at what Scottish politicians eat – and how mere mortals can pay to sit next to them at the trough?

 

Call me old fashioned, but I can’t take seriously blogs riddled with spelling errors. Such as plane stupid moaning about BAA’s role in Scottish tourism. Just embarassing.

 

Here by contrast is Paul Cornell with elegant writing and top-end sci-fi comic design – Indomitable Iron Man.

 

If by now you have not died of boredom, here is a beautiful piece by James Hamilton about the psychology of Brian Clough. Check out the video of Clough sternly gaslighting a fashion challenged youthful John Motson.

 

And Kaite Welsh looking at early palaeontologist Mary Anning - who discovered the first Icthyosaur:

 

… it was Mary’s lengthy career that inspired the nursery rhyme “She sells sea-shells on the sea shore”, but it was not until recently that this oddly-dressed woman from Lyme Regis has been given her due… Anning stumbled across the fossil of a strange monster with “flippers like a dolphin, a mouth like a crocodile, and a pointed snout like a swordfish.”

Phil Walker deftly helps Michael Moore identify a new, just economic order.

 

Phil’s blog is called The Melangerie. No relation to MyLingerie, aka knows as KnickersBlog. Get all your Valentine’s Day underpants here.

 

Any self-respecting blogger keeps a close eye on Search Engine Optimisation (the things you do on your site to soar from the utter obscurity of page 52 on Google to the utter obscurity of (say) page 2. And nothing being sacred, there are even Dirty Tricks here too, as David Naylor explains to the microscopic number of people able to follow him.

 

With your SEO neat and tidy, read The Conservative Blog’s Ten Blogging Commandments. I liked No 9: Clean your Teeth (Or your Blog will Lack Bite).

Alas some bloggers, even cool libertarian ones, just run out of road. So, farewell then, Charlotte Gore…

* * * * *

Very finally, two utterly beyond awesome things.

 

First, peezedtee laments the absence of schwung in today’s advertising, reminding us how toothpaste ads used to look and sound.

 

Second, many of you people out there are full of declinist ennui and looking for something to do with your empty lives.

 

So, here’s an idea. Reacquire Purpose and Meaning.

 

Dig out old video clips of Sid James. Then sit there for many long hours cutting out individual words by him, which you can then arrange painstakingly with electronic music to give us Sid James singing an obscure Pink Floyd song.

 

Aaargh. Dust On the Stylus tells us that it’s been done already – back in 1991, by Fortran 5. Who also got Derek Nimmo into a studio to sing Layla by Derek and The Dominoes.

 

How cool is that?

 

* * * * *

Next week’s BBRU is hosted by Trixy.

 

Make her life easy, readers. Send her a few lively links, via britblog @ gmail.com

My latest Eggcorn posting ended thusly:

Isn't a language like anything else? Without proper care and attention it just decays?

An eagle-eyed reader in Greece asked whether I had meant to add the question-mark. I replied that I had put it in to nod in the direction of the thought that maybe the idea of language 'decaying' is itself tendentious.

And lo, as if prompted, another blogging reader comments:

Language doesn't decay unless it ceases to be used for communication. It changes, sometimes other people's usage (or mistakes) grate upon those who say it differently, but the language itself is not in any danger.

Language has existed for thousands of years, performing its function adequately, without any care or attention at all, and most have never been subject to it at any time in their history.

A rabid free-marketeer like myself can have little complaint if things indeed change and millions of people don't mind too much if at all. Although I do object to my own language and identity changing because the state has effectively nationalised large parts of the teaching of English and simply can't do it properly.

I can not shake off the thought that language is a tool. And tools if neglected can just get blunt, or wear out, or otherwise be less good at doing some vital jobs.

Imagine the English language as deployed for most of the C20 to be a sharp knife - look at the deft work done with it by Orwell, Wodehouse, Joyce, Chandler, Bradbury and all the others.

If we start to 'lose' spellings and grammar as currently constituted and therefore some of the innermost subtlety of expression which together have made English such a towering force for human advancement round the world, aren't we all just poorer? We have fewer tools to do the mass of possible jobs with precision.

It's as if Rembrandt had only ten brushes of varying sizes instead of (say) sixteen, after a thief steals six. Sure, he'll manage to do a fine portrait. But it could have been even finer with those extra tools available. And he is diminished and demoralised if he knows that.

The issue is all too evident in the quality of writing now being served up in the FCO and across government by the nation's top graduates. A non-trivial proportion of it is unusable and sent back for reworking: it is simply not precise enough.

Or see Gordon Brown's letter to Parliament, riddled with errors. The office team sending it not only were too dopey to check properly that it was 100% - they seem to have been too dopey even to run the Spell/Grammar check too.

As a result, a product is produced which is less good and less clear and less authoritative than it could have been.

Sure, not much changes.

But standards help keep us all on our toes. And if a general sense of unstoppable 'declinism' sets in for our language (and so our very thought) as for everything else, that looks and smells like Decay to me.

Right here:

And here's the story behind it.

It's very good.

 

 

 

 

For no reason I can fathom this posting from April last year about Blogging Semiotic Remora Fish attracts a steady stream of rubbishy spam attempted comments aimed at selling running shoes. I merely sigh and delete them.

Why that one?

Remember all those eggcorns?

A nice one in Telegraph Mobile today:

European shares endure their worst week in almost a year as investors speculate whether Eurozone countries will tow the line.

Whereas in fact it should be ...

Meanwhile over at Plane Stupid:

The appointment puts BAA in an incredibly strong position to fight any increase in passenger duty or tourism taxes. It will allow the airport free reign to promote its expansion plans, which would lead to more noise and carbon emissions.

At my old school yesterday I was hearing how there are now few if any marks lost in exams for poor spelling.

Isn't a language like anything else? Without proper care and attention it just decays?

Here at The Monkey Cage is an interesting post on why so many countries which sign the Convention against Torture are themselves high on the list of practising torture.

Could they be ... hypocrites? Is it because they want to ingratiate themselves with the West?

Or is it rather to send a signal to their own people that they are even more evil than their hapless populations expected:

"See? Our depravity knows no limits. We're going to torture you more because we have signed the Convention, and we have signed the Convention because we're going to torture you more.

Tricky? Ha ha!

Now. Get back in line while I recharge this cattle-prodder..."

I'd be interested in Craig Murray's considered views on this conundrum, as he served in a country (Uzbekistan) where torture was horrendous and widespread. It exemplifies the problems we have in dealing with these places, not least at the UN where (apparently) we have to sit placidly as undemocratic countries lecture us on human rights.

And, yes, we can claim the moral high ground only if we deserve it.

But even if we do not always reach the loftiest pinnacles of the Moral High Ground, we usually sit a damn sight closer to them than those regimes who live in the deep dark Chasm of Brutality.

And enjoy the way the screams echo off the steep stone cliffs.

Ralph Peters praises the ruthlessness of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner who has authorised the expansion of 'drone' attacks on key terrorist suspects overseas:

The Pakistani Taliban is losing CEOs faster than Detroit ...

This is another Amazon Space issue. The best (if not only) way to deal with individual terrorist formations lurking in foreign lands - if the governments of the states concerned are unable or unwilling to do it - is not to invade the place and create all sorts of new tensions and contradictions.

Instead it is to proclaim them to be enemies and then hit them before they hit us. 

Thus a new international law precept starts to emerge.

Every country in our networked world benefits from the network. So every country has a responsibility to do what it can to defend the global network from attacks by criminal extremists trying to wreak wider havoc.

If a country can't or won't suppress extremists on its territory, it necessarily forfeits its sovereignty to the extent necessary to allow others to defend the network by taking such action as they see fit, with minimum intrusiveness and respectable proportionality.

These extremists challenge the West's very will to defend itself. Fine.

Whiz.

Bang. 

The decay of the Climate Change movement has reached the point where those of us politely pointing to some of its deep contradictions are no longer the 'denialists'. Rather the denialists are those who insist that the wheezing pantechnicon must roll onwards even as its wheels start to fall off.

It all got just too dodgy:

Likewise, in the years since Syed Hasnain “speculated” about glacial melt, the BBC, the CBC, CNN and thousands of newspapers around the world have hired specialist Environmental Correspondents on lavish salaries. Yet not one of them gave any serious examination to the claims of the IPCC report, or the “science” on which they rested...

... By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain.

In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier.

As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.

The problem remains simple. To generate the 'global concern' needed to achieve 'global action'', political leaderships in a number of key countries (UK to the fore) frothed up the issue beyond all reasonable political and scientific limits.

This, by the way, is another reason for the problems now facing the FCO in London. It fleetingly had as Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who made up for her inexperience in international relations by trying to turn the place into a campaigning organisation for Climate Change, skewing resources and achieving a step-change in dumbing down proper foreign policy work.

Sooner or later this project was bound to collide with reality, in one shape or form:

For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want.  It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. 

But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it.

Note! All of which is not to say that there is no long-term problem with the impact human economic development has on the environment.

Insofar as that is demonstrated and accepted, the best chance to do something about is to be totally transparent about the science, create incentives for investment in lower energy products and processes, and be a lot less insistent on unfeasibly large 'global' collectivist schemes involving state-to-state financial transfers which will end up creating waste and corruption.

Update: a neat analysis from Tim Worstall who (as usual) cuts through a lot of blather:

We’ve also read our Bastiat you see: look for what is hidden, not just what is in plain sight.

Our argument, the rational one, is not that we should do nothing: it’s that what is being done is the wrong thing.

Via the Browser, this heavyweight piece by Yves Smith at naked capitalism which looks at the issues swirling around the parlous position of Greece within the Eurozone and the wider implications.

Including this bold thought by Dani Rodrik:

I have an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full…

To see why this makes sense, note that deep economic integration requires that we eliminate all transaction costs traders and financiers face in their cross-border dealings. Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs. They generate sovereign risk, create regulatory discontinuities at the border, prevent global regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, and render a global lender of last resort a hopeless dream. The malfunctioning of the global financial system is intimately linked with these specific transaction costs.

Or is that a truism, wrapped up in clever language? That as long as there are many different market-places there is no one market-place?

Maybe the Climate/Copenhagen debacle reminds us that nation-states are not planning to abolish themselves for what is proclaimed the Greater Good?

Is this.

Do you want to use about a minute of your fleeting, oh-so-precious time left on Earth to watch a ridiculous cartoon of a vigorously dancing pair of buttocks?

Yes. You. Do.

So, what are you waiting for?

 

Is up and running at Suz Blog.

Good link to Love and Liberty's post:

New Labour’s 4,289 New Laws – Yet Blair Walks Free

And a wail for national liberation from Nourishing Obscurity.

Following Swedish developments closely as one must, I found this story linking my team Tottenham to an individual example of Swedish bandy extremism.

And is some furtive ethnic cleansing busily under way in Malmo? 

It is always difficult to work out when something is just an idiotic if unpleasant episode of local and no wider significance, and when something is part of a wider, really worrying trend.

Partly because this is just not easy to prove anyway with scientific confidence even when all the facts are clear, as they never are.

And partly because each side of the argument will tend to play up evidence it likes and downplay evidence it does not like.

Not to mention media and politicians making whatever noise suits their immediate purposes.

So is anti-semitism on the rise in Sweden?

If so, is it nonetheless still a marginal and at worst nasty phenomenon?

How would we tell?  

As regular readers will recall, I have written at some length about the bewildering complexity - and stunning simplicity - of the EU Budget process.

When all the feuding and whining subsides, it comes down to the banal fact that a few countries Give, and most countries Get.

Those who Get damn the reluctant Givers as meanies, and proclaim themselves to to be the true high-minded Europeans. They fulfil all the lofty moral attributes of angry beggars snarling at the selfishness of anyone who hands them anything less than a fiver. 

Here at European Voice the line-up for the next round of sordid haggling is explored.

But with rather more polite nomenclature.

Time to branch out.

Not least on the dynamic Business and Politics Blog, where my first (albeit somewhat laconic) Diplomatic Despatch has just been posted.

More to come...

Perusing the website of the British High Commission in Malta (as of course one does) I found this link to a letter written by PM Gordon Brown to Dr Alan Williams MP of the Liaison Committee on the way forward after the Copenhagen Climate Change summit.

It also is on the No 10 website, adorned with a ridiculous photograph.

The Liaison Committee of what? you cry.

Dunno. It doesn't say. But it looks like a UK Parliamentary Committee.

Anyway.

Forget the policy, whose credibility is quickly dripping away as per that photograph. Look rather at the inept clumsy drafting.

If those countries which agreed the Accord in Copenhagen inscribe (sic) into it the commitments they made in the run-up to the conference - and I believe it is very much in the global interest that they should do so - the international community will have taken the first steps towards an historic transformation in the trajectory of global emissions.

What? Apart from the rather smutty imagery, how can you transform historically or otherwise the trajectory of a global emission?

It is important that the European Union maintains its commitment to move to a 30 per cent reduction in emissions if others are also ambitious.

And if they are not ambitious?

I believe it is strongly in the Ell’s (sic) economic interest to incentivise low carbon energy and technology investment through this goal.

What the 'ell is the EII?

As ail (sic) countries implement their own domestic plans, the global opportunities for green growth will be enormous.

It's your climate policy which is ailing, Prime Minister.

Already a $3 trillion global market, I (sic) am convinced that the benefits will flow not just to developed economies but to emerging and developing ones as well.

Since when was Gordon Brown a £3 trillion global market? Not worth quite as much as that, methinks?

We cannot afford to delay in implementing the far-reaching commitments on reducing deforestation which many countries have made, and to (sic) utilising the finance which has been committed.

Grammar?

We need to begin now the process of ensuring a trajectory from 2013 towards the 2020 goal agreed in the Accord of $100bn pa in finance flows to developing countries.

Aaargh. Another trajectory. What is it about all these Brownian trajectories?

And so on.

This is another musty needy NuLabour production. The word 'must' appears 12 times. The word 'need' 9 times:

This strange repetitive exhortatory language detached from any real analysis of the problems is reminiscent of the communist apparatchik from Party HQ standing on a barren collective farm field and addressing the workers.

He hectors them to even greater efforts to bring about the triumph of socialist productivity. They stare blankly at him, lost in their own thoughts and the disappointed emptiness of their blighted lives.

What the Ell is happening at No 10 which allows such poor work to be produced and issued for the historical record?

Were I HM Ambassador at a post overseas, I would refuse to link to this awful piece of work on my post's website until a corrected version was posted at no 10.

Why should my Embassy's good name be diminished by No 10's incompetence?

Another look at Ayn Rand, this time dwelling (reasonably) on her Russian roots and their literary impact on her books.

That said, I think Anthony Daniels misinterprets a number of the examples he quotes from her novels to make his point, namely that Rand was clever and perceptive but above all intolerable if not oppressive. She may well have been in real life, but the reasons he gives based on the books often do not work.

Still, worth a read for the Russian literary and psychological angles.

Now and again (and again) I rail against the Precautionary Principle (PP) as do others:

Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence...

The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite — it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.

The PP pops up in all sorts of guises, usually involving someone else's money being spent by force to achieve an outcome which otherwise might not happen.

A classic one as heard on the BBC is the lament of someone in a remote Scottish village, insisting that the sole telephone box be kept open even though almost no-one uses it:

"What if a hitch-hiker had an accident and that telephone was the only way to call help?! You're heartless! How dare you put human lives at risk just to save a little money!"

Drivel.

This sort of howl of primitive indignation is not easy to answer in practice. No politician wants to say:

"Sure, I maybe am putting a life at risk by not subsidising that remote telephone kiosk. But I judge that risk to be pretty small.

Oh, and the money saved by not paying for that kiosk can go to countless other public or even private services where the likelihood of saving lives is rather higher. So get lost".

That sort of reply has the supreme virtue of being true and sensible, but the obvious downside that when the media then roll in a corpse of someone lost for lack of handy immobile telephone communication, the politician looks and feels pretty ghastly. Give them the bloody kiosk, and let's move on.

In other words, irrationality suits too many people too much of the time, especially when we can all borrow from our doltish grandchildren to pay for it. Hence the drama of out-of-control compounding government debt.

What is so dishonest about the PP is its selective use.

Thus many of those who clamour for socialistic health-care refuse to acknowledge that under such systems top-end medicine and other benefits are going to be lost, and that even though everyone is covered (good) there will be many people (rich and poor) who will die (bad) because procedures are unavailable because unaffordable.

All outcomes have pros and cons. It's all about costing the choices in a coherent and sustainable way.

And about educating the public to look at 'risk' intelligently. A hopeless task, it seems.

Of course the huge advantage of socialistic healthcare is that the top people who preside over it can always call in doctors from different, more flexible systems elsewhere in case of emergency, even if the mass of citizens is denied that opportunity.

Some animals are more equal than others.

I continue to be baffled and enraged by the cost of e-books.

Why should a text whose distribution/printing/packaging costs are close to zero (not to mention the fact that all that horrid carbon is being saved by not printing it on paper) cost almost as much in an e-version as the clunky dead-tree hard-back version?

The answer is that it should not cost that much. But the publishing industry at each stage of the book production chain, fearing that it is about to vanish, has a strong incentive to keep things much the way they are for as long as possible.

Here is a neat explanation of it all by Charlie Martin:

... eventually, some publisher will realize that a book that would have sold for $29.95 in a physical edition can be sold for the cost of the royalty, plus a small markup for production and administration. Our $29.95 novel would sell instead for $3.95.

When that happens, except for coffee table books and an occasional print-on-demand hard copy, the physical book is dead.

This weekend kerfuffle is really the death throes of a business model — traditional book publishers trying to preserve their traditional publishing methods for a little longer.

A non-MTS scenario (from one of my first-ever posts) if ever there was one.

Update: a rather more sophisticated analysis of the same issues from Virginia Postrel, with some lively exchanges in the comments about how to calculate marginal costs and marginal revenues in such circumstances.

See also Virginia elegantly here on when it makes sense to run off another copy of a book and try to sell it:

Consider the cost of printing an additional copy of a book. Managers often fall prey to the mistake of adding up every expense associated with the book, including overhead like rent and editors' salaries, and then dividing by the number of copies. (This mistake is by no means unique to publishing.)

But the rent will be the same, regardless of whether the copy is printed. So will the editor's salary. So will the costs of proofreading and typesetting, which have already been incurred.

These costs are important if the publisher is deciding whether to stay in business or perhaps whether to publish a certain title or how many titles to publish. But they have no bearing on the question of whether printing another copy of a given, already created book is a profitable thing to do.

The only costs that matter to this decision are those that wouldn't be incurred unless the publisher added another copy to the press run -- the costs of printing and distribution. This is what economists mean by "marginal cost."

If those marginal costs are less than the revenue the publisher can expect to get from that last copy, then increasing the run makes sense.

Exactly. And in a word where the marginal costs of running off an e-copy are close to nil, the trend will be for the old pricing model based on physical copies to collapse, sooner or later?

This comment from Dave1310 is also pertinent:

It's not reasonable to expect a publisher to ignore real costs simply because you wish to purchase in a new format. It also is not reasonable for a publisher to determine the value of an e-book based on what his (or her) original production cost was for a different format.

This is the same struggle that went on when the paperback emerged and will be solved the same way; in the marketplace in a civilized but bloody struggle.

Robert Lucas. Some readers will have heard of him.

He won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Economics, in part for pioneering work in the field of 'rational expectations':

One important implication of Lucas’s work, which was confirmed by Thomas Sargent is that a government that is credible—that is, a government that makes itself understood and believed—can quickly end a major inflation without a big increase in unemployment. The reason: government credibility will cause people to quickly adjust their expectations.

He also looked deeply at what really makes societies grow, and how success compounds up over time:

"Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the “nature of India” that makes it so?

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else..."

Indeed.

Which is why it is so amazing to run the numbers to compare eg Slovenia with Serbia since 1990 to see the Cost of Milosevic (several hundred billion dollars lost to Serbia for ever, and the loss is growing fast).

Or the Cost of Mugabe, the wealth lost to Zimbabwe by Mugabe's insane policies which will have caused needless misery and disadvantage down far decades to come.

The modern drama we face in the West (Greece, UK and USA and beyond) is simple. Public debt has reached such a level (as with a credit-card) that the total debt starts to compound up faster than the likely capacity of the system to repay the debts by squeezing  new taxes out of the system. Plus the more tax is taken, the less the growth, so the less wealth generated to pay the debt.

Aaargh.

That can stagger on for some time. It suits the governments concerned to project an ability and willingness to honour their debts, just as it suits the institutions which have lent the money to believe that it will one day be repaid.

Sooner or later, the numbers no longer make sense.

See for example Illinois. Illinois has unfathomable commitments for unsupportable health benefits and pensions for bureaucrats:

By July, Illinois will be $130,000,000,000 (that’s BILLION!) in debt. This crushing load hampers the state’s ability to fund public schools and universities, health care, and other essential public services. Most of that money is owed to the state’s pension funds and retiree health care plans...

How did this happen? Basically, Illinois spends $3 for every $2 it takes in. Only in Springfield is this kind of math possible. The state accomplishes this by borrowing or by simply ignoring its unpaid bills. And it has been doing so for years.

Look at the graph of growing official Illinois liabilities since 1998:

California ditto.

So who pays?

It is a moral hazard disaster to expect people who have been relatively prudent to have to dig deep into their own pockets to help deal with greedy state-sponsored profligacy on this scale, the more so since the profligates tend to be in denial and snarl angrily when anyone tells them to cut back on their banal, unsustainable lifestyles.

Which is why wise Germany claims to be holding out against paying for foolish Greece's fast escalating debt.

But if no bail-out, then what?

As Robert Lucas showed, "a government that is credible—that is, a government that makes itself understood and believed—can quickly end a major inflation without a big increase in unemployment.government credibility will cause people to quickly adjust their expectations".

But the corollary of that is that wild and sustained government stupidity as we are seeing in so many places and policy areas can lead to people adjusting their expectations - and behaviour - in wild and persisting stupid directions:

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else...