Booksellers want to blot out the Sun

Clay Shirky writes about the American Booksellers Association's open letter to the Justice Department asking Justice to investigate the competitors the ABA's members can't profitably compete against. The article is great throughout—Shirky has a keen grasp of the economics, technology, and social change involved—so please read all of Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization:

Internet use is as widespread as cable TV, and an internet user in rural Utah has access to more books than a citizen of Greenwich Village had before the web. Millions more books. Like record stores and video rental places, physical bookstores simply can’t compete for breadth of offering and, also like the social changes around music and moving images, the internet is strengthening rather than weakening the ability of niches and sub-cultures to see themselves reflected in long-form writing.

The internet also moderates the competitive threat, because the competition is only a click away. Amazon lists millions of books, but so does eBay, and publishers like O’Reilly or McGraw-Hill or Alyson can sell directly to the reader. If you had to choose between buying books only offline or only online, the choice that maximizes the number of ideas in circulation is unambiguously clear. Even if all but a dozen online booksellers were to vanish, there would still be more places to buy books on the web than there are bookstores in the average American city today.

Obama, Iran, and the Bomb

President Barack Obama suggested that Iran may have some right to nuclear energy—provided it proves by the end of the year that its aspirations are peaceful.

That's from the Washington Post (via Gateway Pundit). Last month, Gateway Pundit reported that an Iranian general thought that it would take only "eleven days to wipe out Israel." As I've implied before, if a cities start getting nuked, the migration patterns of the world will reverse: people will leave cities to live in suburban and rural areas. A side effect of that migration will be a reduction in urban wealth and an increase in suburban and rural wealth as property values are bid up outside cities and down in them.

The Coming Second World

We think of the nations of the world as falling into one of two categories on the development axis: First World and Third World. I believe that one of the side effects of the current global economic turmoil will be a convergence towards a more uniform level of development around the world. The first world countries will come down a peg due to mountains of debt, unaffordable government bureaucracies, falling populations, and civil unrest. The third world will rise by largely dodging the economic problems of the first world, collecting interest payments (China in particular), and maintaining stable population growth.

The most important factor leading to this convergence will be the Internet and the various technologies that it has spawned. The global economic crisis is not the driver of this change, it is merely the catalyst. The Internet and technology will facilitate our evolution.

Government corruption will hamper progress of both First and Third World countries. The surprising thing is how rife the First World is with graft. This gives well governed Third World countries time to advance while the First Worlders are spinning their wheels. Of course, that doesn't mean they'll do so—I don't expect any meaningful improvement in Zimbabwe for another generation.

Will the People Leave?

I recently added Clay Shirky's blog to my blogroll (for his essays, go here). I've always found his writing thought provoking. His recent post left me with a couple of questions, so here's what I just emailed him (with a few edits):

I love your work, just love it. About your newspaper blog post… here are some follow-on questions to think about:

1. When will the problems with newspapers trickle-up to broadcasting? (Broadcast doesn’t have the craigslist problem, but I still think they’re vulnerable.)
2. Why do we still have libraries? When will they mostly disappear? When will they be replaced with a server hosting a copy of the Gutenberg project and/or Wikipedia?
3. If small classes sizes are so great, why not require homeschooling?
4. When will it be possible to get a masters degree by attending iTunes University? A PhD? Why pay for the sheepskin?

Here’s a much deeper question… In “Ontology is Overrated” you said: “…East Germany actually turned out to be an unstable category. Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions.” It’s been years since I read that article—I still recommend it to friends, though. Anyway, I’ve been wondering if cities might become “less real” during/after the tumult you discussed in your newspaper blog post. 5. What is the value proposition of "the city"? I live in St Louis, MO. I get to pay 1% annual income tax to the city. The schools are unaccredited. Crime is high.

To be a little dark… What happens if a city somewhere in the world is nuked? City property values the world over will go down while non-city property values will go up. What about a second nuke and so on? I certainly hope none of that happens. Nonetheless, I think humanity’s future will more closely resemble peer-to-peer networks than the current client-server architecture sustaining our cities.

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Update: Will more cities look like Detroit?