Joining TIG presents an opportunity to reflect on the changing relationship between producers and consumers of intellectual property. There will always be a need for aggregators and editors, people who sift through the crud in their interest area and report out a summary of what’s best. Indeed as the flow of produced information rises exponentially, the need for sifters rises along with it. But the core economics of the sifter market are changing dramatically.
The sifting market used to be a monopoly. It used to have high entry costs. You had to have reputation, and reputation was hard to get. You had to have a lot of capital, because it took a lot of capital to sift through mountains of info quickly. You had to had have access to broadcast publication points, so that your summaries would have an impact.
All of this has changed.
Everyone has access to free publication points for universal broadcast.
Everyone has access to free information sorting and aggregation tools, and the information itself is freely available.
Everyone can establish reputation simply by starting small and being right.
The job of sorting, sifting, and winnowing information is now a highly competitive one. Here’s how this is affecting someone like me. Professors used to have to turn over resources in terms of prestige and work hours to the editors and referees of scholarly journals. You would agonize over a paper for months, then pray that the editor would see fit to send it to the referees. The referees, anonymous, would then pummel your paper. To get it published, you would have to do whatever the referees wanted, no matter how ridiculous. And this often took several years. I know of a paper in the American Economic Review where the referees insisted that the appendix be made into the main text and vice versa. It was done.
Today, I write a paper however I want and release it on SSRN moments later. Anyone can read it. If they like it, my reputation rises. If they don’t, my reputation falls. If my reputation gets high enough, sifters like TIG ask me to contribute papers of more immediate relevance to business clients. People who then go to TIG immediately get scholarly ideas with real impact. That’s it.
The lag time is minutes instead of years, and the work input to the job of connecting producers and consumers is minutes instead of hours. Costs: minimal. Quality: well, there’s the rub. Someone will always say that the editors and referees know more about what’s good scholarly work than the internet at large. Maybe they’re right. But what if they aren’t? Look at Wikipedia. There are many ways to aggregate information about quality. Cramming it into the heads of Ivy Leaguers for long-run storage, then giving them the power to judge Truth or Falsehood, may not be the most efficient or effective way. Just think of the incentive problems that result when we tell a few men and women that they alone have the power to decide whether a paper on income redistribution is True enough to be published.
On the whole, I am not sure that the system of scholarly editors and referees is the best system for judging the quality of someone’s thought. And the competition out on the net offers a similar service for pennies on the dollar. Where does this leave the editors and referees? Out of job, perhaps.
Some very useful information. Thanks for posting it.
Posted by: Anxiety Cures | October 09, 2010 at 05:32 PM