almost a diary

Yesterday’s New York Times featured a portray of Glenn Reynolds, whose blog, instapundit.com, has become one of the most widely read and thus most influential ones in the US.

But as everyone knows, there’s no free lunch. Mr Reynold’s said he has begun to suffer from his successes in the blogosphere – admitting and warning that blogging can easily become an addition – “Today, I was in the gym, on the treadmill, watching CNN [...] And as I was watching it, I was composing a blog entry in my head. Then I thought, ‘This really isn’t normal.’”.

Well, it may not be normal yet. But there’s a good reason why it should: Blogging does make a difference.

More precisely, blogging makes the difference between speaking and writing – for two reasons. Firstly, in a personal conversation, people will often say things they haven’t really thought through. That’s because speaking is such a fast, and flexible, way of communicating. Writing usually does take longer than speaking – time usually used to think about what one is actually writing. Thus, once people decide to put their opinions into writing, these opinions will very likely become better formulated as well as better thought through, simply because they spend more time thinking about them.

Secondly, I suppose, forming opinions on the treadmill is more common than Glenn Reynolds thinks. I believe most people will form some sort of opinion when watching CNN in the gym – well, let’s say there was a time when people could rely on CNN to supply sufficient reliable information to be able to form some sort of opinion while watching it in the gym. Thoughts are still free – so as long as they keep their opinions to themselves, they do not need to be neither coherent, nor correct nor concise. But as soon as they tell a friend about an opinion, it is out there, and it might be challenged. They put themselves on the spot.

Enter blogging: In the Blogosphere, they might just talk to a friend over a virtual pint. But chances are their opinions will (possibly) be read by more people than they would talk to in a gym. And chances are, they will be challenged by a larger and therefore more informed public than will usually available in a gym. And once again, I need a better argument to make a point.

Of course, the proliferation of blogging might counteract this effect to a certain extent. Emailing is not considered equal to a hand written letter. So blogging will probably not create the same incentives that writing a comment for the NYTimes would. But nonetheless – if blogging is actually addictive, it is certainly a socially useful addiction. So c’mon. Go and get your fix. Sign up and start writing today.

Today, 20:15, the second part of the long awaited duel between the chancellor and his challenger. On a tv screen near you. Enjoy if you don’t expect to learn anything.

Well, it was about time. Being a mature liberal democracy with television, it was only a matter of time until there would be a televised duel between the two most serious contenders for Germany’s most important political office, the chancellor.

Yesterday evening, 20:15 was the hour of truth for both contestants. Given that this sort of two-man-show is a new element in German campaigning, it is understandable that both Mssrs. had some trouble to find the right way to deal with the other.

There were no fatal mistakes, no watch-checking, no claims about Eastern Europe being still under Soviet control. Actually, the duel was not actually a duel. The contestants hardly spoke or even looked at each other. Nor did they look at me (or the other estimated 14m viewers, which equals appr. 50% prime-time market share) since cameras, contestants and the two interviewing journalists were placed in a way it appeared the two men simply looked nowhere when they were actually looking at the journalists. Seriously, I wonder if they should pay their campaign advisors.

So the event is the main story. And for all the pundits being interviewed afterwards this was in all likelyhood a very profitable evening. But for the rest of us and for our democracy, the debate (that was not) was not very helpful.

By the way, the (conservative) BILD-Zeitung has apparently decided that Edmund Stoiber won. Actually, a lot of people said that today. Such commentary is a good example of the fact that pessimists tend to be more effetive than optimists, because because their “should be / is”-fraction will always be higher. Stoiber won simply because everyone expected him to perform as abysmal as he did in the first one-hour interview after his nomination as CDU/CSU candidate.

So to sum up, we did a) not learn anything interesting about policy options in the debate (that was not), b) we have a winner because a duel by definition needs a winner and c) unfortunately, that “winner” only because he tragically lowered expectations by himself. It’s a bit like the soaring approval ratings for George W. Bush after his handling of 9/11. Most people expected him to fail so they were positively surprised when he did not (fail entirely).

Note: It is evident why a televised debate is being introduced in Germany just now, but interestingly, it is less certain than in many previous elections that the voters will get the chancellor the want. Germany is a parliamentary democracy and the public elects the parliament, not the government. As no single party will be able to get 50+% of the votes, they will need to form coalition.

This, in turn, means that the candidate who received the most votes will not necessarily become chancellor. It all depends on the vote distribution between the parties. And given current trends, the FDP might well choose the SPD over the CDU as a coalition partner as they would have more weight in such a coalition. So Schroeder could stay in office despite getting less votes than Stoiber. Now this is a logical possibility of a parliamentary democracy and far less problematic than in the case of the last American election.

From here, the discussion would become increasingly theoretical and thus I will spare you (and me) tonight. Whatever the public says (through elections or otherwise) there is no correct way to translate it into majorities. It’s just an (socialised) agreement.

When Paul Krugman stated in his NY Times op-ed column back in February that, in his opinion, in ten years people will regard the Enron induced confidence crisis in American capitalism as a much bigger problem than September 11, 2001 and the ensuing war on terror, the public outrage was immediate. I am not sure Krugman is right with his statement – we’ll have to wait for future generations of historians to rank the events – but he’s making an crucial point. Important things are going on in this world and most people, including those professionally involved with selling opinion, the media, somehow don’t get it.

What I am referring to is the war about who is allowed to benefit from a copyright on Mickey Mouse for how long after its creation. In short, the war about intellectual property rights, the fundamental distributive conflict of the digital age. Another episode in this war is going to take place in the U.S. constitutional court. I am not going to outline the Eldred vs. Ashcroft lawsuit which will be decided soon. Click on the big “e” and find out for yourself. But mark my words: The decision will affect the future of public life in Western societies deeply and possibly lastingly.

As I have argued before, current copyright holders are about to exploit the existing socially institutionalised notion of property rights in order to perpetuate legal institutions for a future in which they will likely be entirely inadequate. The problem with such institutionalised myths of rationality is that people take them for granted. And with a deeply engrained (important!) institution as property, most people will never ask any questions.

Thus, I am grateful that the list of supporters of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit (those in favour of moderate copyright extensions) includes some sort of who-is-who of famous and inflential economists, quite a few of which have been awarded the Nobel Price in Economics: George A. Akerlof, Kenneth J. Arrow, Timothy F. Bresnahan, James M. Buchanan, Ronald H. Coase, Linda R. Cohen, Milton Friedman, Jerry R. Green, Robert W. Hahn, Thomas W. Hazlett, C. Scott Hemphill, Robert E. Litan, Roger G. Noll, Richard Schmalensee, Steven Shavell, Hal R. Varian, and Richard J. Zeckhauser. One of their lawyers is Harvard’s William Fisher whose thoughts on the challenges of digital reproduction and distribution for copyright law I have already recommended.

Hopefully they will be able to have a calming influence on the panel of judges.

Again: The copyright war is a secret war. But – in my opinion – will have more important consequences for our societies than the one currently fought on the screens. So check the lawsuit’s website and help out Mickey!