While reading Reihan Salam's review of Tyler Cowen's new e-book on the stagnation of the American economy, I came across a link to Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans" essay (or is that a blog post?). Kelly's main point is that a self-employed artist or creator can make a living if he gains and retains about 1,000 true fans who spend an average of $100 per year on the artist's product. Kelly claims that this is a reasonable goal, even in the present economy of the "long tail"--i.e., an economy in which the consumer faces an endless selection of goods (think of the amount of book titles available through Amazon, for example), and in which it is very easy for a creator's work to end up on the long, thin tail of sales, but increasingly difficult for a creator to produce a blockbuster which lies on the short, stubby torso (um, so to speak).
Anecdotally, I've seen this approach work in the role-playing game community, which has a small market, and in which independently produced games are a niche within a niche. It seems like it could work in other areas as well, such as music or visual art.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
People I Know
This is the first in a continuing series of blog posts devoted to sharing the traits and accomplishments of "people I know".
Marvin Belzer is a former professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and currently teaches mindfulness meditation at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. He was my dissertation advisor and philosophical mentor while I was a graduate student at Bowling Green.
Marv is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. He has done valuable work in analytic philosophy, particularly in the metaphysics of personal identity, and he also did a great job teaching introductory logic to a large (100+) class of non-philosophy majors. Marv has a unique ability to empathtize and connect with his students, and to paradoxically inspire excellent work through a gentle, patient approach.
Marv has also been practicing and teaching mindfulness meditation for several decades. His strengths as a teacher of academic philosophy are if anything even more evident in his work as a meditation instructor. Marv was also probably one of the first people to teach meditation as an undergraduate philosophy course. He introduced literally hundreds of students to mindfulness meditation in this way. Some of my most cherished memories are practicing with Marv and the rest of his class on the meditation retreats he led while an instructor at BGSU.
Marvin Belzer is a former professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and currently teaches mindfulness meditation at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. He was my dissertation advisor and philosophical mentor while I was a graduate student at Bowling Green.
Marv is one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. He has done valuable work in analytic philosophy, particularly in the metaphysics of personal identity, and he also did a great job teaching introductory logic to a large (100+) class of non-philosophy majors. Marv has a unique ability to empathtize and connect with his students, and to paradoxically inspire excellent work through a gentle, patient approach.
Marv has also been practicing and teaching mindfulness meditation for several decades. His strengths as a teacher of academic philosophy are if anything even more evident in his work as a meditation instructor. Marv was also probably one of the first people to teach meditation as an undergraduate philosophy course. He introduced literally hundreds of students to mindfulness meditation in this way. Some of my most cherished memories are practicing with Marv and the rest of his class on the meditation retreats he led while an instructor at BGSU.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
For-Profit Primary Ed
My girlfriend Brenda Baker recently told me about a for-profit primary education school called K12 (which received a somewhat informative write-up in Forbes a couple of years ago). Now, most people probably associate the idea of for-profit education with greed, inequality, and injustice, but I think that social justice considerations actually point in support of such schools.
The issues are mainly ones of choice and accountability. Pupils in a lot of public school districts suffer from a lack of choice. Now, charter schools do provide parents in a school district with more choice, but not-for-profit charter schools don't face the same amount or kind of accountability as do for-profit schools. For-profit schools have to provide a valuable service to their customers at a low enough cost that there is at least some profit left over for investors. A for-profit school which is doing a poor job will lose pupils, lose funding, and die. A not-for-profit school doesn't face quite the same incentives to keep quality up and costs down. This is the bright side of market self-correction--waste and poor value can only persist for so long.
In a way, K12 seems to have found a loophole into the brave new world of school vouchers, in that in at least some states in which they operate they receive per-pupil funds directly from school districts (just like not-for-profit charter schools). This allows K12 to compete on an even footing with public schools and not-for-profit charter schools (which receive a government-provided subsidy, in the form of school district funds, that is not available to other private schools). It's hard to see how this is a bad deal for parents and taxpayers, since it gives parents more choice for where they send their kids to school, and since if K12 should fail, it is the investors, and not the school district and its taxpayers, who will take the loss.
If there is going to be improvement in America's primary schools, my guess is it will be through for-profit schools which operate as charter schools and slip in under the radar, as it were, of the public debate surrounding school vouchers. The public debate about school vouchers, like most political debates, is so charged with hatred, rhetoric, and ideology, not to mention warped by the lobbying of special interests, that no solution is to be expected through overt or intentional political means. As in so many other areas of social life, order or progress is often brought about through unanticipated and unintended developments. In other words, progress often occurs despite the political process, not because of it. For this reason, I'll light a stick of incense tonight to the god of spontaneous order and pray that he lets us drift unexpectedly into a superior primary education system.
The issues are mainly ones of choice and accountability. Pupils in a lot of public school districts suffer from a lack of choice. Now, charter schools do provide parents in a school district with more choice, but not-for-profit charter schools don't face the same amount or kind of accountability as do for-profit schools. For-profit schools have to provide a valuable service to their customers at a low enough cost that there is at least some profit left over for investors. A for-profit school which is doing a poor job will lose pupils, lose funding, and die. A not-for-profit school doesn't face quite the same incentives to keep quality up and costs down. This is the bright side of market self-correction--waste and poor value can only persist for so long.
In a way, K12 seems to have found a loophole into the brave new world of school vouchers, in that in at least some states in which they operate they receive per-pupil funds directly from school districts (just like not-for-profit charter schools). This allows K12 to compete on an even footing with public schools and not-for-profit charter schools (which receive a government-provided subsidy, in the form of school district funds, that is not available to other private schools). It's hard to see how this is a bad deal for parents and taxpayers, since it gives parents more choice for where they send their kids to school, and since if K12 should fail, it is the investors, and not the school district and its taxpayers, who will take the loss.
If there is going to be improvement in America's primary schools, my guess is it will be through for-profit schools which operate as charter schools and slip in under the radar, as it were, of the public debate surrounding school vouchers. The public debate about school vouchers, like most political debates, is so charged with hatred, rhetoric, and ideology, not to mention warped by the lobbying of special interests, that no solution is to be expected through overt or intentional political means. As in so many other areas of social life, order or progress is often brought about through unanticipated and unintended developments. In other words, progress often occurs despite the political process, not because of it. For this reason, I'll light a stick of incense tonight to the god of spontaneous order and pray that he lets us drift unexpectedly into a superior primary education system.
Greek Is Hard (or, Greek with Peek)
I started studying ancient Greek last semester. I've studied other languages before (Spanish, Latin, German, and French), but never enough to become fluent or to make them stick. (It's like a long string of love affairs that seemed promising but all ended in heartbreak, and none producing a lasting relationship or any offspring.)
Fortunately, Professor Philip Peek of the Bowling Green State University Romance and Classical Studies Department has let me attend his elementary Greek classes. Peek is truly a great professor--he achieves a good balance between challenging and supporting his students, for example, and he's a lot of fun to be around and work with. Unfortunately, ancient Greek is a lot harder than any other language I have tried and failed to learn. There are several reasons for this, including the complex rules for accent, rules for contracting vowels, rules for ellision and crasis, the large number of irregular conjugations and declensions (more than the number of irregular verbs and nouns that I recall seeing in Latin, for example; especialy difficult is Greek's schizophrenic third declension, in which every other word seems to be irregular), the peculiarities of Greek grammar (a middle voice in addition to the active and passive, an optative mood in addition to the subjunctive, a dual number in addition to the singular and plural, an aorist tense in addition to the imperfect and perfect), and many more reasons than I care to list right now. Learning to read a new alphabet has been simple in comparison to all these other issues.
A quote from the textbook we are using, Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips' A New Introduction to Greek (first published in 1941), nicely illustrates the experience:
Fortunately, Professor Philip Peek of the Bowling Green State University Romance and Classical Studies Department has let me attend his elementary Greek classes. Peek is truly a great professor--he achieves a good balance between challenging and supporting his students, for example, and he's a lot of fun to be around and work with. Unfortunately, ancient Greek is a lot harder than any other language I have tried and failed to learn. There are several reasons for this, including the complex rules for accent, rules for contracting vowels, rules for ellision and crasis, the large number of irregular conjugations and declensions (more than the number of irregular verbs and nouns that I recall seeing in Latin, for example; especialy difficult is Greek's schizophrenic third declension, in which every other word seems to be irregular), the peculiarities of Greek grammar (a middle voice in addition to the active and passive, an optative mood in addition to the subjunctive, a dual number in addition to the singular and plural, an aorist tense in addition to the imperfect and perfect), and many more reasons than I care to list right now. Learning to read a new alphabet has been simple in comparison to all these other issues.
A quote from the textbook we are using, Alston Hurd Chase and Henry Phillips' A New Introduction to Greek (first published in 1941), nicely illustrates the experience:
A word bearing the acute upon the ultima is known as an oxytone, one with the acute upon the penult as a paroxytone, one with the acute upon the antepenult as a proparoxytone. One which bears the circumflex upon the ultima is called a perispomenon, one with the circumflex upon the penult is a properispomenon. These terms, though formidable, will save much laborious periphrasis (p. 4)."Will save much laborious periphrasis," indeed. It is only now that I understand Saint Augustine's seemingly irrational hatred of his childhood Greek grammar lessons (as described in his Confessions). We'll see what this semester will bring; reading Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek still seems a long, long way off--and the distance has seemed to only increase the more Greek that I have learned!
Article on the New Rich
Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to an article in The Atlantic describing the new global elite. This is the best article I have read on the new plutocrats. Author Chrystia Freeland takes a balanced approach, noting the real contributions which have been made by the new rich--they tend to be self-made men, creating businesses and producing wealth, instead of just living off of their family's estate--but the article does not shy away from some of the more troubling aspects of this class--noting, for example, that economic inequality has actually been growing in developed societies, creating a social as well as an economic divide between the have-some's and the have-lot's (to coin a phrase).
Passing Strange
One of the best films I saw last year was Passing Strange, Spike Lee's film of a Broadway musical's last performance at the Belasco Theatre. The musical is autobiographical, and is based on the life of its writer "Stew". Stew grew up in a middle-class black family in Los Angeles in the 1970s, but ended up passing as a ghetto black when he moved to Europe to develop his musical career. The film works on many levels, addressing issues of racial identity, prejudice both against blacks and within the black community itself, the difficulties faced by an artist attempting to find his "voice," good-old adolescent rebellion, family conflict, and more. Although he was not involved in the production of the musical itself, Spike Lee did an excellent job capturing the show's last performance on film. Highly recommended (and this from someone who ordinarily can't stand musicals of any kind).
Blogging Again
I'm not sure why I stopped blogging, or why I've decided to start again. Part of the reason for stopping is probably that I have a chronic illness (the so-called chronic fatigue syndrome), which severely restricts the amount of work I can do. Part of the reason for starting up again is probably that I often want to share articles or thoughts with my friends, and I don't use facebook much. Anyway, for anyone still following this blog, expect many new posts soon.
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