Work, Social Production, and Inequality

Posted by Timothy B. Lee

Matt Yglesias links to an interesting discussion about the growth of activities that raise our standard of living without being captured in economic statistics. Wikipedia is a great example of this: it’s tremendously valuable to hundreds of millions of Internet users, but because it’s given away for free that value is not reflected in our economic statistics.

I think this general insight is right, but I don’t agree with John Quiggin’s conclusions about the social implications. In particular, Quiggin writes:

It seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes.

If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours.

The first point ignores the fact that rich people are a crucial part of many public-spirited enterprises. Jimmy Wales was able to finance the initial development of Wikipedia (then called Nupedia) because he had previously earned profits building commercial websites. The Ubuntu project, creators of an extremely popular Linux-based operating system, is supported to the tune of millions of dollars a year by successful entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Brewster Kahle used the profits from his successful Internet businesses to build the Internet Archive, a crucial repository of public domain works. John Gilmore, who made his fortune as one of Sun’s first employees, has used his wealth to promote a variety of free software projects, including GNU radio and Gnash. I could provide plenty of other examples.

The important thing to recognize is that these projects could only exist because of the combination of their founders’ expertise and their money. Without cash, these folks would have been unable to provide the support necessary to get these projects off the ground. But even more important, these projects also wouldn’t have succeeded without their deep understanding of their fields. Only someone with years of experience in the software industry would have the judgment and the relationships necessary to make a project like Ubuntu successful.

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