Free stuff is always problematic for it leads to over-consumption and hoarding. For example, sending an e-mail is free, so spam floods us. Posting on social media is free, so we post a lot of crap. Web pages are free or almost free, so institutional websites tend to proliferate like cancer, with so many pages and so much information that no one can find anything there.
I remember thinking over every sentence over a typewriter, for there was a cost to every mistake: I’d have to retype the entire page. Not sure if my writing was more eloquent or precise, but it was definitely less verbose. The ease of word processing has made thick handbooks possible, and then acceptable. The abundance of cheap labor discourages technological development. The ability to pollute air and water for free discourages environmental thinking.
Moreover, scarcity of free or cheap resources often encourages hoarding behavior and leads to more scarcity. For example, any department on campus can schedule as many classes as it wants, sometimes with the only purpose of hoarding rooms just in case they are needed in the future. While we seem to have enough rooms every semester, there is a period of acute scarcity right before the classes start.
Scarcity is always there even it is sometimes invisible. For example, the abundance of marginal information cause an intense competition of human attention, which turns out to be limited after all. Our life spans are getting longer, but we still have a limited number of hours and minutes to live. Some instructors believe they have plenty of time in a class, and keep filling time with less than relevant stories. Others treat class time as a precious resource that has to show some intensity and richness of learning experience.
Some economists believe that pricing a resource is the only efficient way of managing scarcity. That is not true. Pre-market economies have been managing resources for millennia without affixing price tags on most. Systems of cultural norms, taboos and conventions did the trick for a long time. Such cultural regulations exist now, and often work well. You may notice that the volume and average length of e-mails is slowly going down, for people have learned to be more modest in claiming too much of each other’s attention. Our university just introduced more stringent regulations on the number of web pages a unit is allowed to produce. Over-consumption does not always result from free resource. For example, we cannot really breathe more than we do, so there is no need to price air. However, it often does. There is never enough of everything, and the tragedy of the commons is not inevitable, especially in organizations with a strong ethos.
I remember thinking over every sentence over a typewriter, for there was a cost to every mistake: I’d have to retype the entire page. Not sure if my writing was more eloquent or precise, but it was definitely less verbose. The ease of word processing has made thick handbooks possible, and then acceptable. The abundance of cheap labor discourages technological development. The ability to pollute air and water for free discourages environmental thinking.
Moreover, scarcity of free or cheap resources often encourages hoarding behavior and leads to more scarcity. For example, any department on campus can schedule as many classes as it wants, sometimes with the only purpose of hoarding rooms just in case they are needed in the future. While we seem to have enough rooms every semester, there is a period of acute scarcity right before the classes start.
Scarcity is always there even it is sometimes invisible. For example, the abundance of marginal information cause an intense competition of human attention, which turns out to be limited after all. Our life spans are getting longer, but we still have a limited number of hours and minutes to live. Some instructors believe they have plenty of time in a class, and keep filling time with less than relevant stories. Others treat class time as a precious resource that has to show some intensity and richness of learning experience.
Some economists believe that pricing a resource is the only efficient way of managing scarcity. That is not true. Pre-market economies have been managing resources for millennia without affixing price tags on most. Systems of cultural norms, taboos and conventions did the trick for a long time. Such cultural regulations exist now, and often work well. You may notice that the volume and average length of e-mails is slowly going down, for people have learned to be more modest in claiming too much of each other’s attention. Our university just introduced more stringent regulations on the number of web pages a unit is allowed to produce. Over-consumption does not always result from free resource. For example, we cannot really breathe more than we do, so there is no need to price air. However, it often does. There is never enough of everything, and the tragedy of the commons is not inevitable, especially in organizations with a strong ethos.
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