Peter Friedman
Lawyer
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity
We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
A couple of weeks ago I quoted from Tony Judt’s critique of free market ideology. Raj Patel, in “How Free Market Delusions Destroyed the Economy,” goes into considerable depth about the stupidity of our faith in markets, but this brief point makes clear the wisdom underlying the entire article:
There is a discrepancy between the price of something and its value, one that economists cannot fix, because it’s a problem inherent to the very idea of profit-driven prices. This gap is something about which we’ve got an uneasy and uncomfortable intuition. The uncertainty about prices is what makes the MasterCard ads amusing. You know how it goes — green fees: $240; lessons: $50; golf club: $110; having fun: priceless. The deeper joke, though, is this: The price of something doesn’t measure its value at all.
The music industry, book publishing, and now Lexis and Westlaw?
Our technological revolution is taking down the music industry as its operated for the last 80 years or so, the book industry as its operated for the last 150 years or so, and now there are plenty of people who think that internet in general and Google Scholar in particular will take down the online legal research regime that has only existed since a couple of years before I started law school in 1981 — Stephen E. Arnold writes:
What is the financial outlook for the LexisNexis-type and Westlaw-type firms? Short term there won’t be much change. Over time, life gets tougher. I do quite a bit of work in online information, and I am not sure these outfits can adapt to the Google’s legal push.