Libraries provide so much public good: giving the public internet access, allowing people to read classics and better themselves for free, and giving some quiet space for those wanting to study (and not have to pay for a $5 coffee).
But I think you're making a good point that others are missing: The most valuable things in society are often things that aren't easily measured by straightforward means.
Who runs libraries? People with Masters in Library Science. I expect severe budget and certification crises would come to any library that won't put a certified librarian in a head position.
Or, I'm a working class guy and it's Sunday, my traditional off from work, can I go to the library? No, it is closed because there needs to be Master Librarian on duty and they've negotiated a contract to never have to work Sunday. Now the facility sits there unused 14% of the time, during the most likely time it would be used.
However, it is a great library. No arguments there. It's a pain that its closed on Sundays just when kids want to use it most.
The small, small, small town north of here though is closed on Sunday.
And you would be wrong. My local library is considered one of the best small-town libraries in the nation (I believe at one point it literally won an award for being the best) -- and does not have a certified librarian in a head position.
Also, to compare MLS librarians with MBAs in regards to the workings of what's under them is exceptionally unfair. Most librarians I know (a set which includes my father in law, who is a county library director, and two close friends, who hold MLS degrees) are extremely academically curious about new things they can do to make their libraries more accessible and attractive.
My point is not to disrespect MLS, in fact as even as a programmer, I'd probably be terrible as a head sys-admin/tech-support for a library too.
I'm wondering why we've never heard of anyone making a good career move by setting up tech at a library (other than as a fat and easy contract)? If we can all relate to these deficient computer networks being run in public libraries, why has nobody succeeded in this space? I'm suggesting perverse incentives in management structure is why this much needed service isn't being filled by our extremely talented tech workforce.
> it literally won an award for being the best and does not have a certified librarian in a head position.
kind of my point, no?
Because they are underfunded, Bezos seems to be addressing that.
>>kind of my point, no?
No, the provided example seems to be counter to your point.
If those with the means paid a fair price for the library resources they are sharing, a library could be open for many more, have better resources AND cost the taxpayer less.
Libraries weren't always free. Like the one Ben Franklin helped establish. These didn't cost the taxpayer anything. And if you wanted to help someone without the means, you would just pay for their membership.
Making something free for some, but not others could stir up resentment ("why should I pay for your use of the library?"), which would make it easier to cut funding in the future. This could lead to a spiral of increasing fees (or decreased service) -> smaller constituency -> less funding.
I'm also not sure that the marginal user costs a library very much. I doubt that a library with twice as many potential patrons needs twice as many books or two times the staff, for example.
A month's worth of food costs a lot more than using a book for a month.
In the US, Republicans have been talking about "welfare queens" and people buying lobsters with food stamps for literally decades. This strategy has apparently worked for them, even though benefit fraud is supposedly quite rare.
On the flip side, it's virtually impossible to cut Social Security and Medicare in the US, in part because the programs are not means-tested and everyone hopes to get something back from them.
Source: https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2014/07/do-librarians-need-a...
A lack of complete uniformity across the industry does not mean he's wrong.
Even my university library has sunday hours.
Also, the main branches of suburban libraries in places like Glendale and Pasadena are open all weekend too.
The hours for all branches are on the following page; to find the ones open on Sunday, just search on the page for:
Sun: 1-5
Also, the Beverly Hills Public Library -- which is, of course, not part of the LA library system -- is open 12 - 6 on the weekends:
Somebody was willing to step up and rehab a local library. Had they not done so, it would have been forced to close. It is staffed entirely by volunteers. The town can barely afford to budget the heat.
Fortunately, the same person now donates regularly and there's no risk of immediate closure. They will have also left a small trust for the library when they pass away.
They lack books, though. The shelves are low, widely spaced, and don't occupy much of the floor space.
http://www.buildingwork.design/projects/kenmore-library/
I've long since given up even looking for books there. I just go buy them.
Contrast this with Half Price Books:
http://www.waymarking.com/gallery/image.aspx?f=1&guid=ae61a8...
It's crammed with books. (The picture barely does that justice.)
On the contrary, even the poor have their own computers and smartphones these days and these libraries don't see much sense in upgrading their rarely used computers.
Using an old android device to browse the internet is browsing as a second-class citizen. When I job hunt, I open many documents, hundreds of tabs, visit hundreds of websites... all of this would be greatly hindered by a mobile device.
Have you been to a low income library where people are not using the computers? My previous neighborhood's library computers were being used almost all the time when I went there.
> even the poor have their own computers and smartphones these days
I'm curious what you've read that informs this opinion. The digital divide still exists, especially in rural areas but in general across socioeconomic class.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2016/state-urbanrural-digital-...
These are actually amazing investments because they're getting incredible duty-cycles out of all of those objects when they're being shared. One purchased instrument or computer for the library is access when it's needed for dozens if not hundreds of people. It's like the argument for self-driving cars being shared because normally cars are idle 95% of the time.
Think of the library as the efficient distribution center of Common Good.
One can agree with all the positives mentioned in the article and your points as well but still question if there is an _even better_ investment than libraries that will result in the most good.
Even Jeff Bezos' wealth is finite so spending it is a zero-sum game. Donating to public libraries means money not donated to researchers needing $1m to find cures/antibiotics that would benefit all of humanity more than upgrading libraries. (Or whatever other recipient you can imagine that could have a greater multiplier effect of that money than libraries.)
Maybe libraries are the best use of his donation money. Maybe not.
The meter-stick to compare all charities (or hell, government programs? Personal spending?) is that we can donate $3000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and save a child's life.
I might be a numbers-first globalist nerd, but $3000 per life? It makes me want to defund most welfare programs in the states because by comparison, they are horribly inefficient. And inefficiency of resources, in this scenario, results in dead children.
(The web design is a disaster, but the content is fine once you dig it up)
If libraries are underfunded, that is a problem you need to push through public channels. In the same vein as why a private company doing infrastructure makes no sense, if we can demonstrably show the benefits of having libraries (and we can) that breaks down the most fundamental barrier to public funding of anything - justifying the expense with demonstrable results.
The government has a hard time investing in space flight because without a demonstrable major goal like beating the Commies it looks to the uninformed like money down a black hole. It is really hard to justify, no matter the degree of information availability, bleeding edge research on the public purse because you have to explicitly detail it isn't a guarantee on results for any given years investment. In politics where the mood changes based on yesterdays news, few can weather a bad year if they are putting large amounts of money into important research.
Libraries, though? We got statistics for that. We are well versed in building and staffing libraries. They are functionally infrastructure - and that is supposed to be what government is good at. If you live in a country where it is not good at infrastructure, you got bigger problems to deal with then.
Basically, something what Tesla did, apply Silicon Valley tech startup mentality in a non-tech industry.
The other issue (at least in the USA) is a ton of compliance stuff you have to deal with. HIPAA compliance is such a pain in the ass. It's not "cool" or fun, so it doesn't usually attract great devs or people that don't want to deal with constant red tape and permissions for accessing things. Naturally, this business sort of attracts the bureaucratic minded people and the really efficient people end up frustrated/burn out and move into an industry where getting shit done is easily quantifiable in the short term.
Regardless, I work in the healthcare industry currently and it's a shitshow for lack of a better word.
Preventing those 2 diseases alone would save the country billions, if not trillions, a year in medical costs.
Judging the quality of the medical service is also often difficult. The true quality and the utility of the service you receive will often be apparent only years or decades later. Did a patient need for antibiotics for a basic viral infection? Probably not but it feels like a better service.
We are as far from a market where you can experiment with healthcare as you can be aside from outright banning private medical practice.
How about they pay their damn taxes.
I don't want "charity". No, I want these deadbeats to start pulling their own weight. Then we'll buy our own damned libraries.
https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/winners-and-losers/tech...
"For economies to thrive, companies need to hand over a quarter of their profits.
But the Four Horsemen – Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook — pay far less than the average US corporate tax rate.
Loser: future generations, who will have to pay off the debt racked up by politicians unwilling to tax the most profitable companies in the world."
Though an interesting idea would be to combine the roles of a library with a traditional pub house.
That's either the best idea ever, or the worst idea ever. I'm not sure that it'd be very quiet, either.
This should be a thing. It might be a horrible thing, but it should exist.
Health care for all? Affordable housing? Food security?
Unsurprisingly, you can't just stick "size of government" on an axis and say one side is good and the other is bad. The way you spend the money matters way more than how much you spend. One dollar of state spending can mean anything from magnitudes of benefit to a negative impact on the economy or society from the consequences of that dollar.
It's still a good idea.
First, there's regulatory capture[1]. In short, the regulated industry ends up writing its own regulations. As a result, the regulations just enshrine business practices as they are. The total size of the regulatory regime can even increase because of the second aspect of regulatory capture. When an industry captures the agency, it can seek to make the rules purposely byzantine and vague, in order to ensure that almost any business practice can be defended, provided one has enough legal muscle.
Regulatory capture is what people who root for Uber's business model demonize. The car-for-hire industry, they say, is regulated in such a way as to keep the taxi industry profitable even if the service is, they claim, subpar.
Second, there's policy that goes under the names "regulatory reform" or "regulatory relief"[2] Here, the regulations themselves are not subject to change or reduction, only the effort by the government to do meaningful enforcement is cut. This is what we see around the US role and reaction to the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Laws that could have been used to prevent this event, or to prosecute the executives responsible, do exist. Violations are simply not prosecuted.[3]
For others who are asking about measurable ways government regulation has decreased[4], don't look as the size of the CFR, look at the relationship of the regulations with existing business practices and the current low-enforcement regulatory regime.
Finally, one might ask, if the regulations are so business-friendly and enforcement so lax, why hasn't the size of the regulatory workforce shrunk? Well, of course it has, but also, a big regulatory regime is a barrier to entry for competitors. The most profitable companies don't want competition, so they are happy to have regulators help them ensure that what they do is legal, while making sure that compliance is expensive and difficult enough to deter new entries into the markets.
[1] http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/dalbo/regulatory_capture_pu...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1981/11/15/u...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/books/review/the-chickens...
In what measurable way?
He could support archive.org to scan all the books for free, or just buy the scans from Google (if they sell them). Of course make that free for all. Eventually almost everyone will have a $50 Android, use some sort of wifi and there's your library.
I have no idea what you're trying to express here, since space flight and disease are large issues that governments are really really interested in.
The article also claims that libraries are getting defunded, so you may not have your library up the street for much longer.
Like NASA? Elon Musk is building on top of decades of government funding.