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Libraries have such an enormous impact on people that need them! It's as if you read the article and completely ignored all the points the author made -- music

Libraries have such an enormous impact on people that need them! It's as if you read the article and completely ignored all the points the author made -- musical instruments, tools, and art being loaned out. Makerspaces, computers with internet access, free classes, resume help, job applications -- a politically neutral meeting space! 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.

jasode 9y ago
>It's as if you read the article and completely ignored all the points the author made [...] 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.
- civilian 9y ago
  Yup, jasode has got the right idea. 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.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/#we-are-giving-what-we-can https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/#we-are-giving-what-we-can (The web design is a disaster, but the content is fine once you dig it up)
- eutropia 9y ago
  An excellent point, there's always the possibility of something better: but there's time and energy invested in finding the better too, not to mention risk. Libraries are most certainly not going to result the highest utilization of that money but I would argue that they should form a stable, low-risk, immediate, guaranteed ROI core to his philanthropic efforts.
zanny 9y ago
I don't think anyone is arguing libraries aren't worth having. The argument is how to spend private money. 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.

jasode 9y ago

>It's as if you read the article and completely ignored all the points the author made [...] 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.

civilian 9y ago
Yup, jasode has got the right idea. 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.
- goialoq 9y ago
  https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/#we-are-giving-what-we-can https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/#we-are-giving-what-we-can (The web design is a disaster, but the content is fine once you dig it up)
eutropia 9y ago
An excellent point, there's always the possibility of something better: but there's time and energy invested in finding the better too, not to mention risk. Libraries are most certainly not going to result the highest utilization of that money but I would argue that they should form a stable, low-risk, immediate, guaranteed ROI core to his philanthropic efforts.

zanny 9y ago

I don't think anyone is arguing libraries aren't worth having. The argument is how to spend private money. 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.