Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [26]
Yet we don’t. Why?
FIGURE 3
Here again, the political scientist might demur. There are many different causes, some good, some not so good. Good: Getting it wrong with climate change is costly (lost jobs, slowed economic growth). Getting it wrong with copyright is less costly (we don’t get as much for free). Not so good: Key Democrats come from big-coal states. They’re not about to willingly accept higher costs for energy, even if justified by good economic principles.5 The carbon free riders have important allies. Copyright free riders, on the other hand, don’t.
But as well as reasons good and not so good, there’s another we cannot ignore. There is a radical difference in political funding by pro-reform advocates of both carbon and copyright.
Pro–carbon reformers get wildly outspent by anti-reformers. In 2009, pro-reform and anti-reform groups fought vigorously over whether Congress would enact a cap-and-trade bill to address carbon emissions. They didn’t fight equally.6 The reform movement spent about $22.4 million in lobbying and campaign contributions. The anti-reform movement spent $210.6 million.
An even more dramatic story can be told about copyright. Between 1998 and 2010, pro–copyright reformers were outspent by anti-reformers by $1.3 billion to $1 million—a thousand to one.7 These are rough estimates, as transparency organizations don’t aggregate copyright as a category. But even if I am wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude, the point is still correct: in both cases, the anti-reformers outspend the pro-reformers by at least a factor of ten.
FIGURE 4
So, again: Don’t read these numbers to make any claim about causation. Read them and ask yourself one question only:
Not: Did the contributions and lobbying buy this apparently inconsistent result?
Instead: Do the contributions and lobbying make it harder to believe that this is a principled or consistent or sensible result?
CHAPTER 6
Why Don’t We Have Successful Schools?
Imagine a virus that spreads among kids, causing a certain kind of brain damage. The virus strikes kids at certain schools more than kids at other schools. It seems to strike rich kids less than poor. But it is pervasive, and spreading.
Then imagine that scientists discover a vaccine—a vaccine that might guarantee that no one, neither rich nor poor, will contract this brain-damaging disease. Imagine this vaccine is relatively inexpensive. Or, at least, the cost of the vaccine is a fraction of the cost of the damage done by the virus.
How long would it take before that vaccine spread to every kid in America?
We’ve argued throughout our history about just what government should do. Should there be a standing army? (Framers: no. Us: yes.) Should the government subsidize a partisan press? (Framers: yes. Us: no.) Should the federal government build highways? (Framers: no. Us: yes.)
But the one thing that everyone believes, at least now, is that the government has an essential role in ensuring a good education for our kids. Not everyone agrees on how. Some believe a voucher is all the government need do. Some believe it must mandate that everyone attend a public school. But within that wide range of means, all agree on the end: a safe and prosperous nation requires a well-educated youth.
We are failing in this. Miserably. In 1973 the United States was ranked high in the world in providing high-quality public education. We have fallen to fourteenth in reading among OECD countries (with math at twenty-five, and science at seventeen).1 Things, of course, were not so great for many, many Americans in 1973. They are just bizarrely worse for almost all Americans today.2
One particular problem in the collection of challenges around public education has been how to improve the lot of the worst-off among us. Despite the fact that billions have been spent to improve our schools—indeed, a