Remember that guy? He wrote "The Bell Curve" a few years ago, and he's argued in the Wall Street Journal that we should move to a trade-school structure in this country.
Salon.com has an article today in The War Room about how Murray is complaining that he's underpaid as a writer (he isn't, really, but that's how it's spun). Some of the linkys are interesting, so I posted it here.
This is just part of the ongoing debate about the value of writing, books, gatekeepers, etc. that began with the Internet. Same arguments have flowed about MP3 downloads -- are people willing to buy an album to get 2 songs? Are people willing to pay for content, whether printed or musical or ebook or opinion columns?
Laura Miller's post at Salon yesterday brings up some good points, but it all comes back to access. Posting to a blog, or publishing a PDF, is cheap, and evidently some folks have all the time in the world on their hands -- hence, the Internet!
The world needs gatekeepers, whether those are college professors, book editors, record company executives, talent scouts, or the "good old boy (gal) network". It's more needed now that so much information can be posted so quickly -- the signal to noise ratio of the Internet is getting smaller every day.
Our common constraint is bandwidth.
