I would much rather billionaire types take on large issues that governments don't want to touch, like space flight or specific diseases in foreign countries, than something already in service like libraries. Maybe I just have a bias due to having a library just up the street from where I live currently, but I have never not had access to an adequate library in my life time, and only see room for marginal diminishing returns in improving them.
Visit a library in a low-income area (where people need them the most) and see the kinds of computers people use to hunt for jobs, do their homework, etc. I've been to a library that was running windows 2000 on TWO ancient Dells with with CRT monitors in 2015. And the two computers they had were being used by adults and students. There is so much to be gained from improving libraries.
Let me give you a hypothetical company IT department: while you are allowed to work there with any education background, only an MBA can be a manager. How do you think they would perform at IT tasks?
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.
I completely agree. Where I lived at in Houston, trying to find a place to sit and study quietly was near impossible, which is something I certainly took for granted.
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).
The libraries in my city offer legal advice, business advice and much more beyond storing books. Heck, the majority of books are put in storage in order to free up physical space for doing homework, computers, study rooms, etc.
This makes me think a recycle/reuse program should exist. "Our" old hardware is newer/better than what they have. I know this program probably does exists but I usually assume they are just breaking my device apart and pulling out gold/metals. If I knew the library needed a gently used device, I'd have no problem giving them my old stuff.
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.
Physical libraries seem so inefficient. Can't the same thing be accomplished at a fraction of the cost by distributing laptops with subscriptions to KhanAcademy etc ?
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.
>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.
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.
"The government" is virtually the only entity that has ever taken any interest in space flight. The cumulative government investment in space research, development, and operations is orders of magnitude higher than the the cumulative private investment, and even today in the supposed golden age of private spaceflight more than 80% of the money is coming from taxpayers.
I wish some tech billionaire or rich tech company invested in rethinking healthcare from the ground up (or like Elon Musk likes to say, from first principles) with focus on UX, state-of-the-art technologies and integration. Anytime I use our healthcare (although, this is the Czech Rep, could be different in USA), I feel like it should be easy to design a better service.
Basically, something what Tesla did, apply Silicon Valley tech startup mentality in a non-tech industry.
Many have tried, but my guess is that it's extremely difficult mainly because the government is involved, and decades of archaic systems (and minds) that you need to deal with. The word "fast" isn't in the vocabulary in this industry, and every decision moves at a snail's pace. Granted, there's a reason and you can't simply fuck up and prioritize into the next sprint that you'll fix the previous fuckup.
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.
I think rethinking healthcare would start with better nutrition education and a focus on preventing disease. Med school has almost no nutrition education and doctors are largely ignorant of food's role on disease. Most cases of heart disease and diabetes are largely preventable.
Preventing those 2 diseases alone would save the country billions, if not trillions, a year in medical costs.
One problem that can't probably solved by simply "focusing on the UX and better service" is that the service provider (medical professional) is both responsible for evaluating what's wrong with you (and what services you need) and the administering the treatment.
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.
Except you can't just manufacture healthcare in your back yard and win with capitalism. The whole industry is deeply and systemically regulated - trying to stir the pot gets you sued, either by existing hospitals for your threat or by any patient dissatisfied with the results of your treatment. Or by state health agencies that see you not following the extraordinarily rigid rulebook on how healthcare is to be done.
We are as far from a market where you can experiment with healthcare as you can be aside from outright banning private medical practice.
Agree that private money is best used where public money isn't available... Bezos purchased the entire Washington Post - the 8th largest paper in the country with national readership - for $250M. [1] By comparison, the two library systems that service the Seattle area cost a combined $190M to run just in 2017. [2] [3] The reach and impact that can be achieved by strategic investments like the Post surely outweigh what little incremental improvements could be made in existing library systems.
Libraries serve a very important function, preserving and distributing knowledge. Yes, internet access can mitigate some of the needs, but even then many use libraries to access the internet.
Though an interesting idea would be to combine the roles of a library with a traditional pub house.
Bezos doesn't have enough money for that...as much as he has. It will be drained in a very few years IMO.
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 would much rather billionaire types take on large issues that governments don't want to touch, like space flight or specific diseases in foreign countries
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.
It should be acknowledged that public libraries are now defacto places of social work. This actually makes eminent sense, in a way. It should be acknowledged, so that the proper resources and funding can be delivered where it is needed and will do much good.
Libraries are an excellent place to put some money. They provide learning opportunities, but many also provide resume and job search training, community meeting places, free internet access, and I think is one of the few "neutral" places in American society. Neutral in that there are few, if any politics involved, and it's an equal opportunity benefit to a community that most people can get behind. Even if they don't use the library, few I think would speak against.
I grew up in one of the poorer places in America - Appalachia. Despite that, we had a nice library, donated initially by a wealthy individual and then sustained by various forms of private funding over the decades.
It didn't always have the absolute latest books, the selection was decent though. It had Internet access very early on and was a valuable, inexpensive resource for young and old people alike. It was also relatively well maintained; pre mid 1990's Web, if you needed to really know a subject in-depth, it was easily the best local resource. The local community benefited immensely from it.
I'd like to see Bezos (and ideally matching contributors) put together an effort to modernize the concept for the 21st century. Virtual reality for example will become an important access technology over the next 20 years, that many lower income people won't be able to afford and will have future job importance in many fields.
This is poorly thought out and edited, because I have to run, but I thought it worth posting. I've been thinking more about libraries lately. I really think it is time to reinvigorate and expand them. Pretty sure I'm preaching to the converted here about the power of information; I think what some folks miss is just how incredibly valuable libraries are. No, they aren't a panacea, but they are a cheap source of immense social good.
A lot of people see a building full of books and wonder why it can't be replaced by a bank of terminals and Google. I won't get in to the relative merits of dead trees vs. electrons, and largely don't care about it. What that line of thought misses is two-fold: the librarians and the community space.
Decent librarians are hugely underrated resources. Great ones can be incredible. Maybe natural language systems will become good enough in my lifetime to handle some of the vague requests librarians routinely manage to match to the right book, but the leaps of association to related topics, the knowledge of the edge cases of information classification to navigate them well, and the general mass of knowledge they accumulate is massively useful to have on hand. And so few people take advantage of it.
Meeting spaces in this context (both formal, sign-up-for-your-group and informal) serve an important role as well. It seems[1] like they're becoming rarer as government buildings use security as an excuse to close to the public, and in calling around to private groups with spaces that previously did that sort of thing have been much more reluctant to do so when I've tried to organize things over the last several years.
To personalize this a bit, I grew up in a poor family. One thing that was heavily emphasized to me was the value of learning - I think it was reaction to missed opportunities. Who knows what would have happened, but I do know that my college essays (written referencing library books, building on interests fostered in the math and the American Lit sections) would have been very different without them, and I kinda doubt I would have gotten a free ride to a top-10 school if I had been only drawing on what public school offered.
I'd love to see more experiments with libraries. I know some are playing with becoming more "maker-space"-ey, which is a decent thing to explore. I think finding a way to offer peer-classes in whatever - learn Javascript, fancy knitting techniques - would be an interesting thing to try as well. But I'm bad at seeing opportunities like this. I wonder what people with that super power could come up with.
The modern day equivalent of a public library (storing information history) is the internet archive.
I think donating to the internet archive would be a better donation which a lot more benefit to society than funding physical libraries.
Libraries solve one of the worlds most important problem -
keeping societies important information history safe. Websites are not immune to this problem. They require maintenance. When a webpage goes down its gone forever. Without something like the internet archive, we would not have a modern day library equivalent for the web. We are losing a lot of important information. Physical libraries today are in comparison much less important than digital ones.
Archiving information is only one function of libraries. They are community spaces, social equalizers, educational institutions, and temporary shelter, among other things.
The problem libraries solved, mostly access to information, has largely been monopolize by the internet. Most, including the third world impoverished, have access to the internet. Therefore the necessity of a library has been largely diminished and inevitably libraries will disappear. Complaining about libraries when people have no sanitation and access to clean tap water sounds largely like a first world problem, as much as I dislike the term.
Libraries should evolve with the change of technology and move their function from curation and access to information to something that is able to benefit more people. Books occupy volume and removing them would make more room for desks and rooms where people with no access to quiet areas could use to be more productive.
Libraries are and have always been more than just about the books, and the information therein. They're also meeting places, community centers, and sometimes even double as soup kitchens. They are public forums. They are polling locations.
They're still, to this day, very important, and the fact that they're dying is a bad thing.
And to address your second paragraph, libraries have been, some more slowly than others, adapting with the times. My local library system has _three times_ the number of ebooks as they do print books. They provide access to things like EBSCOHost. Heck, the librarians in this system are even trained to help you find jobs.
In fact, all of this was addressed in the article.
Copyright law is crazy broken. IP in general at least needs dramatically reevaluated in the context of global information networks. Building more libraries to circumvent and subsidize an archaic model of corporate profit doesn't sound like a great use of societies resources.
This is what I meant where libraries should evolve from being curators of books to adapting to new technology.
It also seems obvious that instead of access to libraries a better use of money would be access to the internet. SpaceX and Facebook are already working on solving this problem. It’s just a matter of technology and infrastructure. If it’s unfeasible to lay wires in remote areas maybe access to internet would better be served by satellites or balloons.
If a person is not educating themselves through the internet what makes you think they would educate themselves at a library? At some point it comes down to personal responsibility and as much money you throw at the problem it will never solve it.
I think this is a good idea. I would add YMCAs and similar places.
I think one of the best places for a mega-philanthropist to invest would be in the time and places that kids spend outside of public schools. Many of the biggest disadvantages in opportunities for kids are created when they fall behind before and after school and during summers, relative to kids who are better off socioeconomically. These disadvantages compound and are lasting. Safe places to engage in healthy recreation, productive endeavors, and getting something nutritious to eat that they wouldn't otherwise have access to would go a long way for underprivileged youth and have an impact for the rest of their lives.
Ehh i don't think Bezos and Gates are the issue; it's that services (like libraries and public transit) are raising the value of nearby land. We should tax the beneficiaries; ie the landowners who today profit off tax payer investments.
Subsidized public roads also raise the value of land around which they are built, by giving you access to build something there.
It isn't a specific group of landowners. These sources of profit created by public infrastructure simply and generally make people rich, so you need to tax the rich.
I'm definitely not convinced disincentivizing people from living in walkable distance from libraries and public transit terminals is good. Sounds more like we need the opposite - incentivize walkability, build more libraries and public transit, and more generally incentivize higher density residential to cut down on the total amount of infrastructure needed, because our current scale is unsustainable with current tax models.
As much as I hate books, I love public libraries. Our local library (Northside branch santa clara) gives a big conference room every saturday to a team of passionate locals trying to teach themselves programming. My friends and I go there every Saturday to help people who are stuck and give them guidance (what to learn next, how to prepare for interviews, what language is best suitable for what they are trying to do, etc).
Talk about diversity, the library is a place where you get to see people from all walks of life outside the silicon valley bubble (different race, age, handicap). It builds a learning community where people have the opportunity to help each other at a more human level.
Readit News
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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
[1] https://goo.gl/QfbJG1
[2] http://www.spl.org/about-the-library/budget
[3] https://kcls.org/budget/
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.
Health care for all? Affordable housing? Food security?
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.
Dead Comment
I grew up in one of the poorer places in America - Appalachia. Despite that, we had a nice library, donated initially by a wealthy individual and then sustained by various forms of private funding over the decades.
It didn't always have the absolute latest books, the selection was decent though. It had Internet access very early on and was a valuable, inexpensive resource for young and old people alike. It was also relatively well maintained; pre mid 1990's Web, if you needed to really know a subject in-depth, it was easily the best local resource. The local community benefited immensely from it.
I'd like to see Bezos (and ideally matching contributors) put together an effort to modernize the concept for the 21st century. Virtual reality for example will become an important access technology over the next 20 years, that many lower income people won't be able to afford and will have future job importance in many fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
A lot of people see a building full of books and wonder why it can't be replaced by a bank of terminals and Google. I won't get in to the relative merits of dead trees vs. electrons, and largely don't care about it. What that line of thought misses is two-fold: the librarians and the community space.
Decent librarians are hugely underrated resources. Great ones can be incredible. Maybe natural language systems will become good enough in my lifetime to handle some of the vague requests librarians routinely manage to match to the right book, but the leaps of association to related topics, the knowledge of the edge cases of information classification to navigate them well, and the general mass of knowledge they accumulate is massively useful to have on hand. And so few people take advantage of it.
Meeting spaces in this context (both formal, sign-up-for-your-group and informal) serve an important role as well. It seems[1] like they're becoming rarer as government buildings use security as an excuse to close to the public, and in calling around to private groups with spaces that previously did that sort of thing have been much more reluctant to do so when I've tried to organize things over the last several years.
To personalize this a bit, I grew up in a poor family. One thing that was heavily emphasized to me was the value of learning - I think it was reaction to missed opportunities. Who knows what would have happened, but I do know that my college essays (written referencing library books, building on interests fostered in the math and the American Lit sections) would have been very different without them, and I kinda doubt I would have gotten a free ride to a top-10 school if I had been only drawing on what public school offered.
I'd love to see more experiments with libraries. I know some are playing with becoming more "maker-space"-ey, which is a decent thing to explore. I think finding a way to offer peer-classes in whatever - learn Javascript, fancy knitting techniques - would be an interesting thing to try as well. But I'm bad at seeing opportunities like this. I wonder what people with that super power could come up with.
[1] Anecdata alert!
[Update]
The author is not talking about a global project.
“Hidden in plain sight, the local libraries of America are patiently waiting for your attention”
I think donating to the internet archive would be a better donation which a lot more benefit to society than funding physical libraries.
Libraries solve one of the worlds most important problem - keeping societies important information history safe. Websites are not immune to this problem. They require maintenance. When a webpage goes down its gone forever. Without something like the internet archive, we would not have a modern day library equivalent for the web. We are losing a lot of important information. Physical libraries today are in comparison much less important than digital ones.
Libraries should evolve with the change of technology and move their function from curation and access to information to something that is able to benefit more people. Books occupy volume and removing them would make more room for desks and rooms where people with no access to quiet areas could use to be more productive.
They're still, to this day, very important, and the fact that they're dying is a bad thing.
And to address your second paragraph, libraries have been, some more slowly than others, adapting with the times. My local library system has _three times_ the number of ebooks as they do print books. They provide access to things like EBSCOHost. Heck, the librarians in this system are even trained to help you find jobs.
In fact, all of this was addressed in the article.
It also seems obvious that instead of access to libraries a better use of money would be access to the internet. SpaceX and Facebook are already working on solving this problem. It’s just a matter of technology and infrastructure. If it’s unfeasible to lay wires in remote areas maybe access to internet would better be served by satellites or balloons.
If a person is not educating themselves through the internet what makes you think they would educate themselves at a library? At some point it comes down to personal responsibility and as much money you throw at the problem it will never solve it.
I think one of the best places for a mega-philanthropist to invest would be in the time and places that kids spend outside of public schools. Many of the biggest disadvantages in opportunities for kids are created when they fall behind before and after school and during summers, relative to kids who are better off socioeconomically. These disadvantages compound and are lasting. Safe places to engage in healthy recreation, productive endeavors, and getting something nutritious to eat that they wouldn't otherwise have access to would go a long way for underprivileged youth and have an impact for the rest of their lives.
Raise taxes and on people like Bezos and Gates for the needs of society.
It isn't a specific group of landowners. These sources of profit created by public infrastructure simply and generally make people rich, so you need to tax the rich.
I'm definitely not convinced disincentivizing people from living in walkable distance from libraries and public transit terminals is good. Sounds more like we need the opposite - incentivize walkability, build more libraries and public transit, and more generally incentivize higher density residential to cut down on the total amount of infrastructure needed, because our current scale is unsustainable with current tax models.
Talk about diversity, the library is a place where you get to see people from all walks of life outside the silicon valley bubble (different race, age, handicap). It builds a learning community where people have the opportunity to help each other at a more human level.