The trouble with tinkering
You may have read that the Quebec government is looking into the possibility of controlling book prices — specifically, no more than a 10 per cent discount in the first nine months a book is out — in order to help independent book stores. That’s “independent” bookstores, not “independence” bookstores, which you might be forgiven for thinking, since the government is run by the Parti Québécois and for many PQ militants all of life is aimed at the independence of Quebec, though of course they don’t actually call it that since factual descriptions of what they want make their fellow citizens nervous.
You might also think a government that has been heavy-handed in legislating against the public display of religious symbols, except of course Christian ones, which are not so much religious, you understand, as historical, and that has also developed a reputation for a less than liberal approach to immigrants and minorities would want to stay away from regulations regarding books. Book laws don’t have a good history.
True, no one’s proposing burning books, just making them more expensive for a time: nine months: a kind of gestation period for the independents. And in fairness the province did exempt books from provincial GST when that tax came in the 1990s (a policy that seems enlightened but is actually misguided: when nothing’s exempt, consumption taxes both cost much less to administer and don’t alter relative prices). But anyone with half a brain knows that in the 140-character-a-throw frenzies we have these days any policy that contains the words “regulation” and “books” is going to be trouble.
I think the policy is nutty, too, and resent the fact that energy will have to be expended explaining why to a legislative committee that’s going to examine the issue. But what really gets me about the policy is, not that it’s so bizarre, but that it’s so banal. We live in an age of social tinkering. Everybody wants to tinker. Tinkering is us. Why should we be surprised if somebody decides to tinker with the book industry? In fact, we’ve had several decades of federal and provincial policies tinkering with the book industry. Ever try to import textbooks into Canada? Didn’t think so. Only governmentdesignated importers are allowed to.
Why this particular policy proposal? Someone has noticed that independent bookstores are in trouble. Possibly some disinterested policy analyst. More likely the independent bookstores themselves. What’s their problem? Paper books are becoming extinct, which this policy doesn’t — and can’t — address. But also they’re being buffeted by mass retailers who very aggressively discount what paper books do still get sold.
An economist, which I am, is bound to say “Tough. The guys who did illuminated manuscripts fought against Gutenberg, too. They lost. You did a good job for a long time but now we’ve found better ways to get books to people.” (I know an economist who publishes his own mystery novels as e-books on Amazon.com. He sets his price. Amazon takes a cut. Bingo: The books are published. What could be more exciting than that for books, for readers, for authors, for reading?)
Non-economists, which is most people, may be inclined to think instead that independent bookstores provide more benefits than books: a unique local experience, quirky taste, personalized service, a meeting-place for the community, and so on. Fine, we economists respond, those are all good reasons they should be able to survive without help. Let consumers weigh all those benefits against the higher cost of books. If the stores survive, it’s because consumers think the ancillary benefits are worth the higher book prices. If they don’t survive, it’s because consumers value cheaper books more than all these other things. In which case, RIP and good riddance. The world changes. C’est la vie, as you might say.
But logic isn’t going to stop the would-be tinkerers who think the world would be a more perfect place by tweaking price rules to give the independents a nine-month head start.
I used to be a tinkerer. As an economist, I was trained in and have even taught cost-benefit analysis, which is the handyman’s manual of tinkering. Figure out all the consequences of your policy; add up all the benefits; compare them to the costs; weight costs and benefits differently if they accrue to different groups (e.g., benefits for First Nations count double); and if the benefits exceed the costs by enough, full speed ahead with the policy. But don’t miscalculate. Don’t leave anything out. Don’t get the weights or the sums wrong. And, above all, don’t let the policy process get captured by participants. (And good luck with that one.)
I’m not a tinkerer anymore. Tinkering has brought us a policy for absolutely everything. Take 10 minutes: Try to think of something government isn’t involved in. I bet you can’t do it. Spend an hour on your favourite government’s web portal: It opens doors to several universes of activity. We may once have had government of the people, by the people, for the people. We now have government of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the interest groups — pretty much because we have all implicitly agreed that tinkering is just fine. But the smallest smidgen of common sense suggests the chance of getting these thousands of interventions anything close to right, whether individually or in aggregate, is now pretty much zero.
This is not a defence of anarchy. It is a suggestion that government needs to be much less ambitious. We do want everyone to get a good basic education. We do need a national defence (maybe). But we should stop insisting governments give us a perfect world. The perfect is, as they say, the enemy of the good. In more and more cases every day, we would be much better off just leaving well enough alone. A book a few years ago (I can’t remember its price) said “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” If you’re a government, you shouldn’t just not sweat the small stuff. You should completely forget about the small stuff.
If the PQ has taken perfectionist tinkering to an extreme, well, somebody has to be on the leading edge.