In the summer of 2007, I took a calculus course at University of Kansas. The textbook was written by James Stewart and cost over $100.
Calculus isn't proprietary information (because Isaac Newton's heirs weren't as good as Walt Disney's at getting a "not really perpetual" perpetual copyright). If the information is basically zero-cost, the textbook should be priced to only cover paper, ink, and entrepreneurial talent. The materials are low quality (the cover is paper, and the corners of the spine are worn), and the entrepreneurial talent is fairly non-existent (I required several supplemental books to make sense of Stewart's writing). So why did my book cost so much?
Two years later, when reading the Wall Street Journal, I found the answer. Stewart was building an 18,000-square-foot house (are they still called houses when they're larger than Old Navy stores?) that cost $24 million.
"If I hadn't commissioned this house, I'm not sure what I would spend the money on," he said. Well, he could have started by not rent-seeking, by not accumulating monopoly power and then using that power to create prices above marginal cost for his textbooks, by making a sufficient living from his talents instead of accumulating so much money that he quite literally was almost not sure what to do with it.
My copy of his book is the "University of Kansas edition," dramatically reducing my ability to resell it. What makes this edition distinct from any other? Well, it has a paper cover and it's missing Chapter 7. By creating BS editions for individual schools, Stewart not only took my money when I bought the book, but he kept me from getting more of it back when I tried to resell it.
There's lots of evidence that Stewart supports the Occupy Wall Street movement (he's a mathematics professor, he's Canadian, he's rich, and he dressed as Satine at his annual Halloween costume party in 2008). But many of the young people in the movement were to some degree impoverished by Stewart, and unnecessarily so. He gained rents from students left little choice (buy this overpriced textbook or don't get your college degree). And I'm sure Stewart has no idea that the real villains of the world look a lot less like Zidler and a lot more like a 60-ish Canadian in drag.
via oneofthebest
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