Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free, and Malcolm Gladwell’s recent bestseller, Outliers, offer contrasting visions of success. Mr. Gladwell writes that success comes from hard work – at least 10,000 hours of challenging practice – combined with being in the right place at the right time. Mr. Anderson embraces the contrary thesis that economist Milton Friedman’s favorite expression, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is “deeply, almost head-scratchingly” wrong.
Consider the Free economic paradigm:
[S]omebody’s paying, but it’s probably not you; indeed the costs may be so distributed that we individually don’t feel them at all.
I tend not to prize goods I don’t pay for. After spending $80 to rent a seat at the concert hall, I cherish every second of undivided attention to music. Had I invested over 10,000 hours of blood, sweat, and tears to master the cello – as Slava did – I’d appreciate Dvořák’s brilliant Cello Concerto even more. Downloading a free song, on the other hand, gets no skin in the game. If the first few seconds fail to entertain, the song drops with a thunk into the digital trash bin. Music appreciation degrades to sound bites instead of deep contemplation. No investment, no engagement, no feeling, no value.
Free hypes the glittering generality that a near-zero marginal cost of distributing information will lead to an era of abundance, using the sci-fi term “post-scarcity economics.” This ridiculous oxymoron ought to remain in the realm of fantasy because allocating scarce resources is precisely the point of economics. For pirated songs, photos of inebriated teens on Facebook, or silly tweets on Twitter, there is no scarcity, so economics does not rule. Readers might overlook one nugget of fool’s gold like “post-scarcity economics,” but Free is a mother lode of contradictions and tautologies.
Mr. Anderson does a yeoman’s job surveying the societal, technological, financial, and marketing basis of free goods. He recites many familiar anecdotes, quotes, and history lessons. Insights on trends in the computer, network, and media industries seem apt and even farsighted. I’d rate the book’s distillation of the Free business models a paragon of clarity.
Yet Free is no outlier. Unlike Mr. Gladwell, who starts with a premise that resonates, Mr. Anderson fights an uphill battle, ultimately failing to convince that a free lunch is on the path to success.