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Next: The Value of Communication Up: Measuring Entropic Items: Quantity Previous: Distribution costs.

Societal value.

In some cases, it is misleading to consider only individual pairs of buyers and vendors when assessing value. Accordingly, I introduce a notion of societal value.

I take a common-sense view of societal value, as a measure of ``how much the commonality benefits'' if some entropic item is widely distributed. For example, consider the benefit that accrues to spreading knowledge that tends to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Individuals can only benefit greatly from such knowledge if such knowledge is widespread. Another example is knowledge of the proper use of the telephone or the internet. Individual benefits increase, to the extent that large populations use these communications media. By comparison, consider the degraded value of a telex connection, now that it is so rarely used.

There is, of course, some cost to any wide distribution of an entropic item. This can be broken down into three components: compensating the author(s) of the item, broadcasting the item, and perhaps compensating the recipients for their attention.

Most public-service broadcasting on radio and TV, we should hope, contains items whose societal value is greater than their societal cost. Otherwise we shouldn't fund their broadcast through general taxation. We should further demand that such broadcasts have a positive monetary (individualised) value for enough individuals that the societal value will exceed societal cost. That is, each broadcast must be sufficiently entertaining not to alienate or annoy too many people. Otherwise it will probably be ignored, and will certainly make future public-service broadcasts more costly.



Clark Thomborson
Fri Oct 3 14:28:46 NZST 1997