How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.