Veblen and the NYT

This is a long--four part--article on the New York Times and its business model, titled "The Information Theory of the Leisure Class, or, Why I am Dropping My NYT Home Subscription."

The author, Kenneth Anderson, is a law professor at Washington College of Law, American University, in DC. He makes the case that the New York Times has changed its business model from being a provider of facts to a provider of opinion, opinion that helps a certain segment of the population confirm themselves in their opinions, a service for which they are willing to pay, up to $600 a year. Thus, the reference, by the author, to Theodore Veblen and his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

The argument is about what we are paying for when we take the Times home delivery. (I should point out that I purchase the paper copy of the New York Times nearly every Sunday.) Professor Anderson contends we are paying to be able to say we read the Times and to have the times confirm to us our prejudices (well, not for the Professor nor for me--we are checking on the prejudices of others, of the elites in New England and the Middle Atlantic States and the Coast). I think the paragraph that sums it up best is this one:

Hence dropping Times home delivery is, for my family and me, the way one minor individual subscriber re-establishes the connection of price to quality. I’ve decided against conspicuous consumption; I’ve decided to pay the actual value of the goods online, by going online. Pay, that is, exactly the value that the Times itself puts on it as factual information, rather than a prestige good. There is a substantial psychic cost to me in doing this, by the way – and not just to my New Yorker wife, losing the paper connection to home. I’m an academic – and as a conservative academic (heaven forfend), there is a genuine prestige benefit to flaunting my paid-for, pulp-paper, hard-copy, print edition of the New York Times at my university office and around, thus showing my colleagues that I am broad-minded enough to pay for the damn thing, something they wouldn’t bother to do and, anyway, they wouldn’t ever consider subscribing to the WSJ or the Washington Times, and as for the Weekly Standard, I doubt they’ve even heard of it. Losing that is a genuine cost in conspicuous academic consumption.

This is a long, four part, article, but I found it worth the read. I could quote more, but your time is valuable and you should spend it reading the original.

Regards -- Cliff