At the heart of a bureaucratic mission statement is bringing people together for a long period of time in a spirit of expansive inclusiveness. Nothing does that better than meetings. Every committed bureaucrats looks back fondly on the time when she or he was free to leave to attend meetings. Meetings provide rare vision that cannot be adequately expounded upon. Meetings reveal this, show that, we could go on and on. Meetings are such stuff as memories are made of.

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An important note before this Carnival continues: we functionaries here at the Carnival of the Bureaucrats are deeply disturbed in conjunction with the increasing reception of Carnival submissions from parties that we tentatively categorize as entrepreneurial Blog carnival submitters. We recognize that entrepreneurs create new businesses that help to generate employment and tax revenues. Nonetheless, the rules of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats clearly prohibit submissions from entrepreneurs, innovators, hustlers, and persons vigorously seeking to help others to make more money. As in previous months, such submissions have been rejected by us.

Karen MacInerney at Poisoned Pen Letters describes difficulties she had with her house appraisal. Apparently the geometric shape of a house significantly affects its appraisal value. Perhaps an ambitious economist might find a pointer to a significant t-statistic in this sad story.

Jeremy at WTTF submits a post entitled, "Practical time travel, and remembering to zip your fly," and remarks, "A non-conventional water cooler conversation." Due to the current heightened indecency risk level, I will not discuss this post. I recommend instead Jeremy's comic and post entitled, The New Revolution. Jeremy writes:

Turn off your TV and start listening to yourself. You were born with everything you need to survive, now act like it.

I accomplished turning off the TV years ago. But I'm still too busy talking to myself to listen to myself.

Alvaro Fernandez at Brain Health Blog interviews Yaakov Stern about how to build your cognitive reserve. Dr. Stern states:

the group with high level of leisure activities presented 38% less risk (controlling for other factors) of developing Alzheimer's symptoms.

This study indicates the importance of bureaucracies providing more leisure time for their employees.

Steven Silvers at Scatterbox discusses leadership changes at WakeUpWalMart. He states:

Two years after WakeUpWalMart and Wal-Mart Watch launched their political-style campaigns, Wal-Mart is indeed a different company. It has responded to reputation attacks with its own PR-savvy initiatives. It lowered heath insurance premiums and demanded that suppliers meet higher environmental standards. Chased out of Chicago, it became an economic hero to a distressed community across the street, creating a presence that supports the area’s unique economic interests and shopping habits. It even replaced its disgustingly lowbrow and ironically insulting “May I help you?” employee vests with khaki-and-polo shirt ensembles.

What's lowbrow and insulting about helping? I favor keeping the old vest, but changing the phrase to, "Like the government, we're here to help!"

In the spirit of expansive inclusiveness, the Carnival of the Bureaucrats is pleased to recognize other bureaucratic sites on the web. This month we note Liberal Bureaucracy and Adventures in Bureaucracy, and we award distinguished mention to Instant Bureaucracy. Instant Bureaucracy offers, as a public service, six very useful forms. No longer need you skimp on paperwork in your personal life!

That concludes this month's Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our Carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the Carnival index page.

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Digital forms and ubiquitous networks are greatly increasing opportunities to circulate authored symbolic works. Digitization projects are creating huge online libraries of digitized books that persons around the world can access at zero incremental cost. Storage prices are dropping so rapidly that one small device will soon be able to store all the music that most persons listen to throughout their lives. Video sharing sites are collecting and distributing large amounts of video across the Internet. Many persons can now easily create a huge library of digital works. How persons respond to vastly expanding access to works will significantly shape the communications industry.

To understand better the circulation of works, consider U.S. public-library users’ book-borrowing behavior since the mid-nineteenth century. Measured relative to the unskilled wage, the dime novels that Irwin Beadle began selling in 1860 were almost five times more expensive than the twenty-five cent paperbacks being sold in 1950. A lower real purchase price for books increased the incentive to purchase rather than borrow. Average time spent reading, according to the best available estimates, fell 50% from 1925 to 1995. Less time spent reading implies less demand for borrowing books.

Other factors probably pushed toward more borrowing. The number of books in print, and the number of books in libraries, increased immensely from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Perhaps such a change encouraged persons to read a larger number of books less thoroughly, and hence favored borrowing books relative to purchasing books. Library users’ travel costs, in time and money, probably fell with improvements in transportation technology since the mid-nineteenth century. Lower travel costs reduce the total cost of borrowing books from a library.

Library book circulation per user has no strong, long-run trend. From 1856 to 1978, library users borrowed from U.S. public libraries about 15 books per user per year. From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline. These figures depend on estimates and disparate samples of libraries with varying circulation and user accounting methods. Nonetheless, these figures are of sufficient quality to suggest that historically established institutions significantly stabilize borrowing behavior.

Users borrowing items from public libraries has plausible connections to a variety of institutions and values. Much of the pleasure from reading comes from discussing a book with friends who have also read the book. The desire to discuss books among friends may constrain the rate at which individuals will read books. At the same time, persons may value going to the library as an activity in itself. Borrowing library items may be in part a by-product of interest in those visits. On the supply side, libraries can counterbalance changing demand for books by shifting the distribution of book collections between popular and less popular works, by changing investments in promoting book borrowing, and by shifting collections from books to audiovisuals.

Media use that is connected to wider scope of behaviors and interests is likely to change more slowly. The shifts in music from vinyl records, to CDs, and then to digital downloads were format changes that required relatively small changes in behavior. Persons who read the same newspaper every morning while using the bathroom, or who watch a half-hour television news program every evening before dinner, have their media use connected to relatively stable patterns of life. Generational changes in patterns of life, rather than changes in relative prices, quality, or features, are more important for such media use. Established institutions, meaning both routine patterns of personal activity and indefinitely chartered organizations, can give media use considerable stability despite major changes in activity incentives and technological possibilities.

Note: Post edited and updated. For sources and data, see Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856 (also on SSRN).

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The beastly heat in DC this past week revealed that my air conditioner doesn't work. As a dedicated civil servant on his second shift, I was sitting at my computer late Wednesday night with nothing on but my boxers, my window fan running for all its worth, and I was still overwhelmed by the heat I could feel radiating from my computer screen. I was too hot to work.

The next day I called an air-conditioner company. The air-conditioner company is sending someone to my place next Tuesday. That's a long time for me to be too hot to work.

A bowl of ice on my desk does the trick. For at least the one fan that I know I have, I now report: once again I am not too hot to work.

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The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this fall will release another report lamenting the decline of literary reading. From the late seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, many cultural leaders would have applauded a decline in reading of popular novels. Now, however, such a decline is a cause for grave concern. Fiction has become a major public good.

Appreciating modern fiction requires considerable sophistication. The Executive Summary of the NEA's 2004 report, Reading at Risk, declared:

Reading at Risk presents a distressing but objective overview of national trends. The accelerating declines in literary reading among all demographic groups of American adults indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

The NEA's news release begin with this description:

Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature.... The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002....

The report's Executive Summary included this finding:

4. Women read more literature than men do, but literary reading by both groups is declining at significant rates.

Under that finding was this data:

Thus less than half of American men have read literature for at least as far back as 1982. While the overall share of literary readers declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002, the gender protrusion in the share of literary readers (the difference between women's and men's shares of literary readers) has been larger than 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002. In 2002, the gender protrusion was 17.5 percentage points!

Reading at Risk emphasizes the tremendous public importance of literary reading. In the preface to the report, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the NEA, declares:

print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that makes complex communication possible. To lose such intellectual capability -- and the many sorts of human continuity it allows -- would constitute a vast impoverishment.
     More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study not only affect literature but all the arts -- as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.

The gender protrusion is literary reading is much larger than the decline in literary reading that the NEA and many concerned persons, including some who note various flaws in the NEA report other than the lack of interest in the impressive gender protrusion, have addressed. Why hasn't the awesome gender protrusion attracted widespread public interest, or at least concern, or at least notice?

The NEA's press release for Reading at Risk detumesces sex. The press release states:

Women read more literature than men do, but the survey indicates literary reading by both genders is declining. Only slightly more than one-third of adult males now read literature. Reading among women is also declining significantly, but at a slower rate.

The first independent clause of the first sentence has "women" as the subject and indicates that women lead men in the valued activity of concern. That sentence then has an attention-deflecting conjunction ("but" rather than "and") linking to a second independent clause indicating a similarity between the sexes. The second sentence returns to the idea of the first independent clause of the first sentence. It presents a statistic about "adult males." It does not, however, present the parallel statistic about "adult females." The third sentence returns to women and slightly qualifies the second clause of the first sentence. This disjoint prose structure doesn't convey what should be a major concern for those who truly believe that literary reading has great public importance: in 2002, 37.6% of men, in contrast to 55.1% of women, were literary readers.

Good literature is an antidote to conventional master narratives and narrow interests that obscure the continually new reality of the world. When it comes to men, failure of imagination may in fact indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

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Persons' spatial representations of an action described verbally are biased in the spatial orientation of the action. Recent research indicates that a left-to-right bias develops from experience of a culture's left-to-right writing system, and a right-to-left bias likewise from a right-to-left writing system.

The Morgan Bible of Louis IX and the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, two magnificent books, illustrate this cultural effect. In the Morgan Bible:

The repetition of a figure moved rightward in a painting corresponds to temporal sequence. Figures generally enter a scene from the left, and exit to the right. Bringing Benjamin back and the repulsion of the Israelites are painted with predominate right-to-left directions of action. In these and other instances, the reversal of the visual convention of European text signals a spatial or conceptual reversal.

The Shahnameh, created in a Persian culture with a right-to-left writing convention, depicts action in the opposite direction:

Among the 258 figural paintings in the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, on my count 70 of these to have a predominate horizontal line of action: 50 from right to left, and 20 from left to right. Left to right lines of action associated with reverse meanings include folio 42v (Faridun's eldest son retreating), 98v (Turanians invading Iran), and 102v (retaliatory killing).

Writing systems are not neutral communications technology. Like any communications technology, they depend on standard physical artifacts that inevitably have sensory effects.

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I'm considering placing my sculptural masterpiece, Runaway Model, in a private collection. I have nothing against private collections. I've acquired from private collections several pieces that are in my apartment. I realize that many persons visit weekly private collections. Nonetheless, I would prefer to place my art in a leading public art gallery, such as the Tate or the Corcoran.

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