Mason: $16.80 for an Argument About Free Copies

What exactly became cheap?

In Chapter 5, The Prophets of Postcapitalism, Mason explains Romer’s distinction between things and instructions for making them. Developing a new instruction has a cost. Once it exists, it can be used again: the next use does not require repeating the entire original research effort.

This is the distinction behind marginal cost—the additional expense of another unit, not the full cost of creating the first one. In the book’s example, copying and pasting does not repeat the economist’s work in writing the paper. Nor does it establish that research, editorial work or technical infrastructure cost nothing.

There is a second distinction. When one person listens to a digital recording, another need not wait for a single copy to become available. Mason describes this information as shareable. Access can nevertheless be restricted. That is not merely his retelling: in the abstract of his own model, Romer describes technology as a nonrival but partially excludable good—one person’s use does not prevent another’s, yet users can be partly excluded.[2]

Those properties should not be collapsed into a promise that everything will become free. Information that is not used up through use is not necessarily information that anyone can obtain without restriction.

The paywall is already inside the argument

Mason does not overlook that boundary. Alongside the PDF anecdote, he discusses legal and technical restrictions on copying, as well as firms defending their control of information. This essay does not use the book’s prices, market shares or legal examples as present-day evidence.

Paid access is therefore not a straightforward refutation of his thesis. It is already part of the contradiction he describes: information is technically easy to distribute, while rules and access arrangements allow it to be sold. Equally, the technical possibility of sharing does not establish that such control must disappear.

Mason leaves that fork open at the end of Chapter 5. Either a new combination of firms, markets and networked collaboration stabilises, or networks undermine the market order and a transition to another system begins. Those are different possibilities, not two descriptions of an already guaranteed outcome.

A transition cannot be executed with a copy command

Chapter 10, Project Zero, shows how many additional decisions stand behind the second possibility. Mason proposes restraining monopolies, changing intellectual-property rules and making the results of publicly funded research available for common use. These are elements of his political programme, not an account of the law currently in force.

Moreover, the chapter does not advocate simply abolishing markets by decree. The proposed rules are meant to change the conditions in which they operate. Those measures can be disputed, but they should not be replaced in the argument by a technical property of a file. Copying cannot pass legislation or organise collaborative production on people’s behalf.

For the question of digital abundance, a concise account is enough if it keeps three separate entries on the bill: creation, reproduction and access. The book’s $16.80 illustrates why the second can approach zero while the third does not. It establishes neither the inevitability of postcapitalism nor its impossibility.

This essay examines specific arguments from Chapters 5 and 10 of the 2015 English-language edition. It does not assess all the book’s historical explanations or economic predictions.

Sources

[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/188551/postcapitalism-by-mason-paul/9780141975290 — Penguin — PostCapitalism, Paul Mason [2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w3210 — Paul M. Romer — Endogenous Technological Change (NBER Working Paper 3210)