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This Harvard Business School paper from Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou on the estimated monetary value of open source is kind of an incredible feat.
$8.8 trillion, btw.
That's the estimated value of open source, according to these researchers' excellent work.
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-502c-4139-8bf2-56eb4b65c58a.pdf
I've talked before about how the most important things don't always show up in spreadsheets (“What IS the ROI of clean water, good soil and breathable air?”)
and how organizations whose purpose is to make money are currently having a harder time ~making money~ because they don't/can't measure the non-pecunariary resources they rely on.
So, if all orgs stare at and act on are spreadsheets, they'll eventually deplete those foundational resources enough that their spreadsheets will look worse.
I've also talked about how those of us who see the ~incompleteness~ at play are having to create shared language from scratch as part of the massive effort to make the important stuff legible.
In a world where we want everything to be tidily manageable, and it's believed that what's measurable is manageable, quantifying the value of the commons is a really necessary step towards, you know, creating alternatives to it getting plundered.
It's a long road, but Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou, I am in your debt.
A while ago I thought there were some similarities between contributing to FOSS and what feminists called care work. (Both socially and economically)
The feminists talked about the economic value of house work which is unpaid, and motivated by social factors outside of the economy.
Eventually the critique lead to some estimates of the value of unpaid house work. (Which is currently estimated to be about 5.3 trillion for the US.)
https://www.bea.gov/data/special-topics/household-production
@alienghic this is amazing, thank you for sharing!
@alienghic @anthrocypher I have thought this too and there's also really interesting parallel work about female managers in jobs like managing a grocery store that I recently cited in a paper (it's been called task bind -- for women managing grocery stores they get penalized for doing "back of house" work in the office rather than walking out in the grocery store because when women are not visible it's assumed = not working vs male managers are assumed working when not visible)
@alienghic @anthrocypher this one: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63027
I thought there were a lot of potential parallels to forms of software work. A software reviewer thought this was the stupidest thing they'd ever seen which made me even more certain it was a good connection lol
Wait, but, isn't that's backwards?
I thought woman tended to be stuck doing more work? Especially lower status grunt work that doesn't advance ones career goals.
@alienghic @anthrocypher many true things are present in the world at the same time. This particular finding is about how work is seen by others and tradeoffs that are sometimes made in order to achieve short term goals, but that result in long term decreases in performance. Not about the amount of work that's done but about the type of work being seen differently.
@alienghic @anthrocypher in this particular case getting out and visible in a grocery store is perceived as working harder and being more present not as grunt work (well I'm sure it's complicated but that's the general context here)
@alienghic @anthrocypher I found it super fascinating to learn about management of such a different thing as a grocery store! We need so much more insight into these essential workplaces and so much of what we say about gender and work is really white collar which doesn't tell us about so much of the world (speaking as someone with a MIL who was a daycare provider!)
To be fair you were also talking about perceptions and not time studies.
@anthrocypher that looks like a very interesting paper, thank you!
It's a bit sad that we are forced to project everything on the money axis : money is often just totally beside the point, plus it fails to create alternative narrative than "money is the most important things on earth" while it's just a proxy (cargo culting is so sweet). But well, I guess that horse is far, having a nice way to tell "ahah, your trillion company worth nothing compared to breathable air" is a potent way to balance things.
@anthrocypher The 'tragedy of the commons' has become the 'crisis of the commons' because a few people have far more than their fair share of greed and it appears to increase with scarcity. i.e. They want more of things when there is very little left. They are failures at living in society. If they can't share, they shouldn't be allowed to benefit.
@anthrocypher it just occurred to me to ask: have you seen/read "Seeing Like A State" by James Scott? It's basically about how governments impose "legibility" that obscures the messy complex reality of the systems and resources that sustain their nation or state, which leads eventually to mismanagement and collapse of those systems and resources.
It's kind of long-winded so would only recommend if you're really interested, but it's got a lot of good examples and stories.
@darchergood good lookin’ out! not in its entirety, but far enough that its premise has stuck with me
@anthrocypher I see this everywhere in just fundamental economics.
GDP doesn't include unpaid work. It doesn't include depreciation. It doesn't include child rearing. It doesn't include resource quality. It doesn't include quality of life.
Everyone runs around optimizing for GDP growth.
Our parks are dirty, our bridges are unmaintained, our populations are shrinking, our water is dwindling, our people are stressed and mad.
None of it is on the big GDP dashboard until it becomes a crisis.
@gatesvp that’s really well said
@anthrocypher if you want to put a monetary value on the environment, how much would it cost to build a bunker that could keep its occupants alive for decades when the outside air and water are poison?
@anthrocypher in these cases the non-tangible ROI needs to be given a monetary value by changing the question “how much would it save us if we had clean water” or “how much would each person pay to have clean water” so that it can be properly factored into discussions.
@anthrocypher I did a back of the envelope estimate of the value of just Wikipedia to humanity and got over $1 trillion.
@Wikisteff ooh! Up for sharing how you calculated that?
@Wikisteff (all models are wrong, some are useful, etc)
@anthrocypher honestly i expected more, knowing that the world would literally collapse if all open source things stopped
@SRAZKVT totally. But like statistician George E.P. Box said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful"
@anthrocypher
Lots of interesting bits! Their "goods basket" of OSS vs commercial s/w
@anthrocypher Amazing study. This line in particular is wild on a very surface read through: "96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers."