The instinctive response is: YES, they do care and they resent the fact that banks are being rescued having lost a lot of money. But the counter-intuitive response is rather different.

Over the last fifteen years or more, the populations of the developed economies have been saving less and spending more than they can afford. Saving rates in places like the UK and the USA have fallen to virtually zero – well below a healthy savings rate of about 5-7% of disposable income. One explanation for this is simply that interest rates are so low that the saver gets little or nothing for their prudence and with inflation rates almost matching interest rates, the real return is either zero or negative. Combine that with the taxation that is levied on the interest earned and there is absolutely no incentive to save anything.

The governments of the developed economies then decided that eternal growth was required and they simply didn’t want the population to save anything – they wanted them to spend, spend, spend. And the population responded with the most sustained and emphatic spending spree ever – all funded by borrowing on their credit cards and from the bank. Eventually, of course, the borrowers couldn’t afford the repayments and the interest, so the banks started repossessing their homes and that’s when they discovered the loans were sub-prime in the real sense of the word.

The governments have now used the money that the population gave them in income and sales taxes to shore up the banks. I suppose all that has really happened is that the economy has been a bubble based on froth and that the money now being used to mop up the collapse was money the population would have saved had the government not encouraged them to spend.

Who’s to blame? No one and everyone – human nature and human greed drove the spending spree and governmental greed and politics eliminated saving. The economic policies of all the political parties have shown themselves to be truly disastrous, truly policies of the brainless and gormless. Politicians simply didn’t consider the Law of Unintended Consequences and didn’t bother thinking about the inevitable outcome of their misconceived policies. We don’t need a new economic model, we need a new political model and realistic policies.

I suppose it is no surprise to discover that politicians, bankers and lawyers are the three least trusted categories of people.

In a perfect world, the author will have found a publisher (not the easiest thing to do, I might add!) who will take a licence to publish the book in exchange for the royalties to be paid. The publisher will then market the book and booksellers will then sell the book to willing buyers who will take it home and read it (I did say “in a perfect world”). The sale of the book generates the royalties and the author should, in theory, get paid. But this is not a perfect world!

The reality is that writers need readers … … – otherwise there is no reason for the writer to write except to inflict their ideas on the world – and many publishers have now positioned the price of a book (particularly text books) too high for the market: especially if that market is in the developing world (in Vietnam, for example). The result is that those in the developing world take a proactive decision and simply photocopy the book and distribute it to their students in complete breach of the Copyright Law.

It seems, therefore, that we need to approach this in a different way – copying and distributing a book is wrong, but if we deny them that facility, then they will not receive the level of education they desire and they will not become potential customers for future books. Either publishers, in their own enlightened self-interest, need to have a differential pricing mechanism in place, or the author should use geographically limited licences. OR we should abandon the current publishing model and find something that addresses the fundamental issues.

The published material on the www.pm-solutions.com web site is covered by a Creative Commons Licence that allows anyone to use and copy the material however and in what quantity they want providing they ensure that the copyright holder (or author) is duly acknowledged as the copyright holder (or author). This at least ensures that potential readers and users are not guilty of breach of copyright but it doesn’t address the supply side of the relationship: it doesn’t ensure that the author gets paid. Instead of trying to enforce the unenforceable copyright laws, and instead of charging so much for publishing a book, it seems to me that authors and publishers need to find a completely different business model that ensures the creator (the author) is paid for his or her work, that the publisher receives compensation for their value added contribution, and that readers are free to use the published work in whatever way they want.