An Important Reason Not To Raise The Retirement Age

There's been some Steve Landsburg bashing going down in the left-leaning parts of the 'sphere lately, but I like this observation:

There's an important economic point here: The vast rewards that go to successful novelists can grossly overstate the social value of their work. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has sold over 6 million copies and almost surely earned its author over $20 million. But if The Da Vinci Code hadn't been written, some other now-unnoticed book might have taken its place as the blockbuster of the year, and readers would have been almost as happy.

Just off the top of my head I can think of a few ways in which that's an oversimplification, but there definitely seems to me to be an oversupply of books worth reading. Since the earth doesn't get any bigger, every year I feel like I get closer to having visited all the places I would like to visit, even if I probably won't ever get around to seeing all of them. But so many books are published every year, and so many were already written before I was born, that I feel like I get further and further away from having read everything I would like to read as time goes by. I was thinking it was finally time to getting around to Sabbath's Theater and Patrimony when a copy of The Plot Against America plopped into my lap so I read that instead. I'd meant to read Jennifer Government when it first came out, but somehow didn't, and saw it in the bookstore on Saturday and bought it even though my intention had been to get Diary. Sitting on my desk in the pile of free-nonfiction-books-I'd-like-to-read are Fixing Elections, Skepticism and Freedom, Six Modern Plagues, Freedom on Fire, and Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action while I'm still trying to finish The End of the American Era and doubtless eleven new things will be published before I get through even one of those books.