More than borrowed books
On public stadium financing, Ben Franklin's contributions to Philadelphia, and what self-respecting communities ought to think about their libraries
An economic-impact study commissioned by the Georgia Public Library Service concluded that the state reaps $3.75 in benefits for every dollar spent on public libraries. The estimated value is measured in everything from volunteer hours to computer time to meeting space, in addition to the obvious value in book-lending.
■ Any study claiming to show economic impact should be taken with considerable skepticism, of course. Nothing matches the kind of returns that people claim will come from the “multiplier effect” of public spending on stadiums and arenas, just for example. It’s hard not to find a positive return when you’re being paid to look for it: “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing“, as the saying goes.
■ But the thing about libraries is that, in any sensible and self-respecting community, they need not show an economic return at all. The real value of a library isn’t in the net per-capita return on investment. The value is that any capably-managed library is certain -- dead certain -- to have an utterly transformative effect on some share of its patrons. Maybe it’s one in ten. Maybe one in a hundred. Maybe one in a thousand.
■ The frequency itself is both unpredictable and immaterial. What matters is that any decent library in a free country is a place where a person can choose self-betterment. Really, truly choose it.
■ It’s the prospect of turning out just one Benjamin Franklin that should appeal to us most. He may have been an unusual character, but he wasn’t born in his final form. In his autobiography, he wrote that the library he helped establish in 1730 “afforded me the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day, and thus repair’d in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me. Reading was the only amusement I allow’d myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolicks of any kind; and my industry in my business continu’d as indefatigable as it was necessary.”
■ There’s no reason to believe that natural talent is concentrated in any particular race, gender, social class, or other distinction. Everyone benefits when natural gifts intersect with a motivation for self-improvement (as they did in Franklin’s case, as in so many others), and the bonanza payoff to a library is found when it opens a door to that self-improvement for someone who otherwise wouldn’t have found a way through.
■ Thus, with all due respect to the study in Georgia (which, to be fair, was probably conducted with a fair amount of analytical rigor), the measurable economic returns to libraries shouldn’t be the central concern to reasonable communities. What ought to matter is the value in capturing the opportunity to convert a young person with innate gifts into someone with great capacities. Those rare cases can transform the world.