According to Clay Shirky, Wikipedia has taken approximately 100 million hours of human effort. Also, according to Clay Shirky, the internet connected population watches 1 trillion hours of TV per year. As Clay says, 1% of our time spent watching T.V. is enough to create 100 Wikipedias.
Whilst this is a wonderful example of how human capital can be spent to create incredibly valuable public resources, it also creates a slight problem. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Wikipedia is worth approximately $7 billion. In other words, each one of those 100 million hours of human capital provided is worth approximately $70.
This means that the T.V. industry has been potentially using $70,000,000,000,000 of human capital each year and as far as I can see they haven't paid a penny for it. Now that just doesn't seem fair.
