It’s easy to hate greed; it can be a nasty human emotion and a destructive one. People have destroyed their own lives out of greed, not to mention the lives of others that they love. However, basic greed sometimes has positive externalities. Printing companies in Austin may be one of the industries with the largest positive externalities to their work. While not all ideas are good ones, and some books may have benefited the world by never being printed, printing companies on the net provide massive amounts of benefit to the communities they’re in and the world around them. We benefit from information, and we are able to consume vast amounts of it. The average citizen of a city like Austin, TX is likely to be exposed to thousands of pieces of information through the written word in a short period.
This information helps us lead better lives, while not everything written is good, even knowing about the bad things makes it easier to deal with them. If you’ve had exposure to failed ideas and concepts you’re more likely to recognize the flaws in them when they’re introduced to you under a new guise. Now, not all printing companies are publishing companies, and most books written are not intended to change the way people think about the world. Instead what most printing companies do is spread basic information, either through internal documents, advertizing documents, or even basic informational packets. This spread of information can sometimes result in hypermediacy (seeing so much at once that our brains don’t process it all) but it can also serve a myriad of valuable roles.
Specialized jobs only survive if the skill is hard to acquire and there is demand for its use. Medicine stands as a classic example; it’s hard to become a surgeon or pediatrician, and the role is in high demand. On the flip side it takes years of practice to become a master accordionist, but there is little demand for the skill so it hasn’t survived as a profession. Printing companies survive because even a smaller city like Austin will boast multiple companies that need printing they can’t do, and to open one up you need a good deal of physical capital and knowledge. The printers themselves can be very expensive and rather specialized. It wouldn’t make sense for most companies to spend tens of thousands of dollars on printers that will be used only a few times a year, by the time the money saved by not hiring a printing company is reached you’re likely to have replaced the printers due to obsolescence. Because of this combination of difficult to start, and high demand, we still see plenty of printing companies around Austin. And though they may only be alerting us to sales at local companies, that information is valuable and can help improve our lives.
