"subsidy"

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

I wrote to Joe off-line that his post made me realize that 
"subsidy" is a highly loaded term that means "investment that I 
don't approve of and want to see stopped".  If a restaurant makes 
its money off the liquor, you don't say the liquor subsidizes the 
food, because you believe in the food.  If you stop believing in 
the food (if it's all chicken wings and you're really in the bar 
business) then you think differently.  The high-revenue 
passengers on an airplane and the low-revenue ones are just there 
because of a pricing model, but you don't say that the first 
class passengers subsidize the folks in steerage -- unless you're 
agitating for a different pricing model. Think on it, but my 
surmise that the choice to use that word is a sign that something 
is shaky in the underlying value proposition and the speaker 
knows it.  (I'm part of the oldest completely open access journal 
in the humanities, Bryn Mawr Classical Review.  We pay the bills 
with revenues from another publishing venture.  We've never used 
the word "subsidize" in our in-house conversations about it; BMCR 
is an opportunity that we seized because we had a way to pay for 
it and we're glad we do it.)

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.

Sandy Thatcher wrote:

I used to say that the "surplus" we made on publishing journals 
at Penn State Press helped subsidize the publication of 
monographs. How would you analyze that, Joe?

Sandy Thatcher