Topic: How Libertarianism was created by big business lobbyists - page 3. (Read 24009 times)

Also, to cunicula. I have been running some simulations of t-test results on data from various random distributions and it looks like ones similar to the pareto distribution are most likely to cause false positives and exaggerated estimates of effect size. Have you ever seen any econ literature saying this? I searched a bit but got a bunch of noise.

Without reading the whole thing I skipped directly to the data and wondered why they fit a "fourth-order polynomial", why is 1905 or whatever it is less than 1900 in figure 5. Why is number of patents not normalized to total patents for that year. The fact these figures exist makes me immediately suspect crap paper with crap reviewers. Perhaps it is explained within, if so where?

Right, we can return to the 16th century before the government became involved in IPR protection. Britain was really idiotic to reform IPR in 1622. That whole industrial revolution thing really set us back. The US was really really stupid to improve upon Britain's IPR protections. It just made the mess even worse.

Is this some kind of joke? Your head is already comfortably lodged in your ass, there is no need to try to stretch it further.


Pretty rich statement coming from Mr. Asshat himself. Mr. Asshat speaks of alternatives. It is not clear what he means, but let's be charitable and assume he has a concrete idea.

One libertarian alternative is to have a coalition of potential inventors bribe the initial patent holder to put his IPR in a pool that is commonly held by the coalition. Research suggests that this is more harmful for innovation than the initial monopoly patent right. It creates a persistent cartel which is more difficult for outsiders to break than the original monopoly.

http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/NBER_US/N090616L.pdf

You asserted something without providing reasoning or evidence as well.

As usual, I am overpowered by the careful reasoning supporting your libertarian convictions.

Lol.

Sure, but the private problem is much, much simpler. The entrepreneur evaluates private benefit vs. research cost, while the state evaluates social benefit vs. research cost.
The fact that private calculations are more accurate isn't much help. The entrepreneurs are trying to solve the wrong problem.

Unless the entrepreneur is megacorp, a la Singapore Inc., then the entrepreneur will fail to undertake socially beneficial projects. If the alternative is mega-corp, I will take a US/European/Japanese democratic state any day of the week.

By the way, in developing countries, megacorp is often the way to go. The state's suck so much that citizens are often better off under megacorp's monopoly.

If you think funding research to put it in the public domain make sense, you are absolutely welcome to do it. If you're spending your own money, it's much more likely you'll get the cost/benefit analysis right. Perhaps you are right, perhaps I am getting it wrong. The beauty of a free market is that everyone gets to do their own such analysis.

Joel, if you don't want the government to do research and put stuff in the public domain, then you have to support private research through strong IPR. However, IPR generates a monopoly rent that has a negative knock-on effect on all subsequent innovation.

The negative knock-on effects work as follows, if I invent B and you have to license A to invent B, then A is going to get a bunch of profit from my invention. If I invent C, and I have to license B to do this (and thus A as well), then A and B are both going to profit from me. Continue down the chain and there is no point in bothering to do D,E,F,G,..., the pie has to be divided among so many rent-seekers that there is nothing left for me to gain. [Consider for example the case where SHA-256 and ECSDA belong to Microsoft. Does bitcoin happen?]

There is plenty of evidence that putting research in the public domain stimulates subsequent invention. (i.e. that IPR reduces subsequent innovative output) e.g:
http://economics.mit.edu/files/6803
http://www.sfbtr15.de/uploads/media/Moser.pdf

Thus, even if the government is many times more inefficient than private research labs, it can still be better for society for the government to fund research. This is particularly true for basic research that has wide applicability (i.e. which can produce a long chain of dependent innovations).

Alternatives:
No IPR and no state-funded research. For things that are very easy to copy, such as life-saving medicines, this leads to almost no research being done.
Massive corporation that owns IPR to all science. I guess that is the libertarian solution to this problem. To me it sounds like a movie in the sci-fi/horror genre.

Your talk of cost-benefit analyses is naive. Credible cost-benefit analyses are extremely difficult to do in this area. The problem is dynamic and large-scale. This makes it very complex.

You can't get it back, it's already spent. As you say, about the most you can hope for is that it would continue to be at least somewhat functional as a conduit of funds from the productive.

That said, the SS issue is one of demographics more than anything. The actualities of things are that retirees extract goods and services from the economy whilst not currently providing anything in return. As the non-productive grow compared to the productive, problems ensue. Having a private system would certainly have been better but still faces the same basic reality. The government also continues to move people from the productive to non-productive category at an alarming rate so it's just not looking good all around. Plan for your later years with that in mind and don't trust promissory notes from a group that considers a promises expiry date as as soon as you're out of sight.

That's a decision people have to make ahead of time. We are failing to make that decision and it's one of things destroying our health care system. If you want hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to extend your life a month or two at the end, that's your choice. But I don't see why my health insurance should be unaffordable because of it. Our health and education systems are going down the tubes precisely because we don't conduct cost/benefit analyses and thus we don't focus our costs where they get us the greatest benefits and have to overpay for the benefits we really want.

Quite the reverse, it doesn't make sense not to.

It's even worse when you don't do that. You wind up driving costs through the roof and people can't afford the services they really do want. The protection against euthanasia and eugenics is individual rights.

I agree. But if you factor in the probability that the research will not pan out, I think these all flunk any sensible cost/benefit analysis. I don't think you can make a coherent case against a cost benefit analysis.

The same way a cow on a farm is redefined as livestock so as to not be regulated by animal rights laws. Health will be redefined to mean something one step removed from "amount of attention from a doctor". Education will be (already has been) redefined as getting people to memorize things in books, family I have no idea... perhaps it will grow to include a government family counselor or something.

Health will be redefined to mean something else, education will be redefined to mean something else, family will be redefined to mean something else... all in pursuit of tricking people to maintain funding. You won't see a cancer cure in the near future because the majority of the research focuses on one target, then trying to compensate for everything else that fucks up in the system, etc. This is what occurs when linear thinking is used to assess systems with multiple feedbacks. Once people start really trying to model these tissues as systems they will then have to waste a bunch of time on getting rid of all the false interactions from their models and basically do the whole thing over again from scratch anyway. Best treatment for cancer is what it has been for 50 years: detect early, cut it out, then, if necessary, poison the person to near death in the hope the cancer dies first.

There is an existing, voluntary method for funding projects which "society" sees as necessary, but which traditional investors will not fund for various reasons.

It's called Kickstarter.

I used to think the government should fund long term R and D, no longer. I have seen what happens. They turn it into a jobs program, develop useless metrics by which to judge people's merits (p values and number of publications) that distort the process in various crappy ways. Everyone chases the metrics rather than real results, leading to the vast amount of false positive literature which in turn wastes the time of other researchers who have to sift through it all leading to lower quality work and more crap literature, etc in a vicious cycle. You can't even use the journal or author prestige as a heuristic since often these are the crappiest of all.

Maybe given a concrete goal and vast public support for funding it can be superior (eg apollo) but over time all government institutions get crappier and crappier (more bureaucratic and staffed by more mediocre, easy to replace individuals..ie cogs in the machine) due to the funding process and lack of negative feedback for not producing actual real results.

To be sure large companies can fall prey to this as well, it is about the size of the organization and the reward/punishment process. Government just exaggerates the lack of proper negative feedback since they can force people to pay for it. Honestly I don't even want my tax dollars going to the fda for approving drugs or NIH for funding research any longer (of course the alternative is not lower taxes, it would just get spent on something even crappier). FDA should focus on making sure the stuff on the label is the stuff in the package.

Speaking of the FDA did you know they set a target of drugs to approve each year, and try to keep this as constant as possible because any deviation could lead to questions? That is to say, the approval process is NOT focused on making sure drugs are useful or safe, but to meet some stupid metric.

Time will not tell.  That is the very point.  We can't have two versions of society running side by side, with a government control and an anarchist experiment.  Well, we can sort of.  That was the original idea behind the seperate soverignty of the individual states of the US, but we don't really have that experiment anymore.  Some people simply aren't willing to let the experiment be long enough to have a conclusive outcome.  It's simply against their nature.

Only time will tell. The past doesn't necessarily corroborate your views.

Well, I'm glad someone got it.

When the government does something, you see the thing the government did, and you reason (often correctly) that had the government not done it, it wouldn't have been done. However, what you don't see is what those resources could have produced had they not been taken by the government. And what you fail to factor in is the cost of all the research that doesn't produce useful results.

Yes, you need the government to take risks so bad that nobody's willing to take them with their own money. But it stands to reason that the vast majority of the time, the costs outweigh the probable benefits. We'd be better off without it.

Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.

This is one of those analogies where one aspect is deliberately vague, so that different people can see differnet answeres and not be wrong.  I look at the 'fluorine' as representing something about governments that most people can't imagine can arise without government.  That could be "order" or "charity", or it could represent the regulatory nature of governments, and thus fluorine represents such dictates.  Or it could simply be the monopoly on force that is government itself.  I'm inclined to assume that it's likely the latter, because I also believe that the character Grover is a not very veiled reference to Grover Norquist, who has spent a career fighting the size of government in the pursuit of greater liberty (as he see's it, mind you), without really questioning the role of government in society, or it's importance to the end result.