This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The philosophical justification for patents is that they allow the genius of a new idea to capture the benefits of their contribution to society, thereby encouraging them to be geniuses. Except-- that almost never actually happens! The people actually responsible for the ideas that lead to vaccines, or to AI advancements, or to new machines, typically only capture a tiny fraction of the value they generate anyway. The rest goes to stockholders and to upper management. And while that parasitical class tries to present themselves as necessary to the genius' ultimate success, you should view that with the same skepticism as if an FDA regulator claimed to be responsible for the creation of some new cure or treatment. Maybe they're contributing something-- but the primary reason they exist is because of a distortionary, monopolistic government intervention. So the default assumption should be that they're worthless rentseekers-- extracting value from consumes and producers through their artificial control of resources that aren't naturally excludable.
Companies might stop investing-- but that's fine, because companies are full of unproductive middlemen. But if people want something done, then they'll invest. Have more faith in the free market! Can you seriously not think of a single financial instrument that might be used to fund research by purely self-interested parties? I can easily imagine something like a "transferrable kickstarter" system, where I put seed money into a research-production concern that's building something I'm interested in, and in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage. Sure, another person might start their own concern, intending to steal the advancement and produce it themselves... but then I get the thing I want even faster, and they have to risk their own money on a product that might not work out, against an unknown number of competitors that want to do the same thing.
And in practice, we already see so many companies funding open research, and posting the results publicly. If it benefits a company to invent something new, they will-- and if their competitors are interested in the same thing, then they're likely to contribute, rather than copy-and-fork, because that gives them the ability to determine the course of the initial development.
Stockholders benefit because they provide the capital to actually realize the advancement. You can't actually do anything with an idea that leads to vaccines without massive capital investment -- the two are both necessary to gain any benefit.
And the upper management thing is just plain wrong -- executives are paid massively, but are so few in number that they constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending. Satya Nadella makes $80M at Microsoft, an eye watering amount that pales next to the total HC cost of $10-20B. Even with all his C-suite and all the VPs and directors, it isn't more than a couple percent.
You're coming at this from the perspective that the current dominance of stockholders is a just a natural feature of society, but it's not. Joint-stock companies are a useful economic innovation, and stockholders a necessary feature of capitalism, but their power is completely distorted by their ability to extract rents from using IP. If the government didn't enable that, stockholders would have less money, and consumers would have far more, and consequently consumers themselves could provide the capital investment required to create-- for example-- new vaccines.
And I'm absolutely sure that should be possible all capital investment ultimately derives from consumers paying for things anyway. The money required is already in the economy. Have no fear of free-riding stifling innovation. If people want a product, they'll pay for it, and financial-services whiz kids will figure out how to connect buyers to sellers regardless.
They constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending (ignoring stock compensation, which I'm lumping in with "stockholders"), but they determine a massive part of it. And specifically, they determine it should go to all sorts of middlemen-- layers of layers of lawyers and middle management and HR. Not because that actually enables them to make more products, but because those are the people that let them extract their economic rents.
All businesses can profit from creating useful IP -- whether they are joint-stock, private, sole-owned or otherwise. This ability is completely independent of ownership structure.
That would be great. I wonder though, if consumers wanted to provide the investment required to create something that was capital intensive, whether they could come up with some kind of fractional ownership system whereby each consumer that wanted to fund a given endeavor could pledge some amount of capital and receive a proportional share of whatever profits derived from it.
Even counting stock compensation, the entire suite of executives and all their hangers on correspond to a single digit percentage of all personnel compensation at the median firm.
Uh, they determine all of it -- that's what they do -- mange the company on behalf of the board.
This makes no sense. Executives would, as a general rule, only pay layers of expensive-as-all-heck white collar employees if they added value to the firm. Of course lots of firms are inefficiently run, but that's true across a wide spectrum of the world.
This is one good reason startups are so common and so profitable -- they run extremely lean and create lots of products (and lots of rich shareholders) without using lots of labor (and hence not paying employees as much) because of simplified processes. They eventually displace inefficient firms.
But if there was no IP, the valuation of a business becomes more independent of its past accomplishments, and rests more on its ability to keep producing new ones. It would destroy the ability for vulture capital firms to buy up a business with promising IP, fire all the innovators, run it into the ground while extracting maximum rents, and then sell of just the IP later, for example. Removing IP law would change the balance of power between middlemen and producers, to the benefit of producers.
You say that executives determine all of corporate spending, but that's missing the deeper point-- that some proportion of business spending is allocated towards productive investments, but that executives use the power inequalities between them and their consumers/producers to claw away rents for their own personal benefit. I'm talking about corporate money spent on making impressive executive offices, building new corporate headquarters closer to where they live, buying prestige-enhancing charity products, etcetera. And like you mentioned, re: inefficient firms, the ability for executives to do this is a direct result of corporate bureaucracy and much of corporate bureaucracy exists because of IP law. Paying people to file IP claims raises the "value" of a company, but has no material effect on its ability to actually produce a product.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].
Why would you even need such a right if IP didn't exist?
Not investors-- consumers. There's a critical difference. An investor doesn't necessarily need or want the end product; they want the chance to perform arbitrage between the producer and the consumer. But-- to use a concrete example-- pharmacies, hospitals, government entities, and charitable organizations would still want new antimalarial drugs even if they can't prevent other people from manufacturing them. Their goal would be to fund the research and production of a certain amount of drugs at a particular price-- and then if other people get the drugs after they do, that doesn't change whatever supply/demand calculus drove their funding in the first place.
There would still be a role for investors in creating financial instruments intended to mitigate e.g. the free rider problem. But after the information is actually created, they wouldn't have the power to extract rents for using it.
You're going to inevitably end up in one of two separate outcomes here.
A substantially less is invested into these searches for new tech
As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.
As it sounds like you want to do away with patents entirely option 1 seems very likely. And this is all very naive about the risk of these attempts to discover new tech not panning out. Every individual hospital is really going to become expert in which new drugs to invest into during the research stage? No, they're going to developed specialized companies.
That's just not what empirically happens. Look, we've effectively already performed a natural experiment on repealing IP law when it comes to art, books, and music. Instead of no one publishing anything, or alternatively the exact same business models persisting, we get Patreon + Kickstarter for the writers and artists, and Soundcloud + Touring/Streaming for the musicians. There are still middlemen involved, of course, but as compared to publishing companies or record labels they're taking far smaller cuts.
You're talking about things that can be done by a single artist for the most part here. Simple media products with little to no logistics necessary and practically no risk. You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant. (In this case, to how the internet makes traditional enforcement of copyright law against individual consumers near-impossible.) Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law. Looking at the current state of things and saying, "this is the only possible system that results in innnovation" is like living in the 1800s and saying, "the royal monopoly granted to the British East India Company is the only possible system that result in trade with India."
I think they won't be anarchism. Plausibly trade secrets if the field lends itself to them. It's not just the complexity, it's also the risk element. Anarchists would do well to remember that the basis of private property to begin with is guaranteed by the state, intellectual property is special case of private property which can be deconstructed in much the same way. Can you build some things without a state protected right to own your tools? Sure. Can you build large scale projects? Maybe, but it'll be much harder than if you can rely on the police to prevent people from riding away with your tractors.
Patreon exists within a context where IP law exists. Most large scale projects for media are completed outside of patreon, in fact the vast majority of media spending operates under traditional IP law frameworks.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be able to produce some small scale projects. I'm saying you're going to have orders of magnitude less resources deployed. much fewer life saving drugs.
I'd love for there to be a realistic alternative to IP law, and as an improvement I think IP should have a much much shorter life span. But replacing it with nothing will cost us a whole lot and you're just hand waving that loss away.
The difference between actual private property and intellectual property is that private property i excludable. If a person other than the owner takes that property to use for themselves, then the owner is directly harmed by their inability to use it. Consequently, it makes moral sense to defend that property because you are defending against an aggressor, and the state ultimately benefits from reducing the cost o violence by taking that responsibility to prevent theft upon itself.
But intellectual property isn't excludable. You are not harmed when another person uses it. You have no moral right to commit violence to prevent other people from innocent use of your ideas. You're raising the "but what if we have less innovation" objection as a practical objection-- but in the natural experiment of the US versus china, the chinese have been out-innovating us as a direct result of their poor enforcement of IP law. The empirical result is that the justification for IP law is fundamentally unsound.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
posting research is a far cry from developing a product.
My argument applies globally. Why should the researcher get to create a rent-seeking monopoly to extract wealth from the work of process engineers? Why would process engineers get to rent-seek from the work of factory laborers? If people actually want a thing, and are willing to pay for that thing, there will still be plenty of market forces conspiring to give them that thing. I just want to take all the rent-seeking out of the equation. Maybe it served a purpose two hundred years ago when we had far worse transportation and communication infrastructure, but now it's a crutch. Our financial services technology has evolved to the point where IP law is wholly unnecessary.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link