Q&A: What Can We Economists Do Right Now to Be Useful?: INET Edinburgh

What can we economists do right now to be useful, as far as policy is concerned?

I believe that we economists can do very little, right now, to materially affect policy. Joe Stiglitz is an economist. Joe Stiglitz was in fact the chief economist in the late 1990s. Joe Stiglitz then argued that TRIPS was a bad idea. It enriched not America but rather the holders of pharmaceutical patents. It did so at the cost of charging poor countries like Vietnam and Congo through the nose for intellectual property that was non-rival in some very basic sense, and for which the appropriate market price was zero. Joe Stiglitz lost that argument. USTR does not regard its mission as primarily that of promoting the health of the world or even the U.S. economy.

One thing we should be doing is laying the groundwork for some future day in which we can affect policy. We should be pushing very hard right now developing arguments for an expanded public sector—a public sector that will produce real marginal cost pricing for things that are non-rival, or perhaps liable only because of increasingly sophisticated and onerous layers of legal “protectionism”, but that somehow is not called “protectionism” because it is not concerned with movements of goods. Why it does not count as “protectionism” is a mystery to me.

At this point I want to incorporate-by-reference the entire works of Dean Baker, and then stop.

Must-Read: Pam Samuelson et al.: About Us | Authors Alliance

Must-Read: A very worthy endeavor.

However, I feel like a gotta say here that Google Books was the best vehicle for them to realize their dreams.

What is the current state of Google Books, anyway?

Pam Samuelson, Holly van Howling, Tom Leonard, and Carla Hesse: About Us | Authors Alliance: “Authors Alliance promotes authorship for the public good…

… by supporting authors who write to be read. We embrace the unprecedented potential digital networks have for the creation and distribution of knowledge and culture. We represent the interests of authors who want to harness this potential to share their creations more broadly in order to serve the public good. Unfortunately, authors face many barriers that prevent the full realization of this potential to enhance public access to knowledge and creativity. Authors who are eager to share their existing works may discover that those works are out of print, un-digitized, and subject to copyrights signed away long before the digital age. Authors who are eager to share new works may feel torn between publication outlets that maximize public access and others that restrict access but provide important value in terms of peer review, prestige, or monetary reward. Authors may also struggle to understand how to navigate fair use and the rights clearance process in order to lawfully build on existing works.

The mission of Authors Alliance is to further the public interest in facilitating widespread access to works of authorship by assisting and representing authors who want to disseminate knowledge and products of the imagination broadly. We provide information and tools designed to help authors better understand and manage key legal, technological, and institutional aspects of authorship in the digital age. We are also a voice for authors in discussions about public and institutional policies that might promote or inhibit the broad dissemination they seek.

Must-read: William Nordhaus: “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement”

William Nordhaus (2004): Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement: “Schumpeterian profits… arise when firms…

…appropriate the returns from innovative activity… We conclude that only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: TensorFlow and Monetizing Intellectual Property

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: TensorFlow and Monetizing Intellectual Property: “Ten years ago Bill Gates suggested that open source software…

…was the province of “modern-day sort of communists” whose views on intellectual property were hopelessly outdated…. “We’ve had the best intellectual property system…. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.” Gates’ perspective was understandable…. Microsoft is still a big company… but an even bigger company today is Alphabet…. Its Google subsidiary announced it was open-sourcing TensorFlow, its formerly proprietary machine learning system…. Machine learning is super important to Google…. At a superficial level, this doesn’t make sense: if machine learning is core to Google’s future, then what is the point of giving it away?…

There’s a parallel to be drawn to my piece last week about Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing. The fundamental nature of the Internet makes monetizing infinitely reproducible intellectual property akin to selling ice to an Eskimo: it can be done, but it better be some really darn incredible ice, and even then the market is limited. A far more attainable and sustainable strategy is to instead focus on monetizing complements to said intellectual property, resulting in an outcome where everyone wins: intellectual property consumers, intellectual property copiers, and above all intellectual property creators.”

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: TPP Take Two

Paul Krugman: TPP Take Two: “What I know so far: pharma is mad because the extension of property rights in biologics is… shorter than it wanted…

…tobacco is mad because it has been carved out of the dispute settlement deal, and Rs in general are mad because the labor protection stuff is stronger than expected. All of these are good things…. I’ll need to do much more homework…. But it’s interesting that what we’re seeing so far is a harsh backlash from the right against these improvements. I find myself thinking of Grossman and Helpman’s work on the political economy of free trade agreements, in which they conclude, based on a highly stylized but nonetheless interesting model of special interest politics, that: “An FTA is most likely to politically viable exactly when it would be socially harmful.” The TPP looks better than it did, which infuriates much of Congress.