Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

niskanencenter.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#41

Post by qppo »

jogjayr wrote: post #29
qppo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there were two albums, entitled "Beatles Greatest Hits" and "Best of the Beatles" and the former is a compilation album and the latter is a solo album by former Beatles drummer, Pete Best. If a fan buys the second without realizing it is not a compilation album, should the Beatles not be able to defend their name being used to sell it? Or profit off of it?

> should the Beatles not be able to defend their name being used to sell it? Wouldn't trademark law apply there? And not copyright law?

In America yea, but the point is more about the notion of IP law in general I think

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#42

Post by djrobstep »

dcolkitt wrote: post #26
bigcorp-slave wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bob starts with 11 units of utility. Fred starts with 2. It costs 1 unit of utility to exist. Each of Bob and Fred invest their remaining utility in the utility market, which grows at 10% per year regardless of what either of them do. 25 years later, Bob has 109 units of utility, and Fred has roughly 12 units of utility. At the beginning of this thought experiment, Bob had 5.5x the utility units of Fred. At the end,…

But finite life expectancies effectively act as a cap on that process. In the very best case, you only have about half a century to compound wealth. Modern America is not very conducive to preserving intergenerational wealth. Of the top ten richest Americans, only one is not a first-generation billionaire. Rockefeller despite amassing an enormous fortune, equivalent to $400 billion today, does not have any heirs in t…

What you say is simply not true - we know this because the fundamental measure - concentration of wealth - is continually increasing.

Intergenerational mobility, particularly at the very top, is interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to most people. What is relevant are the vast quantities of people who suffer from poverty and grotesque inequality.

Imagine explaining to some homeless person that society was pretty fine actually because in several generations somebody will have overtaken Bezos.

Put another way - you don't make an unfair ladder fair by rapidly re-arranging people on it as much as possible (aka "social mobility" or "opportunity") you make it fair by flattening the ladder (inequality reduction) and making the bottom of the ladder a less unpleasant place to be (poverty reduction).

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#43

Post by qppo »

WalterBright wrote: post #35
qppo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there were two albums, entitled "Beatles Greatest Hits" and "Best of the Beatles" and the former is a compilation album and the latter is a solo album by former Beatles drummer, Pete Best. If a fan buys the second without realizing it is not a compilation album, should the Beatles not be able to defend their name being used to sell it? Or profit off of it?

Think of it like open source software, and the answer will be clear. I.e. anyone can take the open source software I create and do whatever the hell they want with it. (I use the Boost license, which is the most permissive.) I encourage you to, too, if you want to profit from my work :-) I don't think there's anything special about musicians that makes them different from open source developers.

I don't think the answer is clear at all, this specific instance is about deception. The only thing being used is the name of the project to mislead consumers without being openly fraudulent, in such a way that it damages or limits the ability of the original authors to monetize their work.

The closest analogue in FOSS is the forking or reuse of projects to intentionally cannibalize the original work - which is covered by less permissive licenses like AGPL.

Whether it's music or software isn't the point, it's about the rights of the original creator to control how the work is spread and copied, which can be a bigger deal when that impacts the ability of a creator to monetize it. Music is only substantially different than software in that it isn't maintained after creation that requires continual support payments by its consumers.

If you're in a position where you can freely distribute your work to others, you're in an incredibly privileged position to begin with.

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#44

Post by throwaway34241 »

WalterBright wrote: post #4

> At the same time that the major factors expanding the economic pie were losing momentum, other powerful forces emerged that would push toward dividing the pie more unequally The framing of the issue influences what conclusions one draws. Here, the authors think of the economy as a "pie" created by "factors" that gets "divided up". What naturally follows is that if some get a bigger "slice" than others, it is inhere…

I’m not sure what you are objecting to. The section you quoted does not use the word unfair, but unequal. The linked article does not seem to be a call for socialism, but rather a series of proposals to increase growth via normal economic measures, like removing regulatory barriers to new housing, or being less hawkish on monetary policy since inflation has been consistently over-estimated.

If you are arguing that factors (like regulation, tax / fiscal / monetary policy, etc) do not affect the size of the economy or the distribution of income, I disagree.

I also think a model of the economy that consists of only wealth creators is overly simplified. If I inherit (or even buy) a house in Palo Alto and it undergoes millions of dollars of appreciation due to a growing industry nearby that I do not work in, did I create that wealth?

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#45

Post by mikelyons »

abj wrote: post #3

Some great, sane ideas on improving copyright law [1]. The amount of resources the current copyright laws waste is surprisingly high. "For software, the direct costs every year of defending infringement suits from so-called "nonpracticing entities" – better known as patent trolls – come to more than 10 percent of total annual R&D spending by all U.S. businesses." [1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liber…

It would seem obvious to a layman that you must be "practicing" to be an "entity" that's allowed to "defend" against "infringement"

This has an implicit metaphysics that remains un-examined.

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#46

Post by PeterisP »

abj wrote: post #3

Some great, sane ideas on improving copyright law [1]. The amount of resources the current copyright laws waste is surprisingly high. "For software, the direct costs every year of defending infringement suits from so-called "nonpracticing entities" – better known as patent trolls – come to more than 10 percent of total annual R&D spending by all U.S. businesses." [1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liber…

Your quote is about patent law, which has nothing to do with copyright law.

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#47

Post by CryptoPunk »

bigcorp-slave wrote: post #12
WalterBright wrote: post #4

> At the same time that the major factors expanding the economic pie were losing momentum, other powerful forces emerged that would push toward dividing the pie more unequally The framing of the issue influences what conclusions one draws. Here, the authors think of the economy as a "pie" created by "factors" that gets "divided up". What naturally follows is that if some get a bigger "slice" than others, it is inhere…

Bob starts with 11 units of utility. Fred starts with 2. It costs 1 unit of utility to exist. Each of Bob and Fred invest their remaining utility in the utility market, which grows at 10% per year regardless of what either of them do. 25 years later, Bob has 109 units of utility, and Fred has roughly 12 units of utility. At the beginning of this thought experiment, Bob had 5.5x the utility units of Fred. At the end,…

>>This is a simple thought experiment that I hope illuminates something important: in an economy where there is year over year growth, inequality grows by default as a function of exposure to the market.

This is not true. Investment rates of return are much higher when you have smaller amounts of capital to invest, ceteris paribus.

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#48

Post by jogjayr »

qppo wrote: post #41
jogjayr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should the Beatles not be able to defend their name being used to sell it? Wouldn't trademark law apply there? And not copyright law?

In America yea, but the point is more about the notion of IP law in general I think

I don't think it's possible to generalize about all IP law. There's a reason different categories of IP, with varying protections and terms, exist. It's possible for some IP law to be useful and some other to be useless or actively harmful.

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#49

Post by forrestthewoods »

WalterBright wrote: post #5
abj wrote: post #3

Some great, sane ideas on improving copyright law [1]. The amount of resources the current copyright laws waste is surprisingly high. "For software, the direct costs every year of defending infringement suits from so-called "nonpracticing entities" – better known as patent trolls – come to more than 10 percent of total annual R&D spending by all U.S. businesses." [1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liber…

I've become more and more convinced that copyright laws do not promote progress of useful arts and sciences. The most obvious example is the incredible success of free and open software. Are people really going to stop writing books, composing music, painting pictures, etc, without copyright protection? Not a chance!

> Are people really going to stop writing books, composing music, painting pictures, etc, without copyright protection? Not a chance!

Yes, authors who make a living selling books would definitely stop writing books if they couldn’t get paid for it.

Hobbyist art will never die. But the definition of professional involves being paid.

Open source software is not a meaningful comparison to Harry Potter books or Marvel films.

Re: Faster Growth, Fairer Growth: Policies for a High Road, High Performance Economy

#50

Post by bigcorp-slave »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #47
bigcorp-slave wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bob starts with 11 units of utility. Fred starts with 2. It costs 1 unit of utility to exist. Each of Bob and Fred invest their remaining utility in the utility market, which grows at 10% per year regardless of what either of them do. 25 years later, Bob has 109 units of utility, and Fred has roughly 12 units of utility. At the beginning of this thought experiment, Bob had 5.5x the utility units of Fred. At the end,…

>>This is a simple thought experiment that I hope illuminates something important: in an economy where there is year over year growth, inequality grows by default as a function of exposure to the market. This is not true. Investment rates of return are much higher when you have smaller amounts of capital to invest, ceteris paribus.

Can you provide a citation for this? I appreciate that it is a bit unfair to ask for one here, but I fundamentally disagree with your point and would like to learn more about why you believe it to be true. While I concede that at the extreme high end, there are limited ways to invest without distorting the market yourself, it’s just not the case that returns are higher with less money. If anything, returns are lower, because Fred in this example must pick more conservative investments with his single unit of investable utility - he has only the one to lose! By contrast, Bob is free to make riskier bets with higher payoffs, as his asset portfolio starts with ten units of utility.
Post reply on HN