Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact, some economists argue that corporate taxes are fundamentally inefficient, because corporations are just a mechanism for producing either individual income or capital gains for their shareholders, so it would be better and fairer to tax the actual humans profiting from the business rather than the corporate straw man itself.
this is an argument that only works on an infinite time scale. Just like many other taxes on assets, taxing profits works to avoid hoarding (see Apple). Money is meant to be spent, not hoarded.
We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
101–110 of 133 posts
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Page and Brin produced publicly available research with NSF money. They started a company based on that public research. That company created untold billions of dollars of value out of thin air. Taxes are paid out of those new dollars, some of which go to fund the NSF. You left out the part where Stanford patented the results of the research, thereby monopolizing it. Likewise, Google did not create untold billions "o…
> Likewise, Google did not create untold billions "out of thin air." Google created untold billions by leveraging NSF-funded research, and the patent which Stanford licensed to them, in the midst of an explosion of new opportunities which was created when the NSF lifted commercial restrictions on the use of the Internet (which had also been built with public funding). You say it as if it was easy. Like they had it ha…
A private educational institute giving a student a scholarship is very much not the same thing as a public institution granting monies for research. That isn't to say the NSF ought to receive a share of profits, necessarily, but your comparison isn't reasonable.
Moreover, it underlines the point: that the risk of research was socialized (NSF Grant), but the profits were privatized (Google). I think the debate is whether or not that's a good thing. Personally I think it depends on the context but generally I don't think that public grants should result in private profits (at least not exclusively), and it should be especially closely scrutinized if any of the resulting research work is not 100% made available as public knowledge.
> What are you getting at? I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
He's mocking the "rah rah free market! American Capitalism is awesome!" mentality that he perceives "Americans" (clearly a generalization; I doubt he thinks all, and hopefully not even most, Americans actually subscribe to that view) to have.
I can't say I disagree with his point. It's especially prevalent in the software industry, where all the programmers are Jon Galt (apologies to Garrison Keillor). It's an especially amusing thing to see given just how much the software industry is and has been, since its inception, reliant on government for its existence.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#103> When Google received funding for its algorithm from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is it right that after it earned billions nothing went back to the NSF Serious mental gymnastics. Page and Brin doing research with NSF grants isn't even remotely the same thing as Google, their future company, getting a check directly from the government. Page and Brin produced publicly available research with NSF money. The…
>> Taxes are paid out of those new dollars Interestingly, here in Belgium, the press often states that Google pay his taxes as requested by the law. And that Google have some very expert accountant who read the law in suach a way that those taxes are close to zero. I'm afraid Google doesn't pay his taxes like we, the tax payers, think it should... Of course, that's totally proof-less, but well, I've heard that quite…
I am sure the same could be said of every company beyond certain size (200-300 employees comes to mind, but this is just a wild guess), regardless of industry.
This is even the same for individuals. If you try to file taxes yourself (or have your employer do it for you, if possible), you will end up paying a higher rate than if you had taken the good sense of forking $100USD to some accountant to give you some basic advice. Of course this only works if you are wealthy enough that those $100US are marginal compared with what you would end up paying in taxes using the DIY approach.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Page and Brin produced publicly available research with NSF money. They started a company based on that public research. That company created untold billions of dollars of value out of thin air. Taxes are paid out of those new dollars, some of which go to fund the NSF. You left out the part where Stanford patented the results of the research, thereby monopolizing it. Likewise, Google did not create untold billions "o…
> Likewise, Google did not create untold billions "out of thin air." Google created untold billions by leveraging NSF-funded research, and the patent which Stanford licensed to them, in the midst of an explosion of new opportunities which was created when the NSF lifted commercial restrictions on the use of the Internet (which had also been built with public funding). You say it as if it was easy. Like they had it ha…
These are two completely different things. A university gives a student a scholarship as a discount on a good the university provides, for which they would normally charge a price. The state funds research as an open-ended investment, and would normally not expect any fixed quantity of money or other assets in return. Since they weren't selling anything to Stanford or Page-and-Brin in the first place, they were investing, and are indeed due a share of the profits.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#105The article is a lot better than the title! (I only skimmed, rather than read it though.) People should read it. I agree with a ton there. But the article's author has a huge blind spot - if you search the article for "tax", you will see just a couple of occurrences, and the author basically dismisses the mechanism. It's almost as though the author had no idea how the state even gets money - the author just thinks th…
If you agree with John Taylor Gatto, you could argue that the purpose of universal education was never to provide children with opportunities to learn how to make a living (apprenticeships rules date from the middle ages, and every other human society solves this problem somehow), but to condition them to blind obedience and dullness... for the direct benefit of the government (in the age of Napoleonic Wars, you needed lots and lots of idiot sheep that would literally march towards the enemy lines and shoot each other at point blank range) and indirectly to the nascent class of industrialist who needed a new kind of workers who would perform the same micro task over and over again with no regard for the total process.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#106I think the author is pointing to a problem but not correctly identifying what the problem is. The problem is deeper. If the problem were that we have socialized risk of innovation but privatized the rewards, that wouldn't really be a problem. It's a good thing to incentivize innovation. The real problem is that we don't incentivize innovation. Instead, we incentivize investment. People who already have money to inve…
I sure got that as the takeaway. Public investments targeted at innovation we've identified as important, or worth it, whatever should be increased.
There is another aspect to this as well. Check out this history of PDX area Tektronix: http://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregonexperience/segm...
Between Tek, Intel, and a couple others, the area was transformed into something we call "silicon forest" and it spawned a ton of great companies, many of which are in business today.
It was a very interesting mix of private and public investments in education and investment support. Spin offs, not competitive with Tek, got Tek support while ramping up. Colleges offered targeted programs for people to get educated, companies did the same.
The founders got very wealthy, but so did a lot of other people.
We need more of this kind of thing.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just pointing out that the reality is more complicated. The research wasn't "publicly available", rather it was licensed (exclusively) from Stanford. There is legislation that applies to the ownership of federally funded research, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act It's also worth pointing out that before this was passed in 1980 federally funded research was typically owned by the gov't.
The research is publicly available. You can go read it right now and learn from it. You're confusing the difference between the research they did being publicly available, and Stanford holding a patent on PageRank . http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
That's the entire point. That's why the patent system exists. To say something is patented is the same as saying it's publicly available.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#108> When Google received funding for its algorithm from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is it right that after it earned billions nothing went back to the NSF Serious mental gymnastics. Page and Brin doing research with NSF grants isn't even remotely the same thing as Google, their future company, getting a check directly from the government. Page and Brin produced publicly available research with NSF money. The…
Given current "financial technology," government is indeed the only entity that can make R&D investments that are both high-risk and broad-payoff -- broad-payoff meaning that they pay off unpredictably and often across the entire economy. ROI is captured through economy-wide growth via taxation. Only governments can do this because there is currently no private financial instrument that can securitize that kind of investment or capture its upside.
Is/was the public research that led to PageRank patented? If that were the case, it's the only thing I would disagree with. Public research should not be patented, or if it is it should be made available to all domestic (US tax paying) companies and individuals royalty-free. It'd be appropriate to charge foreign licensees fees, as they are not paying into the US R&D fund, but the impracticality of that makes such a national patent licensing scheme kind of dubious.
Edit: yes -- so my comments above should be tempered by this: https://encrypted.google.com/patents/US6285999
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Likewise, Google did not create untold billions "out of thin air." Google created untold billions by leveraging NSF-funded research, and the patent which Stanford licensed to them, in the midst of an explosion of new opportunities which was created when the NSF lifted commercial restrictions on the use of the Internet (which had also been built with public funding). You say it as if it was easy. Like they had it ha…
>You say it as if it was easy. Like they had it handed to them. Clearly a lot of tumblers fell into place, but that doesn't mean the NSF is due a share of the profits. Would you claim Harvard is due a share of Microsoft if it gave Bill Gates a scholarship? These are two completely different things. A university gives a student a scholarship as a discount on a good the university provides, for which they would normall…
You should read the NSF mission and goals (http://www.nsf.gov/about/glance.jsp).
> Initiate and support, through grants and contracts, scientific and engineering research and programs to strengthen scientific and engineering research potential, and education programs at all levels, and appraise the impact of research upon industrial development and the general welfare.
The entire point of the NSF and other similar institutions is to spur innovation. They aren't investing in the way you state they are, rather they are funding. They give money away to those who they feel will continue to push the field forward.
> So, in addition to funding research in the traditional academic areas, the agency also supports "high risk, high pay off" ideas, novel collaborations and numerous projects that may seem like science fiction today, but which the public will take for granted tomorrow.
Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies that have no idea what they are doing carelessly spending other people's money on creating the space age, the Internet age, and the age of genomics respectively. I don't believe for a second that…
Would you feel less comfortable without the NSA? Or put another way, are you just cherry-picking the agencies you happen to like in order to make your point?
If you're asking if the federal government has wasted a lot of my money on things I don't like: sure they have. First, that's not the topic at hand, and second, private ventures also waste fortunes on stupid things, and sometimes with my money e.g. pension funds.