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The Rent Hypothesis

esoltas.blogspot.com

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Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#101

Post by bbcbasic »

Retra wrote: post #74
bbcbasic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Anecdotal argument: In my budget the biggest costs are housing, food, utility bills. The costs of my semi-automatic robots - such as the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, lawnmower are loose change in comparison. I doubt the fully automatic robots of the future will be excessively priced but yes some patent holders will be rich, even undeservedly so, but we won't be their slaves. The bigger pro…

>A side effects of a very smart robot is that she becomes aware that there is more to life than serving humans. This is amateur nonsense. One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!" How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that…

> This is amateur nonsense.

Yes I admit I am an amateur predictor of the future, like most people. :-)

> One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!"

Not sure how this is the same thing?

> How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either.

If you are intelligent you won't work for someone else for no reason.

> If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements.

When computers build computers, they will evolve.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#102

Post by Terr_ »

dalke wrote: post #42
wppick wrote: post #23

At the beginning of civilization, the research budget for the invention of fire was zero, while the benefits of fire were incalculable. Compare this to the development costs of the next generation of Boeing aircraft relative to the small improvements in air travel. This dynamic has enormous implications for the presumed benefits of increases in government spending beyond some low base. Over time and with increasing c…

David Graeber has made me not trust any allusions to archeological events which aren't based in archeological understanding. We have had bureaucracies since at least the Sumerians, and its growth has not been monotonic across the last 5,000+ years, which the paragraph you quoted implies. Presumably many people died or were injured, and property and landscape burned down during the development of fire as a commodity i…

> We have had bureaucracies since at least the Sumerians, and its growth has not been monotonic

People gain experience as they age, but that doesn't mean people are wiser today than 1000 years ago... because they're different people.

Similarly, bureaucracies and societies also "die" and dissolve.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#103

Post by crdoconnor »

gohrt wrote: post #38
crdoconnor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that robots are on the cusp of subsuming all human labor is itself a tool of rentiers: https://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/imag0016.jpg?... (advert by California's restaurant association in protest against minimum wage hikes that will likely deplete their profit margins) Of course, the idea doesn't necessarily have to be true in order to serve its purpose.

The idea doesn't have to be false to be dishonestly used, either. Restaurants already replace servers by ipads, wherever customers tolerate it.

A restaurant I used to frequent went way too far with the ipad thing. I think they 'optimistically' fired about 1/4 or 1/5 of their staff when the amount of labor actually saved was maybe 1/10.

The service went from okay to atrocious when they reopened with ipads and they lost a lot of customers. It was plainly clear that they were WAY understaffed.

You see the same starry eyed optimism surrounding Google's driverless cars.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#104

Post by crdoconnor »

esoltas wrote: post #86
baddox wrote: post #31

> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…

Soltas (the author) here. What I meant by "rents are not always bad" is that "rent" is a positive (i.e., value-free) concept, not a normative (moral) one. "Rent" in economics merely implies that the profits are in excess of a competitive-equilibrium outcome/allocation. In this case, the competitive outcome is perverse -- nobody innovates because, without IP, you pay for the cost of R&D but "copycats" can steal the id…

>nobody innovates because, without IP, you pay for the cost of R&D but "copycats" can steal the idea without paying.

This just isn't true. It's human nature to innovate, just as it is human nature to sing, play music and dance.

There are many times when the IP system is not only absent, but actively working against the creator, yet it doesn't stop the process of innovation. It just slows it down.

The government also innovates and foots the bill for R&D, and there is a good case to be made that the most valuable technological innovations in our society do actually come from them.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#105

Post by crdoconnor »

SilasX wrote: post #99
tolmasky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly on life-saving medicine created by a scientist? Sold at prices out of reach for most people?

Still better than their non-existence.

The scientist (or team) in question who creates the drug is almost never the one collecting the rents.

A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university.

The main difference is that the government and publicly funded universities do not have a marketing line item on their budget that is ~120% of their R&D budget.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#106

Post by mullingitover »

nwah1 wrote: post #68
sliverstorm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the true value of the land under your house? Or do you simply object to the current property tax rates rather than valuation ?

Assessment needs to become more accurate and more of our taxation should shift to land, and away from productive activity. It may even be possible in many locales to use self-assessment, with the concept being that if you set it too low, others may outbid you according to a certain set of rules to keep things fair and reasonable. Current property tax assessors are licensed professionals, and each county in the US han…

> Assessment needs to become more accurate

Doesn't the market already provide reasonably accurate assessment, via insurance companies?

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#107

Post by Pyxl101 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #105
SilasX wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still better than their non-existence.

The scientist (or team) in question who creates the drug is almost never the one collecting the rents. A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university. The main difference is that the government and publicly funded universities do not have a marketing line item on their budget that is ~120% of their R&D budget.

> A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university.

A voluntary agreement that the scientist and Pfizer both believe is in their own interest. The scientist presumably believes that Pfizer's funding and research equipment etc. is worth the shared ownership or whatever arrangement results.

> The scientist (or team) in question who creates the drug is almost never the one collecting the rents.

Can you clarify what you mean? If Pfizer conducts the research then they collect the rent. If an independent scientist conducts the research, then they will own the IP and will collect the rent instead.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#108

Post by crdoconnor »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #107
crdoconnor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientist (or team) in question who creates the drug is almost never the one collecting the rents. A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university. The main difference is that the government and publicly funded universities do not have a marketing line item on their budget that is ~120% of their R&D budget.

> A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university. A voluntary agreement that the scientist and Pfizer both believe is in their own interest. The scientist presumably believes that Pfizer's funding and research equipment etc. is worth the shared ownership or whatever arrangement results. > The scientist (or team) in questi…

>A voluntary agreement

No job contract is truly voluntary in the absence of a guaranteed livable income. Period.

Take the implicit threat of poverty out of the salary/job negotiation process (e.g. with a basic income) and then we can talk about "voluntary" contracts.

>Can you clarify what you mean? If Pfizer conducts the research then they collect the rent.

Legal entities do not conduct research, people do. Legal entities do collect rents, though (which are then distributed).

Ostensibly, the patent system is there to spur innovation by people.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#109

Post by swatow »

esoltas wrote: post #86
baddox wrote: post #31

> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…

Soltas (the author) here. What I meant by "rents are not always bad" is that "rent" is a positive (i.e., value-free) concept, not a normative (moral) one. "Rent" in economics merely implies that the profits are in excess of a competitive-equilibrium outcome/allocation. In this case, the competitive outcome is perverse -- nobody innovates because, without IP, you pay for the cost of R&D but "copycats" can steal the id…

I think that the comment was confusing not because of a positive/normative distinction, but because many economists would use the word rent only to refer to inefficiency. While patents are ex post inefficient since they grant a monopoly, they are ex ante efficient (in theory) because they provide incentives to discover new things.

It seems like a real stretch to call a drug company that researches a completely new drug and patents it "rent seeking", even if they can be said to enjoy "monopoly rents" ex post.

Re: The Rent Hypothesis

#110

Post by JoeAltmaier »

crdoconnor wrote: post #108
Pyxl101 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A researcher working for Pfizer is essentially getting the same deal as a researcher working for the government or a publicly funded university. A voluntary agreement that the scientist and Pfizer both believe is in their own interest. The scientist presumably believes that Pfizer's funding and research equipment etc. is worth the shared ownership or whatever arrangement results. > The scientist (or team) in questi…

>A voluntary agreement No job contract is truly voluntary in the absence of a guaranteed livable income. Period . Take the implicit threat of poverty out of the salary/job negotiation process (e.g. with a basic income) and then we can talk about "voluntary" contracts. >Can you clarify what you mean? If Pfizer conducts the research then they collect the rent. Legal entities do not conduct research, people do. Legal en…

Exaggeration? Small jobs are everywhere (washing dishes, hauling, yard work) that put off starvation. That means you can take a (little) while to decide on a job, and reject jobs that don't appeal. Its not "take the 1st job you find or die".
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