Convergences

Necessities of Life

A Research Brief at Media Post looks at how people are saving money in this tough economic climate. Among the findings: Of the 2576 adults surveyed, 63% have purchased more generic drugs and 45% have brown-bagged instead of lunching out, but only 17% have changed or cancelled cell phone service. And 52% won't even consider a cell phone change.

Those least likely to cut back on cell service are the "Matures" (65+), at 11%. (Hm, I used to be old -- I am happy to see that I have reversed course to Mature')

Marginal Cost, Health Care, and the "Public Option"

As I was raised in Canada, I do not have the usual grounding in "How a Bill becomes a Law," which every school child in the U.S. gets. One would think, though, that having worked in public policy since 1995, that I would have grasped the process by now. The technical stuff (voting procedures, signatures, and committees) is easy. But what is *really* going on? How do people's opinions crystallize into ideas, form into language, and ultimately get incorporated into legislation? It is a baffling process, and in spite of having hurled myself under the bus of this process for some years in an attempt to change its course, I understand it no better.

Influencing legislation often seems to be mostly a matter of having the good luck to have one's idea come to the attention of the right person at the right time. Personal connections, favor, and chance association still, by and large, seems to be the way things get done, as if we were still living in Elizabethan times, as if all our formalities and process did not matter at all. One recent illustration of this is the "public option" for health care insurance, proffered in recent legislation.What is behind this idea, and where did it come from?

Climate Change: The Writing on the Wall . . .

. . . Is in Chinese. See my column at Pajamas Media, on how the Chinese are getting skeptical of the IPCC and its data. A recent article concludes:

Ancient Chinese considered three a breaking point. They could forgive two errors, but not a third. Now that the IPCC has admitted three “human” errors, isn’t it time scientists gave its work a serious review?

Actually, this understates it; the number of errors is far more than three, and still counting.

The subtitle of the article notes the irony: Who would have thought Chinese state-run media could give more thorough coverage of Climategate than the U.S. MSM?

A commenter adds: "That writing is in Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and English as well:"

India forms new climate change body

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

Democracy in China (and the U.S.)

At the AEI's Enterprise blog, I discuss a recent article on democracy in China Daily. My underlying point is that we in the U.S. spend too little time thinking about the problems of making democracy work, and this gap in our thinking will trigger serious consequences in the not-so-long-run.

See, e.g., a recent statement by CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf:

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are prepared to send to the government to finance those services. That fundamental disconnect will have to be addressed in some way if the nation is to avoid serious long-term damage to the economy and to the well-being of the population.

Political incentives militate against any resolution. People are treating the Federal budget as a commons, and hastening to exploit it before others can do so. In such a situation, restraint is a bad strategy -- it leaves more for others and does no good over all.

So, the rising concern about the problem actually leads to an intensification of everyone's desire to get what they regard as their just due, and the rapacity increases. DC lobbyists just had their best year ever, and it was not for any efforts to solve the problem.

The Chinese are surely watching this dynamic with interest. According to legend, Zhou Enlai, when asked his view of the French Revolution, said "It's too early to tell." Similarly, they must be interested in seeing  how this novel U.S. idea of a constitutional democracy works out in practice -- at present, it is too early to tell.

Climate Religion

Michael Barone nails it:

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.

The arguments that green energy is a producer of jobs are all somewhat weird, as if we could improve our lot by banning the use of the tractor in farming and requiring all work to be done by hand, thus returning to the days when it took 90% of the population to grow food.

Technical progress, and the tech industry, depend on making energy as cheap, not as expensive, as possible. A world in which people spend all their time working to produce or pay for inefficient energy is not a world with money to spare for the iPod.

Are confusing and conflicting patents the same as NO patents?

Nanotechnology

I recently read “Patenting Nanotechnology” by law prof Mark Lemley. Excitement about (and fear of) nanotechnology seems to be waning rather than waxing. The article nonetheless includes a curiously paradoxical line of argument about intellectual property that I think is worth setting out in detail.

Presently there is some concern that there are already too many overlapping nanotechnology patents, and/or too many nanotechnology patents that cover basic research concepts as opposed to actual useful products. A number of observers have warned that these patents could interfere with ongoing nanotechnology research. This is a familiar theme over the past couple decades of patent scholarship.

Of course, patents (with all their warts) were around during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, too, when a lot of important advances were made in technology. All kinds of things from sewing machines to radios were developed, and it all worked out okay in spite of much patent nonsense being involved.

Now, here is where Mark comes up with a twist on the familiar arguments. To help make his paper about nanotechnology more interesting, he seems to want to build up the case that nanotechnology is different from earlier technologies, so that the patent system might cause problems for nano that they did not cause for earlier technologies. So he goes through each earlier technology in some detail, and argues that in each case, in effect, for each of these key earlier technologies, patent protection was in effect non-existent. In the case of sewing machines, for example, the patents were tied up in litigation; in the case of radio, WWI intervened and the patents were taken over by the government.

Therefore, he argues, nanotechnology will be the first important technology that is in effect actually protected by patents. He goes on to conclude that there is no reason to worry about this yet. This conclusion seems sensible enough. So… what?

With his argument that previous key technologies were in effect devoid of patent protection as a practical measure, even though they were patented, well, he’s created a mythical monster, the worm who eats his own tail. I don’t think he fully realizes this, so I will play with the idea a little bit.

The argument is, in effect, that when a technology is tied up in patents to such an extent that no one has a clearly enforceable right to it… well, in effect, this is just the same as the technology’s having no patent protection at all. It’s a free-for-all. 

If this is right, well, no need to worry about the anti-commons then, is there, not for nanotechnology nor for anything else. If the muddle with patents gets bad enough, well, everyone just ignores them, or stakes his own claim, or the whole business gets swept aside with compulsory licensing. On the other hand, if all these key technologies developed in a free-for-all, why bother with a patent system at all?

To which I say, hold on a minute! First, just because patents end up getting into a legal muddle after a technology is developed, does not mean that the incentive system that patents creates was not important to their initial creation. Investors are looking to the future, and if things don’t turn out as well as they expect, they’ll have to make the best of it. But that doesn’t mean that our ground rules can treat future expectations as irrelevant to investment.

Second, even if patents get tied up in litigation, well, is this the same thing as having no patent protection at all? In the case of sewing machines, yes, there was a lot of litigation. But there were a limited number of parties to that litigation, and ultimately it was all sorted out (Adam Mossoff’s paper on this offers details).

What I end up taking away from Mark’s paper is this:

--The problem of too many patents (or patents on the wrong sort of idea) is unlikely to emerge as a practical barrier to scientific or technological development for a wide variety of reasons.

--The problem of too many patents (or patents on the wrong sort of idea) is nonetheless worth thinking about, because systemic problems might affect whether investors are likely to see returns on their investment. Mind you, the effect is likely to be small, compared to other factors like entrepreneurial skill in producing and marketing a new idea.

--Too many patents might create a situation similar to the situation one would see with no patents at all, but the details matter. But accepting this idea without looking closely at the context could do quite a lot of mischief.

Mark, being tolerant, will forgive my wrenching his argument out of its context.

-SS