Forbes Magazine is struggling to find a news model of the digital era. They may be settling in on what has not worked for so many other organizations, and that is to just slap by-lines on state produced press releases. I used to subscribe, but haven't for a few years. Here is a problem article talking about innovation:
The problem part is taxpayer support for innovation. Such support is necessarily politically driven, not market driven. What gets "supported" usually ends up trash, or worse like ethanol. What succeeds, like the internet, is so terribly crippled that it is likely a net deficit. Sure, you love email, but some 90% of email traffic is spam. The #1 problem the preacher man is dealing with is families broken over porn. There is zero privacy in communication. All this because of the history of state funding of the proto-internet. A free market would not have yielded those results.
What is seriously wrong is that we do not have a separation of industry and state. What we have is crony capitalism, where a few suits occasionally come up with the least bad thing that necessarily crowds out a universally good thing.
Nobody anticipated the internet, it emerged from a concatenation of telephone deregulation (state imposition of telecommunication monopoly) with open source software (unix) and Job's insight that computers would be decentralized, not centralized. Had their not been the crony capitalist telephone monopolies, war machine darpa com network, two bad things, to match with open source and job;s insights, the 'net would not have happened. But since it was based on a foundation of bad government, what we have is a pretty awful thing. Better to have no taxpayer funding of research and let all that be private.
The fundamental error in the thinking of "basic research" is that great breakthroughs can be had without market nexus. It is by constant hypothesis formation and testing that tiny, steady improvements are made. These filter through and the good ones thrive and the bad ones die off. Breakthroughs do not take a lot of money, just a lot of freedom. The economy will improve if the state gets out of research, and cuts taxes concomitantly.
But as long people who get free $#!+ from taxpayers applaud you wildly at TED talks when you say the taxpayers should give out free $#!+, we'll always have people writing books saying the taxpayer should be dinged for free $#!+. Forbes now likes this argument.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
Mazzucato argues that long-term, patient government funding is an absolute prerequisite for breakthrough innovation. There is something seriously wrong, she says, with a system that asks taxpayers to take all the risk while the private sector takes all the rewardsThe article praises a book that follows that theme... The second part, that is that there is something wrong with taxpayers taking all of the risks and the private sector getting all of the rewards makes perfect sense.
The problem part is taxpayer support for innovation. Such support is necessarily politically driven, not market driven. What gets "supported" usually ends up trash, or worse like ethanol. What succeeds, like the internet, is so terribly crippled that it is likely a net deficit. Sure, you love email, but some 90% of email traffic is spam. The #1 problem the preacher man is dealing with is families broken over porn. There is zero privacy in communication. All this because of the history of state funding of the proto-internet. A free market would not have yielded those results.
What is seriously wrong is that we do not have a separation of industry and state. What we have is crony capitalism, where a few suits occasionally come up with the least bad thing that necessarily crowds out a universally good thing.
Nobody anticipated the internet, it emerged from a concatenation of telephone deregulation (state imposition of telecommunication monopoly) with open source software (unix) and Job's insight that computers would be decentralized, not centralized. Had their not been the crony capitalist telephone monopolies, war machine darpa com network, two bad things, to match with open source and job;s insights, the 'net would not have happened. But since it was based on a foundation of bad government, what we have is a pretty awful thing. Better to have no taxpayer funding of research and let all that be private.
The fundamental error in the thinking of "basic research" is that great breakthroughs can be had without market nexus. It is by constant hypothesis formation and testing that tiny, steady improvements are made. These filter through and the good ones thrive and the bad ones die off. Breakthroughs do not take a lot of money, just a lot of freedom. The economy will improve if the state gets out of research, and cuts taxes concomitantly.
But as long people who get free $#!+ from taxpayers applaud you wildly at TED talks when you say the taxpayers should give out free $#!+, we'll always have people writing books saying the taxpayer should be dinged for free $#!+. Forbes now likes this argument.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
3 comments:
What about IPR (patents), which is obviously government involvement as well? Does Mazzucato actually think that patents improve innovation? Of course they do not - but just impede new development. Mazzucato does not appear to be familiar with Boldrin and Levin's work (Against Intellectual Monopoly). Her argument did not appear to factor this little nugget into her thesis.
So, according to her, should I just hitch my new business up to the big government teat with an SBIR or NIH grant and suckle my way to business prosperity? She appears to completely avoid the issue of having customers in the first place - this is a profound ignorance of basic successful entrepreneurial business practice.
The key point: patents serve to make follow-on innovation much more expensive, and follow-on innovation is often key to continued productivity gains.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130502/10203222918/economist-explains-how-much-innovation-is-being-held-back-says-we-need-to-fix-patent-system.shtml
patent lawyer Freudian slip?:
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/07/10/surfboards-and-umbrellas-solar-power-patents-for-summer/id=43104/#comments
"...You should know that not every patent is commercialized, and not every interesting patent has a corresponding product on the market. You should also know that it is virtually impossible in many cases to find products that are covered by a patent even when they do exist. ... "
Post a Comment