Three Economic Nobel Laureates In A Row Recognizing Power Of Infinite Goods

from the this-is-a-good-thing... dept

With the Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded to Elinor Ostrom (as well as Oliver Williamson) this year, plenty of people are noting that Ostrom's seminal work has to do with how the concept of "the tragedy of the commons" isn't really true in many cases, and how that "commons" can often self-regulate itself. And, Ostrom definitely recognizes how this applies to the "commons" that is the public domain. I didn't want to comment right away on this. While I've read Ostrom's work in the past, I wanted to revisit some of it, to refresh myself on it.

But what comes out in reading through her work is that she recognizes that government intervention -- such as with monopoly rights -- really doesn't make sense in many situations of "public goods." In a recent discussion on this site, people pointed to the concept of a "public good" as something that needs government intervention -- and I noted that more recent economic analysis showed that wasn't true at all. Ostrom's work is much of what kicked off that line of analysis (Coase deserves credit as well...). Her key finding was that in commons situations, the players can often work out perfectly reasonable solutions on their own, that don't involve regulatory efforts to put up fences or restrictions. The idea that a commons will automatically get overrun simply isn't true in practice. And that's exactly what we've seen in areas where there isn't intellectual property protections. The supposed fear of a "tragedy of the commons" never seems to show up. Instead, the markets adjust.

What struck me as really interesting, however, is that this is the second time in three years that the Nobel committee has awarded someone whose research highlights this point. In 2007, the award went to Eric Maskin, who has done work showing why patents can often be harmful (his focus was on software) -- again, suggesting that government intervention can be harmful in cases of "public goods." And, while it's less tied to the reasons why he got his Nobel or his core areas of research, last year's award winner, Paul Krugman, has recently come around to recognizing that "infinite goods" or public goods aren't a problem, but a potential opportunity as a market shifts.

It's nice to see the Nobel committee helping to get these ideas out there -- and highlighting the research that debunks the old wisdom that the answer to any public good is to create a gov't regulated monopoly system, rather than letting the market work out a solution on its own.

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Basic Building Blocks Of Life Patented... But Wins A Nobel Prize

from the is-that-good-or-bad? dept

joseph franklin writes in to point out that this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to some researchers who helped uncover some of the basic building blocks of life, ribosomes. Figuring out how to model these was great, but Franklin's concern is that not only did these researchers get a Nobel Prize for it, they got a patent as well:

The patent holders and licensees surely believe that these products will be life-saving, and profitable, and I hate to rain on the Nobel Prize parade. But should research so fundamental to life, such as the ribosome structure, be locked up for commercial gain -- like Dynamite? Should a private institution, such as Yale, have the only say over how ribosomes may be developed into new biomedical technologies?

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Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Explains How Intellectual Property Damages Innovation

from the and-another-one dept

Over the last year or so, there have been a bunch of excellent books that have come out highlighting many of the issues we talk about here on a regular basis. The latest may be The Crime of Reason and the Closing of the Scientific Mind, written by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Robert B. Laughlin. I became aware of the book thanks to the fact that he'll be speaking at the Cato Institute this week about the book, for those of you in the Washington, DC area.

It's funny, because when we point to all the economic research on intellectual property and innovation, we've been told that economists know nothing. In fact, one critic of our site has claimed that even Nobel Prize winning economists aren't worth paying attention to -- and the only Nobel Prize winners who matter are those in the hard sciences. So, I'm sure those critics will be interested in the conclusions of Laughlin, who notes that the strengthening of intellectual property laws has harmed the ability to share knowledge and to innovate. He's quite worried about how it's impacting research and development.

Newly aggressive patent practices are increasingly violating a principle that has been with us since Roman times and is built into our societies at many levels, including our religions: the laws of man flow from the laws of nature and are subservient to them. Patenting nature is transparently immoral. So is patenting reason, since reason and nature are one and the same. Thus, the current problem with patent law is more serious than the bellyaching of a few jaded engineers. It's a crisis of legitimacy.

So, now we can add a Nobel Prize winning physicist to the list of critics of the patent system, along with a few Nobel Prize winning economists.

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Dear Doris Lessing: Reading And Writing Online Are Still Reading And Writing

from the no,-seriously dept

Doris Lessing is getting a fair bit of attention for her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, where she spends a lot of time talking about the hunger for books in Zimbabwe, but then, oddly, blasts computers and the internet as if they're destroying the ability to read and write:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

These statements unfortunately come off as the stereotypical "back in my day!" rantings of someone no longer in touch with society. It's odd in the first paragraph for her to call out "computers" as being part of the "know nothing" generation. Computers have helped countless people learn more, discuss more and engage more. She describes computers like someone who has never used one. The second paragraph then (again, oddly) combines computers with television -- despite the extremely different nature of the two. One is passive, one is active. One is about communication and engagement, the other is about broadcasting and receiving. Furthermore, as she goes on to lament a lack of interest in books as a necessary core for a new generation of writers, she mocks "blogging" which is actually helping more people write more than they would otherwise. It's an elitist stance to suggest that just because it's short-form and online it doesn't matter. It's also wrong. Studies have shown that students these days are much more comfortable writing -- in large part because they spend so much more time communicating via the written word online. It's truly unfortunate that Lessing would use her Nobel speech to incorrectly bash something on which she apparently has little understanding. The rest of her speech is quite interesting, and it's too bad that it's marred by this unfortunate and misplaced attack on modern technology.

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