patent

Intellectual Property, revisited

pnrj core principles, development economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 12, JDN 2457825

A few weeks ago I wrote a post laying out the burden of proof for intellectual property, but didn’t have time to get into the empirical question of whether our existing intellectual property system can meet this burden of proof.

First of all, I want to make a very sharp distinction between three types of regulations that are all called “intellectual property”.

First there are trademarks, which I have absolutely no quarrel with. Avoiding fraud and ensuring transparency are fundamental functions without which markets would unravel, and without trademarks these things would be much harder to accomplish. Trademarks allow a company to establish a brand identity that others cannot usurp; they ensure that when you buy Coca-Cola (R) it is really in fact the beverage you expect and not some counterfeit knockoff. (And if counterfeit Coke sounds silly, note that counterfeit honey and maple syrup are actually a major problem.) Yes, there should be limits on how much you can trademark—no one wants to live in a world where you feel Love ™ and open Screen Doors ™—but in fact our courts are already fairly good about only allowing corporations to trademark newly-coined words and proper names for their products.

Next there are copyrights, which I believe are currently too strong and often abused, but I do think should exist in some form (or perhaps copylefts instead). Authors should have at least certain basic rights over how their work can be used and published. If nothing else, proper attribution should always be required, as without that plagiarism becomes intolerably easy. And steps should be taken to ensure that if any people profit from its sale, the author is among them. I publish this blog under a by-sa copyleft, which essentially means that you can share it with whomever you like and even adapt its content into your own work, so long as you properly attribute it to me and you do not attempt to claim ownership over it. For scientific content, I think only a copyleft of this sort makes sense—the era of for-profit journals with paywalls must end, as it is holding back our civilization. But for artistic content (and I mean art in the broadest sense, including books, music, movies, plays, and video games), stronger regulations might well make sense. The question is whether our current system is actually too strong, or is protecting the wrong people—often it seems to protect the corporations that sell the content rather than the artists who created it.

Finally there are patents. Unlike copyright which applies to a specific work of art, patent is meant to apply to the underlying concept of a technology. Copyright (or rather the by-sa copyleft) protects the text of this article; you can’t post it on your own blog and claim you wrote it. But if I were to patent it somehow (generally, verbal arguments cannot be patented, fortunately), you wouldn’t even be able to paraphrase it. The trademark on a Samsung ™ TV just means that if I make a TV I can’t say I am Samsung, because I’m not. You wouldn’t copyright a TV, but the analogous process would be if I were to copy every single detail of the television and try to sell that precise duplicate. But the patents on that TV mean that if I take it apart, study each component, find a way to build them all from my own raw materials, even make them better, and build a new TV out of them that looks different and performs better—I would still be infringing on intellectual property. Patents grant an extremely strong notion of property rights, one which actually undermines a lot of other, more basic concepts of property. It’s my TV, why can’t I take it apart and copy the components? Well, as long as the patent holds, it’s not entirely my TV. Property rights this strong—that allow a corporation to have its cake of selling the TV but eat it too by owning the rights to all its components—require a much stronger justification.

Trademark protects a name, which is unproblematic. Copyright protects a work, which carries risks but is still probably necessary in many cases. But patent protects an idea—and we should ask ourselves whether that is really something it makes sense to do.

In previous posts I’ve laid out some of the basic philosophical arguments for why patents do not seem to support innovation and may actually undermine it. But in this post I want to do something more direct and quantitative: Empirically, what is the actual effect of copyrights and patents on innovation? Can we find a way to quantify the costs and benefits to our society of different modes of intellectual property?

Economists quantify things all the time, so I briefly combed the literature to see what sort of empirical studies had been done on the economic impact of copyrights and patents.

Patents definitely create barriers to scientific collaboration: Scientific articles with ideas that don’t get patented are about 10-20% more likely to be cited than scientific articles with ideas that are patented. (I would have expected a larger effect, but that’s still not trivial.)

A 1995 study found that creased patent protections do seem to be positively associated with more trade.

A 2009 study of Great Britain published in AER found it “puzzling” that stronger patents actually seem to reduce the rate of innovation domestically, while having no effect on foreign innovation—yet this is exactly what I would have predicted. Foreign innovations should be largely unaffected by UK patents, but stricter patent laws in the UK make it harder for most actual innovators, only benefiting a handful of corporations that aren’t even particularly innovative.

This 1996 study did find a positive effect of stronger patent laws on economic growth, but it was quite small and only statistically significant when using instrumental variables that they couldn’t be bothered to define except in an appendix. When your result hinges on the use of instrumental variables that you haven’t even clearly defined in the paper, something is very fishy. My guess is that they p-hacked the instruments until they got the result they wanted.

This other 1996 study is a great example of why economists need to listen to psychologists. It found a negative correlation between foreign direct investment and—wait for it—the number of companies that answered “yes” to a survey question, “Does country X have intellectual property protection too weak to allow you to transfer your newest or most effective technology to a wholly-owned subsidiarythere?” Oh, wow, you found a correlation between foreign direct investment and a question directly asking about foreign direct investment.

his 2004 study found a nonlinear relationship whereby increased economic development affects intellectual property rights, rather than the other way around. But I find their theoretical model quite odd, and the scatter plot that lies at the core of their empirical argument reminds me of Rexthor, the Dog-Bearer. “This relationship appears to be non-linear,” they say when pointing at a scatter plot that looks mostly like nothing and maybe like a monotonic increase.

This 1997 study found a positive correlation between intellectual property strength, R&D spending, and economic growth. The effect is weak, but the study looks basically sound. (Though I must say I’d never heard anyone use the words “significant at the 24% level” before. Normally one would say “nonsignificant” for that variable methinks. It’s okay for it not to be significant in some of your regressions, you know.)

This 1992 paper found that intellectual property harms poor countries and may or may not benefit rich countries, but it uses a really weird idiosyncratic theoretical model to get there. Frankly if I see the word “theorem” anywhere in your empirical paper, I get suspicious. No, it is not a theorem that “For economies in steady state the South loses from tighter intellectual property rights.” It may be true, but it does not follow from the fundamental axioms of mathematics.

This law paper is excellent; it focuses on the fact that intellectual property is a unique arrangement and a significant deviation from conventional property rights. It tracks the rise of legal arguments that erroneously equate intellectual property with real property, and makes the vital point that fully internalizing the positive externalities of technology was never the goal, and would in fact be horrible should it come to pass. We would all have to pay most of our income in royalties to the Newton and Faraday estates. So, I highly recommend reading it. But it doesn’t contain any empirical results on the economic effects of intellectual property.

This is the best paper I was able to find showing empirical effects of different intellectual property regimes; I really have no complaints about its econometrics. But it was limited to post-Soviet economies shortly after the fall of the USSR, which were rather unique circumstances. (Indeed, by studying only those countries, you’d probably conclude that free markets are harmful, because the shock of transition was so great.)

This 1999 paper is also quite good; using a natural experiment from a sudden shift in Japanese patent policy, they found almost no difference in actual R&D. The natural experiment design makes this particularly credible, but it’s difficult to generalize since it only covered Japan specifically.

This study focused in particular on copyrights and the film industry, and found a nonlinear effect: While having no copyright protection at all was harmful to the film industry, making the copyright protections too strong had a strangling effect on new filmmakers entering the industry. This would suggest that the optimal amount of copyright is moderate, which sounds reasonable to me.

This 2009 study did a much more detailed comparison of different copyright regimes, and was unable to find a meaningful pattern amidst the noise. Indeed, they found that the only variable that consistently predicted the number of new works of art was population—more people means more art, and nothing else seemed to matter. If this is correct, it’s quite damning to copyright; it would suggest that people make art for reasons fundamentally orthogonal to copyright, and copyright does almost nothing useful. (And I must say, if you talk to most artists, that tends to be their opinion on the matter!)

This 1996 paper found that stronger patents had no benefits for poor countries, but benefited rich countries quite a large amount: Increased patent protection was estimated to add as much as 0.7% annual GDP growth over the whole period. That’s a lot; if this is really true, stronger patents are almost certainly worth it. But then it becomes difficult to explain why more precise studies haven’t found effects anywhere near that large.

This paper was pretty interesting; they found a fat-tailed distribution of patents, where most firms have none, many have one or a few, and a handful of firms have a huge number of patents. This is also consistent with the distribution of firm revenue and profit—and I’d be surprised if I didn’t find a strong correlation between all three. But this really doesn’t tell us whether patents are contributing to innovation.
This paper found that the harmonization of global patents in the Uruguay Round did lead to gains from trade for most countries, but also transferred about $4.5 billion to the US from the rest of the world. Of course, that’s really not that large an amount when we’re talking about global policy over several years.

What does all that mean? I don’t know. It’s a mess. There just don’t seem to be any really compelling empirical studies on the economic impact of copyrights and patents. The preponderance of the evidence, such as it is, would seem to suggest that copyrights provide a benefit as long as they aren’t too strong, while patents provide a benefit but it is quite small and likely offset by the rent-seeking of the corporations that own them. The few studies that found really large effects (like 0.7% annual GDP growth) don’t seem very credible to me; if the effect were really that large, it shouldn’t be so ambiguous. 0.7% per year over 25 years is a GDP 20% larger. Over 50 years, GDP would be 42% larger. We would be able to see that.

Does this ambiguity mean we should do nothing, and wait until the data is better? I don’t think so. Remember, the burden of proof for intellectual property should be high. It’s a fundamentally bizarre notion of property, one which runs against most of our standard concepts of real property; it restricts our rights in very basic ways, making literally the majority of our population into criminals. Such a draconian policy requires a very strong justification, but such a justification does not appear to be forthcoming. If it could be supported, that 0.7% GDP growth might be enough; but it doesn’t seem to be replicable. A free society does not criminalize activities just in case it might be beneficial to do so—it only criminalizes activities that have demonstrable harm. And the harm of copyright and patent infringement simply isn’t demonstrable enough to justify its criminalization.

We don’t have to remove them outright, but we should substantially weaken copyright and patent laws. They should be short-term, they should provide very basic protection, and they should never be owned by corporations, always by individuals (corporations should be able to license them—but not own them). If we then observe a substantial reduction in innovation and economic output, then we can put them back. But I think that what defenders of intellectual property fear most is that if we tried this, it wouldn’t be so bad—and then the “doom and gloom” justification they’ve been relying on all this time would fall apart.

Is intellectual property justified?

pnrj ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , ,

Feb 12, JDN 2457797

I had hoped to make this week’s post more comprehensive, but as I’ve spent the last week suffering from viral bronchitis I think I will keep this one short and revisit the topic in a few weeks.

Intellectual property underlies an increasingly large proportion of the world’s economic activity, more so now than ever before. We don’t just patent machines anymore; we patent drugs, and software programs, and even plants. Compared to that, copyrights on books, music, and movies seem downright pedestrian.

Though surely not the only cause, this is almost certainly contributing to the winner-takes-all effect; if you own the patent to something important, you can appropriate a huge amount of wealth to yourself with very little effort.

Moreover, this is not something that happened automatically as a natural result of market forces or autonomous human behavior. This is a policy, one that requires large investments in surveillance and enforcement to maintain. Intellectual property is probably the single largest market intervention that our government makes, and it is in a very strange direction: With antitrust law, the government seeks to undermine monopolies; but with intellectual property, the government seeks to protect monopolies.

So it’s important to ask: What is the justification for intellectual property? Do we actually have a good reason for doing this?

The basic argument goes something like this:

Many intellectual endeavors, such as research, invention, and the creation of art, require a large up-front investment of resources to complete, but once completed it costs almost nothing to disseminate the results. There is a very large fixed cost that makes it difficult to create these goods at all, but once they exist, the marginal cost of producing more of them is minimal.

If we didn’t have any intellectual property, once someone created an invention or a work of art, someone else could simply copy it and sell it at a much lower price. If enough competition emerged to drive price down to marginal cost, the original creator of the good would not only not profit, but would actually take an enormous loss, as they paid that large fixed cost but none of their competitors did.

Thus, knowing that they will take a loss if they do, individuals will not create inventions or works of art in the first place. Without intellectual property, all research, invention, and art would grind to a halt.

 

That last sentence sounds terrible, right? What would we do without research, invention, or art? But then if you stop and think about it for a minute, it becomes clear that this can’t possibly be the outcome of eliminating intellectual property. Most societies throughout the history of human civilization have not had a system of intellectual property, and yet they have all had art, and most of them have had research and invention as well.

If intellectual property is to be defended, it can’t be because we would have none of these things without it—it must be that we would have less, and so much less that it offsets the obvious harms of concentrating so much wealth and power in a handful of individuals.

I had hoped to get into the empirical results of different intellectual property regimes, but due to my illness I’m going to save that for another day.

Instead I’m just going to try to articulate what the burden of proof here really needs to be.

First of all, showing that we spend a lot of money on patents contributes absolutely nothing useful to defending them. Yes, we all know patents are expensive. The question is whether they are worth it. To show that this is not a strawman, here’s an article by IP Watchdog that takes the fact that “a new study showing that academic patent licensing contributed more than $1 trillion to the U.S. economy over eighteen years” is some kind of knockdown argument in favor of patents. If you actually showed that this economic activity would not exist without patents, then that would be an argument for patents. But all this study actually does is shows that we spend that much on patents, which says nothing about whether this is a good use of resources. It’s like when people try to defend the F-35 boondoggle by saying “it supports thousands of jobs!”; well, yes, but what about the millions of jobs we could be supporting instead if we used that money for something more efficient? (And indeed, the evidence is quite clear that spending on the F-35 destroys more jobs than it creates.) So any serious of estimate of economic benefits of intellectual property must also come with an estimate of the economic cost of intellectual property, or it is just propaganda.
It’s not enough to show some non-negligible (much less “statistically significant”) increase in innovation as a result of intellectual property. The effect size is critical; the increase in innovation needs to be large enough that it justifies having world-spanning monopolies that concentrate the world’s wealth in the hands of a few individuals. Because we already know that intellectual property concentrates wealth; they are monopolies, and monopolies concentrate wealth. It’s not enough to show that there is a benefit; that benefit must be greater than the cost, and there must be no alternative methods that allow us to achieve a greater net benefit.
It’s also important to be clear what we mean by “innovation”; this can be a very difficult thing to measure. But in principle what we really want to know is whether we are supporting important innovation—whether we will get more Mona Lisas and more polio vaccines, not simply whether we will get more Twilight and more Viagra. And one of the key problems with intellectual property as a method of funding innovation is that there is only a vague link between the profits that can be extracted and the benefits of the innovation. (Though to be fair, this is actually a more general problem; it is literally a mathematical theorem that competitive markets only maximize utility if you value rich people more, in inverse proportion to their marginal utility of wealth.)

Innovation is certainly important. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that innovation is the foundation of economic development and civilization itself. Defenders of intellectual property often want you to stop the conversation there: “Innovation is important!” Don’t let them. It’s not enough to say that innovation is important; intellectual property must also be the best way of achieving that innovation.

Is it? Well, in a few weeks I’ll get back to what the data actually says on this. There is some evidence supporting intellectual property—but the case is a lot weaker than you have probably been led to believe.

Why are movies so expensive? Did they used to be? Do they need to be?

pnrj ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 10, JDN 2457611

One of the better arguments in favor of copyright involves film production. Films are extraordinarily expensive to produce; without copyright, how would they recover their costs? $100 million is a common budget these days.

It is commonly thought that film budgets used to be much smaller, so I looked at some data from The Numbers on over 5,000 films going back to 1915, and inflation-adjusted the budgets using the CPI. (I learned some interesting LibreOffice Calc functions in the process of merging the data; also LibreOffice crashed a few times trying to make the graphs, so that’s fun. I finally realized it had copied over all the 10,000 hyperlinks from the HTML data set.)

If you just look at the nominal figures, there does seem to be some sort of upward trend:

Movie_Budgets_nominal

But once you do the proper inflation adjustment, this trend basically disappears:

Movie_Budgets_adjusted

In real terms, the grosses of some early movies are quite large. Adjusted to 2015 dollars, Gone with the Wind grossed $6.659 billion—still the highest ever. In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs grossed over $3.043 billion in 2015 dollars. In 1950, Cinderella made it to $2.592 billion in today’s money. (Horrifyingly, The Birth of a Nation grossed $258 million in today’s money.)

Nor is there any evidence that movie production has gotten more expensive. The linear trend is actually negative, though with a very small slope that is not statistically significant. On average, the real budget of a movie falls by $1752 per year.

Movie_Budgets_trend

While the two most expensive movies came out recently (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Avatar), the third most expensive was released in 1963 (Cleopatra). The really hugely expensive movies do seem to cluster relatively recently—but then so do the really cheap films, some of which have budgets under $10,000. It may just be that more movies are produced in general, and overall the cost of producing a film doesn’t seem to have changed in real terms. The best return on investment is My Date with Drew, released in 2005, which had a budget of $1,100 but grossed $181,000, giving it an ROI of 16,358%. The highest real profit was of course Gone with the Wind, which made an astonishing $6.592 billion, though Titanic, Avatar, Aliens and Terminator 2 combined actually beat it with a total profit of $6.651 billion, which may explain why James Cameron can now basically make any movie he wants and already has four sequels lined up for Avatar.

The biggest real loss was 1970’s Waterloo, which made back only $18 million of its $153 million budget, losing $135 million and having an ROI of -87.7%. This was not quite as bad an ROI as 2002’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which had an ROI of -92.91%.

But making movies has always been expensive, at least for big blockbusters. (The $8,900 budget of Primer is something I could probably put on credit cards if I had to.) It’s nothing new to spend $100 million in today’s money.

When considering the ethics and economics of copyright, it’s useful to think about what Michele Boldrin calls “pizzaright”: you can’t copy my pizza, or you are guilty of pizzaright infringement. Many of the arguments for copyright are so general—this is a valuable service, it carries some risk of failure, it wouldn’t be as profitable without the monopoly, so fewer companies might enter the business—that they would also apply to pizza. Yet somehow nobody thinks that pizzaright should be a thing. If there is a justification for copyrights, it must come from the special circumstances of works of art (broadly conceived, including writing, film, music, etc.), and the only one that really seems strong enough is the high upfront cost of certain types of art—and indeed, the only ones that really seem to fit that are films and video games.

Painting, writing, and music just aren’t that expensive. People are willing to create these things for very little money, and can do so more or less on their own, especially nowadays. If the prices are reasonable, people will still want to buy from the creators directly—and sure enough, widespread music piracy hasn’t killed music, it has only killed the corporate record industry. But movies and video games really can easily cost $100 million to make, so there’s a serious concern of what might happen if they couldn’t use copyright to recover their costs.

The question for me is, did we really need copyright to fund these budgets?

Let’s take a look at how Star Wars made its money. $6.249 billion came from box office revenue, while $873 million came from VHS and DVD sales; those would probably be substantially reduced if not for copyright. But even before The Force Awakens was released, the Star Wars franchise had already made some $12 billion in toy sales alone. “Merchandizing, merchandizing, where the real money from the movie is made!”

Did they need intellectual property to do that? Well, yes—but all they needed was trademark. Defenders of “intellectual property” like to use that term because it elides fundamental distinctions between the three types: trademark, copyright, and patent.
Trademark is unproblematic. You can’t lie about who you are or where you products came from when you’re selling something. So if you are claiming to sell official Star Wars merchandise, you’d better be selling official Star Wars merchandise, and trademark protects that.

Copyright is problematic, but may be necessary in some cases. Copyright protects the content of the movies from being copied or modified without Lucasfilm’s permission. So now rather than simply protecting against the claim that you represent Lucasfilm, we are protecting against people buying the movie, copying it, and reselling the copies—even though that is a real economic service they are providing, and is in no way fraudulent as long as they are clear about the fact that they made the copies.

Patent is, frankly, ridiculous. The concept of “owning” ideas is absurd. You came up with a good way to do something? Great! Go do it then. But don’t expect other people to pay you simply for the privilege of hearing your good idea. Of course I want to financially support researchers, but there are much, much better ways of doing that, like government grants and universities. Patents only raise revenue for research that sells, first of all—so vaccines and basic research can’t be funded that way, even though they are the most important research by far. Furthermore, there’s nothing to guarantee that the person who actually invented the idea is the one who makes the profit from it—and in our current system where corporations can own patents (and do own almost 90% of patents), it typically isn’t. Even if it were, the whole concept of owning ideas is nonsensical, and it has driven us to the insane extremes of corporations owning patents on human DNA. The best argument I’ve heard for patents is that they are a second-best solution that incentivizes transparency and avoids trade secrets from becoming commonplace; but in that case they should definitely be short, and we should never extend them. Companies should not be able to make basically cosmetic modifications and renew the patent, and expiring patents should be a cause for celebration.

Hollywood actually formed in Los Angeles precisely to escape patents, but of course they love copyright and trademark. So do they like “intellectual property”?

Could blockbuster films be produced profitably using only trademark, in the absence of copyright?

Clearly Star Wars would have still turned a profit. But not every movie can do such merchandizing, and when movies start getting written purely for merchandizing it can be painful to watch.

The real question is whether a film like Gone with the Wind or Avatar could still be made, and make a reasonable profit (if a much smaller one).

Well, there’s always porn. Porn raises over $400 million per year in revenue, despite having essentially unenforceable copyright. They too are outraged over piracy, yet somehow I don’t think porn will ever cease to exist. A top porn star can make over $200,000 per year.Then there are of course independent films that never turn a profit at all, yet people keep making them.

So clearly it is possible to make some films without copyright protection, and something like Gone with the Wind needn’t cost $100 million to make. The only reason it cost as much as it did (about $66 million in today’s money) was that movie stars could command huge winner-takes-all salaries, which would no longer be true if copyright went away. And don’t tell me people wouldn’t be willing to be movie stars for $200,000 a year instead of $1.8 million (what Clark Gable made for Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation).

Yet some Hollywood blockbuster budgets are genuinely necessary. The real question is whether we could have Avatar without copyright. Not having films like Avatar is something I would count as a substantial loss to our society; we would lose important pieces of our art and culture.

So, where did all that money go? I don’t have a breakdown for Avatar in particular, but I do have a full budget breakdown for The Village. Of its $71.7 million, $33.5 million was “above the line”, which basically means the winner-takes-all superstar salaries for the director, producer, and cast. That amount could be dramatically reduced with no real cost to society—let’s drop it to say $3 million. Shooting costs were $28.8 million, post-production was $8.4 million, and miscellaneous expenses added about $1 million; all of those would be much harder to reduce (they mainly go to technical staff who make reasonable salaries, not to superstars), so let’s assume the full amount is necessary. That’s about $38 million in real cost to produce. Avatar had a lot more (and better) post-production, so let’s go ahead and multiply the post-production budget by an order of magnitude to $84 million. Our new total budget is $113.8 million.
That sounds like a lot, and it is; but this could be made back without copyright. Avatar sold over 14.5 million DVDs and over 8 million Blu-Rays. Conservatively assuming that the price elasticity of demand is zero (which is ridiculous—assuming the monopoly pricing is optimal it should be -1), if those DVDs were sold for $2 each and the Blu-Rays were sold for $5 each, with 50% of those prices being profit, this would yield a total profit of $14.5 million from DVDs and $20 million from Blu-Rays. That’s already $34.5 million. With realistic assumptions about elasticity of demand, cutting the prices this much (DVDs down from an average of $16, Blu-Rays down from an average of $20) would multiply the number of DVDs sold by at least 5 and the number of Blu-Rays sold by at least 3, which would get us all the way up to $132 million—enough to cover our new budget. (Of course this is much less than they actually made, which is why they set the prices they did—but that doesn’t mean it’s optimal from society’s perspective.)

But okay, suppose I’m wrong about the elasticity, and dropping the price from $16 to $2 for a DVD somehow wouldn’t actually increase the number purchased. What other sources of revenue would they have? Well, box office tickets would still be a thing. They’d have to come down in price, but given the high-quality high-fidelity versions that cinemas require—making them quite hard to pirate—they would still get decent money from each cinema. Let’s say the price drops by 90%—all cinemas are now $1 cinemas!—and the sales again somehow remain exactly the same (rather than dramatically increasing as they actually would). What would Avatar’s worldwide box office gross be then? $278 million. They could give the DVDs away for free and still turn a profit.

And that’s Avatar, one of the most expensive movies ever made. By cutting out the winner-takes-all salaries and huge corporate profits, the budget can be substantially reduced, and then what real costs remain can be quite well covered by box office and DVD sales at reasonable prices. If you imagine that piracy somehow undercuts everything until you have to give away things for free, you might think this is impossible; but in reality pirated versions are of unreliable quality, people do want to support artists and they are willing to pay something for their entertainment. They’re just tired of paying monopoly prices to benefit the shareholders of Viacom.

Would this end the era of the multi-millionaire movie star? Yes, I suppose it might. But it would also put about $10 billion per year back in the pockets of American consumers—and there’s little reason to think it would take away future Avatars, much less future Gone with the Winds.

What does it mean to “own” an idea?

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457195 EDT 11:29.

For a long time I’ve been suspicious of intellectual property as current formulated, but I’m never quite sure what to replace it with. I recently finished reading a surprisingly compelling little book called Against Intellectual Monopoly, which offered some more direct empirical support for many of my more philosophical concerns. (Fitting their opposition to copyright law, the authors, Michele Boldrin and David Levine, offer the full text of the book for free online.)

Boldrin and Levine argue that they are not in fact opposed to intellectual property, but intellectual monopoly. I think this is a bit of a silly distinction myself, and in fact muddles the issue a little because most of what we currently call “intellectual property” is in fact what they call “intellectual monopoly”.

The problems with intellectual property are well-documented within, but I think it’s worth repeating at least the basic form of the argument. Intellectual property is supposed to incentivize innovation by rewarding innovators for their investment, and thereby increase the total amount of innovation.

This requires three conditions to hold: First, the intellectual property must actually reward the innovators. Second, innovation must be increased when innovators seek rewards. And third, the costs of implementing the policy must be exceeded by the benefits provided by it.

As it turns out, none of those three conditions to hold. For intellectual property to make sense, they would all need to hold; and in fact none do.

First—and worst—of all, intellectual property does not actually reward innovators. It instead rewards those who manipulate the intellectual property system. Intellectual property is why Thomas Edison was wealthy and Nikola Tesla was poor. Intellectual property is why we keep getting new versions of the same pills for erectile dysfunction instead of an AIDS vaccine. Intellectual property is how we get patent troll corporations, submarine patents, and Samsung owing Apple $1 billion for making its smartphones the wrong shape. Intellectual property is how Worlds.com is proposing to sue an entire genre of video games.

Second, the best innovators are not motivated by individual rewards. This has always been true; the people who really contribute the most to the world in knowledge or creativity are those who do it out of an insatiable curiosity, or a direct desire to improve the world. People who are motivated primarily by profit only innovate as a last resort, instead preferring to manipulate laws, undermine competitors, or simply mass-produce safe, popular products.

I can think of no more vivid an example here than Hollywood. Why is it that every single new movie that comes out is basically a more expensive rehash of the exact same 5 movies that have been coming out for the last 50 years? Because big corporations don’t innovate. It’s too risky to try to make a movie that’s fundamentally new and different, because, odds are, that new movie would fail. It’s much safer to make an endless series of superhero movies and keep coming out with yet another movie about a heroic dog. It’s not even that these movies are bad—they’re often pretty good, and when done well (like Avengers) they can be quite enjoyable. But thousands of original screenplays are submitted to Hollywood every year, and virtually none of them are actually made into films. It’s impossible to know what great works of film we might have seen on the big screen if not for the stranglehold of media companies.

This is not how Hollywood began; it started out wildly innovative and new. But did you ever know why it started in Los Angeles and not somewhere else? It was to evade patent laws. Thomas Edison, the greatest patent troll in history, held a stranglehold on motion picture technology on the East Coast, so filmmakers fled to California to get as far away from there as possible, during a time when Federal enforcement was much more lax. The innovation that created Los Angeles as we know it not only was not incentivized by intellectual property protection—it was only possible in its absence.

And then of course there is the third condition, that the benefits be worth the costs—but it’s trivially obvious that this is not the case, since the benefits are in fact basically zero. We divert billions of dollars from consumers to huge corporations, monopolize the world’s ideas, create a system of surveillance and enforcement that makes basically everyone a criminal (I’ll admit it; I have pirated music, software, and most recently the film My Neighbor Totoro, and I often copy video games I own on CD or DVD to digital images so I don’t need the CD or DVD every time to play—which should be fair use but has been enforced as copyright violation). When everyone is a criminal, enforcement becomes capricious, a means of control that can be used and abused by those in power.

Intellectual property even allows corporations to undermine our more basic sense of property ownership—they can prevent us from making use of our own goods as we choose. They can punish us for modifying the software in our computers, our video game systems—or even our cars. They can install software on our computers that compromises our security in order to protect their copyright. This is a point that Boldrin and Levine repeat several times; in place of what we call “intellectual property” (and they call “intellectual monopoly”), they offer a system which would protect our ordinary property rights, our rights to do what we choose with the goods that we purchase—goods that include books, computers, and DVDs.

That brings me to where I think their argument is weakest—their policy proposal. Basically the policy they propose is that we eliminate all intellectual property rights (except trademarks, which they rightly point out are really more about honesty than they are about property—trademark violation typically amounts to fraudulently claiming that your product was made by someone it wasn’t), and then do nothing else. The only property rights would be ordinary property rights, which would know apply in full to products such as books and DVDs. When you buy a DVD, you would have the right to do whatever you please with it, up to and including copying it a hundred times and selling the copies. You bought the DVD, you bought the blank discs, you bought the burner; so (goes their argument), why shouldn’t you be able to do what you want with them?

For patents, I think their argument is basically correct. I’ve tried to make lists of the greatest innovations in science in technology, and virtually none of them were in any way supported by patents. We needn’t go as far back as fire, writing, and the wheel; think about penicillin, the smallpox vaccine, electricity, digital computing, superconductors, lasers, the Internet. Airplanes might seem like they were invented under patent, but in fact the Wright brothers made a relatively small contribution and most of the really important development in aircraft was done by the military. Important medicines are almost always funded by the NIH, while private pharmaceutical companies give us Viagra at best and Vioxx at worst. Private companies have an incentive to skew their trials in various ways, ranging from simply questionable (p-value hacking) to the outright fraudulent (tampering with data). We know they do, because meta-analyses have found clear biases in the literature. The NIH has much less incentive to bias results in this way, and as a result more of the drugs released will be safe and effective. Boldrin and Levine recommend that all drug trials be funded by the NIH instead of drug companies, and I couldn’t agree more. What basis would drug companies have for complaining? We’re giving them something they previously had to pay for. But of course they will complain, because now their drugs will be subject to unbiased scrutiny. Moreover, it undercuts much of the argument for their patent; without the initial cost of large-scale drug trials, it’s harder to see why they need patents to make a profit.

Major innovations have been the product of individuals working out of curiosity, or random chance, or university laboratories, or government research projects; but they are rarely motivated by patents and they are almost never created by corporations. Corporations do invent incremental advancements, but many of these they keep as trade secrets, or go ahead and share, knowing that reverse-engineering takes time and investment. The great innovations of the computer industry (like high-level programming languages, personal computers, Ethernet, USB ports, and windowed operating systems) were all invented before software could be patented—and since then, what have we really gotten? In fact, it can be reasonably argued that patents reduce innovation; most innovations are built on previous innovations, and patents hinder that process of assimilation and synthesis. Patent pools can mitigate this effect, but only for oligopolistic insiders, which almost by definition are less innovative than disruptive outsiders.

And of course, patents on software and biological systems should be invalidated yesterday. If we must have patents, they should be restricted only to entities that cannot self-replicate, which means no animals, no plants, no DNA, nothing alive, no software, and for good measure, no grey goo nanobots. (It also makes sense at a basic level: How can you stop people from copying it, when it can copy itself?)

It’s when we get to copyright that I’m not so convinced. I certainly agree that the current copyright system suffers from deep problems. When your photos can be taken without your permission and turned into works of art but you can’t make a copy of a video game onto your hard drive to play it more conveniently, clearly something is wrong with our copyright system. I also agree that there is something fundamentally problematic about saying that one “owns” a text in such a way that they can decide what others do with it. When you read my work, copies of the information I convey to you are stored inside your brain; do I now own a piece of your brain? If you print out my blog post on a piece of paper and then photocopy it, how can I own something you made with your paper on your printer?

I release all my blog posts under a “by-sa” copyleft, “attribution-share-alike”, which requires that my work be shared without copyright protection and properly attributed to me. You are however free to sell them, modify them, or use them however you like, given those constraints. I think that something like this may be the best system for protecting authors against plagiarism without unduly restricting the rights of readers to copy, modify, and otherwise use the content they buy. Applied to software, the Free Software Foundation basically agrees.

Boldrin and Levine do not, however; they think that even copyleft is too much, because it imposes restrictions upon buyers. They do agree that plagiarism should be illegal (because it is fraudulent), but they disagree with the “share-alike” part, the requirement that content be licensed according to what the author demands. As far as they are concerned, you bought the book, and you can do whatever you damn well please with it. In practice there probably isn’t a whole lot of difference between these two views, since in the absence of copyright there isn’t nearly as much need for copyleft. I don’t really need to require you to impose a free license if you can’t impose any license at all. (When I say “free” I mean libre, not gratis; free as in speech, not as in beer—Red Hat Linux is free software you pay for, and Zynga games are horrifically predatory proprietary software you get for free.)

One major difference is that under copyleft we could impose requirements to release information under certain circumstances—I have in mind particularly scientific research papers and associated data. To maximize the availability of knowledge and facilitate peer review, it could be a condition of publication for scientific research that the paper and data be made publicly available under a free license—already this is how research done directly for the government works (at least the stuff that isn’t classified). But under a strict system of physical property only this sort of licensing would be a violation of the publishers’ property rights to do as they please with their servers and hard drives.

But there are legitimate concerns to be had even about simply moving to a copyleft system. I am a fiction author, and I submit books for publication. (This is not hypothetical; I actually do this.) Under the current system, I own the copyright to those books, and if the publisher decides to use them (thus far, only JukePop Serials, a small online publisher, has ever done so), they must secure my permission, presumably by means of a royalty contract. They can’t simply take whatever manuscripts they like and publish them. But if I submitted under a copyleft, they absolutely could. As long as my name were on the cover, they wouldn’t have to pay me a dime. (Charles Darwin certainly didn’t get a dime from Ray Comfort’s edition of The Origin of Species—yes, that is a thing.)

Now the question becomes, would they? There might be a competitive equilbrium where publishers are honest and do in fact pay their authors. If they fail to do so, authors are likely to stop submitting to that publisher once it acquires its shady reputation. If we can reach the equilibrium where authors get paid, that’s almost certainly better than today; the only people I can see it hurting are major publishing houses like Pearson PLC and superstar authors like J.K. Rowling; and even then it wouldn’t hurt them all that much. (Rowling might only be a millionaire instead of a billionaire, and Pearson PLC might see its net income drop from over $500 million to say $10 million.) The average author would most likely benefit, because publishers would have more incentive to invest in their midlist when they can’t crank out hundreds of millions of dollars from their superstars. Books would proliferate at bargain prices, and we could all double the size of our libraries. The net effect on the book market would be to reduce the winner-takes-all effect, which can only be a good thing.

But that isn’t the only possibility. The incentive to steal authors’ work when they submit it could instead create an equilibrium where hardly anyone publishes fiction anymore; and that world is surely worse than the one we live in today. We would want to think about how we can ensure that authors are adequately paid for their work in a copyleft system. Maybe some can make their money from speaking tours and book signings, but I’m not confident that enough can.

I do have one idea, similar to what Thomas Pogge came up with in his “public goods system”, though he primarily intended that to apply to medicine. The basic concept is that there would be a fund, either gathered from donations or supported by taxes, that supports artists. (Actually we already have the National Endowment for the Arts, but it isn’t nearly big enough.) This support would be doled out based on some metric of the artists’ popularity or artistic importance. The details of that are quite tricky, but I think one could arrange some sort of voting system where people use range voting to decide how much to give to each author, musician, painter, or filmmaker. Potentially even research funding could be set this way, with people voting to decide how important they think a particular project is—though I fear that people may be too ignorant to accurately gauge the important of certain lines of research, as when Sarah Palin mocked studies of “fruit flies in Paris”, otherwise known as literally the foundation of modern genetics. Maybe we could vote instead on research goals like “eliminate cancer” and “achieve interstellar travel” and then the scientific community could decide how to allocate funds toward those goals? The details are definitely still fuzzy in my mind.

The general principle, however, would be that if we want to support investment in innovation, we do that—instead of devising this bizarre system of monopoly that gives corporations growing power over our lives. Subsidize investment by subsidizing investment. (I feel similarly about capital taxes; we could incentivize investment in this vague roundabout way by doing nothing to redistribute wealth and hoping that all the arbitrage and speculation somehow translates into real investment… or, you know, we could give tax credits to companies that build factories.) As Boldrin and Levine point out, intellectual property laws were not actually created to protect innovation; they were an outgrowth of the general power of kings and nobles to enforce monopolies on various products during the era of mercantilism. They were weakened to be turned into our current system, not strengthened. They are, in fact, fundamentally mercantilist—and nothing could make that clearer than the TRIPS accord, which literally allows millions of people to die from treatable diseases in order to increase the profits of pharmaceutical companies. Far from being this modern invention that brought upon the scientific revolution, intellectual property is an atavistic policy borne from the age of colonial kings. I think it’s time we try something new.
(Oh, and one last thing: “Piracy”? Really? I can’t believe the linguistic coup it was for copyright holders to declare that people who copy music might as well be slavers and murderers—somehow people went along with this ridiculous terminology. No, there is no such thing as “music piracy” or “software piracy”; there is music copyright violation and software copyright violation.)

In honor of Pi Day, I for one welcome our new robot overlords

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JDN 2457096 EDT 16:08

Despite my preference to use the Julian Date Number system, it has not escaped my attention that this weekend was Pi Day of the Century, 3/14/15. Yesterday morning we had the Moment of Pi: 3/14/15 9:26:53.58979… We arguably got an encore that evening if we allow 9:00 PM instead of 21:00.

Though perhaps it is a stereotype and/or cheesy segue, pi and associated mathematical concepts are often associated with computers and robots. Robots are an increasing part of our lives, from the industrial robots that manufacture our cars to the precision-timed satellites that provide our GPS navigation. When you want to know how to get somewhere, you pull out your pocket thinking machine and ask it to commune with the space robots who will guide you to your destination.

There are obvious upsides to these robots—they are enormously productive, and allow us to produce great quantities of useful goods at astonishingly low prices, including computers themselves, creating a positive feedback loop that has literally lowered the price of a given amount of computing power by a factor of one trillion in the latter half of the 20th century. We now very much live in the early parts of a cyberpunk future, and it is due almost entirely to the power of computer automation.

But if you know your SF you may also remember another major part of cyberpunk futures aside from their amazing technology; they also tend to be dystopias, largely because of their enormous inequality. In the cyberpunk future corporations own everything, governments are virtually irrelevant, and most individuals can barely scrape by—and that sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it? This isn’t just something SF authors made up; there really are a number of ways that computer technology can exacerbate inequality and give more power to corporations.

Why? The reason that seems to get the most attention among economists is skill-biased technological change; that’s weird because it’s almost certainly the least important. The idea is that computers can automate many routine tasks (no one disputes that part) and that routine tasks tend to be the sort of thing that uneducated workers generally do more often than educated ones (already this is looking fishy; think about accountants versus artists). But educated workers are better at using computers and the computers need people to operate them (clearly true). Hence while uneducated workers are substitutes for computers—you can use the computers instead—educated workers are complements for computers—you need programmers and engineers to make the computers work. As computers get cheaper, their substitutes also get cheaper—and thus wages for uneducated workers go down. But their complements get more valuable—and so wages for educated workers go up. Thus, we get more inequality, as high wages get higher and low wages get lower.

Or, to put it more succinctly, robots are taking our jobs. Not all our jobs—actually they’re creating jobs at the top for software programmers and electrical engineers—but a lot of our jobs, like welders and metallurgists and even nurses. As the technology improves more and more jobs will be replaced by automation.

The theory seems plausible enough—and in some form is almost certainly true—but as David Card has pointed out, this fails to explain most of the actual variation in inequality in the US and other countries. Card is one of my favorite economists; he is also famous for completely revolutionizing the economics of minimum wage, showing that prevailing theory that minimum wages must hurt employment simply doesn’t match the empirical data.

If it were just that college education is getting more valuable, we’d see a rise in income for roughly the top 40%, since over 40% of American adults have at least an associate’s degree. But we don’t actually see that; in fact contrary to popular belief we don’t even really see it in the top 1%. The really huge increases in income for the last 40 years have been at the top 0.01%—the top 1% of 1%.

Many of the jobs that are now automated also haven’t seen a fall in income; despite the fact that high-frequency trading algorithms do what stockbrokers do a thousand times better (“better” at making markets more unstable and siphoning wealth from the rest of the economy that is), stockbrokers have seen no such loss in income. Indeed, they simply appropriate the additional income from those computer algorithms—which raises the question why welders couldn’t do the same thing. And indeed, I’ll get to in a moment why that is exactly what we must do, that the robot revolution must also come with a revolution in property rights and income distribution.

No, the real reasons why technology exacerbates inequality are twofold: Patent rents and the winner-takes-all effect.

In an earlier post I already talked about the winner-takes-all effect, so I’ll just briefly summarize it this time around. Under certain competitive conditions, a small fraction of individuals can reap a disproportionate share of the rewards despite being only slightly more productive than those beneath them. This often happens when we have network externalities, in which a product becomes more valuable when more people use it, thus creating a positive feedback loop that makes the products which are already successful wildly so and the products that aren’t successful resigned to obscurity.

Computer technology—more specifically, the Internet—is particularly good at creating such situations. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are all examples of companies that (1) could not exist without Internet technology and (2) depend almost entirely upon network externalities for their business model. They are the winners who take all; thousands of other software companies that were just as good or nearly so are now long forgotten. The winners are not always the same, because the system is unstable; for instance MySpace used to be much more important—and much more profitable—until Facebook came along.

But the fact that a different handful of upper-middle-class individuals can find themselves suddenly and inexplicably thrust into fame and fortune while the rest of us toil in obscurity really isn’t much comfort, now is it? While technically the rise and fall of MySpace can be called “income mobility”, it’s clearly not what we actually mean when we say we want a society with a high level of income mobility. We don’t want a society where the top 10% can by little more than chance find themselves becoming the top 0.01%; we want a society where you don’t have to be in the top 10% to live well in the first place.

Even without network externalities the Internet still nurtures winner-takes-all markets, because digital information can be copied infinitely. When it comes to sandwiches or even cars, each new one is costly to make and costly to transport; it can be more cost-effective to choose the ones that are made near you even if they are of slightly lower quality. But with books (especially e-books), video games, songs, or movies, each individual copy costs nothing to create, so why would you settle for anything but the best? This may well increase the overall quality of the content consumers get—but it also ensures that the creators of that content are in fierce winner-takes-all competition. Hence J.K. Rowling and James Cameron on the one hand, and millions of authors and independent filmmakers barely scraping by on the other. Compare a field like engineering; you probably don’t know a lot of rich and famous engineers (unless you count engineers who became CEOs like Bill Gates and Thomas Edison), but nor is there a large segment of “starving engineers” barely getting by. Though the richest engineers (CEOs excepted) are not nearly as rich as the richest authors, the typical engineer is much better off than the typical author, because engineering is not nearly as winner-takes-all.

But the main topic for today is actually patent rents. These are a greatly underappreciated segment of our economy, and they grow more important all the time. A patent rent is more or less what it sounds like; it’s the extra money you get from owning a patent on something. You can get that money either by literally renting it—charging license fees for other companies to use it—or simply by being the only company who is allowed to manufacture something, letting you sell it at monopoly prices. It’s surprisingly difficult to assess the real value of patent rents—there’s a whole literature on different econometric methods of trying to tackle this—but one thing is clear: Some of the largest, wealthiest corporations in the world are built almost entirely upon patent rents. Drug companies, R&D companies, software companies—even many manufacturing companies like Boeing and GM obtain a substantial portion of their income from patents.

What is a patent? It’s a rule that says you “own” an idea, and anyone else who wants to use it has to pay you for the privilege. The very concept of owning an idea should trouble you—ideas aren’t limited in number, you can easily share them with others. But now think about the fact that most of these patents are owned by corporations—not by inventors themselves—and you’ll realize that our system of property rights is built around the notion that an abstract entity can own an idea—that one idea can own another.

The rationale behind patents is that they are supposed to provide incentives for innovation—in exchange for investing the time and effort to invent something, you receive a certain amount of time where you get to monopolize that product so you can profit from it. But how long should we give you? And is this really the best way to incentivize innovation?

I contend it is not; when you look at the really important world-changing innovations, very few of them were done for patent rents, and virtually none of them were done by corporations. Jonas Salk was indignant at the suggestion he should patent the polio vaccine; it might have made him a billionaire, but only by letting thousands of children die. (To be fair, here’s a scholar arguing that he probably couldn’t have gotten the patent even if he wanted to—but going on to admit that even then the patent incentive had basically nothing to do with why penicillin and the polio vaccine were invented.)

Who landed on the moon? Hint: It wasn’t Microsoft. Who built the Hubble Space Telescope? Not Sony. The Internet that made Google and Facebook possible was originally invented by DARPA. Even when corporations seem to do useful innovation, it’s usually by profiting from the work of individuals: Edison’s corporation stole most of its good ideas from Nikola Tesla, and by the time the Wright Brothers founded a company their most important work was already done (though at least then you could argue that they did it in order to later become rich, which they ultimately did). Universities and nonprofits brought you the laser, light-emitting diodes, fiber optics, penicillin and the polio vaccine. Governments brought you liquid-fuel rockets, the Internet, GPS, and the microchip. Corporations brought you, uh… Viagra, the Snuggie, and Furbies. Indeed, even Google’s vaunted search algorithms were originally developed by the NSF. I can think of literally zero examples of a world-changing technology that was actually invented by a corporation in order to secure a patent. I’m hesitant to say that none exist, but clearly the vast majority of seminal inventions have been created by governments and universities.

This has always been true throughout history. Rome’s fire departments were notorious for shoddy service—and wholly privately-owned—but their great aqueducts that still stand today were built as government projects. When China invented paper, turned it into money, and defended it with the Great Wall, it was all done on government funding.

The whole idea that patents are necessary for innovation is simply a lie; and even the idea that patents lead to more innovation is quite hard to defend. Imagine if instead of letting Google and Facebook patent their technology all the money they receive in patent rents were instead turned into tax-funded research—frankly is there even any doubt that the results would be better for the future of humanity? Instead of better ad-targeting algorithms we could have had better cancer treatments, or better macroeconomic models, or better spacecraft engines.

When they feel their “intellectual property” (stop and think about that phrase for awhile, and it will begin to seem nonsensical) has been violated, corporations become indignant about “free-riding”; but who is really free-riding here? The people who copy music albums for free—because they cost nothing to copy, or the corporations who make hundreds of billions of dollars selling zero-marginal-cost products using government-invented technology over government-funded infrastructure? (Many of these companies also continue receive tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies every year.) In the immortal words of Barack Obama, “you didn’t build that!”

Strangely, most economists seem to be supportive of patents, despite the fact that their own neoclassical models point strongly in the opposite direction. There’s no logical connection between the fixed cost of inventing a technology and the monopoly rents that can be extracted from its patent. There is some connection—albeit a very weak one—between the benefits of the technology and its monopoly profits, since people are likely to be willing to pay more for more beneficial products. But most of the really great benefits are either in the form of public goods that are unenforceable even with patents (go ahead, try enforcing on that satellite telescope on everyone who benefits from its astronomical discoveries!) or else apply to people who are so needy they can’t possibly pay you (like anti-malaria drugs in Africa), so that willingness-to-pay link really doesn’t get you very far.

I guess a lot of neoclassical economists still seem to believe that willingness-to-pay is actually a good measure of utility, so maybe that’s what’s going on here; if it were, we could at least say that patents are a second-best solution to incentivizing the most important research.

But even then, why use second-best when you have best? Why not devote more of our society’s resources to governments and universities that have centuries of superior track record in innovation? When this is proposed the deadweight loss of taxation is always brought up, but somehow the deadweight loss of monopoly rents never seems to bother anyone. At least taxes can be designed to minimize deadweight loss—and democratic governments actually have incentives to do that; corporations have no interest whatsoever in minimizing the deadweight loss they create so long as their profit is maximized.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have corporations at all—they are very good at one thing and one thing only, and that is manufacturing physical goods. Cars and computers should continue to be made by corporations—but their technologies are best invented by government. Will this dramatically reduce the profits of corporations? Of course—but I have difficulty seeing that as anything but a good thing.

Why am I talking so much about patents, when I said the topic was robots? Well, it’s typically because of the way these patents are assigned that robots taking people’s jobs becomes a bad thing. The patent is owned by the company, which is owned by the shareholders; so when the company makes more money by using robots instead of workers, the workers lose.

If when a robot takes your job, you simply received the income produced by the robot as capital income, you’d probably be better off—you get paid more and you also don’t have to work. (Of course, if you define yourself by your career or can’t stand the idea of getting “handouts”, you might still be unhappy losing your job even though you still get paid for it.)

There’s a subtler problem here though; robots could have a comparative advantage without having an absolute advantage—that is, they could produce less than the workers did before, but at a much lower cost. Where it cost $5 million in wages to produce $10 million in products, it might cost only $3 million in robot maintenance to produce $9 million in products. Hence you can’t just say that we should give the extra profits to the workers; in some cases those extra profits only exist because we are no longer paying the workers.

As a society, we still want those transactions to happen, because producing less at lower cost can still make our economy more efficient and more productive than it was before. Those displaced workers can—in theory at least—go on to other jobs where they are needed more.

The problem is that this often doesn’t happen, or it takes such a long time that workers suffer in the meantime. Hence the Luddites; they don’t want to be made obsolete even if it does ultimately make the economy more productive.

But this is where patents become important. The robots were probably invented at a university, but then a corporation took them and patented them, and is now selling them to other corporations at a monopoly price. The manufacturing company that buys the robots now has to spend more in order to use the robots, which drives their profits down unless they stop paying their workers.

If instead those robots were cheap because there were no patents and we were only paying for the manufacturing costs, the workers could be shareholders in the company and the increased efficiency would allow both the employers and the workers to make more money than before.

What if we don’t want to make the workers into shareholders who can keep their shares after they leave the company? There is a real downside here, which is that once you get your shares, why stay at the company? We call that a “golden parachute” when CEOs do it, which they do all the time; but most economists are in favor of stock-based compensation for CEOs, and once again I’m having trouble seeing why it’s okay when rich people do it but not when middle-class people do.

Another alternative would be my favorite policy, the basic income: If everyone knows they can depend on a basic income, losing your job to a robot isn’t such a terrible outcome. If the basic income is designed to grow with the economy, then the increased efficiency also raises everyone’s standard of living, as economic growth is supposed to do—instead of simply increasing the income of the top 0.01% and leaving everyone else where they were. (There is a good reason not to make the basic income track economic growth too closely, namely the business cycle; you don’t want the basic income payments to fall in a recession, because that would make the recession worse. Instead they should be smoothed out over multiple years or designed to follow a nominal GDP target, so that they continue to rise even in a recession.)

We could also combine this with expanded unemployment insurance (explain to me again why you can’t collect unemployment if you weren’t working full-time before being laid off, even if you wanted to be or you’re a full-time student?) and active labor market policies that help people re-train and find new and better jobs. These policies also help people who are displaced for reasons other than robots making their jobs obsolete—obviously there are all sorts of market conditions that can lead to people losing their jobs, and many of these we actually want to happen, because they involve reallocating the resources of our society to more efficient ends.

Why aren’t these sorts of policies on the table? I think it’s largely because we don’t think of it in terms of distributing goods—we think of it in terms of paying for labor. Since the worker is no longer laboring, why pay them?

This sounds reasonable at first, but consider this: Why give that money to the shareholder? What did they do to earn it? All they do is own a piece of the company. They may not have contributed to the goods at all. Honestly, on a pay-for-work basis, we should be paying the robot!

If it bothers you that the worker collects dividends even when he’s not working—why doesn’t it bother you that shareholders do exactly the same thing? By definition, a shareholder is paid according to what they own, not what they do. All this reform would do is make workers into owners.

If you justify the shareholder’s wealth by his past labor, again you can do exactly the same to justify worker shares. (And as I said above, if you’re worried about the moral hazard of workers collecting shares and leaving, you should worry just as much about golden parachutes.)

You can even justify a basic income this way: You paid taxes so that you could live in a society that would protect you from losing your livelihood—and if you’re just starting out, your parents paid those taxes and you will soon enough. Theoretically there could be “welfare queens” who live their whole lives on the basic income, but empirical data shows that very few people actually want to do this, and when given opportunities most people try to find work. Indeed, even those who don’t, rarely seem to be motivated by greed (even though, capitalists tell us, “greed is good”); instead they seem to be de-motivated by learned helplessness after trying and failing for so long. They don’t actually want to sit on the couch all day and collect welfare payments; they simply don’t see how they can compete in the modern economy well enough to actually make a living from work.

One thing is certain: We need to detach income from labor. As a society we need to get over the idea that a human being’s worth is decided by the amount of work they do for corporations. We need to get over the idea that our purpose in life is a job, a career, in which our lives are defined by the work we do that can be neatly monetized. (I admit, I suffer from the same cultural blindness at times, feeling like a failure because I can’t secure the high-paying and prestigious employment I want. I feel this clear sense that my society does not value me because I am not making money, and it damages my ability to value myself.)

As robots do more and more of our work, we will need to redefine the way we live by something else, like play, or creativity, or love, or compassion. We will need to learn to see ourselves as valuable even if nothing we do ever sells for a penny to anyone else.

A basic income can help us do that; it can redefine our sense of what it means to earn money. Instead of the default being that you receive nothing because you are worthless unless you work, the default is that you receive enough to live on because you are a human being of dignity and a citizen. This is already the experience of people who have substantial amounts of capital income; they can fall back on their dividends if they ever can’t or don’t want to find employment. A basic income would turn us all into capital owners, shareholders in the centuries of established capital that has been built by our forebears in the form of roads, schools, factories, research labs, cars, airplanes, satellites, and yes—robots.