You, the doctor, have twenty six patients – Abigail, Benny, Cofi,…, and Zeke. You know them well. You and the twenty six know that one of the twenty six has been infected by Maleficitus, a very nasty disease, while the remaining twenty five have been infected by Tolerabalitus, a tolerably nasty disease. It is too early to guess who has what, but you and they know that now is your only opportunity to administer drugs, and that you have only two drugs at you disposal. One provides mild relief for Maleficitus sufferers, temporarily taking the edge off some of the symptoms. The other totally cures Tolerabalitus. But the drugs interact dangerously. Nobody wants to be taking both.
Should We Wish Well to All? By Caspar Hare
Interpersonal comparisons seem inevitable here. Of course, it seems like the common sense thing to do is to ask the patients to decide which drug to take but suppose for some reason or another, that the same drug must be administered to all of them. One could have them vote on it, or perhaps you could just be a Rawlsian and give them all the cure to Maleficitus. What isn’t clear is what a classical utilitarian would do, indeed, the measure is indeterminate.
The basic argument for patent system is that it will increase innovation. Innovation is rumored to have have an effect on GDP growth. So presumably, when there are more patents, there should be more growth? One can’t complain about the variation in patents, according to the US patent office, the growth of patents granted between 1963 and 2010 has been about 8 fold(from 50k to 400k). Presumably, this should mean that there was a whole lot of innovation going on right?
Hm… I don’t see it… maybe it will show up if I just check the correlation…oh wait it’s… negative… -.28?
During the COVID-19 pandemic we have had ‘health experts’ give some very confident assertions about what should be done. The reasoning is fairly straightforward, ‘more lives will be saved this way’. To these experts, the reasoning is just a trolley problem. This is utilitarianism pure and simple because it requires aggregation of utilities.
Today I just want to make the point that this reasoning is the same as what is done by those who are strongly against gun ownership. Those who are against guns argue that less people will die if people don’t have guns. So once again, the reasoning has to do with the total death toll.
An interpersonal comparison is problematic because it doesn’t take into account the distribution of deaths. Imagine there are three people, Amy, Bob, and Chris. Absent any intervention Amy and Bob would die but Chris would live. However, with the intervention, Amy and Bob will live but Chris would die.
It is fairly straightforward that this is what is occurring with guns. Gun advocates give cases where gun wielding citizens successfully defended themselves from a potentially lethal attack. Anti-gun advocates say that more people die with gun ownership than without. This is exactly what is going on with the example above, Chris would be the one who would have died had he not had a gun and Amy and Bob die because of gun ownership. Huemer makes a similar case here.
This is very similar to a recent study on COVID-19. The vaccination group does have people who die because of the vaccination. Overall, less people die than in the group without the vaccination but there are nevertheless some people who do die. For the policy to be morally non-problematic it must be that those who die due to the vaccination, are the same as those who die without the vaccination.
What is the alternative to utilitarianism? Voluntarism or Monotonicity. Either you do not have vaccines be mandatory (you may put restrictions on the defectors) or you make sure that the cures do not kill anybody who would NOT have died.
I would like to point out that the Hippocratic Oath is 'do no harm', NOT 'Do no harm on average'
There are these entities called patent trolls which seem to getquite a bitof traction. A patent troll is a company which specializes in enforcing intellectual property rights. They usually buy up a lot of patents and then take others to court for infringing on said patents. There is often discussion claiming that these trolls are a net negative to society. Today, another quick argument: if you are pro patents, you are pro patent trolls.
To be pro patents entails that you are for intellectual property rights being enforceable. Presumably, the cheaper it is to enforce these rights, the better. A proponent of patents should say that if going to court to enforce a patent costs 100, this is an inferior scenario than if it costs 50.
But this is exactly what the value added of patent trolls is. A patent troll is a company which hires lawyers who specialize in Intellectual Property enforcement, they specialize in doing the paper work efficiently. It would have cost an entrepreneur, say, 100 if they tried to sue and would get a payoff of 300, but the patent troll has a cost of 50. Which means that if the entrepreneur sells the patent for something between 200<x<250, then the entrepreneur and the patent troll are better off!
In other words to argue that patent trolls are bad, is to argue there is too much Intellectual Property protection in the first place!
It is argued that there is some person, Bill (who lives in an average country), who will not innovate unless the payoff to innovations is high enough. To give Bill a higher payoff, the government decided to give Bill a monopoly of 20 years. It was argued that these 20 years are sufficient to balance out the monopoly effects and the incentive effect. So now, Bill will innovate. Just for illustrative purposes, we will assume that the optimal amount of payoff to Bill from innovating must be 100 euros, this to balances out costs and benefits of patents. If we had given him a payoff of 200 this would have been too much monopoly, and if we had given him a payoff of 80, he would have innovated less.
What is often not clearly articulated is that this argument took place within individual countries before 1995. In many countries, the Bills of the world would innovate if they gained at least 100 euros. But since TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related International Property Rights) in 1995, something changed: Bill could now get a broader monopoly, over a much wider geographic area. So what happened to his payoff? Presumably if a monopoly over one (average) country gives him a payoff of 100, then a monopoly over 200 countries, should net him 20k(ish)?
Something isn’t right… If a payoff of 100 for Bill was what balanced the costs and benefits of monopoly vs innovation in individual countries, why does Bill now need 20k payoff for the costs and benefits of monopoly to be balanced out?
Case 1: Bill has sufficient incentive to innovate with 100 payoff and once TRIPS is signed, the length of patents should decrease by the same proportion the payoff has decreased, so 20 years divided by 200, basically a month of monopoly.
Case 2: Bill did NOT have sufficient incentive to innovate before TRIPS, which set the level just right. As such the patent length before should have been 200*20=4000 years.
Case 3: Intellectual Property never balanced out the monopoly vs innovation tradeoff(in fact, it is not possible to determine it)
These are the logical commitments of the Iintellectual property defender. These cannot be both true at the same time, one should at least be coherent about what the claim is. It is easy to say that ‘Patents increase innovation’, but what about the marginal calculation? Do stronger patents increase innovation always? Saying patents increase innovation without saying what too much and too little is, is like always just defending the status quo.
Today, I just want to give the common-sense notion that intellectual property rights are pro-centralization.
Imagine some small town in China where some small-town girl, Xu, lives. Xu loves to learn English on her free time, she has become an expert at singing Taylor Swift songs. She one day hopes to write her own music but she knows that nobody is interested in hearing her stuff (other than her parents). Recently, an English bar has opened up in her neighborhood, they play English music only and they would like to have someone come in at night to sing for a small sum.
The question is: Should Taylor Swift be able to sue Xu? The law says that you cannot make a profit off of someone else’s copyright or patent, and this would clearly violate it.
Let’s take a patent example:
Greg is a woodworker, he has his stock of wood, and plays around with it to make different kinds of furniture. In front of his workshop, he has a little store where he displays his products and people come and buy them.
The question is simple: Should Greg be able to make and display whatever he wants or should he have to check that what he made does not infringe on what some other person, perhaps the neighbor, or perhaps some person 1000 miles away, made?
It seems to me that any coherent notion of decentralization gets you that Greg and Xu can do what they like with their own property.
Debt is one of those things where everyone has a take. The most common distinction is between public and private debt. Some economists claim that public debt leads to lower growth (yes even after excel mistakes have been fixed), other says that public debt does no such thing, what matters is that there is enough spending to sustain the economy. I don’t really have a hot take about this in general.
There is some guy, Greg, who wants to buy a house next year. He sells pigs in exchange for money, he saves the money and then next year he buys a house. Notice that Greg got nothing when he sold his pigs other than money, which is just like saying ‘The community now owes you this much effort’.
Lesson 1: When somebody saves, it just means the community owes them something for past services rendered.
Before Greg had cash, the community was other things, but now that he has cash, they are building a house. In other words, since they owe him something, they direct their activity to the good that he wants to consume.
If there was also Mary, and she also sold goats and saved up but she wanted a boat. Then there is competition for what the community will produce. If the community can produce both then it is not interesting so we ignore that case. If the community can produce only one of the two, then the price of the boat and house will go up, until only one of them can get produced. Whoever has more savings, gets priority on the community’s effort, otherwise, they will have their wish fulfilled the year after that.
Lesson 2: Too much money chasing too few goods causes inflation
If we say that Greg got priority for his house then in theory, next year prices of boats should decrease so that Mary can also get her boat. Unfortunately, in the modern world this doesn’t happen.
Now suppose that Amy has access to a loan. She can borrow money and then use that money to outbid Greg so that her boats gets build early and Greg’s house can’t get built. In other words, she is going to increase the price of boats relative to houses. Of course, since she is getting higher priority NOW, she is going to have lower priority in the future, she now has spent her savings and has a loan, which means she owes the community more than she owes them.
Lesson 3: Debt means you owe the community future services.
But now suppose that Greg ALSO borrows the same amount as Amy. Since he would have won the bidding war without borrowing, he also wins it with symmetric borrowing. So now, once again, the house gets built. But is this the same as the first case? Well no. Whilst before, though Greg had won the bidding, he didn’t owe the community anything. Now that he won with debt, he does owe the community something. The relative price of the boat to the house has stayed constant.
Lesson 4: If there is only consumption, when everybody borrows, nobody wins
Of course, if one of the two people wanted to invest in a project that actually increases productivity of the economy then debt could in theory give higher priority to that project and then make two projects in one year after that.
Lesson 5: Debt can be non-zero sum if it makes productivity enhancing projects happen earlier
A government encouraging people to borrow to buy houses, is NOT a good program. Houses generally do not increase productivity, and hence citizens wind up in debt, and have nothing more to show for it. We can see an example below, as households get more indebted, house prices rise.
One of the famous passages in Plato’s play Euthyphro involves Socrates asking Euthyphro what it is that makes something good: “Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”. Is something good because it is in harmony with God or is something in harmony with God because it is good? An atheist might claim that if something is good independently of God then God must follow this independent moral standard which binds him; therefore he cannot be omnipotent and he cannot will things which are not good.
Socrates’ interlocutors usually try to explain what it is they are talking about with examples. For example in the Meno, Meno responds that virtue is of different kinds: virtue of a man, husband, father, slave, etc. Euthyphro’s infamous example of piety is: ‘What I am doing right now!’
Socrates is never satisfied with examples, he wants a definition. A definition gives necessary and sufficient criteria for something to be something, or the essence of something. The dialogues usually proceed by the interlocutors giving definitions that meet the sufficiency requirement but not the necessary one (too narrow) or definitions that meet the necessary requirement but not the sufficiency one (too broad). It is indeed very rare that the dialogue finishes with a clear definition.
As far as I am aware only The Republic has a definition which everyone agrees to. Some people have speculated that the first book of The Republic was meant as a standalone dialogue, and by the end of the first book, there is a failure to reach a definition of Justice. But by the end of the fourth book they concur on a definition that sounds like ‘ What is distinctive in the Republic is that it is perhaps the only work of Plato which DOES reach a definition, although some have speculated that the first book of the republic was meant as a standalone dialogue, and it itself fails to reach a definition. By the end of the fourth book they end up articulating the definition of Justice that sounds something like ‘each part doing its own proper job without interfering with the other parts’.
Wittgenstein walks into the room
Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living. Wittgenstein: What? Why? Socrates: Just because… Wittgenstein: Why can’t I just give you examples and see if you understand me? Socrates: These examples you give me, they must have something in common no? An essense! That is a definition! Wittgenstein: Well… no, you know perfectly well what I mean when I say ‘Game’ but you can’t find the essence of a game. Socrates: But Wittgenstein, this is a very weak form of induction. Just because you have tried a few times and failed doesn’t mean you will fail in the future. The republic only manages it in book 4, so maybe you didn’t go write a book that was long enough! Wittgenstein: You know, this is why your interocutors get tired and tell you they have other shit to do. You understand what is being said but you insist on getting definitions anyway! How else would you even evaluate that a definition is faulty! Socrates: Well yes, maybe we grasp the essence intuitively! Like GE Moore in Principia Ethica, he only tried to give three naturalistic definitions of ‘goodness’ before concluding that they all fail his open question argument! That’s no good! Keep trying! Wittgenstein: But maybe they don’t have an essence, indeed, there is no reason we NEED them to have one. We can talk about these things without there being an essence to them. Instead, there could just be a family of similarity. Socrates: But the examination is what makes us distinctly human! Wittgenstein: Sure Socrates, but just don’t have your expectations so high. Philosophy is just words, you assume you can get to the essence of things by talking. Sometimes there are no essential properties, you can’t always reduce the world to language. As I wrote in The Blue book: ”If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: “What are signs?”—Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely at particular cases which we should call “operating with signs… ” What makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality and our contemptous attitude toward the particular…This craving for generality is the result of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusion ” Socrates: So what? You want to behave like animals? You don’t worry about intellectual investigation? Wittgenstein: Intellectual investigation can yield some interesting insights about our own thoughts, but there are words which are immune to definitions. Because of this, to philosophize is often just a waste of time. We have to understand that this is just an addiction, it is a compulsion which holds us captive. It is not that no term is definable, it is simply that there is nothing that makes it mandatory that all terms must have a definition, though there could be some weaker things that link the words… a sort of family resemblance. Socrates: But intellectual investigation surely can be but a good thing! Wittgenstein: Of course you would say that, you know I have previously articulated my position as being the opposite of yours in Plato’s representations of you. It’s obvious in your own dialogues, you only find a good definition like a tenth of the time! Maybe Plato understood this and that’s the hidden point of the dialogues. Socrates: But this is the only thing that makes it valuable! Wittgenstein: Really now? That’s absurd! This is why Euthyphro, Protagoras and some of your interlocutors in The Republic just leave; they have something BETTER to do. If we understand each other and communicate functionally, the definition is superflous. There may be a definition of a game out there, but what’s the point of looking for it if we already recognize games when we see them? Socrates: To be intellectuals! To have wisdom and understand! Don’t you agree that my dialogues have given us better understanding? Wittgenstein: Your dialogues only served to deepen linguistic confusion. With Euthyphro, you baited him into giving reasons for why something is good and then implied that Gods are weak. This is just nonsense, he should have just said that something is good because God commanded it. God’s actions are not amenable to explanation, God acts for no reason at all! Socrates: What? But that is an anti-reason. Wittgenstein: Not at all, it is you who wants to waste our time even if you have no reason to believe words have definitions. In fact, the life you advocate is actually unlivable! Get a life Socrates.
“[Moritz] Schlick says that in theological ethics there used to be two conceptions of the essence of the good: according to the shallower interpretation, the good is good because it is what God wants; according to the profounder interpretation, God wants the good because it is good. I think that the first interpretation is the profounder one: what God commands, that is good. For it cuts off the way to any explanation “why” it is good, while the second interpretation is the shallow, rationalist one, which proceeds “as if” you could give reasons for what is good. The first conception says clearly that the essence of the good has nothing to do with facts and hence cannot be explained by any proposition. If there is any proposition expressing precisely what I think, it is the proposition “What God commands, that is good.”
In other words, the linguistics of God serve the function of saying that a reason is not needed. Wittgenstein writes: ‘it is good because God commanded it, that is the right expression for the lack of reason’. Some philosophers, like Thomas Nagel says that stepping back from our lives and asking for justification is what makes us most human: ‘Well why am I doing this?’. But then Nagel turns around and agrees with Wittgenstein, it is kind of absurd to live in this way, when does the justification stop? There can only be two outcomes, either you never attain a satisfactory answer to every question or you forget about it altogether. Dialogue is only important to try to show that some person is expressing contradictory beliefs. Of course, any contradiction as such will only serve to show that somebody has merely expressed himself poorly and not render them in contradiction.
The trademarks industry is massive and there is a lot of money to be made protecting them. When you try to google the origin of trademark lawyers throw smoke and mirrors at you to make it look like trademarks are very old which would lend credibility to them, today I just want to follow up on my anti trademarktirade and point out that this is false.
First let us be clear about what a Trademark is:
Trademark is a legal right to sue somebody for employing a certain pattern.
To understand what is being done it is convenient to say what a Trademark is NOT:
Trademark is NOT the marking of goods.
Trademark is NOT the creation of a symbol.
Trademark is NOT fraud. Fraud is simply a misrepresentation of your product, you claim there is something in it when there is not. In other words, it is about the internal properties of it.
King Edward 1 for example tried to mandate that jewlers could not sell their gold without first receiving his approved stamp at Goldsmith hall. This is NOT copyright because it is another kind of right that is exercised, mainly: The legal right to sue somebody for NOT employing a certain pattern.
Another thing that is NOT a trademark is the marks that merchants used throughout Europe to have themselves identified. The reason this is so is because these merchants did NOT have the right to sue others for using their trademarks.
Similarly, the kind of law that king Henry III passed, was a REQUIRED marking, NOT a right to sue. The idea behind the Assize of bread and ale, was that the price of bread was to remain constant, so if the inputs to make a loaf of bread had increased, the size of the loaf would decrease to keep the price the same. The idea of the marking was simply to let people know that this regulation applied. Note that the origin of this law was the bakers themselves requesting it as a method to reduce competition
Another kind of law that is NOT trademark is the kind of law that was passed in France in 1544. This kind of law forbade that you fradulently advertise your wine, you were not allowed to say you were selling wine when you dilluted it with milk, water, mustard, nettles, etc.
The first set of trademark laws that are trademarks is the French Manufacture and Goods Mark Act in 1857 and in 1862 when England passed the “Merchandise Marks Act“. Conclusion: Trademarks are less than 200 years old.
Today I want to continue with discrimination. Let us take an example and break it up a little bit. Suppose a restaurant is trying to fill in the role of waiter. They have a fairly strong preference for a young person. When the restaurant owner is asked why they prefer a young person, he can give a few reasons: ‘Young people are more energetic so they can service more tables; they are better looking so they will attract customers; they also tend to bring their friends; they are more in touch with trends so they can choose the restaurant playlist to fit the norms’; etc.
One might retort to the restaurant owner that there is no reason an older person can’t have these characteristics. The restaurant owner would then agree and say ‘Sure bud, that’s true but you know, on average they are more likely to have it’. This is what economists call statistical discrmination, it occurs in all sorts of ways. For instance, Fryer and Levitt found that this could reasonably occur with names: they show that names are correlated with socioeconomic status, which can cause statistical discrmination. This is related to the more general point that action only needs correlation. Positive discrimination policies also provide a very good reason for employers to discrminate against groups, for the same university degree, one should expect a lower performance from the person who was let in due to positive discrimination.
At this point one could ask the restaurant owner: “sure that makes sense, but don’t you want to reduce your probability of hiring the wrong person by finding out about the things you want?” to which he might say ‘Well… I could but it is costly you know… almost nobody will admit the truth, I guess I could hire them temporarily to find out but that’s a lot of trouble’. You could argue that they can design some sort of test, but unless the test captures every dimension, there is no reason for the employer to hire the older person who performed better than the young person who performed worse because the younger person could be better on the other dimensions. Economists call this the cost of information, that is, it isn’t free for an employer to reduce the information asymmetry between himself and his prospective employee. If the employer was perfectly informed, there would be no reason to engage in statistical discrmination.
There is a certain type of people who insist nonetheless in inferring discrimination which is not statistical. They want to show that discrimination is a bias that is unreasonable. To do this they must rule out the kind of statistical discrimination used above. Note that, even if somebody has a false belief , this is still not good enough to rule that something is unjust discrimination. Instead, they must exhibit ‘Taste based preferences’. But to measure if somebody has taste based preferences you must control for their beliefs and their information costs (which may just be being too lazy to go through an interview process). In other words, to actually be able to measure that somebody has exhibited race-based discrimination you must rule out statistical discrimination of ALL types. Which is more or less impossible.
Those who are statistically literate are aware that this discourse is too demanding empirically, so they usually just say something like: ‘Why don’t we just assume discrmination is always occuring?’, which is what something like Critical race theory does(two legal critiques of it are found here and here). Since it is impossible to have a good measure of what is happening in somebody’s mind, they prefer to just assume what is in people’s minds or just focus on the effects instead of the intentions. From the theoretical point of view the result of this reasoning is even worse. If we want to study this phenomenon we must assume that people don’t make decisions based on limited information, which is absurd. This is the problem with academia: they adopt models not because they are obviously true but because they provide measurability.
I would conclude that this discourse is simply unworkable. We need to simply get out of the language of discrmination and back into the language of freedom of association. Discourse based on a divisive and unfalsifiable claim can only stir forces towards conflict. A good discussion on the topic is found here(part 2 is here)
diomavro 