Tag: alex tabarrok

An assortment of links, with the one common theme

Arnold Kling runs some numbers, and comes away less than optimistic:

Now for some grim math. Let C be the number of known cases, H be the ratio of hospitalizations to known cases, and D be the ratio of deaths to hospitalizations. Then we have:

(1) total deaths = DxHxC

For example, if there are 1000 known cases (C=1000), 5 percent of these are hospitalized, and 20 percent of those who are hospitalized die, then deaths = 1000x.05x.20 = 10. Note that in this particular example, I assumed that no one dies who is not hospitalized. In reality some people will die without being hospitalized, and they will count in D.

FT Alphaville with a three point agenda for economic policy, and in the order mentioned:

deal with the health crisis | make sure incomes don’t spiral downwards | investment led programs to boos incomes

Read the post for the details.

Also from FT Alphaville, a plea to let markets be:

We don’t disagree that calming markets is important; the current volatility is bad for thousands of viable businesses looking to raise capital, and for those who are hoping to retire soon. But a ban on short-selling helps absolutely no one, bar perhaps the egos of the regulatory community. Time for a change of tack.

And Alex Tabarrok over at MR is fuming about Theranos and patents. Here are old EFE posts on patents.

And finally, EconLife on externalities, the corona virus and demographics:

An externality refers to the impact of an activity or a contract or a decision on an uninvolved third party. Good and bad, externalities can be positive and negative. A vaccine creates a positive externality while water pollution results in the negative ripple. For the coronavirus, we have a cascade of results that can become positive and negative externalities. They include a depressed or accelerated birth rate and divorce rate.

 

Econ101: Policy Responses to a Pandemic

If you haven’t played it already, go ahead and give this game a try: The Fed Chairman Game. I have a lot of fun playing this game in class, especially with students who have been taught monetary policy. It usually turns out to be the case that they haven’t understood it quite as well as they think the have! (To be clear, that’s the fault of our educational system, not the students.)

But the reason I started with that is because the game always throws up a scenario that mimics a crisis, and asks you what you would do if you were the Chair of the Fed.

In this case, policymakers the world over are now staring at a very real crisis, and they need to be asking themselves: what should we do?

 

There are two broad answers, of course: monetary policy, and fiscal policy.

The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to zero, and while it has other tools to stimulate the economy, a crisis like this requires fiscal as well as monetary responses. The legislation passed thus far has been important, but another round of fiscal policy will be required immediately to fully address this crisis.

A robust fiscal response can provide income support to households, ensure broad and continuous access to safety net programs, provide incentives for employers to avoid layoffs, provide loans to small businesses, give liquidity cushions to households and firms, and otherwise stimulate the economy.

That’s a write-up from Brookings. The specifics follow in that article, but the article makes the point that more of the lifting will need to  be done by fiscal, rather than monetary policy. And that is true for a variety of reasons,  which the article does not get into, but long story short – fiscal, more than monetary.

But, ok, fiscal policy of what kind? Should we give money to firms or to workers? Here’s Paul Krugman with his take…

And here’s Alex Tabarrok with his response:

https://twitter.com/ATabarrok/status/1239936219888242688

So what’s the correct answer? Well, as we’ve learnt before, and will learn again, macro is hard! In an ideal world, all of the above, but as is manifestly clear, we are not in an ideal world. If we must choose between giving money to firms or to people, to whom should we give it? My opinion? People first, businesses second. This is, of course, a US centric discussion, what’s up with India?

 

Here’s, to begin with, a round-up from around the world – you can search within it for India’s response thus far.

Calls are getting louder for governments to support people and businesses until the new coronavirus is contained. The only questions are how much money to shovel into the economy, how to go about doing it, and whether it will be enough.

Already, officials from Paris to Washington DC are pulling out the playbook used in Asia for slowing the spread of Covid-19: they’re restricting travel and cracking down on public gatherings. While those measures have the potential to reduce deaths and infections, they will also damage business prospects for many companies and cause a synchronized worldwide disruption.

Here’s the FT from two weeks ago about the impending slow down:

Venu Srinivasan, whose company TVS is one of India’s largest makers of motorcycles and scooters, said the business had lost about 10 per cent of production in February owing to a lack of Chinese-made parts for the vehicles’ fuel injection system. He added that TVS has now managed to find a new supplier.

But Mr Srinivasan said he was bracing for India’s recovery to take longer than anticipated. “One would have expected a V-shaped recovery, but instead you have an L shaped recovery,” he said. “It’s been the long haul.”

R Jagannathan in the LiveMint suggests this:

This is how it could be designed. Any unemployed urban youth in the 20-30 age group could be promised 100 days of employment and/or skilling options paid for by the government at a fixed daily rate of ₹300 (or thereabouts, depending on city). At an outlay of ₹30,000 per person annually, the unemployed can be put to work in municipal conservancy services, healthcare support, traffic management, and other duties, with the money also being made available for any skill-acquiring activity chosen by the beneficiary (driver training for Ola-Uber, logistics operations, etc). All companies could be given an opportunity to use the provisions of the Apprentices Act to take on more trainees, with the apprenticeship period subsidized to the limit of ₹30,000 per person in 2020-21. If the pilot works, it could be rolled out as a regular annual scheme for jobs and skills. Skilling works best in an actual jobs environment.

 

He also mentions making the GST simpler, which the Business Standard agrees with:

Certainly, the rationalisation of GST will also affect government revenues. However, a simpler and more transparent system would allow greater collection and reduce evasion. The government will receive a windfall this year from lower crude oil prices. The moment to move on the structural reform agenda is now. The GST Council has done well to address the inverted duty structure in mobile phones. Further rationalisation will give confidence to the market that the government is serious about reforms. It was promised that GST would remain a work in progress, and that the GST Council would act often to improve it. So far, however, the changes have been marginal and haphazard. A more structured and rational approach, which outlines a quick path to a single rate, would pay dividends for the economy in the longer run. It would also be an effective way to manage the immediate effects of a supply shock such as is being caused by the pandemic.

Also from the Business Standard, a report on the government now considering (not happened yet) relaxing bad loan classification rules for sectors hit by the corona virus. That’s pretty soon going to be every sector!

 

Assorted Links about the topic – there’s more to read than usual, please note.

Here is Tyler Cowen on mitigating the economic impacts from the coronavirus crisis.

Here’s Bill Dupor, via MR, about the topic:

First, incentivize behavior to align with recognized public health objectives during the outbreak.

Second, avoid concentrating the individual financial burden of the outbreak or the policy response to the outbreak.

Third, implement these fiscal policies as quickly as possible, subject to some efficiency considerations.

Again, via MR, New Zealand’s macro response.

Arnold Kling is running a series on the macro response to the crisis.

Claudia Sahm proposes direct payment to individuals:

This chapter proposes a direct payment to individuals that would
automatically be paid out early in a recession and then continue annually
when the recession is severe. Research shows that stimulus payments that
were broadly disbursed on an ad hoc (or discretionary) basis in the 2001 and
2008–9 recessions raised consumer spending and helped counteract weak
demand. Making the payments automatic by tying their disbursement to
recent changes in the unemployment rate would ensure that the stimulus
reaches the economy as quickly as possible. A rapid, vigorous response to
the next recession in the form of direct payments to individuals would help
limit employment losses and the economic damage from the recession.

Here are the concrete proposals, the entire paper is worth a read:

Automatic lump-sum stimulus payments would be made to individuals
when the three-month average national unemployment rate rises by
at least 0.50 percentage points relative to its low in the previous 12
months.
• The total amount of stimulus payments in the first year is set to
0.7 percent of GDP.
• After the first year, any second (or subsequent) year payments would
depend on the path of the unemployment rate.

 

Macroeconomics IS HARD!

Economics in the times of COVID-19, there is already a book. I learnt about it from Tim Taylor’s blogpost. I have not read the book, but will soon.

The NYT, two weeks ago, on the scale of the problem facing policymakers.

 

Five articles about – what else – the corona virus

Please read this one, even if you choose to not read the others. This is important. Alex Tabbarok in MR about the mathematics of large gatherings in the times of corona.

Now here is the most important point. It’s the size of the group, not the number of carriers that most drives the result. For example, suppose our estimate of the number of carriers if off by a factor of 10–that is instead of 20,000 there are just 2000 carriers in the United States. In this case, the probability of at least one carrier at a big event of 100,000 drops not by a factor of ten but just to 45%. In other words, large events are a bad idea even in scenarios with just a small number of carriers.

And via MR, this read:

The veteran of numerous global health crises, from SARS to bird flu to Ebola, Ryan points out that incredibly aggressive measures by China, South Korea and Japan appear to be bringing outbreaks in those countries under control.

“There’s clearly an indication that a systematic government-led approach using all tactics and all elements available seems to be able to turn this disease around,” he says.

He has been pleading with governments around the world to prepare for the new coronavirus before it shows up at their door — or to spring into action when it does arrive.

That’s what Hong Kong and Singapore did.

Both quickly set up systems to try to identify and treat every case in their territory. Hong Kong developed diagnostic tests and rapidly deployed them to labs at every major hospital in the city. At one point in February, Hong Kong had 12,000 people in quarantine. Singapore’s prime minister called for calm and assured residents that all health care related to the disease would be free.

Both Hong Kong and Singapore continue to find a few new cases each week, but they’ve avoided the explosive outbreaks that have occurred elsewhere.

And a silver lining:

COVID-19 is a massive global economic and health challenge, having caused >3500 global deaths as of this writing (Mar 8) and untold economic and social disruption. This disruption is only likely to increase in coming days in regions where the epidemic is just beginning. Strangely, this disruption could also have unexpected health benefits — and these benefits could be quite large in certain parts of the world. Below I calculate that the reductions in air pollution in China caused by this economic disruption likely saved twenty times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to infection with the virus in that country.

The psychology of the virus:

If you’re feeling overwhelmed as you try to assess what this all means for you and your family, know that this is a normal and perhaps even useful response. “The adjustment reaction is an emotional rehearsal, getting you psychologically ready to cope if you have to,” Peter Sandman, an expert on risk management, has written. “It is also a logistical rehearsal; it’s how you start figuring out what to do and how to do it.”

And finally, not an excerpt, but a useful catch-all guide to the corona virus from The Atlantic.

2 Videos on Property Rights

Tomorrow’s essay will be on property rights, what with it being the first Monday of the month – a continuation of the series of essay I am writing about aspects of the Indian Constitution. Research for that essay included these two videos, which I learnt a great deal from.

 

 

Ec101: Choices matter!

We’ve, in our Thursday posts this year, learnt about incentives and costs. But, and this is a really, really big “but” – they become operational only when we live in a world where we’re able to choose.

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok – two people who have probably done more for educating people in economics than anybody else over the last thirty years or so – have written two of the best textbooks on economics available anywhere – one on micro and the other on macro.

In the book on microeconomics, they summarize ten different “big ideas” in economics: incentives, the invisible hand is the best kind of magic*, trade-offs matter, thinking on the margin matters, trade matters, wealth matters, institutions matter, business cycles are unavoidable, printing more money will lead to inflation and central baking is hard.

*I’ve paraphrased practically all of the big ideas, but this in particular is my phrasing, not theirs.

Two other asides before we proceed: in retrospect, it is interesting (at least to me) that at least one of their PhD’s (Tyler Cowen’s) and quite a few of their books are based literally on nothing more complicated than an exposition of these big ideas. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Also, they say that the biggest idea of them all is that economics is fun. I’d paraphrase that too: learning about the world is fun, and economics is a great tool to use towards that end.

Now, that allows for a neat segue to the topic du jour. At the very start of the book, even before the table of contents, they provide their definition of economics, one that I agree with wholeheartedly: economics is the study of how to get the most out of life.

Here’s the two word version: choices matter!

Unless we live in a society that is free to choose, at an individual level or otherwise, none of the other big ideas even come into play. So, to me, economics is first and foremost about being free to choose – and then about the benefits and costs of the choices that you make.

Which, I’d argue, means that learning about choices is plenty important. Ergo, this post.

  1. First things first. What is choice?
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    I chose (see what happened there?) this Quora post not because it is the “best”, but simply because it is so typical. Here’s what I think choice is: it is an admission of the fact that you can’t have everything. A particularly relevant example for me: what to eat from a buffet at a five star restaurant? With every passing year, “everything!” becomes an increasingly unrealistic answer. So choose those dishes that are likely to taste the best (maximizing happiness), or those dishes that are likely to cause the least harm (minimizing unhappiness) along some dimensions such as spiciness, oiliness or what have you.
    Or hey, do both at the same time! Choose the dish that is likely to taste the best and the dish that is likely to do the least harm. That’s half your micro paper right there – the rest is just math and diagrams. (I am kidding, of course, but only a little bit.)
    Choice is an admission of the fact that you can’t have everything, but that’s a good thing! It forces you to go with the best. Which paintings should you look at when you’re at the Louvre? “Every single one!” is unrealistic. Force yourself to choose, therefore, the very best of the lot. Constraints help you understand your own tastes better: aesthetics is, among other things, a matter of acknowledging the existence of constraints.
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  2. So having too many choices is a bad thing? It would seem so:
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    “It all began with jam. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a remarkable study. On one day, shoppers at an upscale food market saw a display table with 24 varieties of gourmet jam. Those who sampled the spreads received a coupon for $1 off any jam. On another day, shoppers saw a similar table, except that only six varieties of the jam were on display. The large display attracted more interest than the small one. But when the time came to purchase, people who saw the large display were one-tenth as likely to buy as people who saw the small display.”
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  3. But hang on. Of what use is an economics theory that doesn’t have a on-the-other hand angle? Tim Harford, as is so often the case, to the rescue.
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    “But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.”
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  4. And on a related note, have you heard of Herbert Simon and satisficing? This excerpt is from a Wikipedia article on Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, but it is actually about Herbert Simon.
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    “A maximizer is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that their every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. The way a maximizer knows for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task, which can become even more daunting as the number of options increases. The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. A satisficer has criteria and standards, but a satisficer is not worried about the possibility that there might be something better. Ultimately, Schwartz agrees with Simon’s conclusion, that satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.”
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  5. And the final word goes to Tyler Cowen. Or is it Herbert Simon all over again? Choices, choices.
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    “What if you asked people the following: do you wish to choose your own means of limiting your (subsequent) choices, or do you wish to let someone else, perhaps the government, do the work? I suspect the answers would overwhelmingly favor the former option, namely voluntary choice at the meta-level. And if you reexamine the experiments mentioned above, they are all about ways in which people voluntarily limit their own choices. Maybe you don’t wish to run your own cancer treatments, but you wish to choose the doctor who will.”

 

Ec101: Links for 9th January, 2020

Five articles on sunk costs today.

  1. First up, a somewhat basic introductory article. Feel free to skip it if you’re sure you know what sunk costs are (pausing only to note that it is not so much the knowing that matters with sunk costs, but remembering to apply it)
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  2. “The United States has invested much in attempting to achieve its objectives. In addition to the many millions of dollars that have been spent, many thousands of lives have been lost, and an even greater number of lives have been irreparably damaged. If the United States withdraws from Vietnam without achieving its objectives, then all of these undeniably significant sacrifices would be wasted”
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    The quote itself is a quote (if you see what I mean) from this paper, which is a wonderful rumination on sunk costs. Read Taleb on the subject (and not just his tweets!)
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  3. This entire post by Alex Tabarrok is very short (and I have linked to it before, I think), but it is worth reading. Especially the last sentence: do think about it, if you are an economics student.
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  4. “Once your model of choice is at all complex, no one knows what a sunk cost means any more. So a theoretical scolding of those who honor “sunk costs” is not completely well-defined. That being said, there is still the empirical question of whether most people attach too much weight to previous plans and have a status quo bias. The experimental evidence suggests that we are more rigid than we need to be. The propensity to honor previous commitments may have efficiency properties, but we cannot discard this proclivity when we ought to.”
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    The bottom line from Tyler Cowen’s post on the topic. He was responding to Tabarrok’s post above.
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  5. “Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What’s more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point forward—no more cost than it warranted at the outset. If you now succeed, the total cost will exceed the upper bound marked at the beginning. But the additional cost from this point is below that upper bound. And the good you will achieve is undiminished. How do the moral costs you have already inflicted bear upon your decision now?”
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    I am reminded, very strongly indeed, of the Mahabharata. That is the abstract of this paper.

Ec101: Links for 19th December, 2019

  1. “Based on the provided support, it is apparent then that it’s advantageous to be as random as possible for generation of ideas, but sticking with a particular response is predictive of creative originality. So next time your friends say that you are “sooo random,” hold your head up high and keep at it. But don’t forget to spot those brilliant ideas among the dis-order, and focus. Such is the recipe for creativity.”
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    On the benefits of being random.
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  2. “Convex functions play an important role in many areas of mathematics. They are especially important in the study of optimization problems where they are distinguished by a number of convenient properties. For instance, a strictly convex function on an open set has no more than one minimum. Even in infinite-dimensional spaces, under suitable additional hypotheses, convex functions continue to satisfy such properties and as a result, they are the most well-understood functionals in the calculus of variations. In probability theory, a convex function applied to the expected value of a random variable is always bounded above by the expected value of the convex function of the random variable.”
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    That is from the Wikipedia article on convexity, and the next sentence after the excerpt leads us to…
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  3. Jensen’s inequality!
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  4. “The point is subtle and widely misunderstood. Here’s a simple example. Suppose that the average return is 10%. If $100 is invested for two periods the average payoff is $100(1.1)^2=$121. But on average that is not what happens. More typically, you get say 0% in the first period and 20% in the second period, i.e. $100(1.0)*(1.2)=$120. Notice that the average return is exactly the same, 10%, but the total payoff is smaller in the second and more realistic case”
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    And Alex Tabbarok explain why Jensen’s Inequality matters…
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  5. As does Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Tech: Links for 10th December, 2019

  1. “To be clear, both roles can be beneficial — platforms make the relationship between users and 3rd-parties possible, and Aggregators helps users find 3rd-parties in the first place — and both roles can also be abused.”
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    The always excellent Ben Thompson on regulating monopolies online, drawing a distinction between platforms and aggregators. His articles, as I have mentioned before, are always a delight to read, and this one in particular is a great collection of links to articles he has written before. Plus, this article is inspiration, if you will, for the links that follow.
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  2. “Columbia University law professor Tim Wu coined the term “network neutrality” in a 2003 paper about online discrimination. At the time, some broadband providers, including Comcast, banned home internet users from accessing virtual private networks (VPNs), while others, like AT&T, banned users from using Wi-Fi routers. Wu worried that broadband providers’ tendency to restrict new technologies would hurt innovation in the long term, and called for anti-discrimination rules.”
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    An excellent explainer from Wired about Net Neutrality.
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  3. “For years, I winced at how Big Tech approached regulatory matters. When they wade into policy matters, they fail to see the bigger picture — and the younger the company, the worse they are at this. The hole that Facebook has dug for itself is entirely because its leadership seemed to believe that if they stayed within the letter of the current law they wouldn’t be regulated. This is a completely naive and ahistorical view. And this view has prevented Facebook from innovating in their own policy space. Without that policy innovation, we are left with essentially nonsensical suggestions to break up Facebook — which wouldn’t actually solve any of the issues anyone has with Facebook.”
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    If you’re looking to do research in this field, you can’t not read Joshua Gans. This is just one of many excellently argued articles. Do read the whole thing!
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  4. The internet activist Nikhil Pahwa lists out his expectations about the future of internet regulation in India. Agree or disagree (as usual, I fall in the middle), it is worth reading.
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  5. “More generally, however, the bigger Google gets the more countries it has a physical presence in (servers, sales staff and support etc.) and thus the more leverage individual countries, especially large countries, will have to degrade the services that Google offers not just within-country but to the world.”
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    Alex Tabarrok gives a fun example and a chilling analysis in the same short blog post.

Etc: Links for 15th November, 2019

  1. Bibek Debroy about Abhijit Banerjee’s father. This was fascinating!
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    “There were people who didn’t have an exceptional publication record. They were simply superb teachers.Dipak Banerjee was one of them. Except for a paper on utility he wrote while he was at LSE (London School of Economics), he rarely published. He was an exceptional teacher who produced exceptional students. Bhaskar Dutta, Subhashis Gangopadhyay, Dilip Mukherjee and Debraj Ray should be familiar names. They (all Dipak Banerjee’s students) edited a collection of essays in his honour in 1990. Mihir Rakshit primarily taught us macroeconomics and Dipak Banerjee primarily taught us microeconomics. Mihir babu’s teaching was precise. He never deviated from the topic. Dipak babu’s teaching was also precise, but he deviated from the topic and told us “stories”, especially at tutorials. In the course of these stories, we learnt he had two sons. He wasn’t worried about his younger son, who was “street smart”. But he worried about his elder son, who wasn’t that street smart. We learnt this elder son was called Jhima and that he had a middle name of Vinayak because he was born in Mumbai and because his mother (Nirmala Banerjee) was a Maharashtrian.”
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  2. A short article about the “perils” of Amazon Prime
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    “”Because of multiple Prime orders, Amazon has had to think more about packaging. Recognizing some customers’ “wrap rage,” they are using more bubble envelopes. Aware that the excessive space occupied by smaller inexpensive items increases transport costs, they’ve been developing algorithms that match box size to contents to avoid “over-boxing.” And they want manufacturers to know that online packaging needs to be compact rather than attractive.”
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  3. “We therefore predicted that reactivating previously unsolved problems could help people solve them. In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented. The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement).”
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    Fascinating is an understatement – Alex Tabarrok on being productive while sleeping.
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  4. “For me, sleep is the important factor for my cognitive productivity. I typically get between 6½–7¼ hours per night. Much less, and I feel my brain turning to goo when I try to do anything cognitively demanding. I track my sleep with a fitness tracker so I can anticipate when I should expect a “bad day” and plan accordingly.”
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    On the importance of sleep, and holidays. Please look up Jensen’s inequality as well.
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  5. “…music streaming subscriptions are typically far cheaper in emerging markets than they are in the US and Europe, but hardware built to play that music – often from the very same companies running the music services – is significantly more expensive.”
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    I pay 179 INR per month for Spotify – for six family members. INR 189 per month for YouTube Premium – for six family members.

Notes from Launching the Innovation Resistance by Alex Tabarrok

After Murali’s talk in Gokhale Institute the previous week, I got around to reading this book. What follows are some of the highlights from my reading of the book on Kindle, along with a quick review of the book.

Key takeaways (for me):

  1. Alex Tabarrok ends his own post on the book over on MR by saying “although we share a few common themes that perhaps due to differences in personality Tyler focuses on describing problems while I am more excited to promote solutions!”
    That comes through in both the title of the book as well as what I think is they key question for Tabarrok: “What combination of incentives and foundation will bring the greatest innovation to the modern world? How can we create a 21st-century Renaissance?”
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  2. “But there is also a more fundamental critique: After hundreds of years of experience, there is surprisingly little evidence that patents actually do promote the progress of science and the useful arts.”
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    This has been an eye-opener for me: both from Murali’s talk as well as this book. There just isn’t that much evidence that patents have worked.
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  3. “Firms innovate because they know that if they don’t, someone else will. In this kind of industry, instead of stimulating innovation strong patents may create a “resting on laurels” effect. A firm with strong patents may reduce innovation, secure in the knowledge that patents protect it.”
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    And it may actually be even worse! Patents may actually discourage innovation, let alone protect it.
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  4. “Overall, however, the ODA did create real innovation, and as the number of new drugs for rare diseases increased, the mortality rate for people with rare diseases fell.”
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    The Orphan Drug Act seems to have been one of the few things that can be used as an argument in favor of patenting.
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  5. “When asked to rate various sources of competitive advantage only 4 percent of corporate managers regarded patents as highly effective. Much more effective was getting a head start, learning by doing, and investing in complementary sales and service.”
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    “The aircraft patent-war slowed innovation in the American aircraft industry so much that just prior to World War I the government forced the industry to share its patents for reasons of national security.”
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    …were real eye-openers for me
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  6. So what might be the solution, if not patents?
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    “The major vice of a prize fund is that it replaces a decentralized process for rewarding innovation with a political process.” In this regard, you might want to read this book, by Peter Diamandis
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  7. “I see two views of humanity. In the first view, people are stomachs. More people mean more eaters and less for everyone else. In the second view, people are brains. More brains mean more ideas and more for everyone else.”
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    And patents, of course, are a way to restrict ideas.
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  8. “From Florence in the 14th century to Great Britain in the 19th and the United States in the 20th, the leading economic power has always been a leading educational power.”
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    Alex Tabarrok goes on to speak about the usual econometrician’s worries about a statement like that, but all that notwithstanding, this is exactly why India’s education standards (outcomes?) need to be way higher.

 

Overall, definitely recommended.