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Markets and Mobility

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by pnoetx in Markets, Poverty

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Arnold Kling, Benefit Mandates, Collective Mind, Consumer Consensus, Don Boudreaux, Drug Laws, Foreign Aid, Jeffrey Tucker, Ludwig von Mises, Market Interactions, Minimum Wage, Occupational Licensing, Price Controls, Private Property, Public Aid, regulation, Wage controls, War on Poverty

Government aid programs tend to perform poorly, especially in developmental terms. In the U.S., anti-poverty programs keep the poor running in place, at best. Yes, they provide minimal income, but they seldom offer a way out and usually discourage it. Moreover, the administration of such programs diverts a significant share of funds to well-heeled civil servants and away from the intended recipients. Foreign aid programs are probably even worse, functioning as catch basins for funding corrupt officials. Progressives, in particular, persist in taking the paternalistic view that we must rely on government action to “care for” and “protect” the poor, able or not. Markets, on the other hand, are held to offer no promise in fighting poverty. In fact, the general assumption made by the progressive left is that markets exploit them.

The truth is that markets offer great promise for encouraging economic mobility. Arnold Kling offers a good conceptual construct in a recent post: while humans are often subject to irrational tendencies in their assessment of choices, their interactions in markets offer a way of smoothing irregularities and disparate bits of information, providing useful signals about the availability of resources and demands for their use. The result is a flow of information that best signals opportunity. Kling calls the process of market interactions the “collective mind”. Rather than encouraging individuals to fully participate in effective markets, free of intervention, we instead deny them the best opportunities for gain. The notion that the poor must be “protected” from markets is embedded in policies like wage and price controls, benefit mandates, overtime rules, drug laws, occupational licensing, and innumerable other harmful regulations. The poor should have the unfettered ability to avail themselves of the social efficiencies of Kling’s collective mind.

Last Thursday, Don Beaudroux’s “Quotation of the Day” was taken from an essay by Ludwig von Mises in which he characterized private property in a market economy as “property by consumer consensus”. In other words, consumers reward sellers who create value, and those rewards accumulate in the form of private property. Likewise, consumers punish poor performance, which has a cumulative negative impact on one’s ability to accumulate or hold onto private property. The benefits conferred by consumer preference do not stop with the owners of the firm. Others productively affiliated with the firm also reap gains in rewards, allowing them to accumulate private property. And of course, consumers are the beneficiaries in the first place: in their judgement the firm delivers value in excess of price. The key here is that free market rewards and penalties are deserved and based on productivity in meeting desires, and only the market can distribute property so efficiently. The able poor can certainly add value and thereby accumulate property, if only given the opportunity.

Jeffrey Tucker has stated that “Only Markets Can Win the War on Poverty” (ellipses are my edits):

“The default state of the world is grueling poverty, universal insecurity, and short lives. When governments do come along, they nearly always serve themselves first. … Capitalism made huge progress toward the conquest of poverty. For the first time in history, the productive resources of society turned from serving mainly the elites toward serving the common person. This change alone began to flip the power narrative of social evolution.

And this revolution continued for two some two-hundred years, during which time the average life span expanded dramatically, infant mortality collapsed, incomes rose, and the great project of universal ennoblement achieved an unprecedented boost. And this trend continues today wherever markets are given freedom to function, property rights are secure, and people can associate and trade without molestation by the elites. … In short, capitalism made huge progress toward the conquest of poverty.“

Markets are not harmful to the poor. To the contrary, as Tucker says, they have helped lift billions out of poverty around the globe. But government increasingly plays the role of big provider and arbiter of what can and can’t be traded, by whom, and at what price. The suspension of the market mechanism by this process denies the poor the opportunities made possible via participation in free markets, whereby Kling’s “collective mind” processes massive quantities of information and acts upon it spontaneously. But the “collective mind” concept, as a description of market interactions, is too simple: we know that individuals act on the signals provided by the market and are rewarded based on how effectively they do so. There is no doubt that the poor can do that too. It’s time to cast aside the paternalistic and destructive notion that the able poor must be insulated from markets.

Is The Patent a Perversion?

28 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by pnoetx in Property Rights

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alex Tabarroc, Arnold Kling, Beautiful Anarchy, Copyright Clause, Daniel Drezner, Eugene Volokh, Exclusivity, Intellectual Property Rights, James Pethokoukas, Jeffrey Tucker, Lawrence Solum, Legal Theory Blog, Mises Daily, monopoly, Patent Thicket, Rivalrous goods, Roderick T. Long, Stephan Kinsella

money-tree-patent-cartoon

No one likes a monopoly except the monopolist, and a monopoly granted by patent is generally no exception. Patents are intended to be temporary, but they are often extended, at high cost to customers, beyond what many consider necessary as an incentive for innovation. There is also doubt about the validity of many “innovations” on which patents are issued. Alex Tabarrok once posted this cute illustration on the excesses of patent law. He has also discussed the existence of “patent thickets”, situations in which “a new product can require the use of hundreds or even thousands of previous patents, giving each patent owner veto-power over innovation“, or at least a way to skim some of the profits. Such thickets serve as a detriment to innovation, contribute to excessive litigation, and ultimately defeat the purpose of rewarding an innovator. Patent “trolls”, who threaten litigation over patent issues but may not own any patents themselves, have become a growing problem. In many ways, intellectual property laws begin to look like a rent-seeker’s playground. James Pethokoukas blogged late last year about a new study by the Congressional Budget Office stating that the U.S. patent system had “weakened the linkage between patenting and innovation“.

There is strong disagreement among libertarians about the validity of intellectual property rights (IP — copyrights, trademarks and patents). My natural sympathies are with the individual who rightfully seeks to benefit from their own creativity and hard work, but whether an innovator should enjoy a state-enforced monopoly on any and all applications of an idea is another matter. If potential competitors, customers and society have an obligation to this individual, some would insist that it is merely an ethical obligation, not one that should be sanctioned by the state.

In what follows, I will mostly refer to generic “ideas”, with the caveat that there are important distinctions between patents, trademarks and copyrights. I do not mean to minimize those distinctions. Rather, my interest lies in the general notion of intellectual property and any fundamental rights that successful “ideation” should confer. I confess that I have a bias in favor of rewarding innovators, but that might be a mere mental remnant of our legacy of IP protection in the U.S.

Suppose that some person, Mr. I, has an idea, and it is the first of its kind. Should Mr. I be granted an exclusive right to the idea and a monopoly on its application? Two qualities of tangible property are thought to be helpful in thinking about this kind of problem: rivalrousness and exclusivity. Rivalrous benefits make sharing difficult and make a thing more suitable as private property. Exclusivity means that others can be restricted from enjoying the benefits. If ideas had these qualities, then possession of an idea would settle the issue of rights without the need for special recognition of IP by government.

Pure public goods like air are non-rivalrous. Ideas themselves are often said to be non-rivalrous, but what is done with them might produce rivalrous benefits. If the benefits of Mr. I’s idea can be enjoyed by one individual without diminishing the benefits to others, then the idea is non-rivalrous.

Exclusivity is a closely-related but separate concept meaning that the benefits can be enjoyed privately, to the exclusion of others. Pure public goods lack both rivalrousness and exclusivity. On the other hand, a painting can be owned and kept in a private home, thus making it exclusive despite the fact that its benefits are largely non-rivalrous; though multiple individuals can enjoy a film simultaneously (non-rivalrous), it can be screened in a private venue charging admission; and while software can be shared, it is possible to achieve a measure of exclusivity by limiting the media (and replicability) through which it is available. However, the idea underlying a productive machine or process may be exclusive only to the extent that it cannot be discovered or reverse-engineered. While a new machine may be purchased from Mr. I and then owned and used exclusively, the idea itself has only limited exclusivity.

To strip the problem down to bare essentials, suppose there are no frictions in the transmission of information and that if Mr. I makes any practical use of his idea, or even mentions it to someone else, then the idea will be immediately known to all others. The idea itself is non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. There could still be gains to marketing applications if there are production costs involved (as that discourages entry), and those gains are rivalrous if the number of potential buyers is limited. To slightly rephrase the original question: Should Mr. I be granted, by the power of the state, an exclusive right and a monopoly on applications of his idea? A brilliant idea may have a rivalrous dimension and its benefits may be exclusive, but any non-exclusivity of the idea itself will diminish its market value. Does that offer sufficient grounds for the existence of IP?

This was essentially Eugene Volokh’s position when he asserted, in 2003, that a non-rivalrous good (water from the water table) has a market value, like any piece of tangible property, as long as it is possible to exclude others from access (to a well). (But that was not Volokh’s main argument in support of IP — see below.) Lawrence Solum at Legal Theory Blog took issue with Volokh’s position on valuation, insisting that it is often impossible to price IP optimally and therefore it is not like tangible property. Here is Volokh’s brief rejoinder, which rests partly on the argument discussed in the next paragraph.

A standard defense for IP is that rewarding invention and creativity enhances incentives for “great works” and technological advance. This was Volokh’s main defense of IP. Many libertarians find this hard to swallow, however. First, they insist that creative action is often driven by non-pecuniary motives. Nevertheless, art and invention are facilitated by funding, so the existence of IP rights may help to secure that support. A second objection is that ideas are frequently not unique; there are many examples of near-simultaneous discoveries. So, as this objection goes, if A hadn’t thought of it, B would have, and the incentive is often unnecessary. That is anything but absolute, however.

A very libertarian argument against property rights for ideas is that defining such a right infringes on the property rights of others. That is, any law restricting the use of an idea by others necessarily prevents them from using their own resources in a particular way. It therefore represents a kind of taking. This post by Stephan Kinsella at the Mises Daily stakes out this position:

“Patents grant rights in ‘inventions’ — useful machines or processes. They are grants by the state that permit the patentee to use the state’s court system to prohibit others from using their own property in certain ways — from reconfiguring their property according to a certain pattern or design described in the patent, or from using their property (including their own bodies) in a certain sequence of steps described in the patent.

In both cases, the state is assigning to A a right to control B’s property: A can tell B not to do certain things with it. Since ownership is the right to control, IP grants to A co-ownership of B’s property.“

Kinsella’s view is that creation, in and of itself, does not imply ownership. It is a transformation of resources, but ultimately the owner of those resources must own the creation. My difficulty with this argument is that an idea, if previously unknown to anyone, has no necessary impact on a prior use of resources owned by others. The ex ante value of those resources is based on their prior use, and that use can be continued. Certainly, if the new idea implies that the prior use is no longer the best use of those resources, then an patent-like restriction on the use of the new idea represents a harm. For example, if the new idea reduces production costs and an established competitor is restricted from using the idea, they will be harmed. Nevertheless, I hesitate to call this a “taking” because there is no restriction on the prior use.

Roderick T. Long makes the same argument as Kinsella in “The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights“:

“... information is not a concrete thing an individual can control; it is a universal, existing in other people’s minds and other people’s property, and over these the originator has no legitimate sovereignty. You cannot own information without owning other people.“

Long makes the further claim that ownership of inventions embodying IP is not legitimate because one cannot own a “law of nature”:

“Defenders of patents claim that patent laws protect ownership only of inventions, not of discoveries. (Likewise, defenders of copyright claim that copyright laws protect only implementations of ideas, not the ideas themselves.) But this distinction is an artificial one. Laws of nature come in varying degrees of generality and specificity; if it is a law of nature that copper conducts electricity, it is no less a law of nature that this much copper, arranged in this configuration, with these other materials arranged so, makes a workable battery.“

I find this view preposterous. Nature exists apart from our ability to exploit it. A new piece of knowledge or practical technique is not itself a “law of nature”. It is a discovery about the laws of nature.

Here are Arnold Kling’s thoughts on these and other IP posts, including this short piece from Daniel Drezner, who discusses the importance of credible commitment in protecting rights. A credible commitment does not exist when ex ante assertions of IP protection prove to be malleable ex post, under pressure from critics pointing to the larger gains of rescinding those protections.

I was motivated to write about IP after reading a post by Jeffrey Tucker at the Beautiful Anarchy blog, who wrote about the severe handicaps imposed by government regulation on society. In that post, he briefly disparaged IP. Tucker noted the spooky similarity of the present regulatory environment to Ayn Rand’s novel Anthem. I agree, but there is some irony in this, as Rand herself was a strong supporter of IP rights. Here is what Tucker said about IP:

“Through intellectual property laws, the state literally assigned ownership to ideas that are the source of innovation, thereby restricting them and entangling entrepreneurs in endless litigation and confusion. Products are kept off the market. Firms that would come into existence do not. Profits that would be earned never appear. Intellectual property has institutionalized slow growth and landed the economy in a thicket of absurdity.“

The nation’s founders certainly wished to recognize IP rights, but only within limits. The so-called Copyright Clause in Article I of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

So, like it or not, IP is recognized in the Constitution. The libertarian arguments against IP are persuasive in some respects, but I am not wholly convinced of their wisdom in terms of promoting innovation and economic growth. However, I am persuaded that shorter patent duration and severe limits on extensions would reward innovators and offer them incentives without the loss of growth implied by a long-term grant of monopoly. And this sort of modification might encourage more efforts to handle IP contractually, a topic that is discussed in detail (and with skepticism) in the post linked above from Long. There may be benefits as well to defining a higher threshold as to patentable ideas. For example, some say that only discoveries, not mere innovations, should be granted patents. “Mere” innovators could still capture gains via first-mover advantage and their own branding efforts, but not via patents.

Government’s Siren Song of Mortgage Risk

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Arnold Kling, Dodd-Frank, Fannie Mae, Foreclosure, Freddie Mac, Housing Crisis, Interest-only loans, Nontraditional mortgages, Option ARMs, Peter Wallison, Subprime lending, Too big to fail

subprime

What’s not to like about cheap, easy housing credit? It would be hard to criticize if it developed in response to real risks and rewards in a free market, devoid of interference by public authorities. Lenders with their own capital at risk tend to keep their pencils sharp when assessing collateral and borrower repayment capacity; borrowers respond to rate incentives by adjusting the timing of their consumption and their borrowing demands. This helps keep the extension of credit at manageable levels relative to earning power, and discourages destructive boom and bust cycles in housing prices. Conceivably, such arrangements could give rise to a more stable and prosperous economy with relatively, realistically easy credit as a by-product. If so, I’m all for it.

Unfortunately, that is not the sort of housing finance market we have in the U.S. In particular, bank lending often carries little real risk to anyone but taxpayers. Depositors who fund bank lending are almost always 100% federally-insured. As for bank capital, large institutions may be rational to regard themselves as too-big-to-fail, meaning that federal authorities will come forward with bailout money should they fall on hard times. Borrowers are encouraged by mortgage agency buyers (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) whose implicit federal guarantees reduce the nominal cost of borrowing, and whose standards of credit quality tend to move procyclically. Borrowers are subsidized by the tax deductibility of interest costs. Bankruptcy laws and foreclosure rules make collecting on bad debts more difficult. Finally, there is always pressure on lenders to engage proactively in high-risk community lending.

When risks are meaningless to market participants and rewards are inflated, the normal self-regulatory function of the market is suspended. Who cares about mistakes when you don’t have to pay the consequences? But society ultimately pays in misallocated resources, higher taxes and unstable markets. And while the costs to lenders and borrowers are blunted, most don’t get off scot-free: other consequences may include falling housing prices, widespread personal bankruptcies and damaged credit, foreclosures, stricter regulatory oversight, and a prolonged follow-on episode of hard credit.

The expansion of credit leading up to the housing crisis was marked by the rise of non-traditional mortgage products, which typically involve risky collateral and borrowers with tenuous credit. Interest-only mortgages reduce the borrower’s monthly payments, but the borrower fails to build their equity cushion over time. Payment option adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) can be criticized on the same grounds, except they are arguably worse. Subprime mortgages are characterized by high loan-to-value ratios and tend to be marketed to borrowers with less than stellar credit histories.

Arnold Kling reviews a new book by Peter Wallison on the role of “non-traditional” mortgages in the financial crisis. Wallison highlights the culpability of government in encouraging the subprime lending boom, especially Fannie and Freddie. He also points to the failure of government to institute real reforms to prevent the recurrence of such a crisis:

“Congress mandated regulation of practices that played no role in the crisis, either because legislators wanted to mislead the public or were themselves misled. Meanwhile, they did not confront the issue of what do about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and they left the door open for the return of nontraditional mortgages. Indeed, Melvin L. Watt, the recently appointed regulator of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, is once again calling for the loosening of underwriting standards.”

The drift back to risky lending is underway. Dodd-Frank will not stop it or end “too-big-to-fail” risk-taking and cronyism. The best advice to potential borrowers is to emphasize adverse personal and economic scenarios when evaluating a loan offer, and try to resist the temptation to over-invest in housing. AS voters, we  should demand an end to destructive government intervention in housing markets and home lending.

Gender Wage-Arbitrage Makes Me Happy

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

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Alex Tabarrok, Arnold Kling, Capitalism, Gender Wage Gap, Intention heuristic

ingrids-intentionality-elixir

Should we condemn a man who hires a disproportionate number of women for his tech firm because “they are cheaper”? Or should he be praised for offering those women opportunities in a field in which they are severely under-represented? More likely the latter, and I’m not even sure he deserves criticism for thumping his chest about it in a talk he gave at a startup conference. Alex Tabarrok ponders this employer’s hiring practices, noting that he angered some women in the audience and on Twitter. But Tabarrok objects:

“Women’s wages aren’t pushed down by employers who hire women but by employers who don’t hire women. So why does Thornley [the CEO] get the blame?”

Tabarrok blames the negative reaction on a phenomenon that Arnold Kling calls the  “intention heuristic.” This is an often misleading, judgmental rule-of-thumb that gives the benefit of any doubt to good intentions, and casts suspicion on actions taken in self-interest. This presumption is quite common among my friends and certainly in the media. Tabarrok goes on to say (about the CEO):

“…[He] has overcome prejudice (his or his society’s), recognized the truth of equality and taken entrepreneurial action to do well while doing good. It’s Thornley who is broadcasting the fact of equality to the world and encouraging others to do likewise.”

Maybe, but absent the fanfare, Thornly is simply responding to incentives, doing what a good capitalist ought. The response of resources to incentives is a major virtue of capitalism.

What a Joy To Be a Social Scientist With ESSP

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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Arnold Kling, central planning, Scientism, Social Science

The world of social phenomena is so complex that we should be guarded in accepting appeals to scientism. As Arnold Kling points out, social scientism is insidious because it may appear to comport with “common sense,” yet this frequently involves a fallacy of division. Kling believes we should do our best to exercise “ESSP,” or Epistemological Skepticism about Social Phenomena. The egos of central planners are fed by social scientism of the type described by Kling, but their promises regularly fail to pan out, leading to a kind of societal senescence. But if we all rev up our ESSP, and keep are meddling hands off, we’re likely to enjoy a more creative and prosperous society. Let freedom ring!

Is Community Service So Praiseworthy?

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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Arnold Kling, Community service, Milton Friedman, William Buckley

Image

Community service is always praised as an honorable activity, at least when it isn’t assigned in court, but should it be given extra emphasis by schools in admission decisions? Should schools (or society) expect some minimum level of community service of college applicants (or anyone)? Should it be viewed as experientially or ethically superior to time spent developing one’s talents? Time spent gaining job experience? Time spent earning income? Arnold Kling takes a hard line on this question, arguing that community service deserves no more praise than other endeavors. He believes the topic is worthy of a high school graduation speech.

One commenter on Kling’s post noted that Milton Friedman once asked William Buckley (who advocated national service) whether cleaning the toilet in a public school does more to serve the community than cleaning the toilet in a McDonalds. I’m inclined to agree with Kling that there are many activities that have at least as much value as community service. He says:

“If you judge people by how their life’s work contributed to better lives for people and less poverty in the world, then I will gladly stack up the Henry Fords and Thomas Edisons against the Mother Theresas. Collectively, the capitalists and entrepreneurs have a much better claim on our gratitude than do the icons of community service.”

But I also assert that it all depends on the nature of the activity, which should be self-evident. Community service might also reflect on the breadth of an individual’s experiences, or their “well-roundedness.” Still, even “having fun” has value, sometimes great value. If you like your work, your productivity and enjoyment count for a lot. Like Kling, I have strong reservations about conferring special status to time spent doing community service activity. It can be good or it can be of less value than other choices. It can even be a fraud.

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