Comments on: Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance: Statism, not renaissance

By: geoih

geoih — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:27:22 +0000

Quote from valk: “When people have this black & white understanding of economic phenomenon, I don’t expect very profound understanding of moral theory either, unfortunately.”

Yes, most people I’ve met are always looking for more moral vagueness. Life is so much easier when life is gray and without all these questions about what is true or false, right or wrong, moral or immoral.

By: valk

valk — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:11:37 +0000

When all you have is Austrian economics, every problem looks like socialism.

It is quite amusing to see Austrians argue around each other calling either pro-IP or contra-IP camps socialist or statist (I’m not referring to this post specifically). Actually it is quite sad. When people have this black & white understanding of economic phenomenon, I don’t expect very profound understanding of moral theory either, unfortunately. Well at least it is possible to make people accountable for beliefs.

By: Jamie Moor

Jamie Moor — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 08:07:28 +0000

I really don’t see the point of a market anarchist even reading that stuff. You already know that if it doesn’t say ‘abolish everything’ that it’s not going to work. You don’t ‘fix’ the mafia (no offense to the mafia). You get rid of it.

By: Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:55:30 +0000

I looked into the book — he explicitly advocates the Bernie Sanders idea of spending $80 billion or so a year of taxpayer funded prizes for medical innovation. I will agree that in some ways this system is preferable to the patent system but if you really do it, we are talking a trillion a year at least. And Tabarrok does not challenge the premises that underlie state intervention into innovation. He’s just disagreeing with the current way of doing it. He thinks patents should be weakened or abolished, and we should shift to make more use of a taxpayer funded prize system. This is an obviously horrible idea. He makes so many mainstream assumptions in his reasoning.

By: Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:46:19 +0000

I haven’t read the whole thing yet (it’s on my iPad) but according to Cowen it advocates:

“1. Drastically narrow patent protection. Patent propaganda and reality are far apart. Patents, especially recent vague patents, stifle innovation rather than encourage it. Tabarrok’s patent litigation diagram alone is worth the price of admission; it genuinely pushed me over the edge to extreme patent skepticism.”

This would be good. But a tax funded prize system would be horrible. It would be a trillion bucks a year if you really replaced it. And he still says there is a place for patents. It could be that he has decided to stop pushing the tax funded prize system. From a quick look at the book, he seems not to mention the taxpayer funded aspect of it. Maybe he’s backed down off of that and wants only private prizes. Not sure. But it is good that he is a critic of patents.

“2. Drastically increase (abolish?) high-skilled immigration quotas. ”

this is good.

“3. Increase school choice, curtail the power of teachers’ unions, and stop pretending that non-STEM majors produce significant positive externalities.”

I have big issues with the voucher system and public school choice, if that’s what he’s talking about.

Who knows.

By: Jacob Huebert

Jacob Huebert — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:00:50 +0000

Although it’s clear enough that Tabarrok’s proposals are not the libertarian ideal, it’s hard to tell from this review whether they, overall, would be an improvement over the status quo. Caplan’s review, linked in the comment above, suggests they might be quite a bit better?

By: qwerty

qwerty — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:47:05 +0000

For a better review see http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/12/tabarroks_roadm.html