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Intellectual property is a local maximum as far as progress goes. It's clear that society should reward all three of these researchers for their work, but our l
by natrius 11y ago
Intellectual property is a local maximum as far as progress goes. It's clear that society should reward all three of these researchers for their work, but our laws and our currency don't allow this.
Currency might seem like a tangent, but it's not. Currency is what we use to decide who to reward. It signifies a debt owed to you by society. When someone sells you goods or services or provides their labor to you as an employee, they're rewarding you for work that you've done in the past.
It sounds like society should reward all three of these researchers. They should be able to walk into a grocery store (or a Tesla dealership) and say, "Hey, I helped invent a way to edit genes in living cells. Can you reward me for that?" We want the answer to be yes, but we also don't want Tesla and the other people who make things the researchers want to be on the hook for the rewards themselves. The obligation should flow through society like money. Tesla should be able to say, "Hey, we made an awesome car for someone who invented a way to edit genes in living cells. Can you reward us for that by giving us supplies or labor?"
Not everyone will want to reward the CRISPR folks, but there's a pretty straightforward response to that: don't reward the people who don't reward the CRISPR folks. It might sound unwieldy to have to keep track of this information when you're trying to trade with people, but that's why we make software. You'll pick an app that implements the reward policies you prefer, then you won't have to think about it on an ongoing basis.
This is merit capitalism. It requires a common historical record of who has done what for whom, which we can now build thanks to blockchains. Intellectual property is a better tool than nothing, but we're getting fewer of the inventions, discoveries and works of art than we could be getting because it's such a cumbersome tool for incentivizing progress. Let's try something else.
http://meritcapitalism.com/ http://meritcapitalism.com/
- nickff 11y agoDoes this proposal not suffer from the economic calculation problem?[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
- natrius 11y agoGood question. It does, but public goods always have this problem. We currently address the problem by granting temporary monopolies on intellectual property so prices can be established for it. This is replacing one market failure with another. Think about it this way: when humans invent new ways to live healthier lives, we limit the access to these inventions for at least 20 years. Isn't that crazy? Everyone could be living with the benefits of those ideas twenty years earlier, but in order to incentivize the creation of those ideas, we explicitly delay progress. Instead, we could just pay for intellectual property as a society. This introduces a new problem of deciding the price to pay, which is what merit capitalism solves. An individual picks her own price, then decides how much others have to pay to remain part of her society of people she rewards. That is, if you don't pay her minimum contribution, then she won't do work for you or sell you products, nor will she work for people whose justification for their reward is that they've rewarded you in the past. Your rewards are cut out of her economy, which makes rewarding you less valuable for every other human. There's one less place for other humans to go to get rewarded for rewarding you. Does this lead to the optimal price of public goods? There's no proof that it does, but I don't think such a proof is possible. Intellectual property leads to the price that monopoly power achieves, which clearly isn't an optimal price. In merit capitalism, society will iterate until their prices achieve a level of progress they collectively find desirable.