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It's not that new idea. See Intellectual Property in its many forms. For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we

It's not that new idea. See Intellectual Property in its many forms. For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. Which makes really little sense. But then, economics is a "science"[1] of scarcity, not abundance, and somehow economics is the main science used to solve how the society should be arranged. [1] I have a strong feeling that economists have missed the memo from Popper regarding what is modern science. There seems to be quite a lot of unfalsifiable assumptions lying at the bottom of economics, starting from the utility maximizing agent.

tzs 5y ago
> For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. There are other solutions that have been seriously considered or proposed. For example in copyright one idea is to allow things to be freely copied and have some rich entity pay creators. This was how it was done a long time ago, with the rich entity usually being a king or a ruler of a city-state or a wealthy lord. Another idea is to pay creators via some tax on something that is roughly correlated with copying. An example would be a tax on blank tape. A problem with these approaches is deciding who gets paid and how much. In the tax approach not many people seem to like the idea of the government deciding which artists should get funded. The usually way to avoid that is to have it based on how many copies are made. But then you need some way to get that data. You could do it via some kind of polling. That was probably the only way back when copying was mostly physical, such as copying a record to a cassette tape. Nowadays when it is mostly digital you could do it by server side monitoring on download/streaming sites and/or device-side monitoring of playback--but then you are getting into areas that will worry many people for being an opening to more general surveillance. For ordinary physical goods we don't have these problems--a free market (even the poor approximation of a free market that we have) works pretty good for determining what to produce. But that only works if the goods have certain properties, which copies of art do not have. (If anyone wants more information, look into excludable vs non-excludable goods and rival vs non-rival goods). The approach of current copyright law is to legally give copies those properties so that the market can determine what art gets produced and how much the artist makes. This is a tradeoff, because it does mean that the consumer pays more for copies than the "correct" free market price (marginal cost of copying). The other approaches mentioned above tend to make the tradeoff the other way--the consumer pays marginal cost of copying, but less art gets produced than consumers would like. There's not really any way to avoid having either underproduction or underutilization when it comes to easily copyable art. Once you realize this things make a lot more sense.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > This is a tradeoff, because it does mean that the consumer pays more for copies than the "correct" free market price Important to keep in mind that it's not just a tradeoff because it increases marginal cost, it's a tradeoff because it outright restricts the creation of new content. In creative industries, it means that creators are sometimes unable to build on or adapt creative work to apply to new situations or to expand on artistic ideas. Many market consequences extend from this restriction for better and for worse -- there's a reason why Nintendo games don't work on PCs or have certain accessibility features, there's a reason why backing up save data for many of their games is still a giant pain in the neck, and it's because it's illegal for other companies to create those features for Nintendo games. IP law also has the consequence of drastically raising the barrier of entry to creating new IP, since assets and universes can't be reused or repurposed without contracts. And of course, this also has the consequence that certain utility innovations can't happen -- E-Readers in particular have been hobbled for a long time, not just because of patent law but because existing platforms are allowed to make it illegal to transfer legally purchased books into different ecosystems. This reduces market competition in the space, artificially driving up the cost of not just the content itself, but also much of the hardware used to consume that content. There are a lot of things we could build in the E-Reader space around universal annotations, accessibility features like live-reading, etc. IP law restricts a lot of that stuff, you may not build a competing E-Reader that reads EBooks purchased on Amazon. This obviously has consequences for the market itself; by embracing IP law, we have chosen to effectively kill off and completely eliminate competition in several areas of the free market, while making it illegal to build some meta-layers on top of platforms without enormous amounts of capital and negotiation power. But it also obviously has cultural consequences since building on top of existing work and sharing cultural experiences (including stories) is something that is basically built into our DNA as human beings. So we can debate whether there are advantages to IP law and whether they're wortwhile, but I do want to push back a little bit on the idea that marginal cost is the main consequence of Copyright. It's not, Copyright is a choice we've made to artificially eliminate certain parts of the market and to make certain projects and innovations practically impossible to build by anyone other than the biggest players in the market. It's not just about books getting more expensive, Copyright is a system with real tradeoffs, it increases the production of a specific kind of art at the tradeoff of drastically reducing the production of other kinds of art, and at the cost of shaping how art gets distributed and consumed and what things we can do with it, even privately.
jjoonathan 5y ago
The "value" that economics maximizes is wealth-weighted (in the sense of who gets to determine what is valuable and what is not). Understanding this fact has led me to a thousand and one horrible "that's a feature, not a bug" realizations.
- CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
  In my mind resolving this is the next level for democracy.
DavidSJ 5y ago
There's a huge subfield, called behavioral economics, in which economists study the ways human behavior deviates from utility maximization. It's been around for 70 years or so.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. If resources truly do not have scarcity, there is no need to manage them. The need to manage a resource comes about only when it is scarce.
- carapace 5y ago
  This strikes me as diluting the point to irrelevance. The vast majority of resources are abundant only provisionally when they are well-managed. In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Even the oceans and the sky must be managed now, eh?
  - ric2b 5y ago
    > In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Digital data.
    - carapace 5y ago
      Ah, good point.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The vast majority of resources are abundant only provisionally when they are well-managed. That's not abundance at all, its just scarcity. > In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Yes, scarcity is universal, which is why the idea of “post-scarcity” or resources that need managed in a categorically different way because they don't experience scarcity are nonsense.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> There seems to be quite a lot of unfalsifiable assumptions lying at the bottom of economics, starting from the utility maximizing agent. That and other elements of rational choice theory are not unfalsifiable. In fact, some of them were from the outset not merely falsifiable but known false but tentatively held as useful approximations over large populations. In fact, in the scientific part of economics (and other social sciences; rational choice theory has wide impacts), the debate has long been over whether the rational choice model is a still even useful reference point against which to mark variations, given the extensive degree to which it has proven false. (OTOH, a number of higher-level phenomenon predicted by they model have proven predictively useful even though the lower-level model is known false.) Of course, some of economics (e.g., the Austrian school) is overtly driven by a normative ideological agenda rather than pursuing descriptive, empirical science.
- logicchains 5y ago
  >That and other elements of rational choice theory are not unfalsifiable. >Of course, some of economics (e.g., the Austrian school) is overtly driven by a normative ideological agenda rather than pursuing descriptive, empirical science. This is actually one reason the Austrian school criticises the neoclassical school. The neoclassical school is just as much founded on ideological assumptions as the Austrian school (main difference is cardinal vs ordinal utility), as it's impossible to have a "theory of value" without some underlying philosophical notion of value. However the neoclassical school hides this value system under so many layers of maths in an attempt to convince people it's a real, objective science like physics or chemistry. There is a form of economics that makes testable predictions with a reasonably high degree of accuracy, and isn't based on any underlying ideology: it's called "quantitative finance".
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > as it's impossible to have a "theory of value" without some underlying philosophical notion of value. But mainstream empirical economics, including (but not limited to) the neoclassical school, does not have a theory of value. It makes predictions based on hypotheses of how individuals act given the existence of individual subjective value systems. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made, but this is just projection by the Austrian school. You can layer an infinite number of possible idealized value systems on top of any mainstream economic theory to get a policy theory (and there's almost as many of those that have been layered on it as people making policy recommendations incorporating mainstream economic analysis, but that is a separate layer. > There is a form of economics that makes testable predictions with a reasonably high degree of accuracy, and isn't based on any underlying ideology: it's called "quantitative finance". QF is to economics as meteorology is to climatology.
SmellTheGlove 5y ago
> But then, economics is a "science"[1] of scarcity, not abundance, and somehow economics is the main science used to solve how the society should be arranged. I have an economics degree. I'm not claiming to be an economist here at all, but I'm mentioning it because it's relevant to what I'm about to say here: What I learned throughout my undergraduate education is that economics is a social science built upon the _presumption_ of scarcity. Classical economics doesn't apply if you break that invariant. We need something else if we achieve post-scarcity, and I'm not sure that it'd be another existing mainstream economic school of thought. Note that I'm not disagreeing with you - your point is valid. I'm agreeing on the "create artificial scarcity" response that you're observing. I suppose what I'm trying to say is, whatever other unfalsifiable assumptions you're pointing at in economics shouldn't matter because the broken scarcity invariant breaks the rest of it. Trying to use an economic argument in a post-scarcity scenario is, to me, applying the wrong tool for the job in order to preserve a specific interest. That's my opinion, anyway, and I'm sure someone else who has more experience or education in the field beyond my 4 year degree 20 years ago could tell me I'm wrong.
- dantheman 5y ago
  There will always be scarcity of time.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    And intelligence, skilled labor, organizational capacity, and especially wisdom.
    - daddylongstroke 5y ago
      ...and, as long as we don't revert our 'farming' practices to pre-industrialization means, lack of soil health.

tzs 5y ago

> For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. There are other solutions that have been seriously considered or proposed. For example in copyright one idea is to allow things to be freely copied and have some rich entity pay creators. This was how it was done a long time ago, with the rich entity usually being a king or a ruler of a city-state or a wealthy lord. Another idea is to pay creators via some tax on something that is roughly correlated with copying. An example would be a tax on blank tape. A problem with these approaches is deciding who gets paid and how much. In the tax approach not many people seem to like the idea of the government deciding which artists should get funded. The usually way to avoid that is to have it based on how many copies are made. But then you need some way to get that data. You could do it via some kind of polling. That was probably the only way back when copying was mostly physical, such as copying a record to a cassette tape. Nowadays when it is mostly digital you could do it by server side monitoring on download/streaming sites and/or device-side monitoring of playback--but then you are getting into areas that will worry many people for being an opening to more general surveillance. For ordinary physical goods we don't have these problems--a free market (even the poor approximation of a free market that we have) works pretty good for determining what to produce. But that only works if the goods have certain properties, which copies of art do not have. (If anyone wants more information, look into excludable vs non-excludable goods and rival vs non-rival goods). The approach of current copyright law is to legally give copies those properties so that the market can determine what art gets produced and how much the artist makes. This is a tradeoff, because it does mean that the consumer pays more for copies than the "correct" free market price (marginal cost of copying). The other approaches mentioned above tend to make the tradeoff the other way--the consumer pays marginal cost of copying, but less art gets produced than consumers would like. There's not really any way to avoid having either underproduction or underutilization when it comes to easily copyable art. Once you realize this things make a lot more sense.

danShumway 5y ago
> This is a tradeoff, because it does mean that the consumer pays more for copies than the "correct" free market price Important to keep in mind that it's not just a tradeoff because it increases marginal cost, it's a tradeoff because it outright restricts the creation of new content. In creative industries, it means that creators are sometimes unable to build on or adapt creative work to apply to new situations or to expand on artistic ideas. Many market consequences extend from this restriction for better and for worse -- there's a reason why Nintendo games don't work on PCs or have certain accessibility features, there's a reason why backing up save data for many of their games is still a giant pain in the neck, and it's because it's illegal for other companies to create those features for Nintendo games. IP law also has the consequence of drastically raising the barrier of entry to creating new IP, since assets and universes can't be reused or repurposed without contracts. And of course, this also has the consequence that certain utility innovations can't happen -- E-Readers in particular have been hobbled for a long time, not just because of patent law but because existing platforms are allowed to make it illegal to transfer legally purchased books into different ecosystems. This reduces market competition in the space, artificially driving up the cost of not just the content itself, but also much of the hardware used to consume that content. There are a lot of things we could build in the E-Reader space around universal annotations, accessibility features like live-reading, etc. IP law restricts a lot of that stuff, you may not build a competing E-Reader that reads EBooks purchased on Amazon. This obviously has consequences for the market itself; by embracing IP law, we have chosen to effectively kill off and completely eliminate competition in several areas of the free market, while making it illegal to build some meta-layers on top of platforms without enormous amounts of capital and negotiation power. But it also obviously has cultural consequences since building on top of existing work and sharing cultural experiences (including stories) is something that is basically built into our DNA as human beings. So we can debate whether there are advantages to IP law and whether they're wortwhile, but I do want to push back a little bit on the idea that marginal cost is the main consequence of Copyright. It's not, Copyright is a choice we've made to artificially eliminate certain parts of the market and to make certain projects and innovations practically impossible to build by anyone other than the biggest players in the market. It's not just about books getting more expensive, Copyright is a system with real tradeoffs, it increases the production of a specific kind of art at the tradeoff of drastically reducing the production of other kinds of art, and at the cost of shaping how art gets distributed and consumed and what things we can do with it, even privately.

jjoonathan 5y ago

The "value" that economics maximizes is wealth-weighted (in the sense of who gets to determine what is valuable and what is not). Understanding this fact has led me to a thousand and one horrible "that's a feature, not a bug" realizations.

CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
In my mind resolving this is the next level for democracy.

DavidSJ 5y ago

There's a huge subfield, called behavioral economics, in which economists study the ways human behavior deviates from utility maximization. It's been around for 70 years or so.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> For some reason, when we try to figure how to manage abundant resources, only solutions we come up with are to make them artificially scarce. If resources truly do not have scarcity, there is no need to manage them. The need to manage a resource comes about only when it is scarce.

carapace 5y ago
This strikes me as diluting the point to irrelevance. The vast majority of resources are abundant only provisionally when they are well-managed. In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Even the oceans and the sky must be managed now, eh?
- ric2b 5y ago
  > In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Digital data.
  - carapace 5y ago
    Ah, good point.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The vast majority of resources are abundant only provisionally when they are well-managed. That's not abundance at all, its just scarcity. > In fact, I can't think of any resources so abundant that they need no management. Yes, scarcity is universal, which is why the idea of “post-scarcity” or resources that need managed in a categorically different way because they don't experience scarcity are nonsense.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> There seems to be quite a lot of unfalsifiable assumptions lying at the bottom of economics, starting from the utility maximizing agent. That and other elements of rational choice theory are not unfalsifiable. In fact, some of them were from the outset not merely falsifiable but known false but tentatively held as useful approximations over large populations. In fact, in the scientific part of economics (and other social sciences; rational choice theory has wide impacts), the debate has long been over whether the rational choice model is a still even useful reference point against which to mark variations, given the extensive degree to which it has proven false. (OTOH, a number of higher-level phenomenon predicted by they model have proven predictively useful even though the lower-level model is known false.) Of course, some of economics (e.g., the Austrian school) is overtly driven by a normative ideological agenda rather than pursuing descriptive, empirical science.

logicchains 5y ago
>That and other elements of rational choice theory are not unfalsifiable. >Of course, some of economics (e.g., the Austrian school) is overtly driven by a normative ideological agenda rather than pursuing descriptive, empirical science. This is actually one reason the Austrian school criticises the neoclassical school. The neoclassical school is just as much founded on ideological assumptions as the Austrian school (main difference is cardinal vs ordinal utility), as it's impossible to have a "theory of value" without some underlying philosophical notion of value. However the neoclassical school hides this value system under so many layers of maths in an attempt to convince people it's a real, objective science like physics or chemistry. There is a form of economics that makes testable predictions with a reasonably high degree of accuracy, and isn't based on any underlying ideology: it's called "quantitative finance".
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > as it's impossible to have a "theory of value" without some underlying philosophical notion of value. But mainstream empirical economics, including (but not limited to) the neoclassical school, does not have a theory of value. It makes predictions based on hypotheses of how individuals act given the existence of individual subjective value systems. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made, but this is just projection by the Austrian school. You can layer an infinite number of possible idealized value systems on top of any mainstream economic theory to get a policy theory (and there's almost as many of those that have been layered on it as people making policy recommendations incorporating mainstream economic analysis, but that is a separate layer. > There is a form of economics that makes testable predictions with a reasonably high degree of accuracy, and isn't based on any underlying ideology: it's called "quantitative finance". QF is to economics as meteorology is to climatology.

SmellTheGlove 5y ago

> But then, economics is a "science"[1] of scarcity, not abundance, and somehow economics is the main science used to solve how the society should be arranged. I have an economics degree. I'm not claiming to be an economist here at all, but I'm mentioning it because it's relevant to what I'm about to say here: What I learned throughout my undergraduate education is that economics is a social science built upon the _presumption_ of scarcity. Classical economics doesn't apply if you break that invariant. We need something else if we achieve post-scarcity, and I'm not sure that it'd be another existing mainstream economic school of thought. Note that I'm not disagreeing with you - your point is valid. I'm agreeing on the "create artificial scarcity" response that you're observing. I suppose what I'm trying to say is, whatever other unfalsifiable assumptions you're pointing at in economics shouldn't matter because the broken scarcity invariant breaks the rest of it. Trying to use an economic argument in a post-scarcity scenario is, to me, applying the wrong tool for the job in order to preserve a specific interest. That's my opinion, anyway, and I'm sure someone else who has more experience or education in the field beyond my 4 year degree 20 years ago could tell me I'm wrong.

dantheman 5y ago
There will always be scarcity of time.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  And intelligence, skilled labor, organizational capacity, and especially wisdom.
  - daddylongstroke 5y ago
    ...and, as long as we don't revert our 'farming' practices to pre-industrialization means, lack of soil health.