3 ms·
We'd been around for two million years without anything like this. Rent seeking is a very modern invention in the lifetime of the human species, let alone estab
by lucubratory 3y ago
We'd been around for two million years without anything like this. Rent seeking is a very modern invention in the lifetime of the human species, let alone establishing it over non-scarce ideas. It's very bourgeois, not very human.
- blowski 3y agoI’m not sure it’s so modern. Every tollgate in the ancient world was effectively rent-seeking. Even in prehistoric societies, it seems there were protection rackets and shamans with “monopoly access” to the gods.
- mr_toad 3y agoBut for most of human history information was difficult and unprofitable to copy. Copying manuscripts by hand was expensive, and few people could read anyway so the market was limited. It’s no accident that copyrights were invented after the development of the printing press.
- chpatrick 3y agoWe've been around for two million years without anything like this. Electricity bad!
- lucubratory 3y ago...was someone claiming that electricity is human nature, to make you think this was a valid analogy?
- chpatrick 3y agoWe didn't have X for two million years therefore X bad I think it's a very strange argument.
- lucubratory 3y agoMy claim was that something we didn't have for any substantial amount of our two million years of existence isn't "human nature", not that it was "bad" (weird moralising on your part). Electricity isn't "just human nature" either. We should decide whether we as a society want or accept a given thing based on its effects on all of us, not whether it's "human nature" (which is almost always an incorrect claim when it's made).