Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2011

WIPO head: the Web would be better if it was patented and users had to pay license fees

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

Cory Doctorow reports on remarks by the head of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization:

Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object.

In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

This is a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence. The argument that there wasn’t enough investment in the Web is belied by the fact that a) the Web attracted more investment than any of the network service technologies that preceded it (by orders of magnitude), and; b) that the total investment in the Web is almost incalculably large. The only possible basis for believing that the Web really would have benefited from patents is a blind adherence to the ideology that holds that patents are always good, no matter what.

Just imagine: instead of our current anarchic, idiosyncratic-but-still-amazingly-useful Web, we’d have a bureaucratically regulated superset of the old walled garden models like Compuserve, where innovation was stifled long before it got into the users’ hands.

October 6, 2011

What is a nontrepreneur?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Andrew Orlowski posts some of his comments at a recent (British) Conservative Conference Fringe discussion on digital policy:

You all know what an entrepreneur is. But who has heard of the word nontrepreneur?

There were amused and bemused looks.

Well you’re going to be hearing it a lot.

We’re in an exciting time for the internet. This great wave of utopian rhetoric and getting everyone online, for the last 15 years, has come to an end. Almost everyone who wants to be online is online. Something quite new and interesting has happened in the past three years, people are beginning to pay for stuff.

The internet today lacks markets and it’s half-finished. The platforms and infrastructure that recognise and create value aren’t there.

Now words come to define political eras and philosophies, and the last ten years were defined by words like ‘beaconicity’ and ‘targets’ and all these agencies spending other people’s money. I have a horrible feeling that Cameron’s technology policy, despite being guided by people with strong classical liberal instincts, will be defined by the fluff of Silicon Roundabout.

Silicon Roundabout is, essentially, a prank on the media. Let’s see who’s involved. You’ve got what I call faux capitalists — people who want to be thought of as capitalists but are terrified of risk and don’t back ambitious high-risk ventures. You’ve got entrepreneurs who can’t run a business. And you’ve got programmers who can’t program. All looking for each other. Then there’s a vast army of hangers-on: mentors, facilitators. And they all socialise endlessly, instead of doing any work. The socialising is work.

This does not create wealth.

As soon as we start to “un-fetishise” this myth of two guys in a garage, and start to think more seriously about, say, payment platforms or credit systems that make buying stuff nice and easy, as easy as real life, then we’ll create markets. You won’t get this from Shoreditch.

Steve Jobs was not a world-leading philanthropist, thank goodness

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Kevin D. Williams explains why the late Steve Jobs did more good by avoiding big-ticket philanthropy and concentrating on his business:

Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

Update: An obituary from The Economist seems pretty accurate to me:

NOBODY else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could put on a show like Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up a “magical” or “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. He spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy to use products.

[. . .]

His on-stage persona as a Zen-like mystic notwithstanding, Mr Jobs was an autocratic manager with a fierce temper. But his egomania was largely justified. He eschewed market researchers and focus groups, preferring to trust his own instincts when evaluating potential new products. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said. His judgment proved uncannily accurate: by the end of his career the hits far outweighed the misses. Mr Jobs was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a “reality distortion field”, such were his powers of persuasion. But in the end he changed reality, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped music, telecoms and media. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to “put a ding in the universe” did just that.

Update, the second: “Death is very likely the single best invention of life.” Steve Jobs, 2005.

October 4, 2011

European Union’s biggest fear isn’t the financial crisis: it’s the voters

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Mick Hume points out that the EU is undemocratic, and well on the way to being even less so if the Eurocrats get their way:

When even the Europe editor of the Europhile BBC suggests that ‘it is quite possible that an early casualty in the Eurozone crisis will be democracy’, it is surely time to ask some serious questions about the way that the handling of Europe’s financial and economic problems is intensifying the crisis of democratic politics.

If there is one thing that worries the Euro-elites even more than their out-of-control finances these days, it is their uncontrollable electorates. Governments, EU bureaucrats and Euro-bankers do not trust the ignorant European masses, many of whom have stubbornly refused to accept (on the rare occasions they have been asked) that the authorities know what’s best for them. We have followed on spiked in recent years the elites’ sustained efforts to impose a new centralised constitution on the EU and then, when those nations offered a vote rejected their imperious plans, to sneak it in through the backdoor anyway. They will not take ‘no’ for an answer, no matter how often and how loudly we tell them.

[. . .]

Every discussion of the possible outcome of the crisis only seems to suggest two options: either a ‘disastrous’ break-up of the Eurozone or its ‘restructuring’ – that is, a mega-bailout coupled with further moves towards fiscal as well as economic union. The first of these is not really considered an option at all by the Euro-elites. It would be an act of political suicide on their part. So the second option is their only one. But they also fear what the reaction of their peoples will be to that, especially in Germany and France.

Their answer has been effectively to suspend democratic debate of these matters and keep the public out of the loop, conducting the real deals in smoke-free rooms and secret correspondence behind a curtain of media obfuscation.

[. . .]

Democracy is a meaningless charade without choices and competing visions for the future of society. And the bankrupting of democracy is surely too high a price to pay for any financial package. There is no ready-made alternative economic solution to hand. But the very least we should demand is that the true depth of the crisis be made public, and that every aspect of the counter-crisis measures must be openly debated. The first step in that direction should be to challenge the way that European democracy is being bankrupted and asset-stripped in the name of saving the continent. Fighting for the future of Europe is not the same thing as the survival of the Euro-elites.

As things stand, we in Europe look set to end up with the worst of both worlds. We are supposed to swallow the abrogation of democracy and imposition of the dictatorship of experts and bureaucrats in the name of economic necessity. And then their elitist schemes won’t work anyway either to bring about an integrated Europe or to revitalise the Euro economy.

October 3, 2011

Stephen Gordon: markets are volatile, but governments must not be

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:53

In his latest Economy Lab post, Stephen Gordon explains why governments should not leap into the breach every time the markets fluctuate:

Politicians and pundits have jumped upon the recent flurry of bad news from financial markets to demand that the federal government “do something” — although just what that something should be is far from clear.

But no sensible government ever makes policy on the basis of a few bad days or weeks on the market, because financial markets are a notoriously unreliable predictor of the real economy. As the great economist Paul Samuelson once noted, “stock markets have predicted nine of the past five recessions”. I don’t know when he said this, but I first heard the quote when I was a graduate student 25 years ago, and its applicability seems timeless. To a very great extent, the day-to-day movements in markets are the result of random chance, and attempts to fit them into a narrative aren’t always convincing.

October 2, 2011

Tyler Cowen on why “no new taxes” won’t work this time

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Almost everyone (except Warren Buffett) agrees that higher taxes are a bad thing, and the GOP candidates are all singing from the same hymn book about not imposing higher tax rates. Under normal circumstances, this might work. Tyler Cowen explains why these aren’t normal times and how “no new taxes” isn’t a serious way to deal with America’s financial problems:

Consider the example more closely. Cutting $10 in spending for every $1 in tax increases would result in $9 in net tax reduction. That’s because lower spending today means lower taxes tomorrow, and limiting the future path of government spending does limit future taxes, as Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate and conservative icon, so clearly explained. Promising never to raise taxes, without reaching a deal on spending, really means a high and rising commitment to future taxes.

Furthermore, this refusal to contemplate a tax increase — which I’d characterize as an extreme Republican stance — has brought what seems to be an extreme Democratic response: President Obama’s latest budget plan is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy. We may be left with no good fiscal options.

The problems with a no-new-taxes stance run deeper. Because it’s unlikely that spending cuts alone can balance the budget, politicians who espouse extreme antitax views often end up denying the scope of our long-run fiscal problems.

[. . .]

The more cynical interpretation of the Republican candidates’ stance on taxes is that they are signaling loyalty to a cause, or simply marketing themselves to voters, rather than acting in good faith. It could be that candidates are more worried about having to publicly endorse tax increases than they are about the tax increases themselves. If that’s true, it is all the more reason to watch out for our pocketbooks; it means that the candidates are protecting themselves rather than the taxpayers.

The final lesson is this: Many professed fiscal conservatives still find it necessary to pander to voter illusions that only a modicum of fiscal adjustment is needed. That’s an indication of how far we are from true fiscal conservatism, but also a sign of how much it is needed.

October 1, 2011

ESR on sexual repression

Filed under: Economics, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

ESR looks at a recent New York Post article on the price of sex, and comes to a few depressing conclusions:

The New York Post has an interesting article up on the price of sex. Summary; more women are giving it up sooner. Between a shortage of men who are marry-up material, competition from other women, and porn, withholding sex to get commitment is no longer a workable strategy Tellingly the article says “those who don’t discount sex say they can’t seem to get anyone to ‘pay’ their higher price. Consequently, younger women are doing an awful lot of first-date or even no-date fucking, and the marriage rate is steadily dropping.

[. . .]

The first difficult thing to accept, after the sexual revolution, is this: sexual repression and the double standard weren’t arbitrary forms of cruelty that societies ended up with by accident. They were functional adaptations. By raising the clearing price that women charged for sex, they actually increased female bargaining power and raised the marriage rate.

Most people can process that one without wincing. But this next one is a hot potato: the ideology of sexual equality made the problem a lot worse in two different ways. The obvious one was that it encouraged women to believe they could and should be able to act like men without negative consequences — including rising to male levels of promiscuity. The less obvious, but perhaps in the long run more damaging consequence, was that it collided with hypergamy.

Women are hypergamous. They want to marry men who are bigger, stronger, higher-status, a bit older, and a bit brighter than they are. This is massively confirmed by statistics on actual marriages; only the “a bit brighter” part is even controversial, and most of that controversy is ideological posturing.

OK, so what happens when women get educated, achieve economic equality, etcetera? Their pool of eligible hypergamic targets shrinks; the princess marrying the swineherd is a fairytale precisely because it’s so rare. More women seeking hypergamy from a higher baseline means the competition for eligible males is more intense, and womens’ ability to withold sex vanishes even supposing they want to. Thus, college campuses today, and plunging marriages rate tomorrow.

September 29, 2011

Greek tax evasion: not a new problem at all

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

In a New York Times article from last year, Suzanne Daley reported the rather amazing statistic from Athens:

In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools.

So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools.

That kind of wholesale lying about assets, and other eye-popping cases that are surfacing in the news media here, points to the staggering breadth of tax dodging that has long been a way of life here.

H/T to Araminta Wordsworth for the link.

Charles de Gaulle as euro-skeptic

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Germany, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Conrad Black provides a thumbnail sketch of de Gaulle’s real intentions regarding European integration:

Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille in 1890, to the family of a monarchist schoolteacher. De Gaulle was a Flaubertesque haut bourgeois, as well as an officer of the French army when it was rivaled only by the German army as the greatest in the world, and was unrivaled as the most storied army of all. He was imbued with the middle-class concept of the value of savings, frugality, pay-as-you-go. To him, greatness and security could never be bought or sustained on the installment plan. And mere politicians, whom he considered a lesser breed swimming in a sticky fondue of moral weakness and opportunism, could never be trusted to resist the temptation to pander, devalue, or seek short-term gain.

De Gaulle’s farsightedness was not confined to national projections of household economics; he also warned of the dangers of Euro-integration. He was the chief architect of the Franco-German friendship treaty of 1963, and — as a veteran of the terrible hecatomb of the Battle of Verdun and a World War I prisoner of war of the Germans, as well as the founder of the Free French in World War II — he knew as well as anyone the horrors of the centuries-long conflict along the Rhine. He also favored a common market and the end of violent ancient rivalries among the many European nationalities. But he always saw a homogenized, centralized Europe as a dangerous fantasy. He believed that a Continental interest, composed of as many as 20 or 25 languages and cultures, would be only an alphabet gruel, blended and stirred by faceless bureaucrats from the little countries, and not representing any real popular interest at all.

He thought that the original Common Market of France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux could be used by France, effectively maneuvering between the U.S. and the USSR, and between Germany and the Russians, to project and amplify France’s — and, more particularly, his own — influence. Up to a point, while the U.S. was mired in Vietnam, and before European Communism became too enfeebled to challenge the West (which de Gaulle also foresaw), he was correct. But he believed that an unlimitedly accessible Europe would become an incoherent Tower of Babel, governed by bureaucratic intermeddlers in the name of feckless politicians, and liable to excessive outside influence, including from the U.S.

H/T to Monty at Ace of Spades HQ for the link.

“The euro isn’t just a failed currency, but a language unto itself”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Jonathan Weil provides a sampling of Euro terms and their real-world meanings:

It’s bad enough for average Americans that most European leaders speak English with heavy accents. What’s worse, even when we can make out the words they utter, it’s almost always impossible to figure out what these officials are really saying. That’s because they’re speaking in Euro-ese.

Fortunately, there is an answer to their endless riddles: a Euro-to-English dictionary, excerpts of which I have included below. To truly see the meaning of the seismic events rapidly reshaping Europe, you must know what the following 10 Euro terms of art mean in plain American English:

1. Finance ministry: A house of worship where government leaders go to pray for bailouts, economic miracles, panaceas and other forms of divine intervention.

How to use in a sentence: Officials at the Greek Finance Ministry said they remain hopeful the country will receive its next batch of rescue loans in time to avoid a cataclysmic default.

2. Coordinated: Chaotic, unfocused, brain-dead, paralyzed to the point of nonexistence; even in its best moments resembling a hopeless klutz.

Example: Finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations last week said they were “committed to a strong and coordinated international response to address the renewed challenges facing the global economy.”

September 28, 2011

“Fairtrade locks many Africans into non-mechanised, back-breaking cheap labour”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:14

The feel-good virtue implied in the Fairtrade label is actually a deal with the devil for the poor farmer, says Tim Black:

The purpose of the Fairtrade Foundation, we are told, is to guarantee that the producer gets a good deal. The Fairtrade-labelling system, then, is meant to assure us that, when we buy something with the Fairtrade logo, the producers get a better cut of the cash than they would do otherwise. So we effectively pay a little bit more — hence the price premium — to feel a whole lot better about our purchases. Or at least that’s the theory.

But as researchers pointed out earlier this year, the actuality of Fairtrade is not quite as easy on the self-regarding eye of ethical shoppers as the Fairtrade Foundation would have us believe. For a start, it has been suggested that only 25 per cent of the premium price paid for Fairtrade products reaches the producers. Not only that, already-poor farmers actually have to pay to join up to the Fairtrade scheme. And in doing so, they also have to ensure that their business meets certain requirements, whether it is in their long-term interests or not.

And here we come to the main problem. The Fairtrade Foundation demands certain things of the producers if they are to be accepted on to the scheme. For example, producers have to employ what the Fairtrade Foundation deems to be ‘environmentally sound agricultural practices’ and, to qualify as small producers, they have to ‘rely mainly on their own or their family’s labour’. It’s almost cruelly ironic: while champions of Fairtrade claim it is freeing producers from the exploitative relations of the market, it simultaneously ties them into the oppressive and exploitative moral relations of ‘us’ and ‘them’. They have to stick to the letter of ‘our’ vision of the world, in all its sustainable, anti-growth glory. That is, in exchange for a marginally better deal on the market, producers have to adhere to what the Fairtrade Foundation deems to be the right way of farming or harvesting.

This effectively condemns producers desperate for a bit more cash to a low level of material and economic development. In the Fairtrade vision of production, you can forget about the large-scale industrialised production of cocoa; you can forget about the crop-protecting usage of pesticides. What Fairtrade insists upon instead is small-scale cottage industry free of anything that looks too modern, let alone chemical. As Patrick Hayes noted on spiked a couple of years ago, citing a WORLDwrite film called The Bitter Aftertaste, Fairtrade locks many Africans into non-mechanised, back-breaking cheap labour ‘as they cull weeds by hand rather than being able to destroy them with chemicals’.

So while Fairtrade might make us feel good when shopping, it does nothing of the sort for those doing the producing. Which is something to bear in mind when enjoying a bag of non-Fairtrade Skittles.

Toronto: paradise of the high-profit, cellar-dwelling sports franchise

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

Last year, I posted a bit of Toronto-baiting, referring to the town as the place “where professional sports go to be embalmed”. In the comment thread to that post, “Lickmuffin” set me straight about just why Toronto teams are so bad — the answer is that Toronto fans expect no more of them, and are happy to pay for mediocrity. Stephen Marche goes a few steps further on that line (largely proving Lickmuffin’s point):

It’s a given that the true fan goes to games not for the necessarily occasional thrill of winning, but for the quotidian experience of losing — a truth articulated originally and beautifully by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. Losing in Toronto, however, is an unremitting condition. The CFL team, the Argonauts, is so bad that when I recently found a friend of mine betting on it, I immediately wondered if it was time for an intervention about his gambling addiction. As it stands, the Argonauts are 2 and 6 3 and 9. The Blue Jays this year aren’t completely terrible, but when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. They may be a rising power in the East, as many claim, but they sure haven’t risen yet. The Raptors are still in their post-Bosh wilderness (not that the Bosh period was a golden age), and Toronto FC currently rests at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The Leafs, who matter to Torontonians more than all the other teams combined, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and they haven’t made the playoffs in a franchise-record six seasons. The only team with a longer dry spell is the Florida Panthers. The Leafs’ major source of hope seems to be Brian Burke himself, but when the major source of your dreams is a front-office guy, you are in a dark place. Cheering a GM, to me, is hitting rock bottom.

And this in Canada’s biggest city, where hockey matters more than baseball in Boston or basketball in Indiana or football in Texas. The only other places where sports dwell so near the most profound and abiding national questions are rugby in New Zealand, which recoups the warrior culture of the Maori, and football in Buenos Aires, where the slumdog Boca Juniors battle the uptown Millonarios in a never-ending class war. Maybe Real Madrid against Barcelona could be added to that list, but nobody else. People who were surprised that Vancouver burned after the Stanley Cup playoffs last year are unaware of the history of the sport in Canada. Of the 10 biggest riots in Canadian history, six began at hockey games.

[. . .]

So who can blame Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, the business that controls the Leafs and the Raptors, for following that oldest and truest of rules: Never give a sucker an even break? The most recently released financial reports, published by the Toronto Star in 2007 and which were neither confirmed nor denied by the privately held MLSE, suggest they run a profit margin of more than 20 percent. Before we start hacking away at the irresponsible evil-capitalist angle, however, we should recognize that the majority shareholder in MLSE is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund (although they are currently looking to sell); the profits of MLSE have paid for the retirement of a lot of hardworking people, so it’s good that they’re good at business. And they are excellent business people.

Economics on one foot

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:03

September 27, 2011

ReasonTV: ManBearPig, Climategate, and Watermelons

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

James Delingpole is a bestselling British author and blogger who helped expose the Climategate scandal back in 2009. Reason.tv caught up with Delingpole in Los Angeles recently to learn more about his entertaining and provocative new book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors. At its very roots, argues Delingpole, climate change is an ideological battle, not a scientific one. In other words, it’s green on the outside and red on the inside. At the end of the day, according to Delingpole, the “watermelons” of the modern environmental movement do not want to save the world. They want to rule it.

September 26, 2011

Why are gold and silver down in this market?

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:15

It’s a question I’ve been asking too (my miniscule portfolio is taking a beating in both equities and in precious metals). Mike “Mish” Shedlock offers some likely answers:

1. Fed Did Far Less than Expected
The Fed did not do what everyone thought, which is to say something far more than “Operation Twist”. [. . .] In short, the Fed did not print, or even threaten to print. Moreover the Fed committed to a strategy not through the end of this year, but all the way through June of 2012. Perhaps the Fed does more in the interim, perhaps not. [. . .]

2. Mutual Fund Redemptions
Mutual fund cash levels are at or near record lows. In general, mutual funds were not prepared for the market selloff and sell orders came in. Rather than sell garbage like Bank of America at $6, mutual funds unloaded stuff like gold, taking profits.

3. Margin Calls at Hedge Funds
Hedge funds unloaded gold and silver for the same reasons as mutual funds, but also because they mistimed the play and what Bernanke would do. Leverage works both ways.

4. China Growth Story Fading
Commodities in general have been clobbered along with currencies of commodity producing countries because the global economy is slowing rapidly.

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