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Lots of assorted links
1. Sushi robots.
2. The market for hugs: not a Bertrand equilibrium.
3. What spelling bee champions have in common.
4. Culture of sexual violence.
5. In defense of weaker copyright.
6. Short video of me speaking on higher education.
7. More from Paul Samuelson; read for instance his bits on Larry Summers.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 18, 2009 at 02:04 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I've calculated it before: if the higher estimates of rape in South Africa are correct, it comes out to more than one rape per woman over a lifetime.
Posted by: Careless at Jun 18, 2009 3:00:36 PM
Tyler, are you planning on reviewing Eric Falkenstein's new book on your blog? I'm very curious what you think about it.
Posted by: tal at Jun 18, 2009 3:30:34 PM
Samuelson: "The governor of the Bank of England seems to have forgotten or not known that there was no bank insurance in England..". Perhaps accuracy is too much to ask for from a 94 year old.
Posted by: dearieme at Jun 18, 2009 3:49:13 PM
I love the part about Larry Summers never taking a course from Samuelson, which Samuelson interprets as avoiding perceptions of nepotism. More likely, Summers had a pretty good idea of Samuelson's teaching ability.
After suffering with Samuelson's intro textbook as a college freshman--we had the funky '70s edition with the brown-green-orange graphs--I had Samuelson as a professor in grad school at the end of his career. He was at least one standard deviation worse than every other economics instructor I've experienced. His pomposity was only mildly annoying; the worst was his digression-on-digression rambling-man style, combined with his in medias res approach to every topic. The jingling cowbell or whatever the hell he was carrying in his front pants pocket added to the surreality of the experience.
Obviously, the man is a giant of the field as a discoverer of theoretical methods and new applications for those methods. But I wouldn't take him seriously as a guide to pedagogy, policy, or institutions.
Posted by: srp at Jun 18, 2009 7:37:55 PM
"Hey we can use math for this money stuff" or Krugman's "trade really does work." Surfers often think they made the wave.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 18, 2009 8:32:17 PM
If copyright is about incentivizing new authorial works, how is it that Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare were able to produce their writings without copyright?
Another urban legend bites the dust, which actually happened a long time ago.
Posted by: AADL at Jun 18, 2009 9:01:29 PM
I can well believe that Samuelson was a pompous ass and a horrible teacher. He was a second rate economist compared to Mises and Hayek. Indeed, I would call him a hackonomist.
Philip Mirowski deconstructs him in his book "More Heat than Light." See chap. 7, "The Ironies of Physics Envy."
Posted by: AADL at Jun 18, 2009 9:06:46 PM
"If copyright is about incentivizing new authorial works, how is it that Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare were able to produce their writings without copyright?"
QED(?)
Posted by: Vernunft at Jun 18, 2009 9:51:44 PM
I'm still waiting for Walt to come out with more classic cartoons or Sonny to get back with Cher. The Mickey Mouse and Sonny Bono protection acts just haven't incentivized them to product any new works.
Posted by: mulp at Jun 19, 2009 2:52:12 AM
South Africa sounds like a real left wing paradise with the free love and all!
Posted by: lolsouthafrica at Jun 19, 2009 4:40:16 AM
I hate it how these file-sharer addicts try to find "evidence" that copyright should be abolished so that they can feel even better about file-sharing. I think there is a reason why copyright was introduced. Probably not a coincidence that it started to appear soon after copying texts became relatively cheap due to the book press.
Posted by: IWantCookieNow at Jun 19, 2009 4:50:09 AM
Why not a simple(r) IP licensing market? It seems like if an entity is making money of your IP it's easy enough to sue them. If individuals are copying it for personal use, of course they think they are better off, and good luck stopping them. Is this what all the liberal artists were fighting for when they decried the "music industry"?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading
The distributors are fighting a rearguard action in a losing battle. When they win in the courts they look stoopid and evil. Selling a product universally seen as overpriced and being despised for screwing your suppliers and your customers isn't much of a business model. You can use the government as your monetization mechanism. Good luck with that too.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 19, 2009 9:03:30 AM
From the comments after the Samuelson interview:
In 1989, he delivered this chestnut: "The Soviet economy is proof that ... a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."
What I don't get is why Samuelson then (and Krugman now) are considered to be great economists, when they so manifestly are not.
Posted by: AADL at Jun 19, 2009 9:07:16 AM
Re Chaucer, etc.
The developments within the area of the printing press probably had something to do with that. The analogy breaks down quite rapidly when one looks at the increasing at which a work may be copied.
Posted by: Lance at Jun 19, 2009 12:40:54 PM
*Increasing rate
Posted by: Lance at Jun 19, 2009 12:41:32 PM
Re: Chaucer, etc.
The increasing rate at which works could be copied (remember the printing press was introduced after Chaucer and Homer) with minimal cost easily makes the comparison of previous great writers to today quite irrelevant.
Posted by: Lance at Jun 19, 2009 12:43:19 PM
Lance,
There is no more justification on economic grounds today than there was either before the invention of the printing press, or the creation of the Stationers' Company, or the Statute of Anne, which was the first copyright law. Creators of books, music, art, etc. can earn competitive rents (or profits) without having their works copyrighted. And contrary to another urban legend, which he himself promoted, Charles Dickens was paid royalties by three American authors, despite the inapplicability of U.S. copyright law to the works of foreign authors at that time.
A first mover advantage is enough to earn profits on creative works, particularly combined with alternative distribution mechanisms, such as authors' book tours, new introductions to later editions of books, musicians' concerts, etc.
Check out Michelle Boldrin's and David J. Levine's recent book "Against Intellectual Monopoly," which refutes the case for copyright, in addition to other forms of the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property.
Posted by: AADL at Jun 19, 2009 3:48:30 PM
Homer didn't produce any writings.
Posted by: dearieme at Jun 19, 2009 7:15:55 PM
Homer didn't produce any writings.
The Illiad and The Odyssey.
Posted by: AADL at Jun 19, 2009 9:43:13 PM
AADL,
I'll have to certainly check out the work you recommended, especially since they have denied the protection of monopoly!
Posted by: Lance at Jun 20, 2009 6:43:27 PM
Homer did not write the Iliad and the Odyssey. There is even a question on whether a single Homer existed or if he was a composite of many storytellers. The Iliad and Odyssey were handed down by Homer, but he or his composite did not write it down. Only many decades later were the actual stories written down.
Posted by: techreseller at Jun 22, 2009 11:51:19 AM
Copyright may be defensible (incentives other than fame matter), but eternal copyright is not (do Walt Disney's great-grandchildren really need the revenue stream?).
Posted by: Ian at Jun 22, 2009 8:17:57 PM
