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Economic logic proves Boldrin and Levine are correct

Jeffrey has been live-blogging our book over at Mises. There have been lots of interesting comments pro and con; and at least a few conversions. The final chapter is here and you can find the grand collection here. We all encourage you to go leave comments.

Chapter 9 live blog

Live blog 7

"Some talk about the problems of general equilibrium theory and the Austrian alternative. Some amazing material for dissertations."

Jeffrey Tucker's live blog has moved to Chapter 6.

link to the live blog here

I'm going to add a few comments of my own about copyright. There are basically four areas covered by copyright.

Entertainment: This is the tail that wags the dog. Not that entertainment isn't important; it is just that only a small subpart of the entertainment industry is covered by copyright. Let's call that the "professional entertainment" industry - popular fiction and non-fiction; movies; tv; professional music. The problem is that this industry is minuscule - smaller than just the IBM Corporation alone. Absent copyright, we'd lose some marginal contributions, and the very rich people at the top would be less rich. However, "professional entertainment" is tiny compared to "entertainment" which would include everything from home videos, to playing games, to talking on the phone with your friends. This industry is an order of magnitude bigger than "professional entertainment." And the main use of copyright in the "professional entertainment" industry is to limit competition from the "amateur entertainment" industry. Whatever we would lose from the professionals (not much, since copyright is de facto gone anyway) would be more than made up for by the amateurs.

Textbooks: Few people are educated by reading textbooks. If fewer text books are written without copyright (let's hope so since they are all the same) then the people who teach classes will have to do a better job; write more lecture notes; or create open source textbook - else we won't collect our pay as teachers. This industry is a sick joke: copyright is used so that teachers who are too lazy to develop their own material and don't pay for the texts themselves will assign bland overpriced texts to their captive students.

Scientific Research: Getting rid of copyright here would just accelerate the move towards open access scientific publications. If not for the fact that commercial publishers own the reputations of existing journals, they would be gone already. Scientific information is spread through the internet in preprints and working papers; publishing plays no role.

Software: This is an important industry. And one that can thrive without copyright as the example of open source/free software shows. Nor would the proprietary sector be driven out of existence - technical means of protection would still be available without copyright.

Jeffrey Tucker is back at it.

Over at the Mises Blog Jeffrey Tucker is reviewing and blogging about Michele's and my book Against Intellectual Monopoly. Here's a direct link to his article. As Jeffrey says: the discussion is getting pretty wild...we are being accused of being socialists in favor of some sort of common ownership among other things, presumably by someone who didn't read the book. If you have a few minutes, go take a look. You can also buy it from them link here