The ever-excellent James Surowiecki, writes in The New Yorker
The point isn’t that private property is a bad thing, or that the state should be able to run roughshod over the rights of individual owners. Property rights (including patents) are essential to economic growth, providing incentives to innovate and invest. But property rights need to be limited to be effective. The more we divide common resources like science and culture into small, fenced-off lots, Heller shows, the more difficult we make it for people to do business and to build something new. Innovation, investment, and growth end up being stifled.
But for the reason I have set out here in more detail, this critique of intellectual property rights concedes too much.
It is true that society needs economic incentives to invest in research and
innovation, and that one way to do that is to create artificial temporary
monopolies (such as those provided by so-called “intellectual property rights”). But
we should not be seduced by the language of “property rights” into
thinking that ideas protected by patent are like other kinds of “property”. There is an important econmic difference between the consumption of ideas and the consumption of other things: consumption of ideas is “non-rival” – that is, my use of an idea does not preclude you from using the same idea. So if we prevent someone from using someone else’s idea, we deprive them of a benefit that would have cost the rest of us nothing at all, and that is generally bad economics. (That is why some free-market economists are also sceptical of intellectual property.)
The state is “riding roughshed” over its citizen’s rights not, as Surowiecki has it, when it does not enforce patents, but rather when it creates them in the first place. That doesn’t mean there should not be any intellectual property rights – there is a defensible utilitarian argument for granting some temporary monopolies to create returns for innovators – but we should be clear that it is the establishment and enforcement of patents, not limiting them, that amounts to state interference in the freedoms of the individual.
Hat tip: Tom Watson
launched Google News in English for Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe,
Namibia, Ghana, Uganda and Botswana allowing users to search and view news in
localized editions, and helping dozens of African news sites make their stories
available to users worldwide.
Google News Ethiopia is here: http://news.google.com.et/
Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development is one of the smartest (and nicest) people who think seriously about development. What I particularly like is his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom – and to back his judgements with well-researched evidence. When he had doubts about the common view that it was a bad idea for industrialized countries to “poach” health workers from developing countries, he didn’t just put a theoretical argument – he went to Africa to gather data and interview health workers there to understand their stories. His blog post today If Congress Admits More Foreign Nurses, Will It Be Responsible for Killing Children in Poor Countries? Think Again is a good example of the clarity of his thought:
Africa needs stronger health systems, to be sure, but can we build those systems with our immigration policy? There is no scientific evidence that this has happened anywhere, or is possible anywhere. We should be very hesitant to force real people with real families to accept wages that we would never accept, without overwhelming and indisputable proof that by itself this blunt act does enormous good.
The Los Angeles Times reckons it knows the causes of Ethiopia’s famines:
Simply put, the nation, in which 85% of people toil as small farmers, has reached a point where it can’t easily grow enough food to meet its needs. Although agricultural production has increased overall, it has declined per capita, according to the World Bank.
This is a complete pile of piffle. Overpopulation is not the problem:
- Population density is about 70 people per km2 in Ethiopia. That may seem a lot – it is about twice the density of the US. But Nigeria has a population density of 142 p/km2; China 138 p/km2; Sri Lanka 316 p/km2; Rwanda 343 p/km2; South Korea 498 p/km2. There is no famine in any of those countries. So why is 70 people per square km too many in Ethiopia?
- There was famine in Ethiopia in both the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was one third and one half, respectively, of the population today.
- Of Ethiopia’s 113 million hectares, less than 5% is currently irrigated. Ethiopia is the water tower of East Africa, with huge natural resources. But it is one of the lowest ranked countries in the world in the use of irrigation, fertilizers, modified seeds, tractors and other technologies that would multiply agricultural production.
The problem in Ethiopia’s agriculture is not shortage of land relative to the size of the population but shortage of resources, especially money and appropriate technology.
You have to wonder at lazy journalism like this. Is there a whiff of racism in the knee-jerk assumption that Ethiopia’s problem is that there are “too many of them”?
Yash Tandon, writing in Business Daily Africa says that that the Paris Declaration on aid is a form of collective colonialism by donors:
under the pretext of making aid more effective the Paris Declaration project is a form of collective colonialism by Northern “donors” of those countries in the South that (because of their weakness and vulnerability and psychology of “dependency”) may allow themselves to be subjected to it at the Accra September Conference.
This is massively overstated, but there is a kernel of truth here. Donors have the money, the choice and the power, and however progressive individual officials want to be, that power relationship is translated into institutional mechanisms such as the Paris Declaration.
That said, the Paris Declaration is the best opportunity for a generation to change that power relationship, by committing the donors to improving their behaviour as donors, including several measures which could, over time, rebalance the power.
I will be at the Accra September Conference and will report on whether we make progress.
Bill Clinton has finally been persuaded that investment in health systems is more important than funding “vertical” initiatives for particular diseases:
“That’s increasingly in the last few years what our foundation has been focused on – what is the most cost-effective way to mobilise a national health system,” Mr Clinton said.“You can get the universal treatment – the money’s there now, if we spend it most effectively.”
“But we don’t have the health care systems to reach out to people, get them tested and diagnosed in a timely fashion, get them on treatment and do the regular follow-ups.”
Well good. This is what the aid experts have been saying for years. It is why many of us opposed the establishment of funds like the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and PEPFAR in the first place. But politicians like to announce things that they think their public will understand, and big disease-specific initiatives are the kind of thing that seems to fit the bill.
This is without doubt the best out of office reply I’ve ever received.
I’ll be in Africa until the end of August, with irregular access to e-mail. No doubt I will still neurotically check my messages, but I may only be able to respond to pressing issues. I’ll try to get back to all as soon as possible.
I won’t tell you who it is from but he is a well-known development blogger.
Better examples gratefully received in the comments.
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