Which came first?
The trickled-down chicken pot pie (a great
"innovation" for
its time), or
the technology-incubating tooth fairy egg? (Which first?) And
did patents help in any of it? Did patents send the right kind of message to
them who do the inventing?
Inquiring economists (don't) want to know:
Read it here: ...
(a PDF position paper ... click to read)
Huff Post short story take on the Fed's
Kill-all-Patents Paper:
The paper ... argues that the patent system is damaging public health by raising the cost of prescription drugs, while failing to generate a plethora of innovative new treatments for life-saving diseases.
Hoping to improve patent quality, Boldrin and Levine say,
is a lost cause.
"Why use band-aids to staunch a major wound?" Boldrin and Levine wrote. "Economists fought for decades -- ultimately with considerable success -- to reduce restrictions on international trade. A similar approach, albeit less slow, should be adopted to phase out patents [altogether]."
====================================
More details out of the Kill-all-Patents Paper
... an analytic look
PAGE 5:
Fed Fanta-thought #1.1:
"
The market for software and hardware may be viewed as a ... special case. Generally the fixed cost of
producing [already-invented] software [(as opposed to "
developing" it)] is low ... This, however, pales in comparison to the cost of
developing new medicines [(as opposed to "
producing" them)]– which is estimated to have a present value of closer to 1 billion USD – the same way it does in front of that for
developing [as opposed to "
producing"] a new model of automobile ... "
((The Steppy smells a rotting fish here: Observe that the above paragraph compares apples with grapefruits. "Developing" and "producing" (mass producing) are not one and the same thing. Sneaky fellas them are at the Fed. Hee hee ha. Click Read More to see more analysis.))
