Via Jonathan Portes (“Not the Treasury View”), here’s NIESR’s latest chart showing – for the UK – the path of recession and recovery in various previous downturns:
The number of dips is not really an issue when you’re flat-lining
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Category Archives: Political Economy
Enjoying the decadence of the intellectual property imperium
US phone companies may now make it a crime to unlock the hardware you bought.
A shopping basket full of patent trolls
Here’s the case of a troll that tried to get royalties from all on-line retailers for the Shopping Cart. Actually sued, and for some time won, for a percentage on all sales passing through those carts – that has to be huge money.
Now this particular troll has lost a big case, invalidating its previous big wins. Any guesses how much was consumed in legal bills and related costs for its various lawsuits, before the dust settled?
Software patents have two functions: they allow big businesses (the ones with patent portfolios, and pockets deep enough to retain intellectual property lawyers as needed) to increase their market power at the expense of small operators who lack those resources; and they provide a living for pure rent seeking patent trolls, and of course the IP lawyers on all sides of these disputes. Big business tends not to like the second function of software patents, but values the first. For the rest of us, they’re both dead losses.
Insourcing?
James Fallows, in The Atlantic, reminds us that one of the problems with Boeing’s Dreamliner has been excessive outsourcing. And he directs us to Charles Fishman‘s story, in the same publication, about some insourcing in General Electric’s household appliance manufacturing.
Fishman’s story is really two stories.
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Karl Marx is dead, really??
Robert Waldman says Theda Scocpal says Marx is dead, on the grounds that the US Republican party didn’t follow big business’s support for [carbon] Cap and Trade legislation in 2007. His post is both interesting and short, so I’ll reproduce it in full:
BP stands first for Brian Plumer then for British Petroleum — I’m pretty sure DuPont is the firm and not Pierre “Pete”. TS is Theda Scocpal. When I knew her (OK when I took freshman physics from her husband Bill) she was one of the few Marxists at Harvard (I think the only one in the Sociology department).
BP: So around 2007, Republicans were becoming more skeptical of climate policy. Yet the main climate strategy in D.C. was to craft a complex cap-and-trade bill amenable to businesses like BP and DuPont in the hopes that those companies would bring in Republican votes.
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GMO giant hires retired cops to hunt down farmers
The glories of the intellectual property imperium! (from Occupy Monsanto)
GMO giants DuPont have contracted dozens of retired law enforcement officers to begin patrolling farms in the US next year to spot any potential intellectual property theft.
DuPont Co, the second-largest seed country in the world, is hoping to find farmers that have purchased contracts to use their genetically modified soybean seeds but have breached the terms of agreement by illegally using the product for repeat harvests. Should farmers replant GMO seeds licensed by DuPont, they could be sued for invalidating their contracts.
This reminded me of my teacher Sam Bowles talking about guard labor (I Google and am glad to find that he still talks about it). Excessive supervision that pays for itself by keeping down wages, prison guards, etc: a great deal of labor is devoted to just watching people who, in a better structure of motivation, would not need to be watched at all.
(To say nothing of the fact the the part of guard labor that consists of prison guards is devoted to keeping prisoners out of the labor market, so that’s everybody’s effort wasted: on this see Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, and John Quiggin. But I digress.)
Further Googling tells me that Bill Totten, who has a company that distributes open source software in Japan, has made just the same association between IP protection and guard labor.
Skills and the response to crisis
My paper with Andrea Filippetti is now available from Birkbeck’s Centre for Innovation Management Research. Bottom line: European countries with a combination of good short-term unemployment insurance and vocational training participation were less likely to see reductions in private sector investment in innovation in the first year of the financial crisis: having just one of these was no help, and job security, the bête noire of neo-liberalism, made no difference. Another way of putting it is that, in this particular case (investment in innovation, during the financial crisis), it is the security part of the flexicurity model that provides the benefit. This is consistent with the logic of Estevez-Abe, Iversen & Soskice’s chapter in Hall & Soskice’s Varieties of Capitalism.
Unpaid interns wasting their time: US study
Employers value what they pay for (or is it pay for what they value?): unpaid interns are no more likely to get a job offer than students who don’t do internships; paid interns improve their odds by over 50%. From a US survey:
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Economic liberalization depends on strong states
Julia Cagé and Lucie Gadenne find that
tariff cuts lead to lower tax revenues as a share of GDP. The drop is highest in poor countries that don’t have the capacity to compensate for lost tariff revenues with domestic taxes.
This is an important point in itself, and illustrates a more general principle that many of the benefits of economic liberalization depend on strong states. Continue reading
Weak intellectual property and economic catch up – the German case
In Der Spiegel, Frank Thadeusz reviews Eckhard Höffner’s work. The story: 19th century Germany had far better dissemination of new scientific & technical ideas, in part because weak copyright enforcement forced publishers into aggressive pricing & paperback editions. In England publishers thrived but most people couldn’t afford their products. This difference helped Germany catch up.
What Höffner describes in 19th century Germany is a sort of open innovation system – not one without intellectual property protection, but one with weak protection. Continue reading
Frederick Guy 