Patents can be beneficial, but are often harmful
One obvious problem [of patents] is that patents, by definition, create monopolies, which impose costs on the rest of society. For example, the patentee could use its technological monopoly to exploit the consumers… But it is not just the problem of income distribution between the patentee and the consumers. Monopoly also creates net social loss by allowing the producer to maximize its profit by producing at a less than socially desirable quantity… Also, because it is a ‘winner takes all’ system, critics point out, the patent system often results in the duplication of research among competitors – this may be wasteful from the social point of view.
New Year’s Resolutions for us all
- Rapid, planned decarbonization and transition to renewables concomitant with equal restrictions on fossil fuel extractions.
- Decommodification of basic social goods that we already know are more efficient and effective when publicly provisioned.
- A vast shift of resources—and sovereign power—to the Global South, not out of moral duty, but out of rational necessity concomitant with a move away from economic-growth paradigms and toward “growth agnosticism,” human development, and redistribution.
- An end to further dispossession and enclosure, and a turn to sustainable, agroecological food production.
- A permanent shift in the balance of political power away from capital and to labor.
- Greater restrictions, and democratic guidance, of capital flows, and greater freedom and facilitation for human migrations.
- And, underneath all, a release from the vicious cycle described above, a world of greater individual, social, and political security, greater temporal freedom, greater if different material freedoms, and greater human flourishing.
Tuesday shoesday – Merry Christmas!
Drifter – Passion ballet flats in Deep Red
Doing state-owned enterprises right
Enterprises in industries that are natural monopolies, industries that involve large investment and high risk and enterprises that provide essential services should be kept as SOEs [state-owned enterprises], unless the government has very high tax-raising and/or regulatory capabilities. … Privatizing politically important enterprises on the basis of dispersed share sales is unlikely to resolve the under lying problems of poor SOE performance, because the newly privatized firm will have more or less the same problems as when it was under state ownership. …
SOE performance can often be improved without privatization. … Very often, public enterprises are charged with serving too many goals … There is nothing wrong with state-owned enterprises serving multiple goals, but what the goals are and the relative priority among them need to made clear
The monitoring system can also be improved. In many countries, SOEs are monitored by multiple agencies, which means either that they are not meaningfully supervised by any particular agency or that there is a supervisory over-kill that disrupts daily management …
… More competition is not always better, but competition is often the best way to improve enterprise performance. Public enterprises that are not natural monopolies can easily be made to compete with private-sector firms. … [W]here feasible, competition can be increased by setting up another SOE. … Of course, SOEs are often in industries where there is a natural monopoly, where increasing competition within the industry is either impossible or would be socially unproductive. But, even in these sectors, some degree of competition may be injected by boosting some “neighboring” industries (airlines vs. railways).
A lot of our problems are the same problem
recycling simply does not work to reduce the amount of plastic in the world”.
And although the public’s enthusiasm for anti-plastic campaigns is partly motivated by the feeling that it is a simpler and more solvable problem than climate change, the two issues are more closely connected than most people realise. Seven of the 10 largest plastic producers are still oil and natural gas companies – as long as they are extracting fossil fuels, there will be a huge incentive to make plastic. A 2016 World Economic Forum report predicted that by 2050, 20% of all oil extracted across the world would go towards making plastic. “Ultimately, plastic pollution is the visible and tangible part of human-made global change,” the scientists Johanna Kramm and Martin Wagner wrote in a recent paper.
This is the paradox of plastic, or at least our current obsession with it: learning about the scale of the problem moved us to act, but the more we push against it, the more it begins to seem just as boundless and intractable as all the other environmental problems we have failed to solve. And it brings us up against the same obstacles: unregulatable business, the globalised world, and our own unsustainable way of life.