Any listeners out there remember the 60s jingle? Hey Baby They’re Playing Our Song on the Lance Roberts Show.
Actually, that was Art Roberts, an extremely popular DJ on WLS in Chicago, back when WLS had real broadcasting.
Roberts, Lance Roberts, is still going strong, and he’s playing our song.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Lance for about 18 minutes yesterday. We had fun but the topics were serious.
Please give this a play.
Thanks Lance!
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
That would certainly be a win.But guess who will not do it? The US Sugar Lobby, Corn Lobby, and places like Boeing that get a war subsidy. The best approach when given goods too cheap (steel and solar, like Trump is protesting), is to accept it with open arms. The more free or cheap goods we get the better off we are. Tariffs are stupid whether or not any other country has them. That is the bottom line.
I like it when you do radio stuff like this because you have to dumb it down to where people like me can understand 🙂 About what it means to “win” a trade war. What if the definition of winning is: they remove their tariffs in exchange for us removing ours? Could that be the endgame here? It’s probably a stretch to call that “winning” but it might be good outcome all the same.
The difficult question is always how are the innovators to afford major resources if they can’t secure a return for their sponsor if they did discover something?
This wasn’t much of a problem historically when the innovating scientists just happened to also be part of the wealthy elite. I sit very uncomfortably with an irresistible idea that everything that’s gone wrong with the university system can be traced back to sponsoring those who needed to work for a living to go to university in place of the children of the extremely rich.
The presumption in our approach to higher education for social benefit is that only intelligence matters, and places at the university should meritocratically be awarded to the most intelligent as we can measure it. Alas it’s a nice idea, but history is proving that its better for a society to push its wealthy towards innovation over its intelligent. IQ is marginal, wealth is alas not, and there’s only so much you can do to spread wealth around without using the hand of tyranny.
I’m not advocating any return to elitism though. I’m only trying to outline how I perceive we got to this point where we can’t seem to reconcile resources to projects of innovation as we used to be able to: there’s no comparison between the landed gentry of yore and the plutocracy of today. The former was as great as the latter is useless (save Elon Musk: the exception that proves the rule). It’s just an uncomfortable truth.
Yeah it does. And we know from studies now the human beings are motivated to innovate not by monetary incentives but social acknowledgement and curiosity more than anything else.
To phrase that more deeply and poetically, people would rather raise their own credibility than have credit of another financial entity awarded to them.
I’m not for patent system, and pretty much sceptical of the entire intellectual property arena as a whole. But I do think a reputation system should be maintained. It is still important to keep a record of who invented, discovered or contributed what idea. It is indeed very damaging if a society completely ignores its innovators.
**Rayner-Hills: “Only a corporation can psychologically endure a corporate landscape.”**
Well said. Since lobbyists paid by corporations are the ones writing the law these days, that is not too surprising. Abuse of patent protection is a big problem too. In general, rent collecting on concepts and discoveries in nature is a disincentive for private innovation.
I’ll add to that even domestic production. I don’t think we should underestimate how much entrepreneurial spirit we have lost down the decades with the loss of the DIY household.
The greatest inventors throughout history were just as productive in their “spare time” (re: consumer time) as in their working time – indeed in most other times and places that cultural distinction was considerably weaker.
It is on this point that corporate and legal bureaucracy really takes its toll. I’d say China’s willingness to supply the US consumer with cheap electronics to play around with is all that is compensating for the unbelievable barriers to entry imposed on the individual’s pursuit of productive experiment.
Indeed as far as chemistry goes, it’s practically illegal to be a hobbyist chemist. And that’s a huge deal, the early 20th century revolution in chemistry, and definitely all the groundwork that led up to that, none of that would have happened in today’s legal environment because of crippling time and money constraints that are bureaucratically imposed onto the individual risk-taker. The amount of forms involved in private experiment is enough to take the wind out of the sails of any enthusiastic scientist. Only a corporation can psychologically endure a corporate landscape.
Subsidizing “consumers” is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s not even consumption in most cases, this is productive capital that China gives us. Subsidized solar panels boosts productive capacity, and much besides. China subsidizes PRODUCERS.