Comments for David Brooks Is Projecting His Self Indulgence Again at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 40 out of 20 comments http://www.cepr.net Wed, 22 May 2013 05:16:36 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13826 You say my point regarding the relative objectionability of med patent and copyright protections is "completely wrong". Your next sentence starts by affirming my conclusion, then rejecting my reasoning. How does that equate to completely wrong? Maybe you should dial back the hyperbole? I don't personally believe that the concept of patent is waaaay more objectionable in general than copyright, as you seem to. Just medical patent, which is counter to progress in medical care and outcomes. In other words, it is against society's interest to grant patents for medicines. It is absolutely in society's interest to protect copyright, unless we want a country in which only those who can afford to give away their art can produce art. I don't agree as you seem to that all patent protection is a problem. Just the idea that profits should be more important than medical need. And it is silly in my mind to declare all intellectual property protection to be similar to med patent protection. Just as the healthcare market is different from most markets, med patents are different from most patents, and copyright. - Erik Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:18:16 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13779 Brooks acknowledges: "Today we have oligarchic economics ..." what is his proposal: "Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state." Well i don't know what that means, but the rest of his comments are truly more a rant than arguments. And the worst you didn't attack here. From simple logic this is obviously wrong: "It spends so much on poverty programs that if we just took that money and handed poor people checks, we would virtually eliminate poverty overnight." Or does he mean the money from "poverty programs" is mostly diverted to non-poor people? This is meant with "reform the welfare state" ? - Michael Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:42:09 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13770 [b]Jerry Brown[/b] wrote, [quote]It is quite possible that David Brooks training as a historian enables him to see this more clearly than Paul Krugman or Dean Baker.[/quote] LOL. - liberal Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:50:14 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13769 [b]Jerry Brown[/b] wrote, [quote]Progressives believe in the ability of technocrats like Krugman to optimize the distribution of wealth with "carefully crafted legislation".[/quote] More nonsense. Government currently acts to secure privileges that largely though not entirely accrue to the rich. That's both unjust and economically inefficient. Undoing those unjust and inefficient mechanisms requires writing laws, or equivalently un-writing existing laws. [quote]In a perfect world, that might work. In the messy, complicated world we live in, there is no single "ism" that will work. [/quote] Perhaps not, but "working against providing opportunities for economic rent collection" will go a long way. - liberal Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:38:15 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13768 [b]Jerry Brown[/b] wrote, [quote]...progressivism's most cherished belief - that technocrats could solve all of our social and economic ills through the redsistribution of wealth. [/quote] What utter nonsense. Liberals want to solve much (not all) of our socio-economic ills by [b]not having the government transfer as much wealth upwards[/b]. You apparently are under the delusion that government acts, on net, to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle and poor. That's empirically false. The largest transfer of wealth is to landowners, who on net tend to be relatively wealthy. (Meaning, in particular, that while quite a few nonwealthy people own land, it's not as much as the wealthy.) Behind land, there's the economic privilege inherent in banking; bank owners, bondholders, and management tend to be wealthy. Commercial banks are privileged by the right to create money and lend it out at interest. The entire financial sector is privileged because the government acts as backstop to failure (heads I win, tails the taxpayer loses). Then, as Dean mentioned, there's things like patent and copyright, and limits on competition in relatively well-remunerated fields like medicine and law. - liberal Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:33:15 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13767 [b]Erik[/b] wrote, [quote]Copyright and patent are different and the degree to which the government "enforces monopolies" on the two is also quite different. The exclusive right to sell copies of one's art is certainly not as objectionable as the power to decide who lives and dies based on the ability to pay for an overpriced medication.[/quote] No, you have this completely wrong. It's true that patents are more objectionable than copyright, but not for the reason you mention. Rather, patents are more objectionable because they constitute a larger constraint on freedom than do copyrights, since they're broader. (Because copyright only "protects" the (relatively) narrow form of expression, whereas patents "protect" ideas.) - liberal Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:26:09 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13766 I have no idea what you were trying to say. - Jerry Brown Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:24:20 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13765 Than who? To use the phrase "redistribute wealth" is to regard wealth as a scalar and ignore the historic, active, "verb" part of the process of distributing wealth. "Distributing wealth" is a vector, it has magnitude, direction and also, duration through time. One doesn't simply level everyone's pile of chips and then expect different outcomes. This is the error in statements such as the one I quoted above in which you wrongly attribute that error to progressives. - diesel Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:02:26 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13764 There are many economist who believe that the current economic crisis is a long-delayed response to deep structural changes in our economy and culture. If they are correct, our unemployment problems won't be solved by theories that focus on restoring demand. It is quite possible that David Brooks training as a historian enables him to see this more clearly than Paul Krugman or Dean Baker. - Jerry Brown Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:52:39 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13762 Wealth is distributed badly. I think David Brooks would agree with that. Progressives believe in the ability of technocrats like Krugman to optimize the distribution of wealth with "carefully crafted legislation". In a perfect world, that might work. In the messy, complicated world we live in, there is no single "ism" that will work. Futhermore, it is power that is in most need of redistribution. Concentrating it in government or labor is as bad or worse than concentrating it in business institutions. I think you will find that theme throughout Brook's writing. - Jerry Brown Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:31:39 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13761 As remarked above debt is largely a distributional problem as the rich are usually net creditors and the poor are net debtors. Excessive debt, aside from debt help by foreigners which is a tax on the economy say government debt is in effect a redistribution of income from poorer system (the average taxpayer) to richer citizens (the bondholders). Excessive debt means redistribution upward which can counterbalance whatever progressive features the taxcode has. One needs to see the size of this effect. It may be one should means test government repayment with repayment only going to poorer individuals for examplwe - Michael Cohen Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:18:11 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13760 In a perfect world, you might be right. In this world, David is right. And he's much more polite. - Jerry Brown Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:05:13 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13754 "progressivism's most cherished belief [is} that technocrats could solve all of our social and economic ills through the redsistribution of wealth". Not so. Progressives believe that the current Inequality in the distribution of wealth [b]is the cause[/b] of our social and economic ills. There's a subtle difference. The wealth has already been "redistributed", and that in an unjust and deleterious way that has damaged the social fabric. - diesel Wed, 28 Dec 2011 08:10:18 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13752 Paul Krugman writes that it's still clearly insufficient demand that is causing unemployment, not new technology. He's probably looked at the facts as opposed to Brooks. - fuller schmidt Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:50:08 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13751 It is also possible that worlwide increases in inequality have much to do with another worldwide phenomenon: complete liberalization of finantial transactions (with accompanying tax fleeing). That means increasing money flow to the rentiers. - Ignacio Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:32:51 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13749 I firmly agree with everything Dean writes above except the lumping in of copyright and patent. As a creator if copyrighted material (in the arts), I must object to vaguely referencing copyright in the context of medical patents. Copyright and patent are different and the degree to which the government "enforces monopolies" on the two is also quite different. The exclusive right to sell copies of one's art is certainly not as objectionable as the power to decide who lives and dies based on the ability to pay for an overpriced medication. The younger generation's desire to steal music and movies and circumvent the established method of compensating artists is really not analagous to life and death concerns relating to med patents. The work of developing medicine does not require private industry, as its goals are clear and measurable and can be effectively reached without profit motive. There is, in other words, no chilling effect created by doing away with med patents assuming the government does so as part of a shift toward socialized medicine in general. Of course, government taking over the business of artistic expression would turn the arts into a de facto propaganda tool. Doing away with copyright protection, in other words, would have much stronger cultural effects, ultimately changing who we are as a people, than would the narrow example of med patents. It seems obvious that any private system requires some protection of the fruit of one's labor. If you're arguing for socializing medicine, I'm with you. But your argument really seems to condemn all intellectual property law to avoid one specific bad outcome of those laws. Sorry to rant. I'm sure you were just a little flustered by Brooks's silliness. But let's not throw the artists in with the death and disease profiteers. Okay? - Erik Wed, 28 Dec 2011 07:23:11 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13748 Regarding your arguments bashing Brooks: The following is an unproven assumption. "If the government had used bigger stimulus to get the unemployment rate down to say -- 7 percent -- it is difficult to believe that the Democrats would have suffered such a big defeat last year, in spite of people's fear of big government." The following statement doesn't change the fact that large numbers of unskilled people who can no longer find jobs in factories will likely have serious difficulties finding new occupations. And it is extremely naive to think that everyone can become "knowledge workers". "The fact that 100 people in a factory can produce the same output as 1000 people did 30 years ago means that we are potentially much richer than we were 30 years ago. We can have the other 900 people doing other productive work. Alternatively, we can all work many fewer hours." You're putting words in Brooks mouth with this statement. Brooks wouldn't disagree with you that government is a big part of the problem. "Furthermore, it is not a simple fact of nature that the information economy will generate inequality, it requires the hand of Brooks' friend: big government. People are getting rich off the information economy because the government enforces copyright and patent monopolies." Toward the end, you reveal the real point of your attack on Brooks - the defense of progressivism's most cherished belief - that technocrats could solve all of our social and economic ills through the redsistribution of wealth. "As a country we cannot impose huge debt burdens on our children. It is impossible, at least if we are referring to government debt. The reason is simple, at one point we will all be dead. That means that the ownership of our debt will be passed on to our children. If we have some huge thousand trillion dollar debt that is owed to our children, then how have we imposed a burden on them? There is a distributional issue -- Bill Gates children may own all the debt -- but that is within generations, not between generations." - Jerry Brown Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:58:42 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13745 History in pictures: http://www.angrybearblog.com/2011/12/meme-that-refuses-to-die-government.html In 200 years the U.S. has never paid off its debt, except once (result: massive depression). Nor, in *400 years,* has the U.K. We're not paying off our great-grandparents' debt, and our great-grandchildren won't be paying off ours. The only reason the country even issues "debt" (bonds) today is because economists are still stuck with gold-standard (mis)understandings. We could be issuing dollar bills instead of t-bills. It comes to exactly the same thing (yes, including its effect on inflation), but without the bogeyman word "debt" attached. And without paying "investors" to store their wealth for them, risk-free. - Steve Roth Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:42:28 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13743 From the numbers given by Joe Emersberger, I would say that US's inequality increased more than Sweden's, because I would use the difference rather than % change. After all, if the Gini coefficient increased from 0.01 to 0.02, that's a 100% increase, as is 0.5 to 1, which is much more significant. Also, you could equivalently use 1-Gini as an index of equality, but this trivial change makes the % change much lower for Sweden. - Mike B. Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:29:54 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again#comment-13742 If you could suggest some empirical or theoretical support for the proposition, "if the One Percent pocket most of the benefits of productivity growth, then we may have real problems of stagnation and lack of job growth", I'd really appreciate it. It sounds right but I would like to see it tested empirically or set in a more rigorous setting. Thank you. - Lots to Learn Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:29:57 +0100