For example, the marketplace seeks out both comedic writers and comedic actors, although the best comedic actors are more highly compensated.

The problem is that many popular comedians (e.g. Robin Williams, Carlos Mencia, and the execrable Dane Cook) are reputed get their jokes from other comedians — an obscure comedian who hires a writer is essentially buying the right to run focus groups for the big shots. If the jokes are disclosed before purchase, they’ll probably never be bought; if they’re disclosed after, there’s a “lemons” problem: joke writers are likely to give their best jokes to the people with the best delivery, and their worst to the most obscure comedians, just to get good PR and avoid the association with bad acts.

I am, of course, always one Jobs away from being proven wrong, but jobs was living in a world that had typewriters, arcade games, and typewriters; building an IP market requires lots of infrastructure and paradigms (and probably legal intervention) that we don’t have yet.

It happened for GUI and I don’t see why it couldn’t happen for a market for start up ideas, simply because (according to George Tziralis) such a market hasn’t existed up to this current point in time.

I’m not saying it can’t exist because it won’t exist — how could that be my view, when I just said that entrepreneurs (more or less defined as “people who make something that didn’t exist yet exist”) are behind lots of market growth that you blamed on market growth? I think it’s impractical for the same reason that a market in jokes is impractical: the important thing is the delivery.

The GUI idea was just an idea until Jobs and Woz turned it into the GUI business. They didn’t start with computers (they did phone phreaking beforehand — high gross but no net). Given that they took off as entrepreneurs before they knew about GUIs, I don’t think you can call GUIs their catalyst.

It would have been a great idea if implemented in 1992, it would be a great idea if implemented today, it would be a great idea if implemented in 2020.

Mhm. You notice the unemployment rate among founder types is low, but there’s a huge surplus of foundable ideas. And yet you claim a tight market for the ideas?

Was there no creatable demand for gui prior to the mac?

I’ll assume you meant to type “Xerox Star” instead of ‘mac’. You’ll note that the Star was invented by researchers at a large institution; the GUI was then ‘borrowed’ by a brilliant engineer named Steve and an incredible salesman named Steve. If the idea was more important than the Steves, why did the idea languish until the Steves showed up?

Perhaps we can create an information market on whether a startup idea market will be viable prior to investing in creating a startup idea market.

I know it was in jest, but this is creepily similar to the RIAA model. Since IP would only offer a competitive advantage if it were kept secret, your pitch would be, essentially, “Give us money for the right not to talk about what you gave us money for! Then you’ll get money if our secret ideas work out all right!”

If you wanted to start a market like that, you’d probably want to start it within a company (so everyone is already covered by nondisclosure, and so their cost of getting information is lower). For your idea to be effective, it needs to reinvent the internal prediction market — and while it’s never too late for an idea to turn into a startup, you’ve got to admit that other people have a head start.