9 Comments

I disagree with the premise. One of the things that many people think promotes innovation is getting everyone as educated as possible. And that's a very major part of what the state does. When I was in my teens, a political party won power on a slogan that was literally, "Education, education, education." More things that are widely assumed to promote innovation and are strongly supported by western policy elites: local peace, free markets, access to finance, freedom of speech.

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Isn't part of this the risk-averse nature of capital? He have more capital now than at anytime in human history, but most of it is being poured into real estate and the stock market. You would need to incentivize large capital pools to put more than the current 2-5% into venture capital.

Also, perhaps government investments could get a royalty on innovations that create value? RIght now it's easy to rail against government "spending," but what's the ROI on ARPA?

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So Bernie Sanders was correct when lamenting "we don't need 23 kinds of deodorant"?

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I like X prizes.

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Don't underestimate the resistance to change of the majority of the population. They won't tell you they don't want innovation, but what they really want is different results while everything stays the same. Hence the overbearing regulatory state.

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"...Hence, while skeptics of the patent system such as Boldrin and Levine (2013) rightly point out the lack of evidence on patents encouraging research investments, the types of analyses presented in Budish, Roin, and Williams (2015) and Moscona (2020) suggest that more work is needed on this key question."(Emphasis mine)

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Yes, typo now fixed.We do invest in the future, so we'd at least do better to switch to more effective forms of investment.

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If the benefits of innovation accrue to people of the future, that would be a reason not to invest so much in the present.

Our world be more innovate with lower levels of regulationDid you mean to write "Our world would be more innovative"?

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I have a small question, do you think that there is an efficient way of reducing variety of products and services?

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