Intellectual property ≠ free market

The always interesting Robert Darnton has an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books entitled Google & the Future of Books, in which he essentially argues for a reigning of copyrights, combining the ideas of a shorter term (28 years after creation is what Darnton believes is the platonic ideal, as opposed the current 70 years after author's death) with some wishy-washy democratic platitudes that I can't seem to shake much concrete meaning out of.

It's an interesting essay, though he makes a very common mistake, in automatically associating intellectual property rights with free market ideals:

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public's rightful domain.

In a perfectly free market, clearly there would be nobody to enforce intellectual property rights. Though as Boldrin and Levine explain, content creators still have a significant advantage over the imitators, and innovation in an IP-less world doesn't look like it would suffer.

The perils of being an Obama

The story about Obama's half-brother in Kenya getting busted for smoking pot has gotten a lot of play, but the Guardian's article is the first I've read where the author had enough sense to ask why rather than just who, what, where, and when:

Although Kenya is strict about drug possession, there does not appear to be any current police campaign to crack down on usage. The officers who arrested George did not disclose why they searched him, although they are often conducted in the hope of extracting a bribe.

And this certainly isn't the first time that George Obama's been used for his fame:

Last year, during the election campaign, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair claimed to have "found" George Obama, after meeting him at his step-grandmother's home in Kogelo, western Kenya. The report claimed - controversially - that he lived on a dollar a month, and that he was ashamed to be an Obama.

While he is poor and lives in ramshackle accommodation, George is in the same position as well over a million other people who live in Nairobi's slums. Before the US presidential election, he said that he saw no reason why Barack Obama should support him financially; he was content with his life and could provide for himself. That did not stop Jerome Corsi, the right-wing US author of The Obama Nation, from travelling to Kenya in the hope of presenting a $1,000 cheque to George. Fortunately for Corsi, whose stunt was unlikely to have gone down well in Huruma, he was quickly deported.

Reforestation outpacing deforestation?

While most people associate cities with pollution and the material and ecological excess of late capitalism, I've long believed that urbanization has the potential to be a great environmental savior. The NYT has a fascinating article that confirms what I said about cities attracting people who would otherwise live more environmentally profligate lives: the amount of total rain forest is likely growing, due to the reforestation of towns and villages abandoned by people in Latin America and Asia who are moving to cities. Elisabeth Rosenthal, the article's author, explains the reasons that people are abandoning land at a growing pace:

In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population.

By some estimates, these demographic and technological shifts mean that forests are growing back far faster than they're being cut down:

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest – an iconic environmental cause – may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

There are two problems, though, with the new forests: they aren't "old growth" forests, and they aren't necessarily able to support many endangered species. The first part – the fact that they are "secondary" forests and not primeval – might be important in that it means the ecosystem is not as dense and complex as it would be in, say, a rain forest that hasn't been touched since pre-Colombian times. Scientists haven't reached a consensus on how significant this is, though it's comforting to note that as time passes, the now-secondary forests will become denser and older. As for the endangered species, it's a combination of the first point (new growth) and the fact that these new jungles are growing in different places than the forests which are being cut down, and are not reachable by the animals that are endangered within the old growth.

Reading this makes me think of a Wired article from a few years back about the Mayans and the rain forest, and how much of the Yucatán jungles are likely to be feral gardens of the ancient Mayans.

Google takes a step towards free market net neutrality

In the ongoing net neutrality saga, Google has traditionally been the biggest proponent of legislative action forcing net neutrality onto ISPs and consumers (some wavering notwithstanding). But just recently they've released some easy online tools that negate a key argument for net neutrality: ISPs are often not very transparent with their policies on network neutrality (i.e., when they de-prioritize BitTorrent and things like that, they aren't usually upfront about it). Of course, ISPs can still try to hide the truth, but now that it's so easy to test for these things, consumers are inevitably going to wind up better informed.

Just another way that the steady beat of progress in a free market can upend problems that at the moment we only see legislative solutions to.

Where are they now? Ted Haggard edition

Remember Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor at a Colorado mega-church whose fall from grace involved meth and a gay prostitute? Well, he's resurfaced recently as it's come out that his church has been paying off a boy who had a three-year relationship with Pastor Ted that started when the boy was 18. So, where is he now?

Well, former Pastor Ted has two things going on in his life. For one, he's the subject of an HBO special. But on a more mundane level, the NYT gives a great one-sentence synopsis of his life since the ordeal:

In an interview with The Associated Press this month, Mr. Haggard said he was selling insurance and debt-reduction software and that his sexual identity was hard to pin down.

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic explains why we should all care about the fact that Ted Haggard had to lie about his sexuality:

The countless gay men who are currently running many of the world's leading Christian denominations are threats to themselves, to other gay men, to their wives and their churches because ancient doctrine forces them into twisted shells of human beings. In the Catholic church, this led to a horrifying epidemic of child abuse, protected and enabled by the last two Popes. And their response to this? To ratchet up the psychological pressure even further on the men whose psyches and souls they have already permanently warped.

Pharmaceutical patents: not so necessary after all?

Intellectual property is topic on which it seems that the vast majority of people – economists, politicians, and laymen – agree: patents and copyrights are necessary for innovation, and without copyright or patent protection, people who have no reason to innovate because they could not charge more than the marginal cost of production (i.e., the cost of stamping a CD or producing a pill, as opposed to paying the artist to sing the song or the researchers to discover the drug). The copyright argument is being put to the test right now with the internet making enforcement impossible and forcing music artists, TV creators, and filmmakers to compete in a world with significantly weaker copyright protections out there for creators.

Patents, though, are still alive and kickin', and are even expanding their reach based on international agreements whereby rich countries foist IP laws on developing countries in exchange for access to Western markets. Probably the most beloved of all patents is the pharmaceutical patent. Everybody gets pharmaceutical patents, right?

Wrong. Michele Boldrin and David Levine, in his book entitled Against Intellectual Monopoly (free online!), make the case against pharmaceutical patents based on the historical case of Italy, which was the last major industrialized Western country to institute patents for medicine (here is that chapter). Long story short, not only did the pre-patent area have more innovation (not just imitation, but actual research innovation), but there were many more small firms competing before the institution of patents than after. Boldrin and Levine also make the argument that this diminishing level of competition among pharmaceutical companies is the reason for the steady rise of drug companies marketing to consumers and doctors ("marketing" being a very charitable way of putting it, in the case of doctors). They also cite a study towards the end that's pretty damning to the modern American drug industry's defense of patents, where they find that the costs of these patents in terms of cost and innovation far outweigh the protective benefits of giving the patent holder monopoly power of their invention.

I look forward to reading the whole book, but considering I just read the chapter dealing with the most difficult issue for IP opponents (pharmaceuticals), I expect good things from it.

Rethinking crack babies

Remember crack babies? Yeah, not so much. Turns out that alcohol and tobacco appear to be far worse for fetuses than cocaine, either powder or crack. Cocaine use by mothers during pregnancy does result in lower birth weights, though kids recover the majority of their weight and by age 7 have IQs that are only 4 points lower than that of kids whose mothers didn't do coke or crack.

The author notes that pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and in earlier years were prosecuted. Presumably the same does not apply to women who drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes while pregnant, despite the fact that they cause more harm to fetuses.

The doctor discussing all of this says something that applies to pretty much everyone when it comes to drug use, and not just "crack babies":

“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social meaning” of the drug.

Unfortunately I can't find it now, but I remember reading an article recently where the author mentioned that society's lowered expectation of kids whose mothers did drugs while they were pregnant is probably a bigger contributing factor to these kids' development than the drug use itself.

US trade policy pushes Cambodian girls into prostitution, US foreign policy causes Cambodia to arrest them

Radio Free Asia has a sad article on young Cambodian girls being pushed into prostitution, made all the more horrific because it seems that US trade and foreign policy is exacerbating the trend. The US is working in a few ways that harm these young girls: they push for labor standards that make employing these girls legally more expensive, and thus they are left to professions not subject to the law. But more directly, they pushed for anti-trafficking laws that the Cambodian government interpreted as a directive to crack down on prostitution, driving prostitutes deeper into the underworld and away from the protection that legal tolerance provides to these most vulnerable of businesswomen.

In his NYT column two weeks ago, Nicholas Kristof did a good job of summing up the ways that US pressure on Cambodia's labor standards has decreased employment opportunities:

Cambodia has, in fact, pursued an interesting experiment by working with factories to establish decent labor standards and wages. It’s a worthwhile idea, but one result of paying above-market wages is that those in charge of hiring often demand bribes — sometimes a month’s salary — in exchange for a job. In addition, these standards add to production costs, so some factories have closed because of the global economic crisis and the difficulty of competing internationally.

The Radio Free Asia article explains how the worsening plight of prostitutes is thanks to US foreign policy, and how NGOs are willing partners in crime:

In February 2008, the Cambodian government began enforcing the new “Law on the Suppression of Human-Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” after years of U.S. pressure to crack down on sex trafficking.

Human rights groups, however, say the law and its enforcement have made life harder for the women they aim to help.

Prostitutes caught in police raids are made to pay fines of up to U.S. $200 for their release, the 17-year-old girl said.

“They take us to district police headquarters and take our money. If we don’t have the money, we will be kept in custody for two or three days. So we have to run for our lives when we see police approaching us.”

“Police arrest us in the hope that the brothel owners will pay, but if we don’t have anyone to pay for our release we will be sent to one of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It’s o.k. to live at the NGOs, but then our families have nothing to eat,” she said.

“If [the NGOs] want to help me, they should also help my family. Otherwise I can’t quit.”

Crying wolf

One of the things that irritates me the most about libertarians in the West is when they compare their country to the Soviet Union. Here's an example from the Adam Smith Institute's blog, in the UK, which is apparently a pretty influential free market think tank:

According to new research for The Sunday Times by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, state spending as a percentage of GDP has now reached 49% for the UK as a whole.

That's bad enough as it is – the government now controls practically half of the UK economy – but when you look at the regional figures the picture is even worse.

In the Northeast, state spending is 66.4% of GDP. In Wales, it's 71.6%. And in Northern Ireland, it's a whopping 77.6%.

I don't think the Soviet Republics ever managed to achieve quite that degree of state dominance.

Seriously?! You think that Wales is more socialist than the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic was? And this is leaving aside the obvious ridiculousness of trying to quantify how statist an economy is, considering that often times regulations that don't show up on the budget are far more consequential and disruptive than actual expenditures.

Dianne not-so-Feinstein

Lest anyone think that Dianne Feinstein – possible future governor of California – is a serious politician, Reason debunks that myth. Her latest shenanigan is co-sponsoring a bill in the US Senate to toughen penalties for purveyors of candy-flavored drugs. You might be thinking – sugar cubes dose with acid? Nope...she's gone on a moral crusade against candy-flavored meth. As Jacob Sullum puts it: "If Grassley and Feinstein had simply paid a visit to Snopes.com, they could have saved their staffs the trouble of writing this stupid bill."