Post-Scarcity Prophet

Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future.

Ronald Bailey from the December 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

When we speak of institutions, economists mean more than just organizations. We mean conventions, even rules, about how things are done. The understanding which most sharply distinguishes science from the market has to do with property rights. In the market, the fundamental institution is the notion of private ownership, that an individual owns a piece of land or a body of water or a barrel of oil and that individual has almost unlimited scope to decide how that resource should be used.

In science we have a very different ethic. When somebody discovers something like the quadratic formula or the Pythagorean theorem, the convention in science is that he can't control that idea. He has to give it away. He publishes it. What's rewarded in science is dissemination of ideas. And the way we reward it is we give the most prestige and respect to those people who first publish an idea.

reason: Yet there is a mechanism in the market called patents and copyright, for quasi-property rights in ideas.

Romer: That's central to the theory. To the extent that you're using the market system to refine and bring ideas into practical application, we have to create some kind of control over the idea. That could be through patents. It could be through copyright. It might even be through secrecy. A firm can keep secret a lot of what it knows how to do.

reason: A formula for Coca-Cola?

Romer: Yes. Or take a lot of the things that Wal-Mart understands about discount retailing. They have a lot of insight about logistics and marketing which they haven't patented or copyrighted, yet they can still make more money on it than other people because they keep it closely held within the firm. So for relying on the market -- and we do have to rely on the market to develop a lot of ideas -- you have to have some mechanisms of control and some opportunities for people to make a profit developing those ideas.

But there are other stages in the development of ideas. Think about the basic science that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA. There are some kinds of ideas where, once those ideas are uncovered, you'd like to make them as broadly available as possible, so everybody in the world can put them to good use. There we find it efficient to give those ideas away for free and encourage everybody to use them. If you're going to be giving things away for free, you're going to have to find some system to finance them, and that's where government support typically comes in.

In the next century we're going to be moving back and forth, experimenting with where to draw the line between institutions of science and institutions of the market. People used to assign different types of problems to each institution. "Basic research" got government support; for "applied product development," we'd rely on the market. Over time, people have recognized that that's a pretty artificial distinction. What's becoming more clear is that it's actually the combined energies of those two sets of institutions, often working on the same problem, that lead to the best outcomes.

reason: We hear a lot of complaints from academicians about how business and corporations are taking over university research.

Romer: I think it's important to have a distinct realm of science and a distinct realm of the market, but it's also very good to have interaction between those two. One of the best forms of interaction is for people who work in one to move into the other.

The people in university biology or biochemistry departments complain when they see somebody go on leave from the university and start a company that's going to develop a new drug. That's not the way it was done 30 years ago. But this is the best way to take those freely floating, contentiously discussed ideas from the realm of science and then get them out into the market process, because the reality is that there are virtually no ideas which generate benefits for consumers if there's not an intervening for-profit firm which commercializes them, tailors them to the market, and then delivers them. You can point to examples where things jump right from science to benefits for the consumer, but that's the exception, not the rule.

reason: Do we run the risk of ruining science by involving it too much in the market?

Romer: Well, some people would say that everything should be patented. The danger is that if you went that far, you could actually slow the discovery process down. There are very good theoretical reasons for thinking that market and property rights are the ideal solution for dealing with things, but there are also strong theoretical reasons for thinking that in the realm of ideas, intellectual property rights are a double-edged sword. You want to rely on them to some extent to get their benefits, but you want to have a parallel, independent system and then exploit the tension that's created between the two.

reason: What are those theoretical reasons?

Romer: It traces back to this multiple use I was describing for ideas vs. single use for things. The miracle of the market system is that for objects, especially transformed objects, there's a single price which does two different jobs. It creates an incentive for somebody to produce the right amount of a good, and it allocates who it should go to. A farmer looks at the price of a bushel of wheat and decides whether to plant wheat or plant corn. The price helps motivate the production of wheat. On the other side, when a consumer has to decide whether to buy bread or corn meal, the price allocates the wheat between the different possible users. One price does both jobs, so you can just let the market system create the price and everything works wonderfully.

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O Nobel da Economia « O Insurgente links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…Economia, Teoria — Miguel @ 09:50 Greg Makiw apresenta a relação dos favoritos para ganhar o Nobel da Economia segunda a agên cia de apostas Landbrokes. Os 3 primeiros classificdos são Eugene Fama, Paul Romer e Ernst Fehr. Deixe um comentário No Comments Yet » Ainda sem comentários. Feed RSS para comentários a este post. TrackBack URI Publicar um comentário Clique aqui para cancelar a resposta. nome…