Marginal tax rates are meaningless because, even in the 1950s, the system was complex and can be gamed.
If you want to judge the net effect of tax policy over time, look at the percentage of GDP captured by federal receipts (the vast majority of which are taxes). In the U.S., it's averaged ~16.5%-~17.5% with occasional spikes and dips. Currently, it's very close to what it was in those 90%-marginal-rates 1950s.
I disagree with some of the framing, but that's what good discussion is about -- figuring out where we agree and disagree.
But consumer uptake strikes me as the worst way to judge whether the big AI shops will make it. That's not where most of the leveraged user return or deployable capital is.
I think the argument is that artificial comes in with IP law, which some people feel is superfluous.
I do think that corporate price gouging is a huge problem that does need to be addressed. But especially with smaller business types — creatives, et al— I still haven’t gotten any grownup answers about what would compel people to get professionally good at something and innovate in the complete absence of copyright: the vastly better business model would be waiting for someone else to do something new and interesting, stealing their work, and then undercutting them in the market because you don’t have R&D/et al costs to recoup. You can’t say that wouldn’t happen because it’s exactly what the AI companies did to billions of people, scoffing at any protest. And ironically, they’re now whining about the Chinese doing it to them.
I'm with you on all of that. There is, nevertheless, a strong argument that IP protection (particularly for creative / "culturally significant" works) is too long. Twenty years - interestingly enough, the original time-period in the US - of protection seems like a better (for society) deal than life of the author plus seventy. I think, in fact, most artists would agree: if you went back in time and asked a playwrite or filmmaker in (say) 1940, I'd bet they'd rather someone freely revives their work in 2026 than that it be sat on by a corporation that has forgot it (or they) ever existed.
I’ve never met anyone that didn’t think copyrights were way too long in the US, and I’ve got a very large sample size of artists and attorneys. The only people that support such things are executives or counsel for large IP-holding entertainment companies.
I have, however, met a ton of very well-paid tech workers that were extremely against copyright, entirely, especially where it came to paying artists, such as musicians, for their labor. Pretty ironic because the market for software development labor market would probably land somewhere between graphic designers and company IT worker if the commercial software business had no IP protection.
Separating out what is artificial or not seems more like an exercise in rhetoric; defining things as fundamental and real. The whole economy is an imaginary thing dreamed up by our natural human brains.
Drug companies have a portfolio of compounds they research. Most don’t pay off, so R&D costs make their way into the pricing of those superstar and other drugs that do work. Also, timelines are pretty long.
Well, R&D costs are able to make their way into the pricing due to the artificial supply restriction.
If supply was not artificially restricted (through patents), then competitors would be able to manufacture the drug, supply would expand, the price would collapse, and the original inventor would not be able to recover their R&D costs.
So pharmaceutical companies spend far less on marketing outside the US, partly because every other country besides New Zealand makes those incessant drug ads illegal, and partly because governments negotiate prices and keep profit margins down. If the argument is that R&D costs are what make drugs expensive, then we could easily eliminate an even greater expense by just copying what other developed nations do.
In that light, the entire market itself looks essentially artificial, given drug manufacturing couldn’t exist without government guaranteed property rights, which are themselves a kind of monopoly on use.
But yes, the reason brand name drugs are drugs are more expensive than generics is due to intellectual property, both the patent and the trademark.
Unless we came up with a different funding mechanism. Joseph Stiglitz for example has advocated a prize system for pharmaceuticals, though he doesn't suggest replacing the patent system entirely.
Salk didn't need that temporary monopoly to invent the polio vaccine, which has gone on to be one of the biggest success stories of vaccines and modern medicine general.
Rubbish. Artists/creators/tortured souls with berets and clove cigarettes don't get to define what art is or isn't.
Art is that which moves us, and "us" isn't a committee of gatekeepers; it's fractal down to the individual (or even the individual-circumstance) level.
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I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
The biggest impact of something like this -- thoughtful, nuanced and multidisciplinary -- is that it makes you remember just how bad the ocean of hot AI takes really is.
It's a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot with that attitude.