Very interesting article. Enhancing scarcity is definitely a policy choice. For example rent controls are not really about the economics of rental housing, they are about its political appearance. Governments imposing rent controls are making a statement: we are on your side, not your landlord's. That's visible, while the deterrent effect on the supply of new or additional rental housing is invisible. That visible/invisible division is probably also valid for bioethics.
What's the right balance between innovation and regulation? Conservatives often are in favor of deregulation, trusting the market to sort things out, whereas progressives argue regulation provides necessary safeguards.
The ChatGPT copyright infringement debacle is a good example. AI moguls have argued that honoring copyright would have been prohibitively expensive and so they're "moving fast and breaking things." AI, it seems, is ushering a new era of how we think about copyright. This is still in development so who knows how this will pan out, but it seems like the scales might tip in favor of innovation and away from regulation, much to the detriment of anyone who has produced copyrighted material. The irony is that the innovation here won't necessarily produce anything better - at least in the realm of the humanities, where we see a lot of AI slop.
Naturally, it's going to depend on the context. My point about research ethics is that it's possible—indeed, likely—that the IRBs' singular goal of preventing research abuses will lead them to make rules that are too demanding. People have been making a similar point about the FDA for a long time: the public will be a lot more upset if a drug turns out to be harmful than if a drug doesn't get approved (but should have been), even though the harms can be much higher in the second case. So we end up with fewer drugs and shorter lives.
Klein and Thompson make a convincing case that the government can be doing a lot more to promote innovation, including funding more of it themselves. This is what distinguishes their view from a standard deregulate-and-let-the-market-rip approach, or why it's progressive instead of conservative. They correctly see that big breakthroughs involve public-private partnerships. But insofar as they promote certain types of deregulation, it's in areas where the current approach clearly isn't working, such as with environmental review. Yoni Appelbaum makes a similar point in his new book and article in The Atlantic.
Also this meme where one picks a vaguely positive abstraction (abundance) and then make a necessity of it to turn it into a virtue or a mission statement polestar..... hmmmm. Why notjust pick a virtue, like generosity.
Australia has a similar wicked housing problem, but the government for the same period was right of centre. There is an election on right now with a one term left of center government in power having been unable to do anything. The right of center big housing idea wants to introduce a reduction of safeguards on how lenders count the ability of borrowers to repay, but this will just drive prices up, as does each interest rate decrease. It's like we have nothing else to spend money on, a scarcity of options. I guess whatever th premium you have to have somewhere to live...
Australian pension savings are second in the world. We are not the second economy in the world.
[In recent years larger the normal numbers of builders have gone broke leaving people with loans and no house.]
The right can also screw things up, and the left can sometimes get it right! New Zealand's Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act in 2021 was a good supply-based effort.
Very interesting article. Enhancing scarcity is definitely a policy choice. For example rent controls are not really about the economics of rental housing, they are about its political appearance. Governments imposing rent controls are making a statement: we are on your side, not your landlord's. That's visible, while the deterrent effect on the supply of new or additional rental housing is invisible. That visible/invisible division is probably also valid for bioethics.
What's the right balance between innovation and regulation? Conservatives often are in favor of deregulation, trusting the market to sort things out, whereas progressives argue regulation provides necessary safeguards.
The ChatGPT copyright infringement debacle is a good example. AI moguls have argued that honoring copyright would have been prohibitively expensive and so they're "moving fast and breaking things." AI, it seems, is ushering a new era of how we think about copyright. This is still in development so who knows how this will pan out, but it seems like the scales might tip in favor of innovation and away from regulation, much to the detriment of anyone who has produced copyrighted material. The irony is that the innovation here won't necessarily produce anything better - at least in the realm of the humanities, where we see a lot of AI slop.
Naturally, it's going to depend on the context. My point about research ethics is that it's possible—indeed, likely—that the IRBs' singular goal of preventing research abuses will lead them to make rules that are too demanding. People have been making a similar point about the FDA for a long time: the public will be a lot more upset if a drug turns out to be harmful than if a drug doesn't get approved (but should have been), even though the harms can be much higher in the second case. So we end up with fewer drugs and shorter lives.
Klein and Thompson make a convincing case that the government can be doing a lot more to promote innovation, including funding more of it themselves. This is what distinguishes their view from a standard deregulate-and-let-the-market-rip approach, or why it's progressive instead of conservative. They correctly see that big breakthroughs involve public-private partnerships. But insofar as they promote certain types of deregulation, it's in areas where the current approach clearly isn't working, such as with environmental review. Yoni Appelbaum makes a similar point in his new book and article in The Atlantic.
Also this meme where one picks a vaguely positive abstraction (abundance) and then make a necessity of it to turn it into a virtue or a mission statement polestar..... hmmmm. Why notjust pick a virtue, like generosity.
Australia has a similar wicked housing problem, but the government for the same period was right of centre. There is an election on right now with a one term left of center government in power having been unable to do anything. The right of center big housing idea wants to introduce a reduction of safeguards on how lenders count the ability of borrowers to repay, but this will just drive prices up, as does each interest rate decrease. It's like we have nothing else to spend money on, a scarcity of options. I guess whatever th premium you have to have somewhere to live...
Australian pension savings are second in the world. We are not the second economy in the world.
[In recent years larger the normal numbers of builders have gone broke leaving people with loans and no house.]
The right can also screw things up, and the left can sometimes get it right! New Zealand's Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act in 2021 was a good supply-based effort.