Does Monopoly Create Wealth?
[This is part 2 of my live blog of this book] How strange this “intellectual property” issue is. In normal life, we tend to (or should) credit enterprise and markets for most innovations that surround us. I’m typing on a system here that includes products for several dozens different creative companies, with hardware and software and applications of all sorts stitched together through some miracle we call the coordinative power of the market. No news in that, I suppose. Ho hum. But let the subject of IP come up, and most people will say that we only have this stuff thanks to IP. Think of the shift here. On the one hand, we credit markets. On the other hand, we credit monopoly. Both can’t be true. Or if both are true, we have a serious theoretical tangle to unravel. So which is true? This is the topic addressed in the second chapter of Boldine and Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly. They begin by observing that “virtually none of the innovations” in the digital industry of computers
