Becker-Posner Blog

An excellent author on US Competition Law is Richard Posner, a federal judge in Chicago and one of the great intellectuals on the bench. He had a blog (together with an economist) at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ (sadly discontinued after his co-author's death in 2014). Posner has literally written the book on the US' Antitrust law, and he is one of the rare writers I enjoy reading even when I vehemently disagree (as I do with his proposal for a largely unregulated market in babies).

Outside of his nigh-endless legal accomplishments, Posner is also allegedly the basis for the character of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. His blog (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/) is well worth a read. If you're an economic-utilitarian you'll love it, otherwise you'll probably think he's a monster, albeit a very rational one.

This opinion is both extraordinary and extremely significant. Richard Posner is probably the most prolific legal intellectual not on the supreme court. He co-writes, along with Gary Becker (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) this excellent blog http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ Posner is the author of the 4th most cited Law Review article in the field of intellectual property law[1]. Most telling of all is this statistic: "As of 2000, Judge Posner was the most often-cited legal scholar of all time with 7,981 citations, nearly 50 percent more than anyone else" [2]. He retains that position in 2012. [1] - William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, 18 J. Legal Stud. 325 (1989). [2] Fred Schapiro & Michelle Pearse, The Most Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, Michigan Law Review 2012.

I'd like to learn more about economics. I'm happy to hear suggestions about what I should read. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683 Someone who likes to read a lot elsewhere in cyberspace just recommended to me the Becker-Posner blog. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Yeah, Judge Posner wrote an excellent post about how pharmaceuticals and software were basically polar opposites in their needs for patent protection: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-…

Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk. Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-ro… More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-sco… The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.

Becker-Posner Blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

The linked blog post from Posner is excellent: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.html

Wow, I'm seeing tons of false positives. Why on earth is the co-written blog of a nobel laureate and a 7th circuit appeals court judge making blekko's bayesian classifier freak out? #88 - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com - bayes (spam 31.6 > 5.3)

This idea is a special case of Gary Becker's proposal to sell the right to immigrate (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/02/sell_the_right.html… In this special case, the investors in the immigrant's business would pay the immigration fee. I don't see why the potential benefit to the US of immigrants with startup ideas is necessarily greater than immigrants of similar technical skills with no stated intention to start a company. But the immigration fee could help in sorting that out.

Good essay, but one small nitpick: The problems with education are well-documented—teachers make far too little, it’s too difficult to fire bad teachers, some cultures don’t value education, etc. Many of these are easy to fix—pay teachers a lot more in exchange for a change in the tenure rules, for example—and some issues (like cultural ones) are probably going to be very difficult to fix. As another HN'er has pointed out, teacher pay or funding is absolutely not the issue. Per rayiner: Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-ro… More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-sco… The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc. > Sometimes the government people ask “Would you ever move YC out of the US?” with nervous laughter? I really like it here and I sure hope we don’t, but never say never. Hah. :) No you won't. Or, not that you won't, rather, it seems beneath you guys…

> Perhaps the United States is already doing enough. Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of 21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive population for global economic dominance. The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over the long term the US has no hope whatsoever of competing against that without significant structural changes. Those structural changes include fixing our educational system, fighting tooth and nail for skilled immigrants, offering them better incentives to stay rather than return home to fast growing developing economies to make their fortunes, fixing the broken financial and patent/IP systems, etc. Judge Posner sums up our shortfalls well in a recent blog post [1]. The US system will need to be operating at an order of magnitude greater efficiency than it currently is to have any hope of overcoming China's massive numbers advantage. Immigration is one of the few crucial advantages the US can exploit in that competition, but right now we're shooting ourselves in the foot so hard there we're blowing our leg off. 1. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.html

An excellent quote from Posner: "The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals." [1] [1] http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.html

When it comes to sports I always say that I’d rather have exciting sports than fair sports, and I’d rather have fair sports than clean sports. I’m a fan of pro-cycling, so doping news is in my life a lot. My favorite comments on intelligence doping come from the Becker-Posner blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/intelligence_do.htm… http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/comment_on_inte.htm… I especially like Posner’s closing paragraph: Of course the naturally gifted will object to any "artificial" enhancements that enable others to compete with them. But it is not obvious why their objections should be given weight from a public policy standpoint. It is not as if allowing such enhancements would be likely to discourage the naturally gifted from developing and using their gifts (it might have the opposite effect, by creating greater competition for them), let alone discouraging bright people from seeking out other people to marry and produce children by.

One thing that Japanese companies have down is how they plan for their employees' retirements. I remember learning about their system in grad school and thinking I need to move to Japan! But it's been awhile, and I'd forgotten some of the details about how they do it. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/06/later_retiremen.htm… Specifically: The Japanese system where employees past age 60 sometimes work for lower pay at the same company that had employed them would not be possible in the United States and some other countries because of legislation that prohibits alleged discrimination against older workers. The combination of legislation that prevents companies from lowering the earnings of older employees, and of legislation that prevents mandatory retirement in some occupations, creates a major rigidity in the market for older workers. Brilliant. Build a system that rewards workers with retirement, yet subtly place incentives to encourage them to keep working (less). Albeit, they are also working for less $, but at this point, the holistic benefits of having employment probably outweigh the dollar amount.

While I think some of the larger industrial cases are clearer, it's perfectly reasonable to wonder about this. Richard Posner wrote about the difficulties of rigorously studying or even clearly defining corruption in this essay: https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2005/08/economics-of-corruption--po… I've heard some people say the Russian and Chinese cultural contexts make it difficult to talk about corruption in terms of Western ideals. There are social expectations of gift giving and tipping that are offensive to break, but might appear to outsiders like people are paying others for ordinary services. I haven't lived in either country, so I can't say how accurate or apologist that take really is though.

> In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not? Different fields of human invention have different economic characteristics. For a field where patents may be more economically useful than they are in software, consider the pharmaceutical industry. Developing a new drug costs a decade and hundreds of millions, and remains useful for a long time, but once developed is easily copied. None of those conditions are true for software (and there is no equivalent of copyright protection for drugs). For more, try http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-…

Rebuttal from Posner: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/03/mexican-immigration-to-the-u…

The full piece is an interesting read on the Becker-Posner blog as well - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-…

Becker and Posner tend to make pairs of posts on the same subject. The OP is from Becker, here is the corresponding post from Posner: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-…

Economic issues are a bit more complex then shrinking then down to cause/effect analysis as in this case. The fact is that there are a myriad of variables that have to be ascertained when analyzing economic growth prospects. As such, I think this article is woefully misleading in shrinking the entire matter to a simple case of increasing taxes on small businesses. There is a large amount of economic literature which has determined that increasing taxes does not necessarily have to have a negative impact on growth. For a better discussion of why the economy is stalling I would read Becker's analysis on his blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/06/the-slow-economic-recovery-b…