Wow, my 15 minutes of googling indicates that might very well be true. I do appreciate your bringing that up. Luckily are plenty of people working to keep non-IP seeds available.
I don’t think humanity means what you think it does.
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We monkeys are a curious species. That leads to both instability and to progress. There’s no reason to think that if market economies had never been invented that food production wouldn’t have improved, or (considering the fact that even your extreme examples happened under the pressures of existing markets) to what level compared to our own timeline.
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I’d like to agree, but given the diversity of mankind, the lack of large-scale examples of non-market economies producing large scale yields growths leaves me a little leery about toppling the apple cart completely. I won’t claim 100% certainty that the market system is the only means of technological progress, but I will say that there is 0% proof pointing the other way.
Given we only get 1 timeline, I’ll bet on what evidence I have, rather than what I would like to be truth.
I’m old and grumpy, so good intentions and fine words no longer cut it for me. My concern is about feeding 10 billion people and doing it in the long term. Command economies along with the society that go with them have not done particularly well. Self-organizing collectives produce at a rate that is suitable only for the wealthiest of cultures.
In my opinion, demand problems are best addressed by taxing at rates high enough (70% at $60K?) to enable redistribution to allow people to buy food rather than command control the system to produce a different supply outcome (which has historically failed, and sometimes catastrophically).
Mindy, you and I are only alive because there is an immensely complicated engine that involves hundreds of thousands of interlocking pieces. Every item you pick up, every piece of food you eat has thousands of people involved. You cannot sustain 10 billion people on simplicity. When it truly breaks down, millions die.
We are all the beneficiaries of such an engine, and wishing it to become simple (which I have done many a time) is, in essence, wishing for much of mankind to die (which is what I try to remember when I yearn for simple solutions to complicated problems). Our population has grown orders of magnitude above what a simple system can sustain. (And why those from such pastoral systems so often flee to the hell-hole of urban slums…)
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Well, it all goes back to wanting to own the land. When land ownership became detached from title or social class (at least formally) I think some of the existing social classes that transitioned into the capitalist class wanted to regain a foothold on their ‘ancestral’ domains. Look at how Walmart makes bank from real estate. I’m just waiting to find out that Monsanto dwarfs Walmart in that venture. Seriously, GMO crops I think are just a backdoor to becoming land lords of old.
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This discussion is touching so many complex points that I can’t properly participate. I’m generally of the opinion that patents on life, including plants of course, should be invalid. Because, uh.
However, I have to admit that several points stated above by people probably defending or at least explaining the development leading to such lawsuits are valid perspectives, and food is a commodity. Ever has been.
Even the point that famines are rarer today is correct. Those arguments do however not validate an ethical right to the legal actions from where I stand.
I agree, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use ethics to guide us. They need to be the basis for the complicated system, and if problems arise we have to address them.
While I have doubts about the narrative of ‘poor farmers sustaining their families sued by heartless multinational company’ (apologies if someone feels their point misrepresented by that description!), I believe the systemic effect of “legal/illegal crops” based on copyright-similar issues to be generally destructive. It leads to unsustainable farming practices with great losses in natural and human-caused local, regional and even global biodiversity. The problem is that the causality chains are very complicated, so in the end we currently have a believe-based discussion.
Sidenote: I am bit shocked that there are people who do not know how to grow a potato plant out of a potato, and that there are people who believe that potatoes are the seeds of potato plants.
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I keep coming back to the idea that I don’t like it when laws written by people who were never hungry to protect them from other people who ever never hungry are used to oppress people who are making life and death decisions about where their food and shelter come from.
I understand Pepsi’s interest in protecting their proprietary potato from rival snack food manufacturers. They have no interest in attacking farmers who are growing food for people to eat. Those farmers are a basically civilian casualties of corporate conflict. The only way I can imagine feeling that is acceptable is if I abstracted away the actual people being hurt.
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As one who grows most of his own food, I can tell you that the general public is woefully ignorant of just how most of their foodstuffs are produced. And mostly grossed out by it when they do find out. I am most disturbed by the ones who think that is “so easy” to grow food. “I can grow petunias on my deck, how hard can it be?” Really hard work, dude, really hard work.
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By the time there was enough of a knowledge base for it to have potentially happened, markets ruled.
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People who like markets like to give markets credit for technological advances. I find that super sketchy. I think the credit goes to the (mostly cooperative) work of people who are driven to create for creation’s sake, and the market basically skims a little to a lot off the top (maybe in exchange for distributing the advancement to many people).
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This!
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In whose jurisdiction? Such sweeping statements are perhaps misleading in cases where the specific jurisdiction of India is the one at issue.
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While the “great genius working alone” has a lot of narrative appeal, my experience in both academia and industry was a lot more prosaic, with there being a cast of hundreds doing a ton of rather more mundane jobs that were absolutely vital in actually advancing science and technology. And those hundreds need to be paid.
But then again, I’m not much of a believer in the “great person” theory of history. I feel most worthwhile things are accomplished not by a few people utterly devoted to a cause, but people who are doing a job reasonably well who need to support their spouse and children. Pretending otherwise seems mostly to be used to exploit the poor souls by trying to get them to buy into the “if you are to be worthwhile, you should be utterly devoted to being a teacher/doctor/nurse/whatever-profession-we’ve-decided-to-romanticize”.
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True. Growing food yourself is hard work, especially if you want to reach full sustenance.
Growing food for the market is still hard work, even though it is highly industrialised.
The work changes, it’s less manual. But it is still hard work.
Sidenote-related: not knowing that a potato can sprout potato plants is absolutely alien to me. How can you not know, did you never leave a potato sitting in the cupboard for too long?
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Assorted commerce treaties.
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I’m completely against the “great person” theory of history, I think it’s nonsense. Which is why I put “mostly cooperative” work in brackets. If we put everyone on a spectrum from obsessed with tinkering and finding improvements to utterly unwilling to try new things, I think it would look something like this:
Even when we see a “lone genius” make a major improvement there are almost certainly a large number of would-be geniuses who never accomplished anything worthwhile, but we don’t remember them or consider their failed innovation part of what led to the actual innovation even though it’s probably just chance that it wasn’t them.
At the back of Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” Johnson has a massive chronology of important innovations from 1400-2000, as well as a chart of whether those were developed commercially or not and whether they were developed by individuals or by collective work. The non-commercial collaborative quadrant completely dwarfs all others. By far most innovations come from collaboration and (to a lesser extent) most are driven by people who are just interested in making things work better rather than people who have done so to make money.
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That should not come at the expense of people in poor countries… That’s the whole point. A single farmer who ends up with seed potatoes for lays chips is NOT a competitor for the company. They are not materially cutting into the profit margin. This is NOT the same as another larger scale global corporation stealing their potato…
Me neither, but again, you’re going for a black and white thing here. The welfare of institutions should not come at the expense of individuals, which it too often has. They are there to make long terms projects for the good of humanity viable. Anything less is pointless.
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I just wanted to say thanks for an interesting and informative reply. I’ll have to read “Where Good Ideas Come From”, as I’m always interested in quantitative approaches to seemingly non-quantitative fields.
You are quite right - the damages are different. However, I’m always very iffy about the different laws applying in different circumstances. I prefer judgement in how the case is adjudicated, rather than judgement as to whether someone is poor enough to be beyond the law.
In a case like this, if the farmers are indeed guilty, I’d have no trouble with the farmers being hit with fines that approached the damage that Pepsi suffered, which I suspect would be less than 100 rupees, or about 10 seconds of their lawyer’s time.
I’d argue that the welfare of institutions almost always comes at the expense of individuals. However, I consider institutions to be the “seed corn” of social welfare. There is always suffering that can alleviated by using the seed corn to feed individuals who are hungry or starving now.
But in my opinion, the trade-off can be catastrophic. The price of law is is unjust suffering on the part of some. The price of our prosperity is unjust suffering on the part of some. The price of our very lives is unjust suffering on the part of some.
Yet without any institutions, we are reduced to destruction.
So, I knowingly accept that institutions and my very life causes suffering.
In my opinion, our job is try and minimize that suffering, while retaining the essential characteristics of the institution. Then judge whether the institution’s long term benefits outweigh the suffering its existence requires. And then finally, and most importantly, acknowledging that suffering rather than paper over it or pretend it doesn’t exist or that those who suffer because of our choices “deserve it”.
In my opinion, evil is not (necessarily) in accepting the suffering - the farmer who chooses to see his children suffer instead of feeding them the seed corn is not evil. Evil is choosing to ignore the suffering that we cause just because we feel the benefit outweighs the cost. The benefit may (and usually is) many times greater than the suffering that the institution causes. But acknowledging that suffering is our duty.
So in summary - no, the welfare of institutions always comes at the expense of some individuals. If it doesn’t, it simply means I’m not looking hard enough. But the fact that suffering is always the price is not in and of itself reason enough to destroy the institution.
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