The Age of Stagnation

I've had vague concerns that we are living in an era where America's dominance and position are slipping in the world. I've often pointed to the current administration's unfriendly stance toward science - but it's a lot more complicated that that.

The old model that America drove to prominence saw its heyday in the 1880's - The Age of Invention. Anybody with a good idea was developing it, patenting it, manufacturing it and making a fortune off of it. Most of the ideas that made people rich also benefited society. Think of Thomas Edison's light bulb and telephone.

One thing that is often true of innovation is that it displaces something that came before it. Many times the success of a new product meant the death of an old one. The maturation and solidification of our technologies into tried and true solutions is, in itself, a way to stifle innovation. Often those who have maneuvered themselves into a position to benefit from the way things are done now find it in their own selfish interest to suppress anything that threatens their dominance and source of income.

Many people have speculated that auto and oil companies conspired to keep fuel efficient engine designs off the market by buying ideas and sitting on them. I've never seen any proof for this, but it has been true that auto companies have resisted fuel standards for years. If it was a conspiracy - it was a suicidal conspiracy of fools. Ask your local car dealer how business is right now.

That's not exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how someone without, someone in want, someone that lacks - will naturally strive much harder than someone that has all of their basic needs met.

I fear that in the environment we've built up in this country, using good ideas is more like playing musical chairs. When the music stops, you have to be sitting in a chair so someone else will be left out. Today's capitalists believe that you're not going to be rewarded for making the most out of any invention or development, but that the key is to get a patent for an idea or process and sit on it. Milking the most wealth possible out of an idea has become such an American past time that we graduate lawyers from universities just to specialize in patent law. The problem with this way of thinking is that ideas don't work best by bottling them up and placing them on a shelf, ideas work best in action. Ideas in action will necessarily be challenged and displaced by other ideas and forced to compete for prominence. These same capitalists that always trot out the excuse that "market forces" have to dominate any situation don't have the same standard when it comes to their ideas compete on an even footing. The desire to stifle other's ideas is not new. Even back during the Age of Invention, Edison tried to stop one of his brightest proteges, Nicolai Tesla, from developing an idea that would have displaced one of his biggest inventions, alternating current. And the Wright brothers tried to get a patent on flight and stifle all others that tried to make inventions or modifications to the airplane. Fortunately, they lost their battle with Curtis, and we now use flaps on wings instead of having large wings that warp and flex like a bird's wing - a construction that would have been extremely impractical on scale-up.

In the manufacturer's representative business - you always know who are the "mature" salesmen. Someone that has been successful for many years has usually gotten fat and lazy. They already have enough money. They don't want or need to work hard any more - but they still expect to be handsomely rewarded by virtue of their position. This is what I fear the capitalistic class in this country have become.

One thing is certain, expecting to continue to do things the way we have always is a formula for being left behind. In the Age of Invention, the first invention brought in money to fuel the development of the next thing. In our Age of Stagnation, coming up with a good idea once, or having the keys to the castle that contains the thing everyone wants is all it takes to be entitled to an uninterrupted stream of wealth. If that sounds like a fairy tale, it is.

Intellectual Property

I think a lot about what sounds like such a dry subject.

Who owns information?

Can you own information?

Benjamin Franklin, America's first great inventor, believed that no one should own an idea. He thought that inventions should be introduced, and others should be free to take your idea and make immediate improvements on it. This way, society as a whole would get the maximum benefit from innovations.

The "American" Dream (as well as that of many others around the world) is to come up with some creation and get rich quick. It's an attractive dream, and not one to toss aside lightly. It goes against the grain of many to give up individual rights, freedoms, privileges, or prerogatives in order to provide possible benefits to society at large. Some would say that to take away intellectual property protections would kill initiative and take away America's advantage as a technological innovator.

Let's look at another aspect of intellectual property. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear that phrase is patented inventions. Copyrighted material is also intellectual property. Literature, movies, and songs are copyrighted in order for their creators to make money off of them. We get upset when someone in China makes a copy of a movie and sells it without giving someone in Hollywood any royalty payments. Many people did not get upset when millions of people copied musical tracks and shared them on the internet without compensating the music industry or the performers.

I was looking on YouTube at some outtakes from The Office, one of my favorite shows. Several people had taken their favorite moments and made little highlight films of the series. When looked it up again later, to show my wife, there was a message that said that the content was protected and had been removed from the site. It actually wasn't, I got around the warning and the videos I had watched earlier were still there. It occurred to me that they should want and appreciate that these little videos were being put together. The YouTube people aren't trying to pass off the work as their own, in fact, they are paying tribute to it. NBC probably couldn't sell little highlight films, so it's not like they are taking away from NBC revenue. You could argue that they are adding to it. The more people talk about the show, the more viewers they might get. You could say the same thing about most literature and music, the creators, in their fondest dreams, envision that their work will be enjoyed by the masses, widespread and popular. They also hope to get rich off of it, or at least that someone else won't get rich while they make nothing (ask Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes if he gets any money off all the window stickers of Calvin peeing on something).

So I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't like paying $20 for a music CD, but I don't think musicians should give away their craft for free. I would love to invent something someday and make a fortune off of it. On the other hand, if someone could invent the 100 mile per gallon engine and someone else could buy the patent and sit on it, depriving me of this useful invention, I would not be pleased. And I find it incredibly stupid that people are applying for patents for genes that the find in some organism, as if they invented it themselves. That's crazy - am I supposed to pay a royalty every time my pancreas secretes an enzyme just because some geneticist found it in the lab? More likely, the geneticist would work for some megacorp with a battalion of lawyers that is quickly applying for patents for everything the poor underpaid geek in the lab sees through his spectrograph.

When the U.S. went to war in WWII, they were hailed as out producing their enemies and supplying their allies to such a degree that we overpowered them and won the war. What a lot of people don't understand is that the government adjusted the rules of intellectual property during the course of the war for the good of the country (and world) as a whole. Aircraft designs, particularly engine designs, were freely copied between the various aircraft manufacturers. They were more than willing to do this at the time because there was more than enough work and profits to go along, as well as the fact that they wanted to win the war. This special circumstance would be worth studying to see if any of the lessons might be applicable to the broader issue of intellectual property.

Sometimes government and universities come up with knowledge that is then made available to the general public. Sometimes this is simply because they do not have an immediate commercial application for the new knowledge, but other times it is because the person making the discovery is not a financial person, but a scientific one. There will always be those that love to figure things out, just as there will always be those obsessed with how to make a buck off of it. Scientists tend to publish their discoveries in journals, such as Science and Nature, where the ideas are peer reviewed for validity, but also widespread to like minded individuals. On the world's stage, this has led to an ever widening sphere of shared knowledge that accelerates technology, innovation, and future discoveries.

I love this pure exchange of ideas, the innovation incubator that our universities have become. We have to somehow find a way to make ideas available widespread without having these commercial and financial concerns stifle development.

Cooperation Makes Strength

Evolution has rewarded those that can out compete. Capitalism rewards those that can out compete at the expense of others. I have the vague sense that capitalism has some fatal flaws that will eventually drag democracy down the rathole.

I have great admiration for Benjamin Franklin. The guy was always curious, always questioning, and always sharing his knowledge. He's responsible for many of the concepts of cooperative civil society in America. Public Libraries and Fire Stations are just 2 of many things he came up with. He was the most renowned scientist in America in the mid 18th century, due to his work on electricity. He freely published the plans for building protection with lightning rods in order to help the greatest number of people. There's no patent for the lightning rod, Franklin did not profit monetarily from the sale of them. He also came up with the Franklin stove, and was encouraged to patent it. He refused, saying that ideas freely shared can be freely improved upon. He saw patents as a detriment to innovation. After all, how can you own knowledge? It's not as if a Franklin Stove could not have happened without Franklin, someone would have come up with it. Franklin's coin was the ability to see a need, study the concepts involved and come up with a useful idea.

So, am I a communist? Well, to be fair, the world has never seen true communism. It never got a clear and fair chance in its pure form. It was always used as a justification for totalitarianism. So you can't say that communism was tried and failed, it was never tried. I don't think it would work in all the forms it was described. The problem is that people do perform out of the profit motive, and people like to think they are being compensated for their time, efforts, and brilliance. So, the whole "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" is also bogus. If you are willfully ignorant or lazy, you should suffer somewhat for it. That's how you pay for your mental and/or physical slothfulness (if that's a word). We do have an obligation to care for those that are in need, if for no other reason than to prevent an atmosphere or spread of misery.

I believe competition has reached a point where it is destructive to society. When investment bankers and lawyers are being produced in more numbers and making more money than engineers and doctors, we are in trouble. The siren song of competition tells us to take what the other person has and become strong at the expense of others. When civilization was primitive, we could see these principles at work as barbarian hordes rode into all the civilized cities and killed everyone and took what they wanted. We put up with this kind of behavior within civilized society when we can dress it up with laws and procedures and make it seem clean and justified. But how is a lawyer suing a doctor for malpractice for a multimillion dollar settlement justified? This is ruining people who stepped forward, sacrificed and worked hard to serve society, and doing it for sport and profit. This is the worst perversion of democracy the legal system has ever come up with. Engineers get it pretty bad, too. Some bonehead either doesn't maintain a piece of equipment or uses it in a manner it was never meant to be used, and of course the engineer should pay to the point of ruin for someone else's mistake. I'm not saying there should never be consequences for medical incompetence or that flawed products should not be recalled or banned. However, companies that are trying to bring you the next wonder drug will never be able to do it at an affordable price if the number one sport of tort attorneys in this country is the class action lawsuit against pharmaceutical firms.

And what about our current energy crisis? I was in high school the last time gas prices skyrocketed. Right when I reached the age of the Teenaged American Dream including the magical driver's license and first car, gas was too expensive to allow for much freedom. America just spent the last 30 years drifting, not preparing for the next crisis. How does this happen? It's in the interests of the huge (enormously profitable) companies that bring you energy and transportation to keep their lock on the consumer. They've fought emissions and fuel efficiency standards for 30 years. This has not served us well. It has not served the auto companies either. Look at how Japan is sprinting past GM with the vigor of a marathoner passing a geriatric with emphysema. What happened to American know-how and ingenuity? What happened to leading the world with technology? Things are the way they are because competition demands that those on top with the money keep things going like they are and prevent any innovation.

America got its first technological boost in the 1700's with the innovation of textile mills. The concepts were simple, use water power and put all of the processes to manufacture cloth under one roof. Raw material in one side of the plant, finished product out the other. England had all the elements of this simple, cost effective, efficient, and highly profitable system in their hands, but were powerless to implement them. They had guilds that were threatened by this new way of doing things and worked to prevent any improvements. Look at England today compared to America. The textile revolution is where we catapulted past in technology and industry. How is what the oil and auto companies are doing to us now any different? If Congress had forced the U.S. Auto Industry to make continuous improvements on fuel efficiency, they would be as competitive if not more by now. They may not have liked it, they may have had to raise prices, but they would have all been in the same boat and would have all been equally hampered in the beginning, and equally healthy and profitable by now.

I believe the world needs to find ways to provide an individual's energy and clean water needs at a grass roots level. We should transform the technology we use to provide these commodities and then sell that technology to the rest of the world. We need to start a revolution and overthrow our corporate overlords. Capitalism has the potential to kill the golden goose if knowledge can be bottled up and either kept away from us or used against us. Information should be a free exchange that generates prosperity for everyone. A healthy a prosperous world, where everyone's energy, food, and water needs are met without taking away from others is a worthy goal. Can you imagine any group of people in the world being disgruntled if all their basic needs are met? Of course, health care and education are pretty basic needs, too, so there are social needs to be met as well to make the picture complete. I believe that terrorism would whither on the vine if it weren't for massive disparities in health, wealth, and opportunity. This is where the real strength of cooperation and the free exchange of knowledge comes in.