Essential for anyone who creates or works with what the old laws once called “the tangible expression of ideas”—a...
Fluent arguments against those who maintain that ripping a borrowed CD or pirating a video is a victimless crime.
At the micro level, such acts are not necessarily world-ending. And doesn’t Hollywood make enough money already? Perhaps, but, onetime Ross Perot running mate and long-time Washington insider Choate (The High-Flex Society, 1986) writes, consider that in China, the world’s largest single market, the largest legal film distributor sold 300,000 copies of Titanic, whereas pirates sold something like 25 million of them. Similarly, in Russia three out of four recordings are pirated, in eastern Europe only one of four software packages is legally licensed, and in Italy (and Washington, for that matter), buying fakes is now a fashion statement. The economic implications are enormous, costing Americans jobs and lots of money. (What’s more, think what would happen if airplanes started using pirated or faked parts, Choate suggests just before offering statistics on how many planes in the U.S. have crashed for just that reason.) Choate goes on to present a vigorous and to-the-point summary of the history of copyright and other intellectual property laws in the U.S., which, he argues, have been economic engines in their own right, rewarding innovation and ingenuity while allowing public-domain provisions to assure the general good. In that light, Choate examines current models of protection, designed to serve the interests of wealthy corporations, not individual inventors. He observes, for instance, that present law locks up economically dead material along with material that lives on and on, such as the song “Happy Birthday,” which should have fallen into the public domain in 1991 but was given a term extension to 2009, the better to enrich Time Warner. To liberate this material, as the framers of the Constitution would have wished, Choate proposes a flexible program that would both protect rights owners and “quickly move copyrighted works into the public domain after their commercial life is ended.”
Essential for anyone who creates or works with what the old laws once called “the tangible expression of ideas”—a significant readership, that is, in the Knowledge Economy.Pub Date: April 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40212-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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