Undocumented Immigrants Don't Steal Jobs -- They Create Them

Stuart K. Hayashi



Do you enjoy taking photographs with your mobile phone? I don’t, because I don’t have a mobile phone with that capability -- I’m low-tech that way. But if you love doing that with your phone, you should thank an illegal alien -- he is the one who invented that capability for a phone. His name is Philippe Kahn. He came to the USA legally from France but then he overstayed his visa. Upon becoming a multimillionaire in Silicon Valley from his inventions, he spent a fortune on legal fees to handle the immigration bureaucracy. He eventually got to the stay in the USA, much to our benefit. Anyone else with less money wouldn’t have been so fortunate.

Of course, “immigration skeptics” laugh off that example; Kahn doesn’t fit the stereotype. The undocumented immigrants who are most feared are the ones who come from poor countries. When Western Europeans fret about immigrants, they usually worry about Middle Easterners and Africans. Those groups are feared in the USA, too, but the group causing the biggest concern is Latinos. Therefore, let’s take a look at Latino immigrants.




Race to the Bottom?
The stereotype usually goes as follows: because they are impoverished, Latino immigrants decide to work in the United States for very low pay in “sweatshops” or in vineyards. Allegedly, they try to out-compete native-born workers by promising to work for a lower wage, and they thereby bid down the wages for everyone in a “race to the bottom.” This allows low-paid immigrants to be stuck in poverty forever.

This should sound familiar, because this is actually a Marxist argument. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proclaimed that the capitalist class would always keep the proletariat in poverty. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said that to stop domestic workers from benefiting from an increase in the number of units produced in factories, the capitalists would have to export the units overseas. From the late 1990s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the political Left -- which was then most commonly associated with “anti-globalism” -- said that greedy multinational corporations make foreign direct investments in poor Asian countries. Again, they said, the poor Asians try to compete against one another by trying to underbid one another in terms of the wages they accept. This ignites a “race to the bottom” that traps Asians in permanent poverty. Of course, that is not what happened. When Mattel invested in factories in Taiwan to manufacture Barbie dolls, the Taiwanese factory personnel initially worked for low pay. Those factory workers saved their money and were able to have their children trained for other professions. As Taiwan liberalized politically, it commensurately expanded in business operations and the Taiwanese have risen to First World affluence.

Even with the welfare state in existence, similar phenomena have occurred with immigrant populations in the United States. Those who invoke the “race to the bottom” argument proclaim that when immigration causes a long-term increase in the population, that commensurately increases the supply of potential laborers competing for work. That increase in the supply of laborers competing for work is supposed to bid down wages. Here is what those commentators overlook: every potential worker is also a consumer. Every immigrant worker needs food, clothing, and shelter: he or she works precisely to obtain the money with which he or she will pay for these amenities. The increase in the supply of potential laborers at businesses is therefore met by a commensurate increase in demand for amenities that must be supplied by other businesses. To supply the amenities that the immigrant laborers demand, those other businesses must hire more staff. Hence, as immigrants increase the supply of available laborers, those same immigrants increase the demand for labor as well, thereby bidding wages back up. Over a matter of months this mass migration increased the size of Miami’s overall working population by 7 percent and the size of its unskilled workforce by one-fifth. Economists noticed no discernible long-term change in unemployment or in wage rates.

Not Job-Stealers But Job Creators
The assumption that all immigrants from poor countries remain migrant farm workers their whole lives is a false one. The New York Times spotlighted the fact that many of the families that arrived in the USA from Mexico during World War II saved their money and eventually came to own vineyards similar to the ones they once worked on. Writing for the Matador Network, Amanda Machado is able to name ten such families in Napa Valley.

Consider Carlos Castro and Jose Wilfredo Flores, both of whom entered the USA illegally after fleeing civil wars in El Salvador. Flores founded W Concrete, which brought in $6.6 million in the fiscal year of 2011. Carlos Castro started Todos Supermarket, which earned $18 million in 2012. The fact that Castro and Flores immigrated to the USA is what resulted in a substantial increase in demand for the labor or native-born Americans -- they needed to hire staff to operate. These undocumented immigrants are job creators.

To expand operations and hire new employees to man those operations, firms need capital. Such capital is provided by the likes of Julissa Arce, who, at age eleven, migrated from Mexico to San Antonio, Texas illegally with her family. She eventually became a vice president at a well-known investment bank. Those are three reasons for the alt-right to dislike her: (1) she came to the USA undocumented (2) from Mexico, and (3) earned a position at Goldman Sachs.

Ambitious in America
Also think of Cristian Arcega and the three other undocumented immigrant students on his team from Carl Hayden High School who, in 2004, beat MIT in a competition to build a robot that would most efficiently operate underwater in salvage missions. This was recorded in the documentary Underwater Dreams and dramatized in the motion picture Spare Parts.

We should also think of Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa. As a young man, he climbed over a fence from Mexico to the USA illegally. His first years in the USA were consistent with that of the stereotype: he was a low-paid migrant farm worker. However, as with the Taiwanese factory workers in the 1970s, he saved his money. He sent himself to medical school. He is presently one of the world’s foremost brain surgeons, saving the lives of native-born Americans.

Immigrants from poor countries are not doomed to poverty and failure -- there are many other success stories. And we would have still more success stories about them if not for the present red tape restricting immigration from poor nations.

Peaceful immigration is a noble enterprise. To deny free immigration is to deny free enterprise.

On September 18, 2017, I replaced the infographic about immigrant laborers increasing demand for laborers. Previously I mentioned that Ethan G. Lewis's paper argued this point. However, the team of Orn Bodvarsson made a whole paper that examined that point more specifically. Hence, I updated the infographic citing the Orn Bodvarsson et al. paper as the go-to paper on this.  I previously misspelled Julissa Arce's name as "Acre."  On January 20, 2018, I corrected this misspelling. On Thursday, July 9, 2020, I added the figure of the Mariel boatlift increasing the size of the unskilled workforce in Miami by 20 percent.

Drawing of Godzilla Coming At You

Stuart K. Hayashi


I drew this from January 13 to January 15, 2017.  You can also see it on Instagram here.

Godzilla is a registered trademark of Toho Co., Ltd.

The drawing on January 14, before it was finished:

Upon completion:

Why, While NOT Being Philosophically More Pro-Technology, the Japanese -- Unlike Westerners -- See Robots As Good Guys By Default

Stuart K. Hayashi

Dark Horse Comics publishing "Astro Boy" in English.

Years ago the futurist José Cordeiro, an associate of Ray Kurzweil, pointed out to me that Japan and the West see robots differently. In Western fiction -- especially fiction published before 1997 -- robots are usually the bad guys by default, whereas the Japanese see robots as good guys by default.

It is true that in both Japan and the West, there are stories where good robots fight evil robots. However, what remains conspicuous is whether they are good or evil by default. In the West's Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the hero, but this Terminator is a villain by default; he only fights on the human protagonists' side because he was defeated and reprogrammed. That is, what is typical in Western movies made before 1997 is that for the sapient robot to be considered the good guy, he has to be manipulated into siding with the human race.

Despite the Star Wars franchise being very strongly influenced by Japanese motion pictures, the Western trend of robots being villainous applies. Yes, C-3PO and R2-D2 are on the Rebel Alliance's side, but much of the tone implies that becoming more mechanical makes you less soulful and less caring. Anakin Skywalker taking on a more mechanical body corresponds with his corruption; he transitions into the cold, domineering Darth Vader. Obi-Wan says, “He is more machine now than man -- twisted and evil.” To be more machinelike is to be less good. General Grievous started out as an organism, but his making his body more robot-like over the years corresponds with a deliberate degradation of his humanity.

By contrast, in Japan the Mega Man video game franchise (called Rockman in Japan, with the “rock” being short for rock ‘n’ roll) is something of a reversal of Terminator 2. Mega Man, as well, pits good robots against destructive ones. However, in the very first Mega Man game, it is stated that all of Mega Man’s opponents began as benign robots that Dr. Light assembled for the purpose of assisting human beings in construction. They did not become villainous until Dr. Wily captured them and reprogrammed them to do his bidding. That is, in contrast to Terminator 2, wherein robots begin as evil and must be manipulated into doing good, Mega Man has the robots start out as good. They will do no evil until they are manipulated into doing so. The recent Mega Man homage Mighty No. 9 is even more explicit about that.

Not even the Transformers franchise -- where the robots can either be good or bad, and there is no obvious default -- provides a real counterexample to this trend. Many people falsely assume that Transformers started in the West. Actually, Transformers was originally a Japanese toy line, though, in the original Japanese story, all of the robots were piloted by humans. It was Hasbro in the West that changed the story, deciding that the Autobots and Decepticons would be sapient.

For a long time, I thought that maybe Japanese popular culture having a more benign outlook on robots than the West indicated one area where Japanese culture is actually more pro-technology than is Western culture. Later, though, some Objectivists on Facebook pointed out to me that a likelier explanation is that this is an accident of culture and, oddly, has to do with ancient Japanese belief in animism.



Japanese Side With the Robots Because of . . . Mysticism?
Animism is the belief of ancient peoples -- mostly hunter-gatherers -- that all objects possess spirits inside of them. This animism was often translated into an early form of political environmentalism -- the idea was that tribal law should forbid you from drastically reshaping this part of the wilderness, as the wilderness spirits will punish you. Even today, there are indigenous-peoples activists who quite successfully lobby for legislation to obstruct the construction of telescopes or roads or pipelines on particular sites, proclaiming that those sites are sacred and that human development will disturb the wilderness spirits and incur their wrath. The Japanese, though, put an odd spin on this -- they said that, to some extent, you are permitted to reshape the wilderness to create manmade tools, but that benign spirits -- usually helpful to humans -- will inhabit those tools. For instance, if you have an umbrella, the umbrella has a benign spirit of its own. On that interpretation, a robot such as Mega Man will, by default, have a soul, too.

Japan’s regard for robots as benign particularly got a boost when Osamu Tezuka started his manga Astro Boy in 1952. Tezuka conceived of Astro Boy as a modern or futuristic Pinocchio. Astro Boy is a goodhearted little boy but, instead of a wooden puppet being magically animated, he is a lifelike robot, an android. (Android is gender-specific; the prefix andro- means male man. A female robot would be a gynoid.)

Tezuka is the main reason why manga/anime characters have such exaggerated large eyes. Tezuka read lots of Uncle Scrooge comics and noticed all the Disney toons had exaggerated large eyes. As something of an homage, he gave all his human characters similarly exaggerated (neotenous) large eyes. He inspired later generations of manga/anime artists who copied him. Likewise, those same artists copied the idea of robots being good by default. Notably, the creators of Mega Man cite Astro Boy as a major inspiration.

As for why robots are generally depicted as the heavies in Western popular culture, I suspect it has to do with nineteenth-century Romanticist philosophy.



Nineteenth-Century Romanticist Philosophy: Why Western Artists Depict Robots As Bad Guys
Today we have this stereotype of pretentious avant-garde artists who proclaim that their artistry is of pure emotions loftier than anything technological, and who rail against materialistic commerce. Yet that stereotype is relatively recent; it was alien for most of modern history.

Filippo Brunelleschi pioneered in using linear perspective in paintings. In so doing, he revolutionized the arts, and these principles were explicitly scientific. Following his lead, painters throughout the Renaissance understood that art naturally followed from science. To create more lifelike depictions of the human nude, they studied anatomy, even dissected corpses. To produce a more lifelike effect in their paintings, they studied optics and the scientific nature of light and its effect on how objects are seen. And, despite some lip service to Christian anti-materialism, these artists were hardly abashed in how commercial they were in their pursuits. On into the nineteenth century, J. M. W. Turner continued to learn the science of optics to improve his art.

It was Turner’s contemporaries who changed the direction of art in the West, though. We are familiar with the virtues of the Romanticist style of art in the nineteenth century -- the emphasis on larger-than-life themes and the exploration of what it means to be a hero. While Romanticist style is beneficial, most of the Romanticists’ explicit philosophy is not. Back in the days when the nascent political Left was praising industrialization, and promising that industrialization and technology would develop further under their social collectivism, it was the Romanticist philosophic movement denouncing industrialization and technology. Whereas Karl Marx wrote of his collective being good on account of being able to advance industrialism better than private capitalists could, William Blake’s poetry bemoaned “dark Satanic mills.” Whereas members of the Old Left in the vein of Edward Bellamy heralded a collectivist technological utopia in Looking Backward, Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Since the nineteenth century, the basic ethical attitudes of Romanticist philosophy have come to pervade Western art, and that includes motion pictures. This is how we end up with James Cameron, creator of The Terminator, turning out Avatar. For Western artists, sapient robots symbolize industrialization. To them, industrialization is evil. Therefore, following that syllogism, sapient robots must also be evil.

If you think of the Mega Man video games as being representative of Japanese attitudes, and then regard James Cameron’s Avatar as representing the attitudes of Western artists, it may seem that the Japanese are more open-minded about the benefits of robots and artificial intelligence. Strangely, though, that might actually be the result of Japan’s mystical belief in animism -- a mystical belief that, in its present form, is often implemented as environmentalist legislation.



Other Notes
Ironically, by the 1970s, Osamu Tezuka -- as was (and is) common for Japanese artists since the late twentieth century -- had become fervently environmentalist. Like most Japanese artists who craft tales about heroic robots, Tezuka actually agreed, to the end of his days, with nineteenth-century Western Romanticists that industrialization is cruelly encroaching upon the wilderness, dehumanizing humanity and robbing the wilderness of its grandeur. I don’t think Tezuka adequately reconciled, intellectually, how human beings would have to burn energy and alter the landscape to power their benevolent robots, just as people don’t think of all the fossil fuels they burn in order to play the video game Final Fantasy VII, which cast electrical utilities as inherently villainous.

Also noteworthy is that, while Star Wars is strongly influenced by Japanese cinema, that cinema consisted mostly of samurai movies that were released prior to Astro Boy.

Still, in large part thanks to Japanese influence over Western culture, we are increasingly seeing Western motion pictures and comic books depicting robots as sympathetic by default, such as in the cases of the Steven Spielberg picture A.I. and in the computer-animated Big Hero Six. Despite being unrelentingly “chick lit,” Cassandra Clarke’s The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is also interesting. It is the story of a young woman in love with the world’s only remaining sapient robot; she wonders if he truly shares her affection or if he is merely a “philosophic zombie” that mimics human emotions but does not truly experience them.

2017

Stuart K. Hayashi

Happy New Year? 😯

. . .

Happy STU Year! 😄

The Market Is 'Self-Correcting' in the Way That Science Is 'Self-Correcting'

Stuart K. Hayashi

Circa 1788, Jacques-Louis David did this portrait of Antoine Lavoisier and his wife.

If science is "self-correcting," then science is to Divine Revelation what the free market is to government control. Most of the scientists I know dislike anyone pointing that out, because they are left-wing statists and philosophically inconsistent. But here goes.

To say that science is self-correcting doesn't mean everybody stands idly by and then some erroneous misunderstanding magically reverses itself. Rather, insofar as there is freedom, a scientist is free to look into other people's conclusions and double-check them. Some people say that science is inferior to Divine Revelation because scientists are admittedly fallible in their conclusions, whereas Divine Revelation is infallible. But they miss that the reason why Divine Revelation is infallible is that arbitrary postulations cannot even be right or wrong.

The majority of scientists I know absolutely hate the free market. They want the government to be their sugar daddy and supply them more taxpayer funding. But there is a limit to that; the taxation and regulation they favor does have some inhibiting effect on economic growth, and there is that danger of reaching the point where the goose will be killed and lay no more golden eggs.

Many scientists who properly praise science for being "self-correcting" make it a point to ridicule those who observe that the free market is "self-correcting" as well. They employ the straw man that one who considers the market to be self-correcting presumes that everyone can sit idly by and do nothing, and then some problem will magically disappear. That is indeed a false impression that the term laissez faire gives as long as laissez faire is taken to mean "let it alone." Politicians hate referring to themselves as laissez faire because they think that if they call themselves that -- if they say they know how to leave people alone -- that makes such politicians sound passive and lazy, whereas politicians gain fame by developing a reputation for being proactive (which, in real life, translates to that politician being meddling). But in the free market, a peaceable entrepreneur improves living standards exactly because she is not letting something alone.

A more precise translation of laissez faire, and one that applies more closely to what happens in the market, is "let you do" -- emphasis on the DO. That is free enterprise. Insofar as peace is maintained, people are free to enterprise -- you are left free to DO. A free-market entrepreneur is proactive in the way that a meddling government cannot be -- she remains peaceful and obtains help from others through their voluntary consent. A peaceful market is self-correcting in the way that science is self-correcting: someone who notices a problem has the freedom to take action and do something about it. Insofar as peace is maintained, financial profit is often a good impetus to motivate someone to devise some solution.

We often hear the misleading phrase market failure. The implication of it is that even when no one is being violent as some problem occurs (say, no one is being violent but someone at some company made an error resulting in unsafe units of some product being sold), the problem is inherent to those people being left free to cooperate or not, and only the initiation of the use of force on the government's part can solve the problem. But no, the error is not a market failure but a human failure -- people make the same errors both in private organizations and in government-controlled enterprises. The difference is that insofar as people are free and peaceful, a company continually making a dangerous error is ultimately penalized by losing customers, whereas, if a government-controlled enterprise makes the same error, taxes still pay to support that government-controlled enterprise's staff anyway. The notion that government force is necessarily more competent than free individuals to perform any nonviolent enterprise -- say, mail delivery or educating children -- is an article of faith.

No matter how statist any scientist becomes, science and free enterprise are connected. Science is the peaceful pursuit of empirical knowledge, and free enterprise is the peaceful application of that knowledge.

An Invention Takes Years of Commitment and Tangible Resources; It's Not Something You 'Just Pull Out Your Ass'

Stuart K. Hayashi

Preface:  The following essay is an adaptation of a Facebook Note I published on December 29, 2016.  As of my posting this here, two Murray Rothbard-influenced libertarian anarchists informed me over Facebook that they didn't even need to read the following essay to know it is wrong and foolish.  One cannot help but marvel at their ESP powers of precognition.  😒

Since Howard Hughes was an inventor and entrepreneur, I have long been fascinated by his life story.  This drawing of mine is supposed to be of him in his younger days, complete with the flight goggles.

Some libertarians on my Facebook Friends List have approvingly Facebook-shared this insipid image:

The story in the image is as follows. The caveman inventor came up with the wheel -- rather easily, apparently, and showed it to a copycat caveman. In just a day, the copycat was able to produce another unit of the invention with no payment to the caveman inventor. To employ the crude sort of slang that normally accompanies memes such as this one, the copying got the caveman inventor quite "butt-hurt"[!!!]. The caveman inventor thus wishes the government could use force on the copycat to prevent him from producing any units of the caveman inventor’s invention if the copycat does not obtain the caveman inventor’s permission first.

But, implies the image, that would be an initiation of the use of force on the caveman inventor’s part; in producing his own unit of the wheel, the copycat was peaceably doing what he wanted with his own private property, hurting no one; it is not as if the caveman inventor lost his prototype unit. The caveman inventor is unjustly demanding a government-enforced monopoly on the industry that is the production of units of wheels. Besides, the caveman inventor can simply go invent something else; he pulled this invention out of his ass quite easily -- just as the copycat duplicated it so easily --and now the inventor can quickly dream up his next invention. Easy!

That is a typical straw man employed by opponents of intellectual property rights (IP rights or IPRs) -- it is also found in The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible -- and it is built on lies.

The meme above practices what it preaches in an important respect -- very similar to the Facebook Libertinius page, it flagrantly disrespects a specific party's intellectual property. The meme is a vandalization of a work by the cartoonist Baloo, and it doesn't even credit Baloo.

What Baloo's cartoon looked like before being vandalized.

The argument, such as in the meme above, conflates vague general ideas with patents. Going by the worldview of those who denigrate patents, we are to believe that patents are legal claims of exclusive ownership over vague general ideas that anyone can pull out of his ass. If it were true that patents were on vague general ideas that anyone could come up with, then it would indeed be petty for a patent holder to sue you for using the same obvious idea that the patent holder pretends to have devised on his own. That is the imagery that opponents of patents rely on -- they want you to believe that anyone who enforces his patent is petty and a bully. “Who is this petty party,” we are expected to ask angrily, “to use the force of law to deprive other people of using simple ideas?”

But a patent does not attempt to claim legal ownership over a general idea for a category of product, and it is not a government-enforced monopoly on an industry.



The Myth of “IP As Monopoly”
Ponder something as relatively simple as paperclips. You might think that if a man obtained a patent on his paperclip, he would then monopolize the paperclip industry for at least seventeen years. If you think that, you would be wrong. Since the late nineteenth century, in the USA alone there have been many patents on the paperclip, often granted in intervals shorter than seventeen years. That is, prior to one party’s paperclip patent expiring, a patent on yet another paperclip would be granted.

Notice that in every instance on this table where a new paperclip patent is granted, it is fewer than 17 years subsequent to the approval of the paperclip patent immediately preceding it. (Click on the image to get a magnified view of the table.)

The reason for this is that a patent is not a claim of ownership over a general idea or a whole category of product. A utility patent protects the aspects of your specific original design for a product pertaining to how that product functions. A design patent, on the other hand, protects the aspects of your specific original design for a product pertaining to that product’s aesthetic qualities. When George Lucas obtained a design patent on his “Boba Fett action figure,” for example, it meant that you would need to obtain George Lucas’s permission if you were to produce a toy that carried an obvious deliberate likeness to the character of Boba Fett from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Your receiving a patent on your paperclip does not preclude others from patenting or selling their own paperclips. Every time a patent is granted on a paperclip, it is not on the general idea of having a device that holds more than one sheet of paper together. Rather, the patent is on a specific original aspect of the design. The reason why there are so many patents on paperclips is that different designers have made them from different materials, arranged them in different shapes, and employed new methods of producing units of paperclips in bulk quantities.

A common straw man used to denigrate patents is “Two separate parties, completely unbeknownst to each other, can each come up with the exact same invention at the exact same time.” As is typical of opponents of patents, this argument relies on a misunderstanding. Many parties, each working independently, can each arrive at the same general idea at separate times that are within relatively close proximity to one another, but that general idea is not what they patent. Each of those parties arrives at a different specific design, and each party’s patent has features distinct from the others’.  A party patents not a general idea, but instead patents its own unique new method for implementing that idea. All the while, there remain myriad different methods whereby this idea can still be implemented. 

Where two separate parties’ patents are similar -- where there is “overlap” in their function-related features -- the common result has been for those separate parties to pool their patents in a single trust, such as when Robert Noyce invented one aspect of the microprocessor at Fairchild Semiconductor while Jack Kilby invented another aspect of it while at Texas Instruments. None of that evinces anything unjust about the principle of intellectual property as such.

When Jack Northrop received his patent on his “flying wing” design for airplanes, that did not grant him a government-enforced monopoly on the production of airplanes; other parties still designed and patented their own airplanes. Not even the Wright brothers had a patent on the general product category of “airplane”; their patents were on the method of steering. Their innovation was steering the airplane by means of warping the shape of its wings. This did not stop their competitor, Glenn Curtiss, from making his own airplanes. Before the Wright brothers’ patents expired, Curtiss patented the way in which he arranged his ailerons on airplane wings. Ailerons are fins on the wings of airplanes that change direction in unison and thereby change the direction in which the airplane is to head. (The Wright brothers did ultimately use ailerons, but their patents didn't describe them in the same manner that Curtiss's did.)

A general idea for a product is something that can be dreamt up quickly, but that is not something that is patentable.  One does not need a working physical model -- a prototype unit -- as a condition for obtaining a patent, but patents that lack an accompanying working model are relatively difficult to enforce in court.

If you actually want to be able to sue other parties successfully for patent infringement, such a strong patent normally includes a detailed model.  Throughout the rest of this essay, when I say model, I do not mean it as physical model synonymous with prototype unit. By model, I mean "theoretic model," such as what is explained in the series of diagrams that is frequently found in patent applications.  In any case, a patentable invention requires some model that can, in scientific terms, plausibly function as promised and can be operated by someone skilled in the art, skilled in the trade. That is, if you invent a new sort of furnace for steel-making, obtaining a reliably enforceable patent for it calls upon you to provide a detailed theoretic model (this often includes diagrams) that produces steel as promised, and the explanation for how it is to be used must be understandable enough to steelmakers so that they can operate the prototype successfully once this prototype is produced. Contrary to the insipid caveman image at the top, as well as The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, that is not something you can just pull out of your ass.



What It Takes to Produce a Design Both Patentable and Reliably Enforceable in Court
Consider Chester F. Carlson and the development of the xerographic photocopier -- what is more conventionally known as a Xerox machine. He first came up with the idea in 1934 working at a law firm. He found it tedious to copy documents in his own penmanship, and wished there was an effective low-cost method for making clear, legible duplicates of documents. He spent hundreds of dollars on equipment (money he could have instead spent on other amenities, such as better housing) and hours of his life each week (hours he could have spent earning money at a second job with steadier prospects for supplementing his income) to run experiments to test his theories on how this device could accomplish its intended task. It was not until 1938 when he finally finished a detailed theoretic model ready for patenting. This patent was granted in 1940.

Even then, nothing was easy for Carlson. He approached multiple big, capital-heavy corporations with his proposal to license this technology to them, hoping they would develop units of this device. Twenty of these big firms turned Carlson down. It was not due to a lack of capital on their part -- far from it! They had enough money to produce multiple units of Carlson’s design. Rather, for them the issue was that they judged that there would not be enough demand for this product to justify allocating their capital for this purpose.

Carlson’s fortunate break came in 1944 when Carlson finally -- finally! -- was able to license the invention to the Battelle Memorial Institute. in 1947, Battelle turned over this technology to Joseph Wilson’s Haloid Corporation -- a company whose name Wilson would change to Xerox.

It was not until 1949 when Xerox had developed a model that it felt confident about putting on the market -- the Xerox Model A. This turned out to be a commercial flop. Upon a cost-benefit analysis, the target market for this product -- corporate offices, law firms, and schools -- decided that this machine was not even worth renting. Joseph Wilson had to go back to the drawing board to find a method of producing a model that would satisfy consumer demand adequately while remaining cost-effective for Xerox to manufacture. This led to the firm unveiling the Xerox 914 in 1959. This was the first model of a xerographic photocopier to generate a profit for any party. Carlson’s original patent had already expired before Xerox could profit from xerographic photocopying. Fortunately for Carlson and Xerox, Joseph Wilson was able to obtain patents on other design aspects on the Xerox 914 that the company had developed during its own R and D process. In the 1960s, royalty payments made Carlson one of the richest people in the country -- well-earned.

Examine those durations. It took Carlson four years to develop a model that he could patent. The duration between Carlson’s initial inspiration and the introduction of any xerographic photocopier in any market was a whopping fifteen years. And the time it took between Carlson’s generation of the idea and the moment that this idea first generated a profit for any party was twenty-five years.

What happens in all those years? What happens is research and development and experimentation. In the four years it took Carlson to make his original vague general idea into a patentable model, Carlson had to purchase his own equipment -- tangible goods can only exist as a finite number of units -- to test his models to determine whether they functioned as he intended. The same happened in the twelve years between the moment in which Joseph Wilson first gained access to this technology and the moment on which anyone profited from it. Xerox spent thousands of dollars employing engineers and technicians to run tests on how they could minimize costs while still producing units of this technology that were able to satisfy consumer demand. To run such experiments, they too had to acquire tangible equipment coming in a finite number of units.

Here is why that point is important. Yes, your patent is on something that is intangible -- a theoretical model on how a product is to be structured physically and how it is to function. But, by that same token, you would not have been able to come up with the intangible model if not for your using up tangible goods that come in finite units -- units that are, more often than not, relatively perishable. That is an important point overlooked by opponents of intellectual property, such as Arnold Plant and Timothy Sandefur.  The fact is glossed over by those who claim that private property rights revolve entirely around settling disputes over who gets to access and use up goods that are necessarily tangible and which necessarily come in a finite number of units.


Yes, Timothy Sandefur and Arnold Plant, Intellectual Property Rights Do Address What Economists Call “Scarcity” of Units
Timothy Sandefur is a lawyer widely beloved by Objectivists and I have met him face-to-face in Honolulu, but he rejects the very Objectivist foundation for private property rights and propagates the usual pernicious misconceptions about IP. Timothy Sandefur says,

In the case of tangible property, real or personal,…the property is naturally exclusive, meaning that if I have it, you simply cannot; if I take it, you no longer have it -- you have been "disseissed." Intellectual property, however, is not like this. I can "take" it from you, and yet you still have it. If, for example, you are the greatest musician in the history of rock and roll (that is, John Fogerty) and you have written the greatest song ever (that is, "Born on The Bayou"...), then I can sing "Born on the Bayou" in my shower, and you can still, at the same time, use and enjoy your "property" as you wish: you can perform it, sell it, or leave it alone.

We will come back to this later: Sandefur's example of singing a famous copyrighted song in the shower is a straw man. For now, note the similarity between Sandefur’s statement and the assumptions of the people who Facebook-share that caveman cartoon: when the copycat makes his own unit of a wheel, that does not deprive the caveman inventor of his prototype or any other unit of wheel that the caveman inventor produces. Therefore, the caveman inventor lost nothing, right?  That same idea comes across in this Facebook meme:

Timothy Sandefur’s misrepresentation, as well as the arguments of most IP-denouncers from the twentieth century onward, derives from this statement from University of Chicago economist Arnold Plant:

It is a peculiarity of property rights in patents (and copyrights) that they do not arise out of the scarcity of the objects which become appropriated. They are not a consequence of scarcity. They are the deliberate creation of statute law, and, whereas in general the institution of private property makes for the preservation of scarce goods... property rights in patents and copyrights make possible the creation of a scarcity of the products appropriated which could not otherwise be maintained.

Here is a rephrasing of the argument that Timothy Sandefur and Arnold Plant present. Private property rights, primarily being the law’s method of resolving disputes over how finite resources are distributed and allocated, are applicable exclusively to tangible goods coming in a finite number of units. If apples and apple trees are commercialized, then private property rights apply to them. If widgets are machines made for human consumption, then private property rights apply to them. As there is presently a finite number of units of widgets in existence, then if you acquire more units of widgets, that is fewer available for me. If you have more apples, that is fewer apples for me. I could grow my own trees and then graft my own branches on them to grow more apples (all apples on the market are clones from the same ancestral branch; wild apples grown from wild apple trees are not uniform in quality). More units can be produced in the future -- this would take time and resource inputs -- but the fact remains that in this precise moment, there is a finite number of units of apple trees and widgets in existence.

That is what conventional economists mean when they say that economics is about “scarcity.” (Contrary to the fears of many Objectivists, when conventional economists say that markets address “scarcity,” they are seldom ever implying agreement with Rev. Malthus that humans just use up nonrenewable resources and one day will be left with nothing; they just mean that there is presently a finite number of units on the market.)

If there were no private property rights, say Arnold Plant and his followers, people would always be violently fighting over who gets what -- over who gets this apple orchard. Once private property rights are established, it reduces the risk that such fights will break out. Private property rights, say Arnold Plant and his followers, mean that you and I agree that this-and-that belongs to you, whereas this-and-this belongs to me, and we leave each other be. On that interpretation, then, private property rights are nothing more than a means of settling disputes over who gets to access and use up highly tangible goods that are finite in number.

Then Arnold Plant and those who argue in his vein, such as Timothy Sandefur, continue that because intellectual property rights are intangible, they cannot be authentic private property rights. This is question-beginning on their part. To “win” their argument, they decide that, from the outset, they have to define private property rights as referring exclusively to tangible goods that come in a finite number of units. Upon pretending that that arbitrary premise is some well-established fact, they then point out that intellectual property rights are intangible and that, by their own (arbitrary) definition of private property rights, patents and copyrights are precluded from being authentic property.

 First off, the government’s attempt to resolve some potential dispute over the allocation of tangible goods -- goods coming in a finite number of units -- is not the main justification for private property rights. The main justification is that you should maintain legal control over the very economic value that you have created -- I explain that in this blog post. You deserve to maintain control over your art and inventions for the same reason that you, as a homesteader, deserve to maintain control over the patch of land that you have rendered inhabitable.

The economic value that a homesteader wrings out of a patch of land is an emergent property. Emergent property refers to what happens when, once the same old components are arranged in a particularly fortuitous fashion, some new (sometimes even wholly unprecedented) phenomenon occurs. For example, there was a time when there was no life on Earth; for billions of years, it was the same old chemicals lying around.   But one day, those same chemicals were arranged in a new fashion, and what was nonliving matter became the first primitive living matter, some proto-micro-organism.

Similarly, when a homesteader improves a plot of land --meaning she makes it inhabitable for human use -- she is not creating any new matter; she is rearranging the matter that already exists.  But this new arrangement has rendered this land, once previously uninhabitable, into land that is inhabitable, and that habitability is the new phenomenon, the emergent property.  It is also the new economic value created.  That same principle applies to patentable inventions.  The patent for a highly profitable invention is a set of instructions for arranging already-existing matter in a fashion that produces some effect that satisfies consumer demand, and what makes this patent lucrative is that the patent's instructions allow for a manufacturer to educe this demand-satisfying effect in a manner that is cost-effective enough to allow the manufacturer to sell units of this arrangement at a net profit. This invention produces a net increase in utility in the economy, utility that previously had not existed.  That net increase in utility, that unprecedented economic value that has been created, is also an emergent property.

Both (1) a homesteader's improvement in the land and (2) an inventor's contribution of a net increase in utility, are emergent phenomena whereby new economic value has been created, economic value previously unexplored.

For the law to recognize this newly created economic value as being the private property of the party that created it does both of the following: (a) it justly allows the party that created this value to sustain itself while (b) it also signals to other market participants that they, too, will be free to reap the rewards of their own value creation if they, too, produce these new forms of utility. 

Secondly -- and this is what Arnold Plant and Timothy Sandefur conveniently elide -- intellectual property rights do address the allocation and usage of tangible goods that are finite in number. They do address what Arnold Plant calls “scarcity” and what Timothy Sandefur calls the fact that tangible goods, coming in a finite number of units, can be “disseised.”

In the four years it took for Carlson to develop a xerographic photocopier model worthy of licensing, he had to acquire equipment for testing this model. That equipment came in the form of perishable tangible goods that always had, and always would, come in a finite number of existing units. As Carlson used up these goods in his experiments, they depreciated in value, meaning that if other people tried to use these units of goods afterwards, they would not be able to derive the same value from those goods if Carlson had not acquired and used them up first. After all, tangible goods are frequently perishable in the long run. When, in the development of his model for a xerographic photocopier, Carlson used units of tangible goods for his experiments, it meant that those units would not be used by anyone else.

The same principle applied in the twelve years it took for Xerox to produce a model of xerographic photocopier that satisfied enough consumer demand to generate a profit. In its own testing, Xerox employed engineers and technicians running their own tests, again using tangible equipment that came in the form of units that would always be finite in number. For any firm to run its own tests in R and D, it must use up resources, and those are units of resources which other parties are not able to access. Even if those resources remain intact once R and D is done, those resources have usually depreciated, meaning the same value cannot be wrung out of them as was wrung when the R and D process began.


The Tragedy of the Public-Domain Commons
Recall that before Carlson won a deal with the Battelle Memorial Institute, he approached twenty corporations for licensing and got rejected by each of them. Imagine what those twenty firms could have done if there was no intellectual property protection for the xerographic photocopier:once the Xerox 914 hit the market in 1959 and finally generated a profit for Xerox -- after a quarter-century of being in development and profiting no one -- those twenty corporations could pirate that model with legal impunity.

Arnold Plant’s followers would celebrate that as wonderful, as they proclaim that patent protection imposes an artificial “scarcity” on the number of units of xerographic photocopiers on the market. With the Xerox 914 having patent protection, Xerox did not even have to sell these units; organizational clients had to pay rent to use any units. By contrast, continues the reasoning of Arnold Plant’s argument, if the twenty corporations that rejected Carlson were able to pirate Carlson's design, then that would put that many more units of xerographic photocopiers on the market by the early 1960s. The increased competition would lower prices; maybe Xerox Corporation would be motivated to sell units of the product rather than be stingy and only lease them out.

Such an argument is shortsighted.

An intellectual property is intangible -- it is a theoretical intellectual construct. But it is a theoretical intellectual construct that generates a financial profit for a party only to the extent that this theoretical construct is scientifically accurate enough to produce the practical results that it purports to produce. And putting together that theoretical intellectual construct requires experimentation whereby the IP holder or her investors must invest in tangible equipment that exists on the market in the form of a finite number of units.

It took four years of Carlson’s life to come up with a model that was patentable. It took a span of twenty-five years for Carlson’s initial vague idea to become a profitable unit. In that span, Carlson and Xerox Corporation used up and depreciated thousands of dollars worth of units of tangible goods, which they paid for themselves. If there was no IP protection for xerographic photocopying, and the twenty corporations pirated the Xerox 914, those twenty corporations could use their extensive capital exclusively on turning out units of Xerox 914 knockoffs while not having spent a penny on the man-hours and perishable equipment that Carlson and Xerox Corporation labored to acquire and employ to develop the Xerox 914's useful design.

By pirating Xerox’s intellectual property, those twenty corporations would, in effect, be stealing the tangible goods that Carlson and Xerox needed to use up and depreciate in the process of developing the Xerox 914. That, Timothy Sandefur, is what gets “disseised” when someone pirates intellectual property.

The four years that Carlson spent on his model would be for naught. The twenty-five years it took for Carlson’s idea to come to fruition, culminating in the first profitable xerographic photocopier, would be for naught. Would-be inventors who saw what happened to Carlson after twenty-five years of this work would be discouraged from coming up with their own practicable original designs for useful products.

The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible treats inventions and artworks as if they can easily be pulled out of one’s ass. That can be done with vague general ideas, but that is not what patents protect. Patents protect viable specific models -- models that come with diagrams and detailed explanations for how members of the intended market can use the device in its intended purpose. And such models are developed from years of experimentation that require using and depreciating tangible goods that always exist in units that are finite in number.

That creating such a model -- such a practicable design -- takes up so many man-hours and material resources, is the reason why such models themselves come in units that are finite in number. People have billions of throwaway ideas every day. By contrast, patentable designs that satisfy consumer demand and change the world are much fewer in number, numbering in thousands per year at the most. And if inventors could not profit from such models, or could not even recoup what it cost them to produce those models, then there would be fewer such models still.

If the law did not protect an apple grower’s right to the orchard he homesteaded, and anyone could trespass onto the orchard and pick off the apples freely, then in the long run there would be fewer apples grown. Likewise, if the law does not protect Chester F. Carlson’s right to have exclusive control over the model he produced, and any capital-rich corporation can pirate his model, then in the long run there will be fewer such practicable models being thought up by inventors. This will happen:

If an inventive party's right to exclusive control over its own specific original design is not recognized by law as the rightful private property that it is, most inventors will be Atlases who "shrug."

There is a reason why so many people who claim to be free-marketers stubbornly reject recognition of this. It is because the economist who most influenced them on this issue, Arnold Plant, failed to observe that intellectual property protection does address what Arnold Plant would call a preexisting “scarcity” -- a finitude in the number of available units that existed prior to the legal establishment of patents and copyrights.


Artwork -- IP That Is Copyrighted and Trademarked -- Also Cannot Be Created Without the Usage of Tangible Goods Coming in a Finite Number of Units
The same principle applies to the pirating of artwork. No matter how easy it is to duplicate an artwork, the original version of it was the product of many inputs of tangible goods that always existed as a finite number of units. If Justin uploads an image of a painting he did, it might take me a second to make a JPG or GIF of the image and pay him nothing for it. But the painting did cost Justin. He spent hours on that painting, hours he could have spent on a more secure form of employment. He used units of tangible goods, units finite in number. Natural resources went into the creation of the paint he used; those are units of natural resources and paints that other people will not have.

The same principle would apply to someone who does professional-quality artwork in Photoshop or Microsoft Paint. It takes years of practicing one's craft to reach that level of quality, and that is time one could otherwise spend on some steadier source of income.

Consider Justin making a feature-length motion picture that takes place in a haunted house -- one that is very low-budget but which he intends should still be of professional quality. Either he must construct the set himself or he must rent a set that was already constructed. Either way, that involves tangible goods that will always be finite in number. When Justin uses the set, other people cannot use the set. When specific objects are added to the set to give it the needed ambiance, those objects are not being used by other people. Maybe this process costs Justin and his investors $10,000, and they plan to recoup the costs by selling DVDs of the movie. Now imagine people pirating this work, producing perfect digital copies of the movie and paying nothing to Justin and Justin’s investors. According to the argument of Timothy Sandefur and the caveman image, no theft occurred. After all, Justin and his investors still have the set; they have not lost any of the props they purchased and which remained intact once shooting had been completed. That the movie was pirated does not deprive Justin and his investors of the original print of the movie.

But that is a lie.

When various parties decide to pirate Justin’s movie and pay nothing for it, they are stealing the thousands of dollars worth of value of the tangible goods that Justin used up and depreciated in order to make the movie a reality. And once Justin and others like him realize that they will not be able to recoup the costs they incurred from using up such tangible goods, such independent-but-still-professionally-produced feature-length motion pictures will become scarcer.

When an artist puts out a copyrighted work for commercial purposes, he does so on the contractual condition that any time another party obtains custody over another unit of this artwork, this is done with the permission of the copyright holder.  Normally such permission is granted on the condition that the copyright holder receives the monetary compensation it sets as its price.  Likewise, when an inventor puts out a patentable design for commercial purposes, she does so on the contractual condition that any time another party obtains custody of another unit of a contraption that is designed according to the patent's novel specifications, this is done at the permission of the patent holder.  Here, too, usually such permission is granted on the condition that the patent holder receives the licensing fee that it sets as its price.  Suppose I hire you to do manual labor for me. Then you do it. Then I refrain from paying you.  This contractual breach would, in effect, involve me stealing the value of your time and labor -- time and labor you otherwise could have spent on some other endeavor. The same principle applies to the pirating of IP.  To pirate IP is to breach contract with the IP holder, stealing the value of the time and labor and tangible inputs that the IP holder had used up in the process of availing the artwork or invention to the market.   

In sum: if I make an unauthorized duplicate of Justin's motion picture, that does not deprive Justin of the master copy of that motion picture; he still has it.  What I have stolen, though, is the monetary value of the tangible units of resources that Justin invested, consumed, and destroyed for the purpose of making that motion picture.  These are tangible units that Justin invested for the movie's consumers -- its viewers -- on the implicit contractual condition that those consumers financially recompense him for the expenses of using up and destroying those resources.  After all, Justin and his other investors had to trade away their own belongings to gain access to the resources they invested and destroyed in producing a motion picture that I have opted to consume (the experience of viewing the motion picture is the experience of consuming it).

At this juncture, those desperate to continue disparaging IP might equivocate IP protection with protectionism.  If I make an unauthorized duplicate of Justin's movie, I don't deprive him of the original copy of the movie but I have rendered him unable to recoup the wealth he invested to make this motion picture available to me in the first place. One might say, "Isn't that the purpose of protectionism? If Chrysler demands tariffs against automobiles imported from Japan, isn't this on the basis that Chrysler already invested lots of capital -- fixed costs -- on producing units of its product, and that, without tariffs, Chrysler's ability to recoup its investment will be jeopardized?"

Someone who advances such an argument would not be doing anything new, because this rationalization for undermining IP was common in the 1800s.  It was advanced by a Member of Parliament -- John Lewis Ricardo, nephew to free-trade economist David Ricardo.  As University of Chicago historian Adrian Johns phrases it, John Lewis Ricardo maintained that patents are "the equivalent, in effect, to the navigation acts or the Corn Laws themselves."

Here is the reason why that comparison fails.  It is true that, in both examples, filmmaker Justin and  protectionist Chrysler are trying to protect their investments.  Moreover, both Justin and Chrysler expect to be recompensed financially by customers who consume their respective products.  The difference is this: if Chrysler goes out of business because Americans all purchase Toyota cars instead, the reason why Chrysler is not receiving money from Americans is that Americans are not using Chrysler's product. Chrysler received money from no one, but that is because no one consumed Chrysler's product.  No one stole the fruit of Chrysler's labors. By contrast, if Justin goes out of business because all his potential customers made unauthorized free downloads of his movie, people are using Justin's product but still refusing to pay him, violating the implicit contractual terms upon which Justin made his movie accessible at all.

If the absence of tariff enforcement allows Chrysler to go out of business, it's the case that this happens because no one bothered to exchange money for -- and then consume -- Chrysler's product.  If the absence of copyright enforcement causes Justin to go out of business, it's the case that many people consumed Justin's product and then refused to pay him anyway.  The reason the motorist never paid money to Chrysler is that the motorist didn't initiate a business contract with Chrysler to begin with. Conversely, the reason the movie buff never paid money to Justin is that the movie buff did enter a business exchange with Justin but then stiffed him on what he was billed. Chrysler is unable to recoup its investment because the customers it desired discern no value in what Chrysler is trying to sell; Justin's movie business is unable to recoup its investment because its customers got value out of Justin's work and then cheated their way out of paying for that value.



Notice How Opponents of IP Resort to Caricatures and Straw Men About IP Enforcement? They Have No Case Without the Caricature: A Case Study
Let us go back to Timothy Sandefur saying, “If, for example, you are...John Fogerty...and you have written...‘Born on The Bayou’..., then I can sing ‘Born on the Bayou’ in my shower, and you can still, at the same time, use and enjoy your ‘property’ as you wish: you can perform it, sell it, or leave it alone.”

The activity of singing in the shower is generally regarded as comical, and therefore this example might seem to be just levity on Timothy Sandefur’s part. Whether or not that was his main conscious intention, this statement of his happens to be misleading in a way very convenient to Sandefur and other opponents of intellectual property. It is convenient for their straw man. If you sing a famous song in the shower -- off-key, as is common for those of us who are not professional musicians -- and then the recording artist behind the song sues you over it, that would be rather petty on the part of the recording artist, wouldn’t it? This is in keeping with the same theme as the caveman cartoon above -- the attempt to caricature anyone trying to protect his IP as petty. On some level, opponents of IP recognize that their argument will fall apart if they do not construct this straw man wherein they caricature enforcement of IP as generally something very petty.

In real life, no professional musician -- not even Lars Ulrich or Roger Hodgson -- will sue you for singing his song in the shower. My father is a musician who had paid gigs in his younger days, but I still sing off-key (my refusal to learn about music was part of my rebellion against him). No one is going to pay to hear me sing “Born on the Bayou” off-key. Fans of the song will still pay money to iTunes to hear the original recording of this song; my singing in the shower is not stealing any of the value of the tangible goods that were inputted when Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded the song. By contrast, if people make perfect digital copies of the original Creedence Clearwater Revival recording and pay nothing to the owner, that is stealing the value of the work of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the value of the sophisticated equipment, which could only exist in a finite number of units, operated to produce such a sharp recording.

Likewise, if a professional musician, who has had years of his own musical training, is paid to perform in front of large paying audiences while he performs John Fogerty’s songs without John Fogerty’s permission, that is stealing the value of the perishable tangible goods that John Fogerty had to use up as he wrote those songs. If a professional musician got paid to perform John Fogerty’s songs at packed houses against John Fogerty’s consent, there would be nothing petty about John Fogerty having his lawyer send a letter to that professional musician.

When Timothy Sandefur conflates enforcement of intellectual property with John Fogerty suing you for singing “Born on the Bayou” off-key in the shower, that conflation amounts to a propagandistic "package deal." You are to associate IP enforcement with pettiness. Then, when you hear about a plausible instance of IP enforcement -- say, John Fogerty suing a professional musician for performing his songs, against his consent, at a paid gig in front of a crowd of paying fans -- you are expected, by extension, to think, “That’s petty, too.” But it isn’t.

By the way, this disclaimer appears on the bottom of an authorized reproduction of the chapter of "The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible" that denounces intellectual property rights protection as invalid.

Conclusion
When someone implies that intellectual property rights enforcement is petty, here is the principle behind what is really going on. Suppose you own a huge apple orchard. One night, I trespass onto the orchard and fill up just one basket with your apples. Before I leave, you catch me. I then reproach you for your self-righteousness. “What's the big deal?” I say. Then I point out, “You still have an entire orchard full of apples; I just took a basket's worth. You still have the trees and the branches you grafted onto them. You can always grow more apples.” That defensive retort ignores all of the inputs you had to pay for when growing your apples. Likewise, those who say that pirating IP is no big deal  are people who just as easily and just as conveniently ignore all of the "scarce" inputs that the IP holder had to pay for in producing or acquiring the IP.

Protecting your inventions and artworks from piracy is not petty. What is petty is how the enemies of intellectual property rights have resorted to caricatures and straw men to misrepresent the creators and holders of intellectual property. It is petty how they pretend that invention is easy or accidental and something anyone can do without effort. There are no accidental inventions. The initial inspiration for an invention is often accidental, such as how, during the wintertime, Frank Epperson absentmindedly left his fruit drink outside overnight, only to find it frozen the next day, which inspired him to see if he could market his own frozen snack. But that was not the patentable invention. The invention was the culmination of years of R and D that Frank Epperson did afterward to develop what came to be known as the Popsicle.

Also petty is the crude manner in which IP holders are relentlessly caricatured as whiny control freaks who just hate that they might not be able to micromanage other people’s applications of their obvious ideas, such as in the caveman cartoon we started with.

But no, the production of a patentable invention or copyrightable artwork is an arduous process, and we owe it to those who produce these designs that we recognize that they deserve to exercise legal control over the new value they have created.



On March 9, 2017, I added the second meme about copying (the one that mentions Netflix) and I added the explanation about protectionism, John Lewis Ricardo, and the difference between a pro-tariff company going out of business versus an IP holder going out of business.  On Sunday, March 12, 2017, I added the table showing the different years wherein a new patent on the paperclip was granted in the United States.  On Monday, April 3, 2017, I added an updated version of the table, this time including entries from 1867,1877, and 1889.  On June 5, 2017, I added the image of what the original Baloo cartoon looks like.

Psychology Experiments Evince That Negative Humor (Self-Effacing, Cynical, Morbid, or Derogatory) Harms Your Health

Stuart K. Hayashi

Lately the State of Humanity has been on my mind...

You know that saying that laughter is the best medicine? Psychology experiments confirm that life-affirming humor has a beneficent effect on your long-term happiness. By contrast, psychology experiments evince that morbid humor, cynical humor, self-effacing humor, and put-down humor do have a deleterious effect on the person dispensing such humor; those types of humor do not mitigate long-term unhappiness but instead reinforce it ultimately.

Whereas positive humor styles increase feelings of self-worth and conscientiousness, and possibly even improve longevity, negative humor styles have the opposite effect. People who use self-defeating humor tend to experience depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, and those who use aggressive humor [putting others down] often adopt poor coping mechanisms.... 

In short, humor can either improve or harm our health, depending on how it’s used. Dealing with conflict in positive ways, such as laughing to put ourselves in a good mood, is probably as important as getting on that Stairmaster three times a week. Laughing negatively at ourselves or taking a dark, sardonic attitude — well, you might as well starting drinking and smoking, too.

—Scott Weems, Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why, (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2014), p. 147, citing Paul Frewen, et al., “Humor Styles and Personality — Vulnerability to Depression,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 21, no. 2, year 2008: pages 179–195; Vassilis Saroglou and Lydwine Anciaux, “Liking Sick Humor: Coping Styles and Religion As Predictors,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17, no. 3, year 2004: pages 257–277; Nicolas Kuiper and Rod Martin, “Humor and Self-Concept,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 6, no. 3, year 1993: pages 251–270; and Nicholas Kuiper, et al., “Humor Is Not Always the Best Medicine: Specific Components of Sense of Humor and Psychological Well-Being,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17, no. 1/2, year 2004: pages 135–168.

It Is My Business

Stuart K. Hayashi


Once you have taken the initiative to shove your suicidal and homicidal gestures in my face, you don't get to say it's none of my business.  An issuance of a violent threat is everyone's business.

My Policy on Objectivists(?) Friendly to the 'Alt Lite' (Semi-Mainstream Normalizers of the Alt-Right)

Stuart K. Hayashi

It’s sad that I have to write this. Objectivists have a long history of unfriending and blocking each other on Facebook for petty, stupid reasons. But there is now something serious enough to warrant shunning other people over: the alt-right is in neo-Nazi territory. There is no way around it.

There is something called the "Alt Lite," which does not go as far as the alt-right (it often stops short of making eugenicist claims about race and IQ on its own; it leaves that dirty work to the alt-right), but still treats the alt-right as just having another opinion worthy of respect.  The racist and eugenicist claims are presumed, at the worst, simply to be an as-of-yet-unproven but plausible hypothesis. (Here is a mostly reliable overview some well-known people of the “Alt Lite.”) Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos are in this “Alt Lite” category. Even when someone from the Alt Lite refrains from explicitly endorsing the eugenicist claims about IQ and race, the Alt Lite still normalizes and reinforces the alt-right's pathology. If I think you are promoting Paul Joseph Watson's normalization of this, I will unfriend or block you. Zero tolerance.

Why ‘Existence Always Existed’ Is Likelier Than ‘Something Created All Existence’

or, The Conjunction Fallacy in Cosmology

Stuart K. Hayashi

Fall-Winter 2009 semester at Hawaii Pacific University

Two Questions
Question 1: Suppose there is a woman named Linda, and here is what we know about her: She writes a lot of poetry about capitalists exploiting the masses. In her free time, she wears a beret and attends performance art shows. She reads Noam Chomsky books and is trying to be a raw food vegan. Which of the following is likelier?:

A. Linda is an executive at a big bank.

B. Linda votes for left-wing progressive political candidates, owns a Che Guevara shirt, and works at a big bank as an executive.

According to a psychology experiment by Keith Stanovich and Richard F. West, people who score high on the SAT are more prone to answer B than are people who scored average on the SAT.


Now here's another question.

Question 2: Which of the following scenarios is likelier?:

• A. Some entity always existed. If you try to pinpoint some moment in the past when this entity began to exist, you won't find it; its existence is eternal.
• B. Some entity always existed. If you try to pinpoint some moment in the past when this entity began to exist, you won't find it; its existence is eternal. In fact, this entity is beyond sapient; it makes choices. Moreover, this entity created all other entities existing; everything that exists, exists because of this entity. This entity created all of Existence; there was a time when there was absolute nothingness, and, at the same time there was absolute nothingness, this entity already existed. This entity is also responsible for all morality. It is the final arbiter of moral judgments, and it is the final arbiter of all purpose. If you have a purpose in your existence, it was decided by this entity.

In both cases, the likelier answer is A.



Overcoming the Conjunction Fallacy
Here is the reason. When it comes to the first question, both of your options say that condition X (Linda is a bank executive) is present. The notion that Linda is not a bank executive is not an option. However, option B says that not only is Linda a bank executive, but she is also a political progressive (condition Y). Many people who score high on the SAT notice from the description that Linda fits the stereotype of a political progressive, and therefore they select option B. But in terms of formal logic, A is likelier, because only condition X must be present for A to be true, whereas B requires both conditions X and Y to be true.  The likelihood that X is true is greater than the likelihood that both X and Y are true.   It can be mapped out as follows:

• If X is true, then A is true.
• If X and Y are both true, then both A and B are true.

Logically, then,  A is likelier. That option A does not refer at all to Linda's political progressivism does not stop A from being likelier than B, because B being true presupposes A being true, whereas A being true does not presuppose B being true. When people who score high on the SAT answer that B is likelier, they fall prey to a logical fallacy called the Conjunction Fallacy.

It is for that same reason that in Question 2, answer A is also the likelier option. For either option A or B to be true, some entity always had to exist. Once again, option B cannot be true unless option A is also true, but option B does not have to be true for option A to be true.



Option A: Existence Always Existed; That’s It
Option A refers to an idea from Aristotle's heyday that the Totality of Existence does not need to be created by some external source. That is, Existence does not have to be created by God; something always existed and, if you try to pinpoint some time in the past when Existence emerged into existence, you will not find it.

Some people proclaim that the Big Bang disproves option A, as the Big Bang created the universe. That reflects a misunderstanding of the Big Bang. When physicists talk about the Big Bang, they do not mean that there was absolute nothingness and then an explosion happened, from which all Existence emerged. The idea behind the Big Bang is that at one time, "the universe" was in a particular physical state unalike what it is presently. Then "the universe" underwent some change that altered its form; this change is described rather metaphorically as an "expansion." The use of the term expansion is metaphorical, as it is not exactly the same as the type of "expansion" we normally talk about in our everyday lives; it's not the same as a sponge expanding or a bread loaf expanding.

The Big Bang Theory therefore does not refute the idea that Existence, in some form, already existed. If there was a great "expansion," it presupposes that there was already some entity there to "expand." If we say that the Big Bang created the universe, that statement only makes sense if we make a distinction between "the Totality of Existence" and "the universe as we presently know it," with "the universe as we presently know it" being a subset subsumed under the greater category of "the Totality of Existence." If the universe had to "begin," that universe had to begin within the greater Totality of Existence, which already existed and always existed.

In The Elegant Universe, Cornell University physicist Brian Greene seriously entertains this idea:

...[Maurizio] Gasperini and [Gabriele] Veneziano suggest that there may be a whole prehistory to the universe... In this so-called pre-big-bang scenario, the universe began in a vastly different state than it does in the big bang framework. ... because the pre-big bang epoch involves its own inflationary expansion, [Alan] Guth’s solution to the horizon problem is automatically built into the pre-big bang cosmological scenario [New York: Vintage, 2003 trade paperback second edition, p. 362, emphases author’s].

There Was a Time When Nothing Existed, But At the Same Time Something Existed Before Anything Existed and Then It Made Everything Else That Exists?
Since Thomas Aquinas's time, many theologians and also lay believers scoff at the notion that some entity (the Totality of Existence) always existed. They call it highly improbable, ridiculous. Rather, they say, there was a time when there was absolute nothingness and then God had to put something there. Hence, God created somethingness, as opposed to the nothingness.  But this is a self-contradiction, because anything that exists counts as an entity. If God always existed, then God counts as an entity, and this means that there was already an entity that always existed. Therefore, in Question 2, both options A and B are premised implicitly on the understanding that some entity always existed and did not need to be created by some external creator.

For option A to be true, we only need to say that some entity always existed. For option B to be true, option A must be true -- some entity always existed -- and, in addition to that, the entity necessarily possesses some other traits: it is sapient, it makes choices, it created every other entity, and it imbued those other entities with purpose.

There is another manner in which this can be worded:

Question 3:  Which is likelier?

• A. The Big Bang happened.
• B. The Big Bang happened, and it was caused by an entity that is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent, and the source of all ethics and the final judge of everything. 

Many people laugh at those of us who say that for Question 2, option A is likelier -- those of us who say that some entity always existed, and that we need not presume this entity to possess so many anthropomorphic traits, such as making choices and creating. We are mocked for thinking Existence always existed and then leaving it at that. Those who laugh at us dismiss that scenario as unlikely. But those laughers overlook that they themselves are saying some entity already always existed and did not need to be created, and then their belief requires assigning various other traits to this entity. People who presume that option B is likelier are falling prey to the conjunction fallacy.