What happend to increasing leisure?
Thirty or forty years ago widely expected that as technological advances made labour more productive, working hours would shorten and the biggest problem, at least in develop countries, would be educating people to enjoy leisure instead of working. This has clearly not happened, so what went wrong? (more…)
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Drug patents: inefficient R & D funding
Patents allow pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs at several times the price they would be able to get in a competitive market. Only a small proportion of the extra money spent by the public goes into research and development (R & D), despite the latter being the supposed benefit of the higher prices. (more…)
11 reasons free markets are not
- Most markets are oligopolies dominated by a few companies). For a market to be able to ensure sufficient competition individual companies should be not be able to significantly influence market prices. Economics text books acknowledge this.
No competition please!
Yet another example of the public sector being asked to get out of the way so the private sector can do a worse job. The BBC is restricting its downloads using DRM, in order to avoid competing too much with commercial broadcasters. (more…)
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Bad incentives in drug development
The pharmaceutical industry would like you to believe that they fund the expensive development of new drugs, they get patents in return, and this provides a nice efficient market driven mechanism for developing new drugs. There are many things wrong with this picture: (more…)
Socialised is bad?
The logic of open access to research is simple: if taxpayers pay for research, taxpayers should be able to see it without also paying (very expensive) subscriptions to academic journals. Similarly, non-profit organisations like the Welcome Foundation want the research they fund to be used by as many people as possible. (more…)
Guy Kawasaki’s blog numbers do not add up
There is something that does not really stack up about the numbers in Guy Kawasaki’s review of his first year of blogging. (more…)
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Ten effects of DRM
For those who do not know, DRM is the technology that prevents users from taking copies of various types of videos, audio and even written material in electronic form. It is an abbreviation of Digital Rights Management – and its your rights they are managing. (more…)
Most people should be agnostics
I suppose it is suprising that a Christian should promote agnosticism, but I think that for many, if not most people, it is the belief that they can most honestly hold. (more…)
Wrong again, BBC
I have blogged about this before, but the BBC were good enough to give me a superb example to technology journalists getting things wrong. (more…)
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