Brink Lindsey: belief

Transcript context

…As you probably know there’s a famous piece by Nordhaus that shows that from a given innovation on average, only about 2% of the value of that innovation is captured by the innovator, if that’s true and you may choose to challenge it. But how could we know that in terms of a net estimate for intellectual property, how could we know that right now IP law is too tough? It seems to me it could just as likely be too easy. Nordhaus’ estimate shows us that the basic premise of IP law that unless you can really appropriate gains from your… Appropriate something like the lion’s share or the gains from your invention, you’re not going to do it. And it’s clear that almost never happens. That innovation is occurring all the time when the innovators are capturing only a tiny fraction of the gains. The fundamental fear that undergirds IP that unless we give people strong ownership and ideas, they’re not gonna come up with anything, I think is fundamentally belied by the Nordhaus estimate. But at the margins……

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.