Permissionless innovation
learnliberty.org
learnliberty.org
He learned that there wasn't a governing body. So he realized that as long as he didn't do anything stupid (a la burn the building down), he was pretty much free to do as he pleased.
If you are responsible, freedom of that sort is empowering. If you are not, you wind up being the jerk that causes regulations to be written and permitting processes to be created, ruining it for everyone.
Here's a pdf (warning) of all of the hoops you need to jump through to install solar in Chicago: https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/bldgs/g...
Disclaimer: This is off the top of my head from stuff I read in the paper five or more years ago. I can't find any articles now, but I have looked into the permitting process and it looks like a pain in the butt.
This is a sad aspect of living in a high-density society. A lot of people are not only boring themselves, but they excessively want everyone else to be boring too.
Number of problems I have had thus far (8 years) that a HOA would have helped with: 0.
Previous house that I lived in for 5 years:
Number of stupid time wasting problems I had with the HOA: 3.
Number of problems that I tried to get the HOA to help with unsuccessfully: 2.
Number of times the HOA actually helped: 0.
I think the canonical example is something like the Wright Brothers first flight in Kitty Hawk, NC. Of course living in more agrarian times helps when you have an impromptu airport runway in your backyard. But the "permissionless innovation" theory probably concludes the reason we are not driving around in flying cars just yet is precisely due to government hamstringing the great inventor.
Particularly with strong AI the proposal comes up often: why not create a sandbox? Let the risk takers run their experiments and insulate the general public from their consequences. Allocate a few abandoned oil rigs off the coast of Venezuela and let anyone with a rocket design attempt a launch ;)
Ultra-light aircraft is very much regulated under philosophy of "if you aren't endangering others, well, it's your funeral".
Source: I've halfway convinced myself to shell out the $10k or so for a motorized paraglider rig + lessons. Pretty much what I'd need to do is sign up for lessons, buy gear, and make sure I stay out of the way of big planes and protected wilderness areas. I don't technically need to sign up for lessons, but, well, it's my funeral.
I don't think the "permissionless innovation" theory is something to be applied in isolation. It only covers some aspects of human endeavour.
The reason we're not all in flying cars right now are twofold:
1. Flying is much less energy-efficient than driving on a solid surface, since you need to expend additional energy to maintain altitude.
2. Humanity as a whole has proven beyond doubt that regular people are nowhere near responsible enough to safely operate regular cars, and the kind of accidents that happen on the roads every day would have much more disastrous consequences if they happened in the air.
Self-driving tech might eventually solve 2., but we're not there yet today, so one can't blame governments for not allowing things that can not be done safely with today's technology. And even with 2. solved, the market still likely won't accept flying cars due to 1. A better/cheaper solution for vertical stacking of transport is the boring one[0].
> Particularly with strong AI the proposal comes up often: why not create a sandbox? Let the risk takers run their experiments and insulate the general public from their consequences.
With strong AI this proposal is particularly dumb for all the reasons covered under the search terms of "AI alignment problem", "AI control problem" and "unfriendly AI".
> Allocate a few abandoned oil rigs off the coast of Venezuela and let anyone with a rocket design attempt a launch ;)
See: Copenhagen Suborbitals. If you want to experiment with aerospace, it's generally doable, though expensive due to the nature of the task (and the fact that the difference between an orbital rocket and an ICBM is only in payload).
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Small aircraft get 10-20 mpg, and the world record is over 60 mpg. Energy efficiency might be a reason why ground transport would continue to exist, but I'm skeptical that it's the fundamental obstacle to "flying cars"
And since there is a lot more space in the air than on the road, the "self driving" problem is probably much easier.
It's true that the failure modes are a lot worse, not just for human error but for mechanical failures. But it's actually somewhat plausible to me that 100 years of unregulated innovation would have given us some kind of personal air transport.
> With strong AI this proposal is particularly dumb
Yes. So of course AI development is pretty much the only thing in the world that isn't regulated at all. Does this increase your confidence in regulation as a social technology?
To heavily paraphrase over the gist of the second-hand account from the boss: "Our workplace will be rule-free until people start abusing it. When someone goes overboard, a rule against their abuse will be created under their name which will be applicable to everybody; if you think that rule bullshit, go thank that person and a talk with your manager will always be welcome. We do this out of respect for you, our employees; you have our trust until you prove we don't."
For example: "I need to be able to walk to the dresser and closet without hurting myself so I can put clothes away." This was clear and sensible instructions for deciding for themselves where they could leave toys out and where they couldn't. The reason for it was also readily grasped and something they could agree with. It wasn't just abstract "I am in charge, you will do as you are told!" type BS.
As in: leases are a cure all for all of societial and organizational woes. I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts. But the basic notion is give all the cruft a TTL, after which the cruft cleans itself up.
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Want a new tax, or tax break? Sure. It expires in 36 months. Want an extension? Then ask again and we'll reassess.
Want to bring dogs into the office? Sure. Let's try it for 6 months.
Want to provision a new customer of a critical service? Sure. Here's your token. It expires in 2 days.
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Hat tip to Bill Joy, Jini, JXTA, etc for lifting the lease notion up the OSI stack.
Hat tip to The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber for describing how organizational scars/scabs come to be.
I'm not yet sure how, if ZeroTrust Networking extends this model, metaphor.
That said, maybe tax reform is not the right place to try this idea. But I like it WRT regulation, and especially office rules - having an expiration date helps not getting stuck with obsolete regulations.
To offer the other side of the coin: I am currently working in a situation where the rules are protecting bad managers against employees.
My current manger is clearly lacking in "good" manager skills, and his direct manager is protecting him. A group of my coworkers is working together "to survive" the both of them. Hopeful questions about re-orgs are asked, regular private meetings about sub-group self-reliance are held. "I'm worried about ageism", "I've lost total hope with this manager", "I'm in survival mode", and similar quotes are regular weekly features.
The team has clear and obvious elevation in productivity and moral when the manager is absent [vacation, off-site business, sick, whatever]. The manager's manager doesn't want to hear it; "just work together" type of "advice". Yea ok that's been tried for a long time now, it's time for departures or re-orgs and those are the solutions at this point.
/rant
To me, this is disrespectful to employees in the extreme. It shows a total disregard for the power disparity that exists, which makes rules more important for clarity for employees than for the company.
If they wanted to be respectful to their employees: Set rules, and create a mechanism for asking for exemptions and be lenient with the.
Otherwise they're asking me to trust that they will not abuse their power.
Because I'm a developer and I need to install things to develop. For whatever reason, the vast majority of windows packages require admin to install.
If you think it's great that I have to open a ticket to IT every time I want to update VSCode or install Python or Node or whatever, that's good for you, but I find it cumbersome and annoying and would rather work for a company that gives me root and trusts that I won't install viruses.
Often times I come against some form of permissions issue which prevents me from doing my job because of my non-real status. Because of red tape and nothing else I promise you, nothing about "but proprietary data" or anything like that. It may be root access to a specific computer, it may be casual access to a particular online processing system. "Oh, just go to the group github and... oh, you can't. Let me find a thumb drive and the latest release..." or "Can you access the group's shared data access website yet? ... but, we filed a bug about your access for this a few months ago, and still nothing? Are you sure? Can you try again and send me the error and cc IT?" ... and so on. Everyone's frustrated; I do what I can, push it up the chain, make the noise to maintain hope for improvement.
Ask yourself why your current company has that rule, and consider if they could do it in a more practical way without making you guess. E.g. put dev servers on a separate network segment.
Stupid rules are worse than no rules, but if you join a place with stupid rules at least you know what you're going to. Because in reality there are rules in the "no rules" place too - they're just unwritten conventions you have to learn by trial and error.
Here are a few that I enjoyed recently:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/10/megan_mcardle_o.htm...
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/07/sally_satel_on.html
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/07/chris_blattman_2.ht...
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/06/christy_ford_ch.htm...
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/sam_quinones_on.htm...
_"To truly innovate, one must be prepared to seek forgiveness not permission."_
"The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this way."" sums up so many human-made problems, it's not even funny.
What if Darpa had decided to build an infrastructure on top of compuserve, aol, and prodigy. the whole world would look completely different.
As a generalisation, I think that solar "subsidies" are a two-part problem. First off, the government is refusing to price the negative externalities of greenhouse gas emissions (in part due to the republicans largely refusing to acknowledge the externalities even exist), which distorts the value of solar by implicitly subsidising fossil fuels.
Second, people acknowledge that solar needs to be made more viable and attempt to correct the market by adding a subsidy to solar instead of removing the subsidy from fossil fuels.
I think this exposes a fundamental flaw in common neoliberal ideology today - the notion that the way to remove market distortions is for government to do less, not more. This is clearly absurd, since climate change will cause trillions of dollars of property damage, and penalising property damage is basically the government's job.
Devise a social organization that focuses on protecting and encouraging this freedom
Instead of railing against solar power maybe he should also rail against the massive subsidies the oil industry gets through decades long military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere. He also doesn't touch more complex areas such as nuclear energy for example. Is it OK for everybody to do "Permissionless Innovation" on reactor designs and from time to time one of them blows up? I hope the author will move close to one of these innovation paradises.
That was his point.
"Instead of railing against solar power..."
Irrelevant what-about-ism.
"Is it OK for everybody to do "Permissionless Innovation" on reactor designs ..."
I will tell you that you don't really understand what the author is saying. But you won't believe that. You will continue to believe the author must be stupid.
Go back. Read the article again. Multiple times. And TRY to do it fairly. TRY to recognise your biases and presumptions.
If you are incapable of doing that, then what chance would other people have of successfully explaining it?
Twitter is just one valid example among many that have emerged in the internet era; the whole reason we've seen so much innovation in internet-related technologies in the past 20 years is that the innovation could be done without asking anyone's permission.
Concerns are now growing that with Google, Amazon, Facebook etc are becoming such powerful gatekeepers that the freedom to innovate is declining. You'd likely find he'd support government actions to reverse that trend.
There's no grand anti-government agenda in this or any other of Munger's work [1]. As an economist and political scientist, he repeatedly makes the sensible point that government should limit its activities to what helps society and avoid doing things that harm society. Obviously there's vast scope for debate about what that really means, which is why he writes articles like this one, to examine the issues in detail.
On this point:
Instead of railing against solar power maybe he should also rail against the massive subsidies the oil industry gets through decades long military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere.
He's not railing, just commenting. And in his other work he's extremely critical of the US government's interventions in the Middle East. But this article isn't about that.
[1] He's highly critical of both the Republicans and the Democrats due to their corporate cronyism and militarism, but that's very different to being critical of government altogether.
For example: Innovation in self-driving cars would be much quicker if there was no regulation but how do you balance that against people not wanting to get run over by a car with buggy software? This would be an interesting discussion. Twitter is just a too easy example.
Compare this to progressives, who want to protect the environment but have no metric or process for measuring how much environment to protect and how/why, other than what appeals to their emotions, so they deal with everything case-by-case and inconsistently. In general, this leads to broad, draconian regulations in some domains (like not allowing people to create ponds on their property) and a lack of progress in other domains (CO2 emissions and waste disposal, for example).
And yes, the carbon tax is a libertarian concept.
A Randian objectivist is also not the same thing as a Libertarian.
A libertarian generally opposes government involvement because it creates inefficient pricing errors in the economy, such as subsidies. The argument for a carbon tax is that, for those who believe in climate change, it will actually minimize the current pricing error by taking into account the externalities that the carbon will create.
The only question is then what the tax should be priced at, and by whom, in order to accurately reflect the damage.
Who determines what the damage is and who pays for the people who make the determination?
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/switzerland-giant-new...
At some point, the government either needs to generate bids for a contract in the free market (subject to the cronyism of government officials) or do it in-house (inefficient). We need a government, so every implementation of any policy you can think of can potentially suffer from a combination of these two factors -- I hardly see that as a hole in this approach.
> who pays for the people who make the determination?
China and the Fed, obviously -- same as now. If you are trying to shoot down these ideas because you don't think I believe in any taxation, you're really walking into a trap here. The quoted cost for undoing damage clearly takes into account bureaucratic / managerial overhead, as would any contract.
Actually, it's not.
Pretty much everything I've read by the libertarians (Rothbardians really) about carbon taxes either call it a wealth redistribution scheme (which the original inventor[0] intended it to be) or a case illustrating how the true tragedy of the commons is the fact that the commons exist at all.
So, for your mercury example, the libertarian solution would be for the owner of the polluted water supply to hunt down the source of the contamination and seek restitution for the damaged caused.
As far as I can tell No True Libertarian has ever conceded that The State has the legal or ethical right to tax or outlaw anything (other than theft, fraud and coercion), ever.
[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/08/09/the-unsung-inve...
No True Scotsman! Just like you are closely aligned with Fidel Castro and other autocrats on all issues, because you probably believe in socializing certain things, right? :)
Libertarians are extremely intellectually diverse in their politics -- anecdotally, much more so than conservatives and progressives combined (population size adjusted). Old school Libertarians -- the ones often associated with the birth of the movement (and the ones quoted by Democrats to avoid intellectual debate) -- tend to lean heavily conservative and have an oversimplified view of either the non-aggression principle, the imperfect nature of the world, or both. Milton Friedman is an example of one of the first prominent libertarians to start considering alternative approaches for externalities.
Do I care who first coined the term carbon tax? Nope; it's not about scoring points for your team. The fact of the matter is that the idea of a carbon/pollution/externality-offsetting tax arises naturally from the non-aggression principle, as I described.
> So, for your mercury example, the libertarian solution would be for the owner of the polluted water supply to hunt down the source of the contamination and seek restitution for the damaged caused.
I didn't realize you spoke on behalf of true libertarians!
Tell me, what would you do today if someone dumped mercury in your yard? The same thing -- just because there are laws, does not mean you don't have to deal with people breaking them. And regardless, no, mercury has non-localized and criminal effects (poisoning is a form of assault). If someone threw a couch or some other localized non-poisonous pollution in their neighbor's yard, then yes, that is generally a matter for the civil courts. As it is now, even though littering is illegal.
Which begs the question on how one collects taxes without aggression?
> And regardless, no, mercury has non-localized and criminal effects (poisoning is a form of assault).
So you criminalize the "assault" then you don't need gov't watchdogs tracking all uses of mercury to ensure it doesn't end up on some poor sap's lawn because once you give them the power to outlaw one thing you give them the power to outlaw whatever they want.
The Road to Serfdom as they say...
That is what the Rothbardians do not understand -- there is always aggression in the world. What you do not understand is that even though there is aggression in the world (i.e. we don't live in a perfect world where people don't game the system), that does not mean we should not seek to minimize it. To minimize aggression (and thereby maximize freedom) is a non-trivial and ever-changing optimization exercise.
For example, if by levying a tariff or property tax, a freedom-maximizing society's government is able to fund a standing army to prevent other governments from conquering a society, it is presumed that net aggression is minimized (i.e., from the standpoint of the citizenry who are being aggressed upon by their government in the form on involuntary taxes, because otherwise we can assume a different government would take its place, which would most likely not be a freedom maximizing government (or it wouldn't have been forming empires in the first place)).
> So you criminalize the "assault" then you don't need gov't watchdogs tracking all uses of mercury to ensure it doesn't end up on some poor sap's lawn because once you give them the power to outlaw one thing you give them the power to outlaw whatever they want.
Not sure what you're getting at here, if anything. I see no connection between 'lack of government watchdog employing mass surveillance to track all thermometers in the country' and society falling apart. Nor do I see the converse as an actual solution to mercury pollution -- do you?? So they track it, then what? How? What happens when thrown-out thermometers break and run off into the storm drain? What happens when somebody throws out mercury on some poor sap's lawn anyway? This is the second time you've made this invalid point -- people will break the law sometimes. There is punishment for that in both of these proposed systems. How is yours any more effective?
There will always be littering, and I whole-heartedly support generic clean-up efforts to counteract the summation of small, non-enforceable aggressions, that are not already assumed in externality taxes along the supply chain (like people dropping gum on the sidewalk, etc.) On the topic of those externality taxes, here's an example: purchaser of a combustible manufacturing fuel used to create cigarettes is charged an externality tax for the inherent environmental cost of using the fuel. Then the smoker pays a different tax to pay for the externality inherent in using the cigarette. Such a thing would not be fair for gum, though, because most people do not drop gum on the ground -- it isn't inherent so why should the Sean Spicer's of the world bear an outsized burden of the cost for cleanup?
These are two different philosophies, in the same way that communism is completely different from Bernie sanders style "democratic socialism".
Not really. His plan calls for the proceeds of the taxes to be returned to every adult in equal portions. The "redistribution" is from people who pollute more to people who pollute less, not from the rich to the poor.
Meanwhile, so-called environmentalists and social justice advocates helped to defeat a proposed carbon tax in Washington state, specifically because it returned the revenue to the public (specifically targeting the poor) rather than spending it on their preferred government programs: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112016/washington-state...
> People sometimes ask me, “What is the most important concept in political economy?” The answer is easy, but subtle: permissionless innovation, a strong presumption in favor of allowing experimentation with new technologies and with new business platforms that use those technologies.
Surely the ideas of capital, labor, markets, property, etc. are more important concepts in political economy?
Learn Liberty is project of the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian-focused nonprofit with Charles Koch and other conservative businessmen and politicians on its Board of Directors.
It's propaganda.
Joe has a patent on the widget. I can’t make a widget without violating his patent. I get a patent on an improved widget. Joe can’t manufacture the improvement. He’s incented to cooperate with me and I’m incented to innovate. Incented, not stifled.
Just allowing copying incents manufacture but not innovation. Even China is moving in the IP direction.
(In reality: enter China, who doesn't give a fuck and innovates anyway.)
(In real reality: unfortunately, the Chinese government is starting to enforce western IP more and more, due to economical pressures from the west.)
Berkeley invents CRISPR. Broad Institute invents improved CRISPR.
In a parallel universe, does John Galt invent CRISPR? Let's see. He'd have to spend millions on development and then wouldn't be able to recoup that because anyone could copy it. So no, Galt doesn't do this. He's free to do this but there's no incentive for him to do it.
Galt's world seems more like:
From each according to their ability
To each according to their needSimilar for chip design techniques, online stores and so on.
Then there's network effects. If you build a better class of phone, do you have to build out a whole new non-interoperable phone network in order to get it deployed?