It does make me a bit grumpy to see things like SnapChat being offered $3bn, but nothing like this ever getting that kind of funding. That's a lot of engineering and manufacturing that isn't being done.
Even the boy with the formula one arm had to raise funds himself. (With help, but no funding, from Mercedes. But the engineering they gave is very cool.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/motorsport/formulaone/87006...
Thanks for sharing the link.
Serious question: Do you consider entertainment to have a real value for society?
And in that sense, the entertainment industry captures value that we would be making anyhow. Yes their entertainment is better somehow, better in the sense that people will pay for it, so this is the bottom-line "better", inclusive of demand generators (eg, movie trailers, team rivalries, etc), and not necessarily a general-welfare "better".
You might even argue that this is welfare-capture: once you have seen the movie trailer (for free), or acquired team-loyalty (for free), your welfare becomes dependent on seeing what happens (not free). My son saw a trailer for WALL-E last night. Now he wants to see it. Having seen it, will his net welfare have increased? I don't know. He seems happy enough with his blocks and pencils and such.
I'm afraid I disagree with you. I notice even when getting together with a group of friends to play games, there always tends to be someone who is happy to just sit back and watch the games take place. Some will make the entertainment and others will want to watch. It seems to be basic human nature; professional sports and Hollywood have just figured out how to make money from that.
I thought we were talking about sports? Sports does not even have any entertainment value, it is a complete waste of time and resources
The irony is that at almost every university, the football team is a profit center, not a cost center. It' entirely likely that your library would have had deeper budget cuts without that football team.
Society has allowed copyright to extend virtually forever, while patents tend to last just 20 years. If you have money to invest in either industry with similar risk, which are you going to take a chance on? The one that will support you for life, and your family until the end of time, naturally. This indicates that we favour entertainment more than other types of intellectual property.
I realize people on here tend to be against property rights completely, but if we assume, for argument's sake, they are valuable for promoting creation as is the prevailing reason for having the system, shouldn't copyright be a far shorter period than patents?
Not really; time is hardly the only factor you should take into account.
Firstly, copyright is limited to a specific work, while patents are usually more generic - I can invent a whole new literary genre, but unless people copy the text or very specific elements of my work, they can do copycats all they like. With patents, a whole class of technologies is often monopolized.
Copyrighted works are also subject to strong novelty effects. While copyright itself lasts for ungodly accounts of time, the vast, vast majority of works will stop producing relevant income in just a couple of years, if that, while a patented invention doesn't usually suffer from those problems.
This touches a much deeper topic and won't most likely be related directly to the original post, so I'll stop here :)
"Why do people pay so much money for a small bit of entertainment for themselves when there is so much need in the world?" is a better one. This brings us right back to some uncomfortable facts about human nature.
Supply and demand. The value that Snapchat provides to individuals and advertisers is tiny but huge in aggregate. There just isn't the same volume of people with conditions like Alejandro's and the variety of problems people face make the economics especially challenging within a free market.
However, I feel we're at a really exciting point in history. With open source software and hardware, the work that a single person like Alejandro's dad does can be provide value and spread like neither before. Advances in tech that seem to provide only minimal value to us allow for engineers to be trained, gain the skills and have the know how to make a significant difference to people like Alejandro.
The challenge is how can we channel as much of the value and tech created by the free market into problems that the free market struggles to solve, like disability and assistive technology. Open question!