Why do economists insist on treating information and creative works as scarce – while making the opposite mistake with respect to the depletable services of nature, which they treat as limitless by pricing at zero? Last week, in the inaugural presentation of the new Forum on Society Wealth lecture series at UMass, Amherst, economist Herman Daly tried to shed some light on these paradoxes....In the information commons...intellectual property law is used to make an essentially limitless resource – knowledge – scarce. The over-propertization of knowledge can have lots of unfortunate effects, from preventing universal access and benefit to inhibiting the development of new knowledge. Economists see the imposition of artificial scarcity on knowledge (via copyright and trademark law) as a necessary condition for enabling market exchange. But the upshot, said Daly, is that “we mistakenly think that scarcity increases public wealth.” In fact, its chief result is the creation of private wealth.
Daly lamented the fact that economics deals mostly with the allocation of a resource among competing users, but fails to deal with issues of scale and just distribution. Economists don’t really address the appropriate physical size of the economy relative to the ecosystem – and thus they ignore the environmental sustainability of the economy. Similarly, economists don’t trouble themselves with the issue of who gets property rights in the first place -- and therefore, whether the distribution of market results are legitimate and just. Neither of these problems – sustainability and just distribution – can be solved from within the market paradigm, Daly warned. They require pressure from outside of the market, from civil society and governments.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/08/2005 02:44:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
