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Kevin's avatar

To me, it seems like economists love to assume that patents are good for innovation, because they can measure patents and thus produce papers. Based on my (software) industry experience, I think it would be more accurate to treat patents as a negative factor that slows down innovation.

The vast majority of patents occur when a company has *not* innovated anything, and is copying exactly the obvious things that other companies are doing. Technically this is against the rules of patents, but the patent reviewers are widely understood to be completely incompetent, and this is easily evaded by inserting meaningless jargon. The patent is like a land mine, interfering with other companies that are treading the same ground that has been covered dozens of times before.

Trying to boost innovation by encouraging more patents is like trying to boost housing construction by encouraging more CEQA lawsuits.

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Matt Pencer's avatar

> Federal income taxes paid by the top 10% of earners is 1.6 trillion. So decreasing the marginal tax rate for those earners by 1% costs 16 billion.

I wasn't able to decipher the paper well enough - does reducing the marginal tax rate from 30% to 29% count as a 1% or 3.3% decrease? If the former, the cost would be 53B, not 16B.

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