Neither. Scientific theories are comprised of propositions. Propositions are either true or false. True propositions are also known as facts. Scientists try to discover which propositions are true and which aren't.
When I said scientists did not "construct" the fact that H (heliocentrism), I did not mean that they didn't make a claim about the way things are. What I meant was that H would be a fact even if there were no scientists to observe the relevant phenomena.
Interesting question. I am not well versed in philosophy of language. Taking a stab, though, I'd say that language is the result of millions of infinitesimal steps towards mutual understanding among people -- much like the common law or, dare I bring it up, Linux. In English most words have plain meanings. It is the job of philosophy not to change language to suit its explorations, but to accommodate those plain meanings, and clarify the ones that are not so plain (e.g. for "rights").
What happens when we try to express facts in language depends on whether the facts are explainable in words using those plain meanings. For example, if I say "My cat is sitting on that chair," everyone knows what all of those words mean, and very few English speakers will fail to understand what I mean by it. If I say "It's wrong to torture people for fun," that may be a little less clear (what counts as "torture"?) but still pretty clear. For the few people who don't understand, or who disagree about the common meaning of "torture", or who thought I was using "torture" as hyperbole, one or two sentences of clarification will get the real meaning across. And so forth. The real trap is when philosophers attempt to undermine common meanings using unclear terminology. I recommend the late Australian philosoper David Stove on these points.
If a writer displays unwillingness to think through the meanings of, and issues surrounding, the terms he is using, that suggests to me that the rest of the argument will be sloppy. In fact I did skim the remainder of the article and this expectation was confirmed, as it usually is.
I see. So on your view, all assertions are either facts or opinions? Another poster has mentioned that both of your examples are opinions; the latter is just more directly put.
But on your own view it could be said that both are facts. After all, you define a "fact" as "a statement of something being actual. And it is actual that you believe that I am an ignorant troll, correct? So how is that latter statement not also a fact?
Another point, to show that the way you (and the author of that ridiculous article) describe "facts" is not the way they are described in ordinary English.
I am imagining a courtroom scene in any number of lawyer shows:
Defense Attorney: "Isn't it a fact that you weren't wearing your glasses, so you can't possibly have recognized my client?"
Witness: "No, I was wearing my glasses, so I could see fine."
Defense Attorney: "You didn't answer my question. I asked if it was a fact that you weren't wearing your glasses, not whether it was a true or untrue fact. Please confine yourself to answering my questions."
Witness: "Oh, okay, then in that case it is a fact that I was not wearing my glasses."
"The earth turns around the sun" is a fact today. but the fact is, ( forgive the pun) that it took the world some two thousand years of written reflection on the cosmos ( and quite a few wrecked lives) to construct this simple fact.
To me this is nonsense. "The world" did not "construct" the fact that the earth revolves around the sun -- it did so before Copernicus or anyone else surmised. Perhaps you mean that it took the world two thousand years to construct a theory that explains various astronomical observations, and which concludes that the earth revolves around the sun.
I couldn't get past the first paragraph. "Facts" are socially constructed? "Facts" may not be true? I thought facts were by definition true -- if a proposition is false it can't be a fact. "Rights" may not be true? How can a right be true or false?
The first paragraph makes it transparently obvious that the writer has no idea what a right is, or even what the relevant disagreements are regarding what rights are, nor any idea what a fact is (or even the what the relevant disagreements are concerning how we know things). It's the classic example of a geek thinking that because he can write code that makes him an expert on philosophy (or economics or anything else).
Funny you should put it that way. In the original Robin Hood legend, Robin Hood was a nobleman who thought taxes were too high, and he stole only from tax collectors and sheriffs (old English term for the chief representative of the king in a county). In that sense Robin Hood was a tax rebel. But that would mean he doesn't cater to know-nothing leftist "anti-corporatist" prejudices. What a shame.
You are right. Profit motives are bad for gaming. We should lobby for a federal Department of MMORPGs, and ensure that all MMORPGs are run by the right sort of people, helped out by generous subsidies from taxpayers' funds. We don't want any of those corporations involved; they'll just ruin the fun.
Nobody forces companies to accept unions, it's sometimes just the best business decision to make.
Nobody, that is, except the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, or any number of state-level similar organizations that pass laws saying e.g. that firms are not allowed to pay less than the union-dictated wage, that firms must hire a certain number of union workers, that firms may not make refusal to join a union a condition of employment, etc etc etc etc.
It looks to me like you are the one who has not read much about the reality of unions and how, like large corporations, they rarely settle for operating in a free market.
I won't reply to most of the garbage that comprises this post, but I can't resist the last sentence:
revolution through stealing? hey, it worked for robin hood ; )
In what sense did it work for Robin Hood? When Robin Hood began his story, John was king of England. When Robin Hood died, John was king of England. Robin Hood changed almost nothing -- he got Richard the Lionhearted back onto the throne for a few years, until Richard got himself killed in France.
And Robin Hood's exploits were essentially a tax revolt, even in the stories. So unless you mean "regained Robin Hood's royal favor for a short time", then no, his guerrilla war against the Normans did not "work."
>Still true though isn't it? Wealth implies ownership of something, and land is usually a big part of what a 'Wealty' person owns.
I don't think so. In today's U.S. economy, land rents constitute less than 3% of GDP, so land generates very little income for anyone relative to other economic activities. Before the IR, of course, that figure would have been much, much, MUCH higher.
That was precisely one of the Luddites' hugest beefs with the IR -- that instead of the House of Lords' consisting only of bishops and earls and dukes, it had bankers and (gasp) Jews in it too. In fact, Britain's first Jewish PM, Benjamin Disraeli, was elected during the late IR (although he did take his oath on a Christian Bible).
The big mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution meant an end to social customs and community, to personal status and individual freedom.
Sure, that's why the Industrial Revolution led to the repeal of the anti-poor Corn Laws, the inclusion of non-landowners in the House of Lords, and the first time in history people could have some freedom over where they lived. What if the "social customs" entail burning the houses of Catholics or Jews? Before the IR, you couldn't move away -- you grin and bear it. And the idea that the IR killed individual freedom is ridiculous. The House of Commons gained its first real powers during the IR. Coincidence?
It's chic to bash the IR. But without it, >50% of jobs today would be agricultural (compared to around 2% now). On the other hand, Katz does seem to have a talent for laying down fertilizer, so perhaps that explains his enthusiasm.
Having worked independently on their own farms, they grasped that they would be forced to use complex, dangerous machines in noisy, smelly factories, enduring long hours for slave wages, and that the trade was not in their favor.
Oh PLEASE. "Their own farms", no doubt, were wondrously safe, quiet, fragrant places to work. If Katz seriously believes this then I don't think he has a clue what farming entails. And as for "the trade not being in their favor," yeah, it was undoubtedly much easier to deal with a landlord who took half your harvest but shouldered little of the risk -- and who dictated to you to whom and for how much you could sell your crops.
The fact of the matter is that the IR enormously improved the lives of almost everyone in Britain (and everywhere else it was adopted), and the Luddites were a middle class interest group who supported laws that kept the price of food and wool high (thus enriching themselves at the expense of people who had to buy those necessities). They also objected to the idea that one could become wealthy without owning land. They were not "heroes" in any sense of the word, unless one is a columnist who has built his reputation on bashing free enterprise, and who is willing to pay any price in bad arguments and inept rhetorical flourishes ("slave wages" is a contradiction) to further that end.
Wow -- this is really a perfect parody of a typical Slashdot post regarding MS. No evidence; bizarre assertions about the internal feelings, motives, and beliefs of people the author has never met; the solid conviction that genuinely honest disagreement with the poster's view is impossible... it really captures all the elements in just a few sentences. I give it a 10.
Brian Doherty's REASON review of Cyberselfish contains this passage as a reply to Borsook's argument that, in essence, if it weren't for friendly government regulators we'd all be mucking around a la the commune in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
So what is Borsook's case beyond pique, beyond finding Bionomics conferences to be
"little shops of horror," beyond lamenting that technolibs prefer Edge Cities to "real"
urban centers, beyond finding libertarians "psychically exhausting"? Boiled down, she
makes two arguments: First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since
their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful
businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep
schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like.
The first argument is simply a non sequitur. Government is involved with just about any
commercial transaction or field imaginable, if only because it builds roads. But the fact
that the government paves streets hardly makes it responsible for all the businesses that
spring up alongside them. (There is, moreover, ample evidence that road building would
continue even if government disappeared.)...
...As for Borsook's second line of attack: Anyone advocating a smaller role for the state is
by necessity thrust into the realm of historical fantasy, of imagining the way things could
be. Government has arrogated so extensive a role to itself that it's understandable that
many people might imagine that nothing the government has a hand in could possibly
have happened without it.
One of the key insights of libertarianism revolves around the notion of the "spontaneous
order," the idea that social orders and markets can, do, and will develop to meet human
needs without central direction or control. For instance, just because government has
taken it upon itself to finance and run schools does not mean that no one would be
educated if it didn't. Nor would restaurants start poisoning their customers if municipal
food inspectors disappeared overnight.
But Borsook doesn't understand what libertarians mean when they talk about
spontaneous order. Thus she asserts that such a theory of "self-organization" appeals to
"engineers' physics envy" and that "the reason for the rise in technolibertarianism is that
engineers are practical and like to fix things and get things right, so of course only the
sensible political choice of libertarianism would fit."
In fact, the engineering mentality, which presumes a single best way of doing things in
accordance with unchanging "natural" laws, is the exact opposite of the spontaneous
order mentality that pervades libertarian thinking. That's why Hayek specifically
identified the engineering mentality as the mind-set from "which all modern socialism,
planning and totalitarianism derives."
The whole review is available here. It contains not just an interesting critique of the book but a sampling of many of the book's factual errors.
I am a libertarian but not an Objectivist, just
because I don't believe in egoism (which is part of the Objectivist worldview). Egoism is
popularly misunderstood but that doesn't compensate for its philosophical deficiencies.
Objectivists also tend to believe in natural law,
rights, and all that stuff. While I think there may be such things as rights, in general I am a libertarian because I believe the world will be a better place with more freedom, freer markets, etc.
That's right. No one can influence companies or people in charge of a company. They don't care if you buy their products or threaten to stop doing so. That's why Verant stopped scanning users' hard drives -- just for the hell of it. No other reason. That's why Intel backed down on the PIII id numbers -- just for the hell of it. Chalk it all up to whim. Someone in charge of Verant said, "Well, you know, I just feel like taking this part of the program out. Our customers? Who cares what they think?"
Suppose you were a company. But everyone had to buy the product you made. They could choose which of a few very similar companies made the product, but if 51% of the customers chose that product, the other 49% had to go along, and if you were not chosen as the contractor for this product, you would not have to do anything for 4 years. How much would you care about your product's quality, compared to the situation where people could stop using your product any time they wanted, and anyone could start competing with you at any time?
Rarely is there such a gem of a post that gets things so completely backwards. It makes me wonder whether people think about what they say at all. Maybe this poster is a bot. That would explain it.
Fresno, CA has the same population density as Bangladesh, and a greater density than Bombay (and I've been to Bombay as well as Fresno). So clearly population isn't the problem.
Firstly the crucial case was heard in 1911. (Although the order to dissolve the trust - actually a deal with the railroad owners - was made in 1892)
The court proceedings began in 1905. Perhaps we could even draw a lesson from that: antitrust cases have never had a particularly speedy record.
Considering that the charge they were found guilty of was price fixing, this statement is a little odd. The whole set up of Standard Oil was to use its monopoly in oil (90%+) to gain a stranglehold on the railways which prevented his competitors from being able to sustain margins.
Standard's market share in 1905, when the courts went to work on them, was a shade over 40%. Their market share had already dwindled due to the proliferation of new oil fields in Russia and Texas, not to mention their self-immolating strategy of buying up competing refineries. If they were worried about the conglomeration of power in a single firm's hands, they were solving a problem the market had already solved.
Moreover, Standard's real stranglehold was not on the railways (which, due to their pricing schemes, were an issue in the courts) but their control of the pipeline system throughout the Northeast. However, Standard's argument was that since they were the ones to build the pipeline at an enormous up-front cost, they should be free to do whatever they pleased with it, including refuse its use to their competitors. I think that's reasonable, don't you?
It is true that Standard's rebate policies with the railways may have had the effect of crowding out competitors. But in the end it is just another form of predatory pricing, which they'd already discovered didn't work.
Do not be mislead by the price of oil - the key in the price kerosene (in 1890 few people had cars).
If you look at Richard Posner's 196? paper on the Standard case (which he wrote right after the Alcoa case, interestingly), he includes a graph showing the price of kerosene, crude, and refined oil. The price of kerosene has its spikes and valleys, but in general it is far stabler than the price of refined oil, and not especially high either.
The government has stepped in and broken up monopolies at least twice before, with AT&T and
Standard Oil, both times with tremendous benefit to consumers. (There are probably others, I just don't know of them!)
Really. That's interesting. In what way did consumers benefit from the Standard breakup?
I'll give you a hint -- it wasn't because the price of oil dropped, since the breakup was in 1905 and the price had been steadily dropping since the late 1870s. And it wasn't due to increased mining or refining, since that had been going on since the Russian Caucasus strikes in the 1890s and the Texas strikes earlier.
In fact, consumers didn't benefit from the Standard breakup. The only people who benefited from the Standard breakup were Standard's competitors. If you are going to talk about the Standard case, it might help to read something other than your high school history textbook.
As for AT&T, saying that the government "stepped in" is like saying Microsoft "stepped in" to the operating system business in 1995. The government was already regulating and controlling prices for AT&T well before the breakup. The AT&T of the 70s and 80s was hardly a creation of the market.
(I submitted this story two weeks ago, but it was declined. Maybe my tagline wasn't snappy enough.)
I have two points here.
1) I tend to agree with ESR generally. I used to do regulatory policy analysis for a living and the gulf between what Lessig says will happen in terms of sensible regulation and what actually will happen is enormous. People often think of regulation as being a set of rules handed down by Congress (advised by people like Lessig, of course), and therefore somewhat visible and subject to analysis by us geeks. But that's not the case at all. Congress delegates its enforcement powers to agencies, which sets up a convenient group to blame when the regulations end up being subverted or twisted by ignorant/power-hungry bureaucrats. There isn't a single case of regulation in the U.S. where this does not go on to some extent. After all, who blames Congress for the excesses of the ADA? No one. We blame the various agencies (ATBCB primarily) who enforce it, and of course they're unelected. This is exactly what will happen if Lessig gets his way, and of course no one will blame him personally when it goes bad. We'll blame the U.S. Software Development Agency.
2) It is very striking, when reading the essays, how Lessig's "book knowledge" of the Internet's workings matches up with ESR's working knowledge. This continues to support my view that Lessig is basically a charlatan -- a good example is ESR's point that there are four GPL-like open-source licenses, of which the GPL is just one. Lessig is oblivious to subtleties like that. He's made a name for himself in this area, and now that the pond has gotten a lot bigger, he's used to being the biggest fish.
quote: In particular, he points out that even Linus is subject to regulation in how much control he has over the kernel. He is regulated by the fact that if people don't like what he's doing, they can pack up the source and do someting different. So he can't simply "force" people to use bad technology because he controls linux.
This is ridiculous. If you are going to equate regulation with market forces, then you obscure all the institutional differences between markets and regulatory bodies. I don't think anyone wants to read an essay on why the rules and discipline provided by markets are better, more proactive, and more efficient than the ones produced by government agencies, but it's fundamentally misleading to refer to both as "regulation."
The mathematician and AI researcher (and SF writer!) Vernor Vinge came up with this a long time ago. Basically he points out that if we create a machine that is smarter than ourselves, it will do the same with respect to itself. Vinge, however, doesn't see this as necessarily bad -- for humans it would, on some interpretations, be "like living in a universe alongside benevolent gods." After all, given that these machines could satisfy our every whim without sacrificing more than a fraction of their productive/computing power, why should we fear them?
That is just one view, of course. To read Vinge's original paper on this idea, go here. Also, I think the comment in the original story is pretty lame. It implies that if we smart people get together and discuss these problems, we'll figure out a way to prevent them from occurring. That's ridiculous. The only thing that happens when technocrats get together is that we get new rules and new ways of controlling the future. No way, I say. Let the future happen in its unpredictable fashion, and we'll all be better off for it.
Many studies are silly but this one is particularly so. Check out this commentary on that study. Note that the article at that link will be archived by Saturday 2/19, but the archive is accessible from that location as well.
Interesting argument. I would point out, though, that the last step you take is a bad one. Many large corporations are in favor of regulations in their industries. The reason is simple; regulations harm their competitors more. If you are a Big Corporation with a full time legal staff of 50 attorneys, you will be able to deal with a new regulation (and perhaps even shape it) so that it harms your bottom line very little. It's your upstart competitor who has just one general counsel, with no specialized regulatory experience, etc., who really gets slammed by the regulation. If you can't beat 'em in the market, use the government.
Slashdot Mirror
When I said scientists did not "construct" the fact that H (heliocentrism), I did not mean that they didn't make a claim about the way things are. What I meant was that H would be a fact even if there were no scientists to observe the relevant phenomena.
What happens when we try to express facts in language depends on whether the facts are explainable in words using those plain meanings. For example, if I say "My cat is sitting on that chair," everyone knows what all of those words mean, and very few English speakers will fail to understand what I mean by it. If I say "It's wrong to torture people for fun," that may be a little less clear (what counts as "torture"?) but still pretty clear. For the few people who don't understand, or who disagree about the common meaning of "torture", or who thought I was using "torture" as hyperbole, one or two sentences of clarification will get the real meaning across. And so forth. The real trap is when philosophers attempt to undermine common meanings using unclear terminology. I recommend the late Australian philosoper David Stove on these points.
If a writer displays unwillingness to think through the meanings of, and issues surrounding, the terms he is using, that suggests to me that the rest of the argument will be sloppy. In fact I did skim the remainder of the article and this expectation was confirmed, as it usually is.
But on your own view it could be said that both are facts. After all, you define a "fact" as "a statement of something being actual. And it is actual that you believe that I am an ignorant troll, correct? So how is that latter statement not also a fact?
Another point, to show that the way you (and the author of that ridiculous article) describe "facts" is not the way they are described in ordinary English.
I am imagining a courtroom scene in any number of lawyer shows:
Defense Attorney: "Isn't it a fact that you weren't wearing your glasses, so you can't possibly have recognized my client?"
Witness: "No, I was wearing my glasses, so I could see fine."
Defense Attorney: "You didn't answer my question. I asked if it was a fact that you weren't wearing your glasses, not whether it was a true or untrue fact. Please confine yourself to answering my questions."
Witness: "Oh, okay, then in that case it is a fact that I was not wearing my glasses."
To me this is nonsense. "The world" did not "construct" the fact that the earth revolves around the sun -- it did so before Copernicus or anyone else surmised. Perhaps you mean that it took the world two thousand years to construct a theory that explains various astronomical observations, and which concludes that the earth revolves around the sun.
I couldn't get past the first paragraph. "Facts" are socially constructed? "Facts" may not be true? I thought facts were by definition true -- if a proposition is false it can't be a fact. "Rights" may not be true? How can a right be true or false? The first paragraph makes it transparently obvious that the writer has no idea what a right is, or even what the relevant disagreements are regarding what rights are, nor any idea what a fact is (or even the what the relevant disagreements are concerning how we know things). It's the classic example of a geek thinking that because he can write code that makes him an expert on philosophy (or economics or anything else).
Funny you should put it that way. In the original Robin Hood legend, Robin Hood was a nobleman who thought taxes were too high, and he stole only from tax collectors and sheriffs (old English term for the chief representative of the king in a county). In that sense Robin Hood was a tax rebel. But that would mean he doesn't cater to know-nothing leftist "anti-corporatist" prejudices. What a shame.
You are right. Profit motives are bad for gaming. We should lobby for a federal Department of MMORPGs, and ensure that all MMORPGs are run by the right sort of people, helped out by generous subsidies from taxpayers' funds. We don't want any of those corporations involved; they'll just ruin the fun.
Nobody, that is, except the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, or any number of state-level similar organizations that pass laws saying e.g. that firms are not allowed to pay less than the union-dictated wage, that firms must hire a certain number of union workers, that firms may not make refusal to join a union a condition of employment, etc etc etc etc.
It looks to me like you are the one who has not read much about the reality of unions and how, like large corporations, they rarely settle for operating in a free market.
-BBB
revolution through stealing? hey, it worked for robin hood ; )
In what sense did it work for Robin Hood? When Robin Hood began his story, John was king of England. When Robin Hood died, John was king of England. Robin Hood changed almost nothing -- he got Richard the Lionhearted back onto the throne for a few years, until Richard got himself killed in France.
And Robin Hood's exploits were essentially a tax revolt, even in the stories. So unless you mean "regained Robin Hood's royal favor for a short time", then no, his guerrilla war against the Normans did not "work."
-BBB
1. If he is a shill for MS, he hides it very well. (Translation: I don't think he is one.)
2. He has done a *lot* of solid empirical research in business economics. He's a scientist, not an advocate.
3. His current work on MS is not easy to dismiss.
-BBB
I don't think so. In today's U.S. economy, land rents constitute less than 3% of GDP, so land generates very little income for anyone relative to other economic activities. Before the IR, of course, that figure would have been much, much, MUCH higher.
That was precisely one of the Luddites' hugest beefs with the IR -- that instead of the House of Lords' consisting only of bishops and earls and dukes, it had bankers and (gasp) Jews in it too. In fact, Britain's first Jewish PM, Benjamin Disraeli, was elected during the late IR (although he did take his oath on a Christian Bible).
-BBB
Sure, that's why the Industrial Revolution led to the repeal of the anti-poor Corn Laws, the inclusion of non-landowners in the House of Lords, and the first time in history people could have some freedom over where they lived. What if the "social customs" entail burning the houses of Catholics or Jews? Before the IR, you couldn't move away -- you grin and bear it. And the idea that the IR killed individual freedom is ridiculous. The House of Commons gained its first real powers during the IR. Coincidence?
It's chic to bash the IR. But without it, >50% of jobs today would be agricultural (compared to around 2% now). On the other hand, Katz does seem to have a talent for laying down fertilizer, so perhaps that explains his enthusiasm.
Having worked independently on their own farms, they grasped that they would be forced to use complex, dangerous machines in noisy, smelly factories, enduring long hours for slave wages, and that the trade was not in their favor.
Oh PLEASE. "Their own farms", no doubt, were wondrously safe, quiet, fragrant places to work. If Katz seriously believes this then I don't think he has a clue what farming entails. And as for "the trade not being in their favor," yeah, it was undoubtedly much easier to deal with a landlord who took half your harvest but shouldered little of the risk -- and who dictated to you to whom and for how much you could sell your crops.
The fact of the matter is that the IR enormously improved the lives of almost everyone in Britain (and everywhere else it was adopted), and the Luddites were a middle class interest group who supported laws that kept the price of food and wool high (thus enriching themselves at the expense of people who had to buy those necessities). They also objected to the idea that one could become wealthy without owning land. They were not "heroes" in any sense of the word, unless one is a columnist who has built his reputation on bashing free enterprise, and who is willing to pay any price in bad arguments and inept rhetorical flourishes ("slave wages" is a contradiction) to further that end.
-BBB
-BBB
So what is Borsook's case beyond pique, beyond finding Bionomics conferences to be "little shops of horror," beyond lamenting that technolibs prefer Edge Cities to "real" urban centers, beyond finding libertarians "psychically exhausting"? Boiled down, she makes two arguments: First, high-tech people have no right to attack government since their industry would not have existed without government funding. Second, successful businesses are successful because they operate in a world where governments keep schools going, food and drugs pure, banks honest, and the like.
The first argument is simply a non sequitur. Government is involved with just about any commercial transaction or field imaginable, if only because it builds roads. But the fact that the government paves streets hardly makes it responsible for all the businesses that spring up alongside them. (There is, moreover, ample evidence that road building would continue even if government disappeared.) ...
One of the key insights of libertarianism revolves around the notion of the "spontaneous order," the idea that social orders and markets can, do, and will develop to meet human needs without central direction or control. For instance, just because government has taken it upon itself to finance and run schools does not mean that no one would be educated if it didn't. Nor would restaurants start poisoning their customers if municipal food inspectors disappeared overnight.
But Borsook doesn't understand what libertarians mean when they talk about spontaneous order. Thus she asserts that such a theory of "self-organization" appeals to "engineers' physics envy" and that "the reason for the rise in technolibertarianism is that engineers are practical and like to fix things and get things right, so of course only the sensible political choice of libertarianism would fit."
In fact, the engineering mentality, which presumes a single best way of doing things in accordance with unchanging "natural" laws, is the exact opposite of the spontaneous order mentality that pervades libertarian thinking. That's why Hayek specifically identified the engineering mentality as the mind-set from "which all modern socialism, planning and totalitarianism derives."
The whole review is available here. It contains not just an interesting critique of the book but a sampling of many of the book's factual errors.
-BBB
Objectivists also tend to believe in natural law, rights, and all that stuff. While I think there may be such things as rights, in general I am a libertarian because I believe the world will be a better place with more freedom, freer markets, etc.
-BBB
Suppose you were a company. But everyone had to buy the product you made. They could choose which of a few very similar companies made the product, but if 51% of the customers chose that product, the other 49% had to go along, and if you were not chosen as the contractor for this product, you would not have to do anything for 4 years. How much would you care about your product's quality, compared to the situation where people could stop using your product any time they wanted, and anyone could start competing with you at any time?
Rarely is there such a gem of a post that gets things so completely backwards. It makes me wonder whether people think about what they say at all. Maybe this poster is a bot. That would explain it.
-BBB
-BBB
Considering that the charge they were found guilty of was price fixing, this statement is a little odd. The whole set up of Standard Oil was to use its monopoly in oil (90%+) to gain a stranglehold on the railways which prevented his competitors from being able to sustain margins.
Standard's market share in 1905, when the courts went to work on them, was a shade over 40%. Their market share had already dwindled due to the proliferation of new oil fields in Russia and Texas, not to mention their self-immolating strategy of buying up competing refineries. If they were worried about the conglomeration of power in a single firm's hands, they were solving a problem the market had already solved.
Moreover, Standard's real stranglehold was not on the railways (which, due to their pricing schemes, were an issue in the courts) but their control of the pipeline system throughout the Northeast. However, Standard's argument was that since they were the ones to build the pipeline at an enormous up-front cost, they should be free to do whatever they pleased with it, including refuse its use to their competitors. I think that's reasonable, don't you?
It is true that Standard's rebate policies with the railways may have had the effect of crowding out competitors. But in the end it is just another form of predatory pricing, which they'd already discovered didn't work.
Do not be mislead by the price of oil - the key in the price kerosene (in 1890 few people had cars).
If you look at Richard Posner's 196? paper on the Standard case (which he wrote right after the Alcoa case, interestingly), he includes a graph showing the price of kerosene, crude, and refined oil. The price of kerosene has its spikes and valleys, but in general it is far stabler than the price of refined oil, and not especially high either.
-BBB
Really. That's interesting. In what way did consumers benefit from the Standard breakup?
I'll give you a hint -- it wasn't because the price of oil dropped, since the breakup was in 1905 and the price had been steadily dropping since the late 1870s. And it wasn't due to increased mining or refining, since that had been going on since the Russian Caucasus strikes in the 1890s and the Texas strikes earlier.
In fact, consumers didn't benefit from the Standard breakup. The only people who benefited from the Standard breakup were Standard's competitors. If you are going to talk about the Standard case, it might help to read something other than your high school history textbook.
As for AT&T, saying that the government "stepped in" is like saying Microsoft "stepped in" to the operating system business in 1995. The government was already regulating and controlling prices for AT&T well before the breakup. The AT&T of the 70s and 80s was hardly a creation of the market.
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I have two points here.
1) I tend to agree with ESR generally. I used to do regulatory policy analysis for a living and the gulf between what Lessig says will happen in terms of sensible regulation and what actually will happen is enormous. People often think of regulation as being a set of rules handed down by Congress (advised by people like Lessig, of course), and therefore somewhat visible and subject to analysis by us geeks. But that's not the case at all. Congress delegates its enforcement powers to agencies, which sets up a convenient group to blame when the regulations end up being subverted or twisted by ignorant/power-hungry bureaucrats. There isn't a single case of regulation in the U.S. where this does not go on to some extent. After all, who blames Congress for the excesses of the ADA? No one. We blame the various agencies (ATBCB primarily) who enforce it, and of course they're unelected. This is exactly what will happen if Lessig gets his way, and of course no one will blame him personally when it goes bad. We'll blame the U.S. Software Development Agency.
2) It is very striking, when reading the essays, how Lessig's "book knowledge" of the Internet's workings matches up with ESR's working knowledge. This continues to support my view that Lessig is basically a charlatan -- a good example is ESR's point that there are four GPL-like open-source licenses, of which the GPL is just one. Lessig is oblivious to subtleties like that. He's made a name for himself in this area, and now that the pond has gotten a lot bigger, he's used to being the biggest fish.
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This is ridiculous. If you are going to equate regulation with market forces, then you obscure all the institutional differences between markets and regulatory bodies. I don't think anyone wants to read an essay on why the rules and discipline provided by markets are better, more proactive, and more efficient than the ones produced by government agencies, but it's fundamentally misleading to refer to both as "regulation."
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That is just one view, of course. To read Vinge's original paper on this idea, go here. Also, I think the comment in the original story is pretty lame. It implies that if we smart people get together and discuss these problems, we'll figure out a way to prevent them from occurring. That's ridiculous. The only thing that happens when technocrats get together is that we get new rules and new ways of controlling the future. No way, I say. Let the future happen in its unpredictable fashion, and we'll all be better off for it.
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