Friday, October 11, 2019

Count Me a Pollyanna

I know President Trump has support for his China policy from many Democratic politicians and in academia and the chattering classes.  The conventional wisdom today seems to be we need to be tough on China on intellectual property issues and other non-tariff issues.  That's not an endorsement of Trump's specific decisions on tariffs.

I may be naive, I think in the long run, maybe the long long run, that policy is ill-advised.  That feeling isn't based on much knowledge, but these are pointers:

  • Theft of intellectual property might be bad, but it seems also true that it's not always easy to exploit stolen ideas.  Ideas rely on a network, a specific environment for their implementation and and further development.
  • "theft" of ideas is applying a concept which applies to personal or real property to intellectual things.  Another way to look at it is that the "theft" means additional minds working on scientific and technical issues, coming up with new property which, if shared with the world, can help all of us.
  • In the bad old days of the cold war it was reasonable to worry about theft of weapons designs. These days there's no country with an ideology of world domination.
  • We used to dream of the US as a model for the world (see the Gettysburg Address).  We're losing that dream.

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