Economics of Technology – Page 52

Neurosurgeons Treating Dogs is Mutually Beneficial to Dogs and Humans

(p. D3) An operation commonly performed to remove brain tumors from the pituitary glands of humans is now available to dogs, thanks to a collaboration between a neurosurgeon and some veterinarians in Los Angeles. And that is turning out to be good for humans.

So far, nine dogs and one cat that otherwise would have died have been treated successfully.
. . .
What Dr. Mamelak has gained from teaching the procedure to veterinarians is access to tissue samples from the treated dogs. That’s significant because Cushing’s afflicts only one in a million humans, making it a difficult disease to study. By contrast, it afflicts about 100,000 dogs a year in the United States. The canine tissue samples are enabling him and his colleagues to develop drugs to one day treat Cushing’s disease in both humans and dogs.
“We have a full loop,” he said. “We’re using a human procedure in animals, and using their tissue to study the disease.”

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “Observatory; They Fetch, They Roll Over, They Aid Tumor Research.” The New York Times, Science Times Section (Tues., October 26, 2010): D3.
(Note: ellipsIs added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 22 (sic), 2010.)

When Inventors Could Get Patents that Were Durable and Enforceable, “the World Started to Change”

(p. 50) . . . Coke, who had . . . been made Lord Chief Justice of’ England, drafted the 1623 “Act concerning Monopolies and Dispensations with penall Lawes and the Forfeyture thereof,” or, as it has become known, the Statute on Monopolies. The Act was designed to promote the interests of artisans, and eliminate all traces of monopolies.

With a single, and critical, exception. Section 6 of the Statute, which forbade every other form of monopoly, carved out one area in which an exclusive franchise could still be granted: Patents could still be awarded to the person who introduced the invention to the realm–to the “first and true inventor.”
This was a very big deal indeed, though not because it represented the first time inventors received patents. The Venetian Republic was offering some form of patent protection by 1471, and in 1593, the Netherlands’ States-General awarded a patent to Mathys Siverts, for a new (and unnamed) navigational instrument. And, of course, Englishmen like John of Utynam had been receiving patents for inventions ever since Henry VI. The difference between Coke’s statute and the customs in place before and elsewhere is that it was a law, with all that implied for its durability and its enforceability. Once only inventors could receive patents, the world started to change.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics in original; ellipses added.)

Ice Entrepreneur Gorrie Died Dispirited for Lack of Funds

Source of book image:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51E2APGW55L._SS500_.jpg

(p. 241) In May of the following year [i.e., in May 1851] Gorrie obtained a patent for the first ice-making machine.
. . .
But he was unable to find adequate backing, and in 1855 he died, a broken and dispirited man.

Source:
Burke, James. Connections. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 1978.
(Note: ellipsis and bracketed information added.)

Steven Johnson Ignores Role of Market in Enabling Innovation

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map is one of my favorite books. I also enjoyed his The Invention of Air. I have not yet read his Where Good Ideas Come From. Based on the review quoted below, I do not expect to be as enthused about the new book.
I have read elsewhere that Johnson criticizes patents. If all would-be innovators were independently wealthy then innovation without patents might work. But William Rosen in The Most Powerful Idea in the World has recently shown that patents financed a key group of craftsmen who otherwise would not have been able to create the steam engines that powered the industrial revolution.
The issues are difficult and important—I will write more in a month or two after I have had a chance to read Johnson’s book.

(p. A21) Mr. Johnson thinks that the adjacent possible explains why cities foster much more innovation than small towns: Cities abound with serendipitous connections. Industries, he says, may tend to cluster for the same reason. A lone company in the middle of nowhere has only the mental resources of its employees to fall back on. When there are hundreds of companies around, with workers more likely to change jobs, ideas can cross-fertilize.

The author outlines other factors that make innovation work: the tolerance of failure, as in Thomas Edison’s inexorable process-of-elimination approach to finding a workable light-bulb filament; the way that ideas from one field can be transformed in another; and the power of information platforms to connect disparate data and research. “Where Good Ideas Come From” is filled with fascinating, if sometimes tangential, anecdotes from the history of entrepreneurship and scientific discovery. The result is that the book often seems less a grand theory of innovation than a collection of stories and theories about creativity that Steven Johnson happens to find interesting.
It turns out that Mr. Johnson himself has a big idea, but it’s not a particularly incisive one: He proposes that competition and market forces are less important to innovation than openness and inspiration. The book includes a list of history’s most important innovations and divides them along two axes: whether the inventor was working alone or in a network; and whether he was working for a market reward or for some other reason. Market-led innovations, it turns out, are in the minority.

For the full review, see:
MEGAN MCARDLE. “Serendipitous Connections; Innovation occurs when ideas from different people bang against each other.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., OCTOBER 5, 2010): A21.

If You Think Life Was Better in the Past, “Say One Single Word: Dentistry”

(p. 2) In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: “dentistry.”

Source:
O’Rourke, P. J. All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty. paperback ed. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.

William Rosen’s “The Most Powerful Idea in the World”

Source of book image: http://ffbsccn.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/the-most-powerful-idea-in-the-world.jpg

The range of William Rosen’s fascinating and useful book is very broad indeed. He is interested in THE question: why did the singular improvement in living standards known as the industrial revolution happen where and when it did?
The question is not just of historical interest—if we can figure out what caused the improvement then and there, we have a better shot at continuing to improve in the here and now.
I especially enjoyed and learned from William Rosen’s discussion, examples and quotations on the difficult issue of whether patents are on balance a good or bad institution.
Deirdre McCloskey taught me that the most important part of a sentence is the last word, and the most important part of a paragraph is the last sentence, and the most important part of a chapter is the last paragraph.
Here are the last couple of sentences of Rosen’s book:

(p. 324) Incised in the stone over the Herbert C. Hoover Building’s north entrance is the legend that, with Lincoln’s characteristic brevity, sums up the single most important idea in the world:

THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED

THE FUEL OF INTEREST

TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS

In the next few weeks I will occasionally quote a few of the more illuminating passages from Rosen’s well-written account.

Book discussed:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

All He “Could See Was Cows and Farms” in “Virginia’s High Tech Corner”

(p. A18) . . . government attempts to rejuvenate regional economies have a mixed track record, in the U.K. and elsewhere.

Stuart S. Rosenthal, an economics professor at Syracuse University, remembers driving through Virginia in 1997 and seeing a sign saying, “You are entering southwest Virginia’s high tech corner.”
“And all I could see was cows and farms,” he said. Recent employment data shows that aside from one pocket, little has changed.

For the full story, see:
ALISTAIR MACDONALD. “U-Turn in the U.K.: Big Spending Cuts.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 15, 2010): A18.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 14, 2010.)

Jeff Bezos’ Goal: “Earth’s Biggest Selection”

Jeff Bezos. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 18) You’re a longtime science buff who studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton. Why did you want to be a bookseller in the first place?
You have to go back in time to 1994, and there’s something very unusual about the book category. There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other product category. One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

Initially, Amazon sold books exclusively, but it has since expanded into a retail omnivore that sells basketballs and vacuum cleaners and hamster food and everything under the sun. What is your goal, exactly?
We want to have earth’s biggest selection. Earth’s biggest river, earth’s biggest selection.

For the full interview, see:
DEBORAH SOLOMON. “QUESTIONS FOR Jeffrey P. Bezos; Book Learning.” The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., December 6, 2009): 18.

(Note: bold in original, to indicate questions by Deborah Solomon.)
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated December 2, 2009.)

Wozniak Could Only Predict a Year or Two Ahead in Technology

(p. 293) If you could easily predict the future, inventing things would be a lot easier! Predicting the future is difficult even if you’re involved with products that are guiding computers, the way we were at Apple.

When I was at Apple in the l970s and 1980s, we would always try to look ahead and see where things were going. It was actually easy to see a year or two ahead, because we were the ones building the products and had all these contacts at other companies. But beyond that, it was tough to see. The only thing we could absolutely rely upon had to do with Moore’s Law–the now-famous rule in electronics (named for Intel founder Gordon Moore) that says that every eighteen months you can pack twice the number of transistors on a chip.
That meant computers could keep getting smaller and cheaper. We saw that. But we had a hard time imagining what kinds of applications could take advantage of all this power. We didn’t expect high-speed modems. We didn’t expect computers to have large amounts of hard-disk storage built in. We didn’t see the Internet growing out of the ARPANET and becoming accessible to everyone. Or digital cameras. We didn’t see any of that. We really could only see what was right in front of us, a year or two out, max.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Commodore, Atari, and Some Venture Capitalists, Refused to Fund Jobs and Wozniak

(p. 196) After Commodore turned us down, we went over to Al Alcorn’s house. He was one of the founders of Atari with Nolan Bushnell, and he was the one who’d hired Steve to do video games there two years before.

Now, I knew Al knew me. He knew I had designed Breakout, the one-player version of Pong. I remember that when we went to his house I was so impressed because he had one of the earliest color projection TVs. Man, in 1976, he would have been among the first people to have one. That was cool.
But he told us later that Atari was too busy with the video game market to do a computer project.
A few days after that, venture capitalists Steve had contacted started to come by. One of them was Don Valentine at Sequoia. He kind of pooh-poohed the way we talked about it.
He said, “What’s the market?”
“About a million,” I told him.
“How do you know?”
I told him the ham radio market had one million users, and this could be at least that big.
Well, he turned us down, but he did get us in touch with a guy named Mike Markkula. He was only thirty, he told us, but already retired from Intel. He was into gadgets, he told us. Maybe Mike would know what to do with us.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.