From: nelson_p@APOLLO.HP.COM
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Inventors
Date: 10 Apr 92 18:29:41 GMT


From: jim@netlink.cts.com (Jim Bowery)

>An inventor may spend his entire life, sacrifice his ability to send
>his kids to college (assuming he ever has any), lose his wife (assuming
> any woman without AIDS would have a pathetic kook like him) etc. just 
>to come up with one exceedingly valuable invention. 

  Presumably his assessment of how "valuable" that invention is
  must take into account (or be completely based on!) how much he
  could sell it (or some resulting product) for.   Or does Mr.
  Bowery mean "valuable" in some other sense?   It's a contradiction
  to talk about how someone is forced to sell a "valuable" invention
  for a song.

>Needless to say, this "setup" has one outcome:  
> 
>The inventor's technology is sold for a song (assuming he can sell it
> at all).  Seeing his life's work consumed by parasites, he frequently
>considers suicide.  Inventors of major technologies have a higher 
>suicide rate than almost any other professional group.

  Just out of curiosity, what is the source of this last statistic?

  In any case, the rest of this seems rather anecdotal.  Anecdotally
  I know quite a few patent grantees, and except for the fact that
  in general they seem more intelligent than average, there is 
  nothing remarkable about them in the sense of being "kooks" or 
  being unable to meet familial responsibilities.
 
>Inventors end up with less capital and "wheels" with more capital.  

  Many people have become quite wealthy via invention (e.g., Hughes,
  Land, Jobs, etc)   
 
>Now what do you think this does does to technical and economic advance?  

  Hard to say.  As I pointed out here recently, 4 of the 5 top
  U.S. patent grantees in 1991 were Japanese corporations (Eastman
  Kodak being the one U.S. exception).    The significance of this
  is open to speculation.  

  Another thing is also clear, at least to me as an engineer:  
  much significant new "invention" takes a lot of resources.
  It is unlikely that a breakthrough invention in electronics, 
  materials science, transportation technology, biologicals,
  or chemical engineering will often emerge from a lone
  inventor working in his basement, although as recently as
  earlier this century such a thing was still common.   There
  are still, of course, some areas where an individual inventor
  can have significant success.  But this brings us to the 
  other resource-intensive part of the inventor's problem:
  I earlier mentioned the Technology Review article by Brian
  Kahn on the software patent problem, but some of the same
  issues apply to patents in general: it is often difficult AND
  EXPENSIVE to determine if something is patentable, or
  if it violates an existing patent, and moreover, the
  legal system charged with resolving such things is often 
  not experienced enough with certain areas of modern tech-
  nology to perform their function adequately.   The legal
  costs of defending against charges of patent violation are
  often beyond what any individual can afford even if he
  feels confident that he's right.   

  But whether any of this adds up to a dearth of new ideas 
  or of invention in general is unclear.  Can Mr. Bowery
  cite some evidence that the rate of "technical and
  economic advance" is declining?   Personally, it looks
  like the rate of technical andvance, at least gets faster
  all the time!


---peter