From: jim@netlink.cts.com (Jim Bowery)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.physics.fusion,alt.politics,sci.research,sci.energy
Subject: Re: Alpha Centauri and the Mad Dash to Mars (WAS Re: Disincentives)
Date: 10 Apr 92 15:58:03 GMT
Organization: NetLink Online Communications, San Diego CA

Snide Pucker writes:
>   Basically, we're back to the same problem of letting the people who
>have the money/power (managers) reaping the benefits of the actual 
>workers (labor/inventors).  
 
From a technological/economic progress standpoint, the ripoff of
inventors is qualitatively different from that of laborers.
 
When a laborer enters the job market, he can switch from job
to job anytime he likes.  His "product" is a continuous stream
in a highly competitive market.  Normal market forces are far
more efficient at discovering his true worth and if he is ripped
off, it is only temporary.  He can always walk.
 
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.  When he goes out 
to the capital markets, he finds a scarcity of capital sources due to 
wealth centralization.  These capital sources:
 
1) Didn't make their fortunes inventing themselves and therefore
        haven't a prayer of distinguishing between technologies that 
        are viable and those that are jokes (nor are they able to
         distinguish between technical advisors who can fill that
         roll for them and those that can't).
2) Have a torrent of proposals passing before them.
3) Usually have an inferiority/guilt/hostility complex against the 
        creative skill of inventors and therefore neurotically want to 
        "put them in their place."
4) Knows the inventor knows this about him and therefore wouldn't be
        looking for capital if the inventor weren't desperate.
5) Know the inventor spent his life working on arcane skills instead
        of wheeling and dealing skills.
 
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.
 
Inventors end up with less capital and "wheels" with more capital.  
 
Now what do you think this does does to technical and economic advance?  
 
Somehow, I don't think Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson intended
this sort of situation to arise when they replaced patents of nobility
with patents of invention in the Constitution.
 
PS:  For those who think this is simply the way a free capital
market is supposed to operate, and that any "supposed" wealth 
centralization is merely a natural market equilibrium, I refer you 
to the asset valuation formula:
 
AssetValue = Integral  Risk(t)*Profit(t)/(DiscountRate+1)**t  dt
 
        where   Profit(t) is the profit stream at some point in time 
                Risk(t) is the probability of realizing that Profit
                DiscountRate is the zero-risk rate of return on money
                        typically linked to government debt instruments
 
Now for all his talk about Edison and the Wright Brothers, I don't 
hear Ross Perot talking much about the impact of "DiscountRate" on 
the centralization of capital sources and the difficulty that creates
for inventors.  I don't suppose that would have anything to do with 
the fact that he is a billionaire.

--                    
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