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Comment by gp | Hacker News Reader

Many technologies only exist because of the profit motive. When should we destroy IP rights for the public benefit?

- IP for the best vaccines, vs worse ones otherwise available, so we are all healthier

- Higher yielding crop seeds, vs worse lineages, so that we can all eat better

- Efficient water purification techniques, so that we all have clean water cheaper

- Metallurgy for high performance alloys used in turbines and aircraft structures, so that we can all build safer airplanes for less

- Software to detect early cancer or heart disease from blood markers, so that we can prevent disease

Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things

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I didn't say they shouldn't make any profits, just that I felt they'd already made enough that squeezing the developing world for more seemed unethical to me. For example[1]...

1: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...

> Many technologies only exist because of the profit motive.

And many don't. It's not the only motive in the world.

> When should we destroy IP rights for the public benefit?

When we're in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime global emergency, and the IP in question has a significant chance of single-handedly ending the emergency.

> “Keep in mind, when you destroy the profit motive, you destroy much (Not all!) of the motivation people have to build better things”

that’s a fairytale we’re told to keep things the way they are. every single person on earth has passions to do and create every day. that’s literally built into the biophysics of the universe. the profit motive shapes where we collectively apply our natural motivations, it doesn’t create the motivations themselves. we will always be building better things, it’s just a question of which better things. none of your list strictly requires a profit motive to have curious minds explore them.

I don't think it's wise to create an environment where medical advancements are gated behind there being enough people in the world that are passionate about pencil-pushing and dealing with the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Plenty of people go to work and get the bricks beat off them for 8 hours a day only because they get a sizable paycheck that they can then spend on things they're actually passionate about.

that’s a less than good-faith interpretation of the point i made, which is that, to the first order, people are intrinsically motivated to explore, experiment, and create. that doesn’t preclude the existence or usefulness of extrinsic motivation (e.g., wages), or even the negative effects of bureaucratic gatekeeping.

They're going to continue to explore, experiment, and create up until their curiosity is satisfied and they've run out of gas for dealing with regulatory bodies and running a business. It's true -- people will still research these things, and they'll find their answer, but then they'll require millions of dollars worth of menial man-hours and politicking that people do because it pays well, and not because it's their life's calling.

again, that misses the point. we don't 'run out of gas', at least not until we die. you're equating building a business with discovering and creating, but the building of businesses is a customary, artificial constraint, not a natural one, to creating novel discoveries.

i do agree with your implicit premise that profit motive can drive us to do things we don't otherwise want to do, but that again is because of constraints placed on us by the political economy, not natural constraints. we coerce the economy into producing profits via these constraints, not the other way around.

i get that you want to rail against the bureaucratic regulatory function, and i can agree that we get a lot of things wrong therein, but this line of reasoning doesn't get you there.

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