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The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting. “Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying t

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting. “Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of DNA, upon which rests so much of modern medicine. None of them, who made such large contributions to our well-being, are among those most rewarded by our economic system.”

eaenki 8y ago
What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA. Actually, a woman did. Not only she hasn't been rewarded economically but even culturally-wise.
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA I thought Watson, Crick, and Franklin were working on a team and that she was left uncredited?
  - ghaff 8y ago
    She was not left uncredited but is less well known. She didn’t share the Nobel Prize mostly because she had died and rightly or wrongly it’s not awarded posthumously. Photograph 51 is a good play about Rosalind Franklin BTW.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- SidiousL 8y ago
  No, she most certainly did not discover the DNA. The DNA (which was not named like that) had been around since Friedrich Miescher's work in the 19th century. Your statement is at least[#] as ignorant as saying that J.J. Thompson discovered electricity since he discovered the electron. Of course, the electricity had been discovered long before that. [#] What I have in mind here is that even the statement that she discovered the molecular structure of the DNA is not strictly speaking accurate.
api 8y ago
You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention. Our system rewards value extraction (rent, financial hacks) far more than value creation.
- mailxplorer 8y ago
  TBL is worth over $50 million.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    What's the economic value of the World Wide Web? How tiny a portion of that should we really allocate to the innovators who create the concepts our economy is built on?
    - lajhsdfkl 8y ago
      So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people? Your rhetorical question provides no value. I want to know how we should decide who should be rewarded, how we can obtain the money to reward them and what benefit does rewarding them in this fashion provide to society.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people? Sure. An innovation tax, and a group of cross industry and academic people (e.g. a mix of successful founders, engineers, great researchers, Nobel winners, plus a jury of common folk etc) that decides, every e.g. 5-10 years, who gets to share the money among a shortlist of potential benefactors. "Hmm, looks like this Turing person did good work in retrospect that hugely helped our society. Let him have $100 million of the $1 billion innovation fund".
lajhsdfkl 8y ago
I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things (except Shockley and that point is moot since the coinventors/creators reaped the rewards). Is it really that surprising to people that you wont become rich unless you convince thousands upon thousands of people to hand you money? What our system rewards are practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on.
- api 8y ago
  Your last paragraph is no longer really correct. The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes. You don't build a company for customers but for the next round of investors, and your product is its stock. In the extreme these can be highly clever and polished versions of the "big store" scam where nearly all actual value is flimsy or illusory. This is because all the money is now at the top. Your customers are the ones who can pay. A related phenomenon is Internet companies where the user is the product. Advertisers and others who want user data or access to attention have far more money to spend than users. Computing has transformed into a surveillance platform to monetize users because users are not the ones paying for anything.
  - WillReplyfFood 8y ago
    Its basically rewarded to be a black hat hacker- you scam your way into a industry, take it over from its previous owners - repackage the whole thing and try to get out before any liability could hit you. Obviously nothing of value is here created- a bank-robber doesent create value, he redistributes it - from the bank to himsel. Same goes for Ueber- it takes pre-existing value (taxi services)- reduces the wages and worker protection- and leaves with its share before the police arrive. To call that innovation is really a insult to the likes of tesla and einstein.
  - lajhsdfkl 8y ago
    > The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes The largest rewards are going to people using their money to finance the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy? Yeah that makes sense to me.
Alex3917 8y ago
While it's certainly unfair that innovation is more rewarded than invention, the idea that this is a significant driver of economic inequality is pretty dubious. Also given that academia has already gotten in bed with Reaganism and Bayh Dole, asking government to bail them out now is basically just wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
toasterlovin 8y ago
Though they were never rich, they will be remembered for all of eternity. Whereas history quickly forgets about the merely rich and famous.

eaenki 8y ago

What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA. Actually, a woman did. Not only she hasn't been rewarded economically but even culturally-wise.

mieseratte 8y ago
> What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA I thought Watson, Crick, and Franklin were working on a team and that she was left uncredited?
- ghaff 8y ago
  She was not left uncredited but is less well known. She didn’t share the Nobel Prize mostly because she had died and rightly or wrongly it’s not awarded posthumously. Photograph 51 is a good play about Rosalind Franklin BTW.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SidiousL 8y ago
No, she most certainly did not discover the DNA. The DNA (which was not named like that) had been around since Friedrich Miescher's work in the 19th century. Your statement is at least[#] as ignorant as saying that J.J. Thompson discovered electricity since he discovered the electron. Of course, the electricity had been discovered long before that. [#] What I have in mind here is that even the statement that she discovered the molecular structure of the DNA is not strictly speaking accurate.

api 8y ago

You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention. Our system rewards value extraction (rent, financial hacks) far more than value creation.

mailxplorer 8y ago
TBL is worth over $50 million.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  What's the economic value of the World Wide Web? How tiny a portion of that should we really allocate to the innovators who create the concepts our economy is built on?
  - lajhsdfkl 8y ago
    So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people? Your rhetorical question provides no value. I want to know how we should decide who should be rewarded, how we can obtain the money to reward them and what benefit does rewarding them in this fashion provide to society.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people? Sure. An innovation tax, and a group of cross industry and academic people (e.g. a mix of successful founders, engineers, great researchers, Nobel winners, plus a jury of common folk etc) that decides, every e.g. 5-10 years, who gets to share the money among a shortlist of potential benefactors. "Hmm, looks like this Turing person did good work in retrospect that hugely helped our society. Let him have $100 million of the $1 billion innovation fund".

lajhsdfkl 8y ago

I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things (except Shockley and that point is moot since the coinventors/creators reaped the rewards). Is it really that surprising to people that you wont become rich unless you convince thousands upon thousands of people to hand you money? What our system rewards are practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on.

api 8y ago
Your last paragraph is no longer really correct. The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes. You don't build a company for customers but for the next round of investors, and your product is its stock. In the extreme these can be highly clever and polished versions of the "big store" scam where nearly all actual value is flimsy or illusory. This is because all the money is now at the top. Your customers are the ones who can pay. A related phenomenon is Internet companies where the user is the product. Advertisers and others who want user data or access to attention have far more money to spend than users. Computing has transformed into a surveillance platform to monetize users because users are not the ones paying for anything.
- WillReplyfFood 8y ago
  Its basically rewarded to be a black hat hacker- you scam your way into a industry, take it over from its previous owners - repackage the whole thing and try to get out before any liability could hit you. Obviously nothing of value is here created- a bank-robber doesent create value, he redistributes it - from the bank to himsel. Same goes for Ueber- it takes pre-existing value (taxi services)- reduces the wages and worker protection- and leaves with its share before the police arrive. To call that innovation is really a insult to the likes of tesla and einstein.
- lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  > The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes The largest rewards are going to people using their money to finance the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy? Yeah that makes sense to me.

Alex3917 8y ago

While it's certainly unfair that innovation is more rewarded than invention, the idea that this is a significant driver of economic inequality is pretty dubious. Also given that academia has already gotten in bed with Reaganism and Bayh Dole, asking government to bail them out now is basically just wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

toasterlovin 8y ago

Though they were never rich, they will be remembered for all of eternity. Whereas history quickly forgets about the merely rich and famous.