2003-03-15

The Blank Slate- nonrival goods


Extract
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, ch13 'Out of Our Depths' (p238)


[The economist Paul] Romer's second point is that ideas are what economists
call "nonrival goods." Rival goods, such as food, fuel, and tools, are made of
matter and energy. If one person uses them, others cannot, as we recognize in
the saying "You can't eat your cake and have it." But ideas are made of
<i>information</i>, which can be duplicated at negligible cost. A recipe for
bread, a blueprint for a building, a technique for growing rice, a formula for
a drug, a useful scientific law, or a computer program can be given away
without anything being subtracted from the giver. The seemingly magical
proliferation of nonrival goods has recently confronted us with new problems
concerning intellectual property, as we try to adapt a legal system that was
based on owning studd to the problem of owning information--such as musical
recordings--that can easily be shared over the Internet.

The power of nonrival goods may have been a presence throughout human
evolutionary history. The anthropologists John Tooby and Irven DeVore have
argued that millions of years ago our ancestors occupied the "cognitive niche"
in the world's ecosystem. By evolving mental computations that can model the
causal texture of the environment, hominids could play out scenarios in their
mind's eye and figure out new ways of exploiting the rocks, plants, and animals
around them. Human practical intelligence may have co-evolved with language
(which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and with social cognition
(which allows people to cooperate without being cheated), yielding a species
that literally lives by the power of ideas.