2. My concern is that this bill seems to inappropriately raise the evidentiary bar for a patent challenger to prove invalidity in an inter partes review in the USPTO:
(In a court challenge to validity, the Supreme Court has ruled that invalidity must be proved by clear and convincing evidence, the highest standard in civil litigation, just short of beyond a reasonable doubt.)
- Section 4 of this amendment, when it comes to issued claims, would raise the IPR challenger's burden to clear and convincing evidence. For new claims, the challenger would still have the burden of proof, but by a preponderance.
Both standards are bad public policy, because in most cases a single, very-busy patent examiner is in effect making national industrial policy — and granting the patent applicant a nationwide monopoly on the claimed subject matter — all by his- or her lonesome after doing a prior-art search; the applicant must disclose material information known to him/her but is under no obligation to do a search. That's been the law for a long time.
It'd be as if a graduate school made a rule that a Ph.D. candidate must be issued the degree unless his (or her) dissertation committee does a literature search and shows that the candidate's research wasn't sufficiently novel. (As I understand it, every reputable Ph.D.-granting institution requires the candidate to do a literature search to demonstrate novelty.)
But of course it's worse than that, because — unlike a new patent holder — a newly-minted Ph.D. can't weaponize his- or her dissertation to try to "extract" royalties from other researchers.
> (As I understand it, every reputable Ph.D.-granting institution requires the candidate to do a literature search to demonstrate novelty.)
It is also worse than that, because for most dissertations, your committee is generally going to be more widely-read than the candidate, and have discussed the topic with them for years. Although the candidate may have more specific knowledge by the time they are finished writing the dissertation, the committee is going to have much broader knowledge of the field in general, and is pretty likely to be aware of the relevant prior art anyway.
A closer analogy would be saying the Ph.D candidate must be issued the degree unless a randomly chosen undergraduate can show the research wasn't sufficiently novel.
> A closer analogy would be saying the Ph.D candidate must be issued the degree unless a randomly chosen undergraduate can show the research wasn't sufficiently novel.
That's not correct: Patent examiners are hired for their technical background, they're put through a four-month academy that includes their technical areas, and they get regular refresher training in recent developments by attendance at industry conferences, etc.
I don't mean to digress significantly from the topic at hand, but what impact did you witness after the US switched from a first-to-invent to first-to-file system?
> If every company takes this data and is like "we want to pay at the 95th percentile"
It's thought by some that this is how CEO compensation has gone up so much: Corporate boards of directors have compensation committees, which are fed survey data about comp ranges; a comp committee will say, "We want our CEO's comp to be in the top quartile" — which, as time goes on, leads to an inexorable upward ratchet effect.
The article doesn't mention the Dancing Raisins TV commercial for California raisins — when I first saw it in 1986 I almost fell off the couch laughing. (But as Heinlein's Manny O'Kelly-Davis put it, it's a funny-once.)
My understanding of MMT (unburdened by any formal econ training) is that government spending financed by debt in that government's own currency is OK if and only if the society has — or can quickly enough build — sufficient productive capacity to handle the increased demand that will be caused by the increase in the money supply. I found Dr. Stephanie Kelton's book The Deficit Myth to be a very-accessible explanation that made intuitive sense (which of course is always dangerous).
The perhaps-facile analogy is pump-priming, a.k.a. fiscal stimulus, summed up in the old Kingston Trio song Desert Pete: You come across a hand-operated water pump in a well in the desert (hah!), with a bottle full of water sitting there, and a note explaining: You can "borrow" the water and use it to prime the pump; once you get the pump going: "Drink all the water you can hold, wash your face, cool your feet | Leave the bottle full for others | Thank you kindly, Desert Pete."
But that only works if the pump is working and has sufficient "raw material" (water in the well). And if you drink most of the bottle of water (borrowing for consumption instead of for boosting productive capacity), then the pump won't draw water, and you'll angrily claim that priming it doesn't work. As Desert Pete warned, "Now there's just enough to prime it with, so don't you go drinkin' first. Just pour it in and pump like mad and, buddy, you'll quench your thirst."
The lack of acceptance of MMT among mainstream economists is of course a red flag. But then in medicine, Marshall and Warren asserted — correctly — that many common stomach ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria and could readily be cured with cheap antibiotics instead of with major surgery. They were scorned by mainstream physicians and surgeons protecting vested interests. And eventually they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
So lack of acceptance isn't dispositive; as I read somewhere but can't find online, old economics ideas don't die out until old economists do. (Or maybe it was physicists?)
> Each individual has an obligation to be unobtrusive to those around them. Maybe society will reciprocate and provide support to the individual in return—the US certainly gives poor people more than poor people give society. But the obligation to society comes first.
That's asking a lot when people are living on the edge. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean wasn't sent to prison for nothing: it was for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family.
(Yes, we can debate how many Americans are truly living on the edge — but everyone makes that judgment for themselves.)
It’s not, and it’s not a relative judgment. Violent crime was rare in my dad’s village in Bangladesh, where people did starve. 20% of kids died before age 5 because of the lack of vaccines. Violent crime should be virtually non-existent in America. The fact we have it at a much greater rate than other developed countries is a flaw in our people and culture, not our economy.
> Violent crime should be virtually non-existent in America. The fact we have it at a much greater rate than other developed countries is a flaw in our people and culture, not our economy.
What's your proposed solution? The Puritans tried, and the Taliban are trying, to change human nature, with only limited "success" (if you want to call it that).
I’m not comparing America to some utopia that has fixed human nature. There’s lots of countries where people don’t jump turnstiles, do pay their fares, don’t fill public spaces with graffiti and used drug needles, don’t yell or dance in the subway, etc. It was our choice to let things get this way. That said, I don’t think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube. We would need an intervention on the scale of denazification to mitigate the individualism and entitlement that causes anti-social behavior. We would have to reform the very narratives parents tell their young children about the world around them and their relationship to society.
> Being poor does not cause dysfunctional behavior.
"Being poor" isn't an activity, it's a lack of life resources, and that can certainly be a contributing factor. Analogously, lack of exercise doesn't "cause" heart attacks, but it's widely accepted as being a contributing factor. Sure, some individuals live to be 100 years old with no more exercise than lifting their forks. But that doesn't alter the general case.
Even if poverty contributed to disorderly behavior, you would expect to see more such behavior in poorer places, and you generally don’t. NYC’s bottom quantile income is $27,000 or below. That’s significantly higher than the median (purchasing power adjusted) income in Thailand. Bangkok public transit is incredibly nice compared to NYC. Nobody jumping turnstiles, no graffiti, nobody talking loudly in train cars, no homeless people or aggressive drug users in train cars, etc.
Public disorder is primarily a sociological and cultural problem, not an economic one.
Purchasing power adjustment doesn't take into account cost of housing sufficiently. Those poor countries you compare NYC to have vastly cheaper housing. Also poverty is not just about absolute measures. Inequality is also a huge factor. When everyone's poor property crime is somewhat lower than what you'd expect it to be. Another thing is that those poor countries have societies and infrastructure adapted to the poor. NYC would even ensure that some infrastructure is hostile to the poor.
NYC has vastly bigger safety net and subsidies for housing than a place like Bangkok.
Countries like Thailand also have very high inequality—many city dwellers have family living in literal villages. And even if inequality was higher in NYC—doesn’t that prove it’s a moral and cultural issue rather than an economic one?
> Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order?
OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world.
Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall.
I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years.
EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.
I limited the time horizon to 70 years because Japan’s experience with immigration is much more likely to be like Sweden’s or France’s than America’s.
But America isn’t even an exception. Without immigration, America would be more like Australia or Canada in the late 20th century. Those are better countries than the U.S.: more socially cohesive, better run, lower in crime, less corrupt, and more efficient. Canadians and Australians get much better government per tax dollar because they spend far less political capital bridging over group conflicts.
The influx of immigration I was a part of made Virginia a worse place too. It was an extremely orderly and well-run state when I was growing up in the 1990s. It’s still coasting on that, but in 30 years it will go the way of California.
It’s not a coincidence that there are zero immigrant societies that function as well as Denmark or Sweden. Disorder and conflict is part and parcel of putting different cultural groups in the same place and having them try to run a country together.
If time travel is invented in your lifetime, you should go back a thousand years or so and have a talk with King Cnut — he of the legend of showing his courtiers just how much control he had over the tide [0] — about your views on immigration.
Immigration comes because migrants are dissatisfied enough with the status quo to take risks to do something about it. That ingrained tendency is a major part of human progress.
The accompanying disruption can be uncomfortable. But it plays a big role in how humanity's learning things we didn't know about reality — and in figuring out how to deal with it. Some familiar examples: The amount of life-improving technology that came from WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Advances in vaccine research instigated by the global spread of covid-19. And so on, and so forth.
(Back in the 1980s, Jared Diamond argued that humanity was better off millennia ago, when people were hunter-gatherers, and that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history [1]. Shockingly, his argument didn't seem to get any traction.)
1. This bill doesn't appear to address Alice/Mayo unpatentability under 35 USC § 101. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/222...
2. My concern is that this bill seems to inappropriately raise the evidentiary bar for a patent challenger to prove invalidity in an inter partes review in the USPTO:
- Existing law, at 35 USC § 316(e) says a challenger in an IPR must prove invalidity by a preponderance of the evidence. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/316
(In a court challenge to validity, the Supreme Court has ruled that invalidity must be proved by clear and convincing evidence, the highest standard in civil litigation, just short of beyond a reasonable doubt.)
- Section 4 of this amendment, when it comes to issued claims, would raise the IPR challenger's burden to clear and convincing evidence. For new claims, the challenger would still have the burden of proof, but by a preponderance.
Both standards are bad public policy, because in most cases a single, very-busy patent examiner is in effect making national industrial policy — and granting the patent applicant a nationwide monopoly on the claimed subject matter — all by his- or her lonesome after doing a prior-art search; the applicant must disclose material information known to him/her but is under no obligation to do a search. That's been the law for a long time.
It'd be as if a graduate school made a rule that a Ph.D. candidate must be issued the degree unless his (or her) dissertation committee does a literature search and shows that the candidate's research wasn't sufficiently novel. (As I understand it, every reputable Ph.D.-granting institution requires the candidate to do a literature search to demonstrate novelty.)
But of course it's worse than that, because — unlike a new patent holder — a newly-minted Ph.D. can't weaponize his- or her dissertation to try to "extract" royalties from other researchers.
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