(Non-)rivalrous, public/private goods/products (was: Re: [ox-en] Free market and the Internet)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 22:25:33 +0100
Hi Graham, Russell, all!
Interesting thread. It seems to me that there is something to learn in
this field.
Last week (8 days ago) Russell McOrmond wrote:
Here is where I believe things broke down, along with the other
discussions suggesting that "private property" == "capitalism", and that
is to think of information as naturally being a good/product.
Information is naturally non-rivalrous. In order to make it into a
'good' or a 'product' there is a requirement for governments to make it
artificially rivalrous. These are artificial laws created by humans.
First I'll try to clarify two notions - at least as I am using them.
A "product" is anything which is produced. And in the discussion here
I limit the notion of production to humans. A non-product is probably
a raw material. However, the longer I'm thinking about that notion the
more I see that actually there are very little non-products around.
Even the most so-called raw materials like mineral oil are processed
in one or more ways.
A "good" is something - hmm... actually I have no positive definition
yet :-( . I'm using it to distinguish it from a commodity. In some
sense it is the use value part of something.
In this sense information is a product as well as it is a good: It is
produced by a human and it is useful to a human.
Last week (7 days ago) Graham Seaman wrote:
Stefan's answer conflates scarcity and rivalry; I think the two ideas
overlap but are not the same, and the difference between rivalrous and
nonrivalrous goods would continue even if there were no scarcity. Stefan
earlier made a distinction between (social) scarcity and (natural)
limitations. Natural limitations (eg. the amount of oil in the earth) will
continue whatever the social arrangements. Non-rivalrous goods (ideas,
software, etc) will never run into natural limitations of this sort in any
society; rivalrous goods may.
Thanks for the clarification. Interesting.
IIRC that also ties in with Stefan Mn's interest in personal property? The
'Eigentum' paper (which I haven't read)?
Actually my interest had been fueled by the question of the
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung ;-) . But today I think it is actually an
interesting question Oekonux should really consider - because there is
something to learn. From your hints I see that the playground is far
bigger than I thought :-) .
6 days ago Graham Seaman wrote:
No, I think this discussion is at cross-purposes just because of a
difference in definitions. 'Rivalry' has a very specific meaning in
neo-classical economics quite different from the normal english meaning of
the word. It has no connection with the word 'competition'. A
non-rivalrous good is one which is not diminished in any way by sharing
it.
Thanks for clarifying this. Actually I don't how the German term is
here. "Nicht-exklusiv" or "exklusiv", respectively, comes to mind but
actually I don't know.
1. rivalry refers to a real phenomenon
Yes, I think so. However, I feel uncomfortable with the neo-classical
approach. I'm not absolutely sure why. I reckon it is too abstract.
The approach StefanMz put forward I like much more but it is very
concrete. May be that's over-simplified. I'm not sure about this but I
feel this needs more thought.
2. I really dislike the (loaded) phrase 'intellectual property'.
'non-rivalrous goods' gives an alternative way of saying the same thing.
But non-rivalrous goods are a bigger class than information goods. Ahm
- why not saying information goods?
3. The idea of 'public goods', which is derived from that of non-rivalrous
goods (a 'public good' is non-rivalrous and non-excludable) is the weak
point of neo-classical economics: it was proved in the 60s that there is
no ideal price for public goods, and hence the whole approach of 'pareto
optima' etc (used to claim that the market always gives a quantifiably
best result for distribution of goods) collapses when faced with public
goods. It is the neo-classical equivalent of the transformation problem
for marxists: there are fudges to get round it, but no generally agreed
solutions. So although neo-classical economics introduced the idea of
'non-rivalrous goods' it has been unable to swallow it; the idea itself
points to a different society than the one neo-classical economics
describes, in spite of its claims to be universal.
Thanks for pointing this out. Eons ago on the German list we found
that Free Software is a (value-less) public good. So it's seemingly
not by chance that this drives neo-classical thinking crazy ;-) .
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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