Dare we ask why those ads warning against children learning about gay marriage in schools have been so effective? Does this mean Californians want their children growing up homophobic? Not the state I thought it was.

But, going beyond the political rhetoric, I can honestly say I have never heard a half-decent argument against allowing gay marriage. One concern that could maybe, in principle (I want to be clear that I’m not endorsing this argument) support banning gay marriage is that same-sex couples might be less effective (somehow) as parents.

However, this concern is misguided; just look at what the American Psychological Association has to say:

Research suggests that sexual identities (including gender identity, gender-role behavior, and sexual orientation) develop in much the same ways among children of lesbian mothers as they do among children of heterosexual parents (Patterson, 2004a). Studies of other aspects of personal development (including personality, self-concept, and conduct) similarly reveal few differences between children of lesbian mothers and children of heterosexual parents (Perrin, 2002; Stacey & Biblarz, 2001; Tasker, 1999). However, few data regarding these concerns are available for children of gay fathers (Patterson, 2004b). Evidence also suggests that children of lesbian and gay parents have normal social relationships with peers and adults (Patterson, 2000, 2004a; Perrin, 2002; Stacey & Biblarz, 2001; Tasker, 1999; Tasker & Golombok, 1997). The picture that emerges from research is one of general engagement in social life with peers, parents, family members, and friends. Fears about children of lesbian or gay parents being sexually abused by adults, ostracized by peers, or isolated in single-sex lesbian or gay communities have received no scientific support. (emphasis mine)

Maybe you just don’t believe the APA–granted, the evidence is incomplete. Still, are gays really the potential parents you want to go after? Felons and alcoholics are still allowed to marry and have kids, for such things are fundamental rights. How can we justify taking away these fundamental right from gays if we still extend them to groups whose parenting credentials are much more doubtful?

Finally, I really, really hope the old “marriage is defined as a union between a man and a woman” argument has seen its day pass. While that may be some religions’ definition of marriage, it should not be the secular one, for it discriminates.

“Aha!” some will say, “but we could extend all people the same right: the right to marry a person of the opposite sex, so it’s perfectly non-discriminatory.” Many states used to have interracial marriage bans, which can be described as allowing an individual to marry only another person of the same race. Were those laws fair because they could be stated in a race-neutral way? Equal treatment is not the same thing as symmetric treatment.

Enough ranting. Come on, California! Do the right thing!

Thanks!

I agree, but I would say that patent law may be going in the right direction for the wrong reasons. In particular, when

1. an innovation is one step in a rapidly progressing series of innovations or lays the foundation for significant future innovation, and
2. the innovator’s costs can be recovered without being granted monopoly power,

then a patent is not worth giving.

Widely used-software seldom (never?) lasts more than a couple years without significant changes - just think of how much operating systems or web browsers have changed in the last 15 years (remember Windows 3.1? I don’t, either). Furthermore, by gaining an early market share, companies can often ensure success (MySpace and Facebook had many followers, but the head start could not be overcome).

Thus, both conditions probably hold for most software (and certainly for PageRank - Google’s revenues don’t hinge on IP protection), so I think there is good reason to be stingy about granting monopolies on software.

However, this is a long shot from the legal reasoning that currently threatens software patents. Apparently, the threat comes from the requirement that a patentable process must be “tied to a particular machine,” and apparently being tied to computers in general is not particular enough. BUT, the court has rules that processes implementable on two computers are particular enough. Consequently,

All these and many more fascinating questions will provide ample billable hours for patent attorneys even as inventors look on with utter horror and disbelief at the crucial importance the legal system is placing on distinctions that are technologically meaningless to the innovations sought to be patented.

I hear ya, Duffy

The apparent death of Google’s pioneering PageRank patent under the PTO’s new rule for patentable subject matter may be a cause for celebration among those who are philosophically opposed to property rights in innovation and are eager to confine the patent system’s ambit.

Well, I’m not “philosophically opposed to property rights in innovation,” but I do think we have too much IP. This isn’t about philosophy, it’s about providing the right incentives to promote innovation, and it’s not such an abstract claim to say that patents may inhibit progress when innovations build on each other.

And I wonder: will it ever be persuasive in the world of patent law to argue, “this doesn’t deserve a patent because it has too much potential as a stepping stone for future innovations and there are sufficient incentives for the innovator anyways”? Or will the legal criteria continue to focus on the kind of thing the innovation is at the expense of the economically crucial innovative climate.

Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good? Any explanation based on altruism only goes so far. While users in less developed countries undoubtedly benefit from access to free software, many beneficiaries are well-to-do individuals or Fortune 500 companies. Futhermore, altruism has not played a major role in other industries, so it would have to be explained why individuals in the software industry are more altruistic in others.

I don’t agree that such explanation is necessary. It might be the case that hackers are no more altruistic than other people, but altruistic hackers have a better chance than, say, altruistic auto manufacturers. If Henry Ford had not been interested in turning a profit, he would have had trouble raising funds, and GM would have quickly overwhelmed his company. But Linus Torvalds had little to lose if Linux didn’t work out. Moreover, Torvalds’ selflessness may have given his collaborators confidence that their contributions would not be in vain.

Altruism is a competitive disadvantage in most industries but might be just the opposite in the software industry. Thus, altruism may play a more important role in OSS development than in other industries not because hackers are more altruistic, but because altruistic hackers are more successful.

I’ve recently placed myself in a tough situation. Having moved to the East Coast, home is now quite far away as I become increasingly more concerned about my carbon footprint. While in Princeton, I take segmented showers to reduce my hot water use, I don’t eat meat, and my bike is my first option for transportation. But now that it’s summer I’m going to fly home to visit my friends and family and one could argue that this flight negates the efforts I make during the year. So I decided to look into carbon offsets, and while I didn’t put too much effort into it, I thought I’d share some information and ideas and maybe get some of yours in return.

The principle of a carbon offset is that, though you’re concerned about your own personal contribution to global climate change, you still might engage in some high-impact activities in the process of balancing quality of life with environmental concerns. So since you’re going to be emitting carbon dioxide by driving or flying or whatnot, you can pay some amount of money to support an initiative that reduces carbon dioxide emissions from some other process. For example, you might support a forestry project in which your money goes to reforest an area and ensure that it will remain unharvested in the future, thereby sequestering CO2 in the biomass of the forest. What you’re looking for in choosing a project is additionality, which means the project wouldn’t happen without the support of donors such as yourself. This requires some amount of thoughtfulness on your part and expertise that few people have. For example, I was looking at descriptions of many different projects that Carbon Fund supports, and I was surprised to see landfill gas projects on their list. I did a research project on the climate impact, efficiency, and costs for the various routes of biomass to energy. So I know that many landfills already collect the methane that is produced by the decomposition of biomass in the landfill, not because of any sense of altruism and not because environmentalists are paying them to do so but because it is profitable. So in that case there is no additionality because the project would have happened anyway. Therefore, I recommend trusting to independent third parties that have studied the types of offset projects as well as the organizations objectively. Here is one that I thought presented good information in a succinct manner: http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/carbonoffsets/TCI-offset-handout.htm , and their review of various organizations is here: http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/carbonoffsets/ratings.htm#yesbut . You can also choose projects that are implemented in the developing world and serve to enhance quality of life in local areas by providing, for example, renewable energy or even jobs.

So I went with Atmosfair because it was highly recommended by the website I just provided. Some of the names of their projects are “India: Solar Energy Substitutes Diesel Fuel,” “Thailand: Cleaning Sewage Water Protects Climate,” and “Nigeria: Efficient Fuel Wood Stoves.” Air travel has an extremely detrimental impact on the environment, worse than any ground transportation. The emissions from my roundtrip flight from Newark to SF was calculated to be over two tons of CO2 (and note that this is the amount attributed to each and every passenger on the plane). Since atmosfair is relatively expensive as far as carbon offsets go, I paid about $80 to offset my flight, but had I gone with carbonfund.org it would have cost just over $10. So why is one so much more expensive than the other? I believe the U.S. companies know that Americans aren’t willing to sacrifice much and so they’d rather that you donate $10 and feel like you’re offsetting your entire flight, even though you’re probably not. Both Atmosfair and Carbon Fund are nonprofits, so I just think Atmosfair is more realistic. I admit that I cringed when I saw how much more expensive Atmosfair was, but I’d rather not lie to myself, and even if I only had $10 to donate, it would be better to offset a portion of my flight using a highly reputable organization whose projects I like.

Also, I think it’s better to pay $80 because, well, it’s supposed to hurt a little bit. Paying $10 to ease your conscience about destroying the environment gives me some qualms. The first line of defense when it comes to environmentalism is to change your habits and minimize your own impact. If everybody decided to just maintain a destructive lifestyle and pay a couple hundred dollars every year to call themselves carbon neutral, there wouldn’t be enough offsets to go around and we wouldn’t be really solving the problem. So I wanted to put these ideas out there because I thought maybe some of you might be interested in carbon offsets for the same reasons I was, but understand that I don’t recommend them without some reservations.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Make up a “fact.”
2. Write your fact on a Wikipedia entry without citing a reference.
3. Wait for a journalist from some “respectable” news organization to come along and mention your fact in a publication.
4. Edit the Wikipedia entry to cite the publication.
5. Watch as the world reels in confusion.

So this sounds pretty dumb, but apparently it actually happened with Sasha Baron Cohen’s Wikipedia entry (with the Independent being the “respectable” news organization), and now nobody in the world is sure whether or not he had a career in finance before switching to acting.

We probably underestimate how common this is. One little inaccuracy on Wikipedia can reach thousands of readers in a relatively short time. If the misinformed go on to replicate this inaccuracy, then the mistake becomes exceptionally hard to correct.

It appears that philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who advocated an anarchistic view of (scientific) knowledge, has won.

One great point I hadn’t heard before was for direct carbon taxes over a cap & trade system: since carbon emissions are almost exactly proportional to the carbon in coal that comes out of mines, plus petroleum from oil wells, plus maybe a couple other sources, we can very efficiently monitor and tax the carbon coming straight out of the source (eg, the quantity of coal coming out of the mine) rather than monitoring the emissions out of every smokestack at every power plant and factory. Cap and trade does have the theoretical advantage of setting a well-defined limit on emissions, but it comes with a much larger implementation cost.

As Sachs says, financial types might find the idea of a carbon market sexy, but considering the failures of some recent “financial innovation,” I think it’s prudent to avoid a complex financial solution when a simple and effective tax-based solution is available.

Thanks again to Jamie for this tip and another one: haikus on financial markets.

To motivate the production of knowledge, academics already have something similar to what Stiglitz suggests in the form of Nobel Prizes and tenure: the possibility of secure employment, intellectual prestige, and a good chunk of money does a lot to motivate young intellectuals to create knowledge (which the rest of the world may freely benefit from). Why not do the same thing for open source software, another public good which, like good ideas and new medicines, benefits everybody when it is produced? Turns out Sun Microsystems recently realized the wisdom in this possibility (Or at least it was recently when I first started writing this post). They are going to give out a million dollars in prizes to people who contribute to open source software development.

That’s is a good start, but I would say it’s a long shot from approaching anything near an economically efficient level of public funding for open source innovation. Here’s why:

Open source software (OSS) is a public good in the purest sense of the term. This means if I create an OSS program, everybody else in the world will be free to use it and benefit from it. It also creates a free-rider problem: once somebody pays the costs to produce an OSS program (primarily the labor involved in writing the code), everybody else will be able to use it, and “free-ride” off of the efforts of the creator, who might not get paid squat. So why would anybody want to write an OSS program in the first place?

That’s a good question. A complete answer is probably very complicated, but whatever inspires hackers to work on open-source code, they could probably be more inspired if considerable wealth and fame were on the line. But would it really be worth many millions? I say hell yes.

Think of how much money people in the world economy spend on software: $200 here for OS X, $300 there for Vista, maybe $650 for Photoshop, and $300 for MS Office. If Americans currently average around $100/year on everyday software (stuff than can feasibly be replaced by open-source alternatives), then American as a group are spending tens of billions in total. Now, if just ten percent of that was turned into public funding and used to sponsor OSS, we would have something on the order of a billion dollars to spend - quite a lot more than Sun is putting up.

Maybe the most interesting question here is how we could spend that money effectively. But putting that aside (please do comment if you have thoughts), with that kind of money, I bet we could somehow get the world’s programmers to put a lot more effort into OSS. Just for fun, let’s imagine an annual “Torvalds Prize” given out in Sweden (or somewhere) every year that includes a six-or-seven figure cash prize and a great big gold medal. If we had it five years ago, probably some people associated with Apache, Mozilla, and maybe Ubuntu could be driving around in Ferraris wearing their great big gold medals. This would be a huge motivator for young computer whizzes everywhere, and surely within a few years the quality of Linux, Gimp, and OpenOffice would fly past that of their closed-source rivals (Windows/Mac OS, Photoshop, MS Office, respectively).

That’s a bit hyperbolic, and high-profiles prizes are not the only interesting potential incentive for OSS development, but I think this sort of analysis has serious policy relevance. Software is a huge part of our economy these days, and with Apache and Firefox we have already seen widely-used open-source software that is a perfect substitute for (or even superior to) the proprietary version. Other programs have been catching up. With just a little public funding, who knows how many other open-source programs would fly past propriety rivals and into widespread use?

And here’s the really relevant thought experiment: if Americans collectively pooled as much money as they currently pay for software, could it be used to produce higher quality open-source software than Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc are currently putting out? For the economists out there: are we in the midst of a huge market failure - are we seriously underestimating the positive externalities of open-source software (or overestimating the costs of producing it)?

It’s hard to imagine what we could do with tens of billions going into OSS, especially when we don’t have a clear idea of how we would be using that money, but this is an important question to ask.