This does not advocate the truth of the author's proposition by appeal to his credentials, only refutes the shallow, reflexive "this is clickbait, why is it posted on HN" comment. The answer: it was written by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
He's pretty much describing why Microsoft has been a great investment
That's why large information technology companies have profit margins of 20+% and seem immune to business cycles and macro factors. They just keep printing cash even as other sectors ebb and flow. Microsoft, google, facebook, have huge profit margins and have been good investments.
It’s a sunk cost. If your investment doesn’t pan out, you don’t have physical assets like machinery that you can sell off to recoup some of your money.
Intellectual property grants companies essential monopolies over what they create as well as lets them pay very low taxes. No wonder they are doing well.
The trillion dollar question is what is going to happen in the long run. We know that prosperity is largely a factor of how well you spread technology and wealth. Which I don't think many countries, other than arguably China, manages to do when it comes to intellectual property.
And if the last half century was infrastructure and industry this half century is information and intellectual property. So it is essential to get this right since it might determine whether you get to be Norway or Thailand in the next century.
Based on currently wide-spread practices, IMO it's quite reasonable to assume that this is click-bait verbiage, not the title of a post from a well-known author.
Because of that, I think it would make sense to find different wording for the HN title.
I've seen so many of these kinds of titles and notice that they now have the opposite effect on me. They create an unconscious 'click aversion'. I usually just skip over them automatically. But it was the 9 upvotes and 8 comments in [new] category that drew me in :)
TL;DR: Bill Gates reviews one of his new favorite books, "Capitalism Without Capital". The book extends economic principles to measure value of intangible goods (such as software and online services), which were previously not correctly incorporated in economic models.
Thanks for the TL;DR. I came here just to get this since the title clearly seemed to be click-bait, and I’m conscious not to give more clicks/attention to such things and make the author believe they should produce more of such titles.
Instead of the headline from the site, I propose editing the HN title to "Book Review: Capitalism Without Capital". It's a neutral statement about the article's contents, and also conforms to the Gates Notes url: Books/Capitalism-Without-Capital.