[timr]

> Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time

Folks have a tendency to overlook the inevitability of certain technologies. The light bulb, for example, was going to happen regardless of whether or not Edison's lab came up with it. There were tons of people pursuing it. You could say the same thing about the airplane, the telephone, phonograph etc. Tons of competition and prior art for each thing existed at the time of the thing we identify in retrospect as "the invention". The singular-genius model of invention is essentially never correct.

As smartphones go, the iPhone's specific instantiation was remarkable, but the idea was in the gestalt. Apple had shipped the ROKR already, and lots of people (myself included) looked at the then-current color iPod and said "boy, it would be great if this were my phone, too". So there was lots of speculation about the idea, years before it became real. It wasn't at all surprising that a smartphone would emerge. Jobs even made a joke about it during the original iPhone launch presentation (there was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial on it).

That's not to say that there weren't lots of innovative things about the iPhone, just that the claim that "no one ever expected" it isn't really true.

[ohwellhere]

I think about this a lot from the point of view of economic fairness and wealth inequality.

You have a higher probability of being rich if your ancestors "owned the land" first. Similarly, you have a higher probability of being rich if you "created" the market.

Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.

But the land was always there, and we were always going to continue miniaturizing computers. How big a slice of the pie is fair?

[sooheon]

You'd be interested in Progress and Poverty, a seminal work by late 19th century economist Henry George that tackles these issues of monopoly (of land, ideas, network effects) and their economic consequences.

Full text here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/george-progress-and-povert...

Blurbs from famous people who enjoyed it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty#Notable_r...

edit to add because a link to a book is not a discussion:

> Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.

Landowners "deserve" all the value that comes out of their "stewardship" (i.e. improvements, developments, labor), and none of the value that is inherent to the land or location (i.e. the value of being located in a city center, or the value of natural resources). In practical terms, this would mean a just policy is one that levies zero taxation on anything the owner does on the land, and levies a full tax on the value of natural resources and locational advantage inherent to a plot (calculable as the market clearing rental value of the land minus any developments).

The same holds for having ideas first. Inventions are insightful combinations of natural facts, but they are closer to discovery than true creation (we don't create the laws of physics that underlie every patentable mechanism). To lay exclusive claim to a discovery and wield it as a tool to fight competitors is anti-progress. All inventors have the claim to the fruits of their labor, but not at the exclusion of any other independent human to have and utilize ideas of their own.

[lifeisstillgood]

I am absilutely fascinated by these questions and will dive into your book recommentation.

One can think of an organisation as 'development' on top of land (the market). So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me.

That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land' (laws of physics, existence of GSM networks?). There is certainly nothing 'natural' about the capital structure of companies in the USA that ensures some people become billionaires, nor even that for profit companies are the right way to organise. Although I might be a fish trying to explain away water there.

I get the feeling that if Swardley maps might be useful in laying out a taxation policy we are going down the wrong route however, as I seem to be arguing that each 'layer' from land to transport netowrks to digital networks needs to be accounted for to get the fair level of taxation.

[sooheon]

I'm glad you're interested.

> So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me. [...] That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land'

Exactly right. Which is why none of those improvements should be taxed. They are the product of human labor, to which the laborer has full rights. It is only the common natural resources which an organization monopolizes at the exclusion of others that should be taxed. A tax on such limited resources is in effect a fee that they pay for the private utilization of a public good. Ownership of high value locations is one example, intellectual patents are another. If you squint, a carbon tax is another example.

It doesn't have to get as complicated as Wardley maps. You don't need to account for every layer of improvement in the network of modern business, because no improvement should be taxed. You only need to answer "is this the product of human ingenuity and labor, or is this a natural common good that is owned to the exclusion of anyone else?"

This is the polar opposite of a VAT. You don't want to tax "value add", you want to tax "natural resource use"!

[lifeisstillgood]

So is Amazon's shop owned to the exclusion of everyone else? It's not a natural common good. But it is (if you squint) a utility.

Google's search is a utility with far less squinting

Is an Aqueduct natural common good? Is the water flowing through it? what happens with open source software?

I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"

[sooheon]

> is Amazon's shop owned to the exclusion of everyone else?

Not the online store. The land taken up by their supply chain, offices, and datacenters is all they are excluding others from using.

> Google's search is a utility with far less squinting

It's a valuable service, but because the service was built by humans, it should belong fully to those who built it. I don't see a justification for taxing the output of someone's labor just because it is popular. What they should give back to society is what they have taken from society, again the land that their office buildings and datacenters take up.

There is a more nuanced point about the natural monopolies of certain businesses due to network effects and economies of scale, but it's better to read the book for a full treatment, I can't do it justice.

> Is an Aqueduct natural common good?

I don't see why. It's built by human hands, designed by human engineers. The land the aqueduct takes up, and the reservoir of water it draws from are natural common goods, of course.

> what happens with open source software?

Software is very interesting. It is the output of labor clearly, but ideas are part of the public domain (ideas are there in nature to be discovered, anyone can discover an idea). If you package a set of open ideas into a service, I don't think anyone else has a claim on that service than you.

> I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"

Land is not just land. "The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities". Land is one of the three unique factors of production, along with labor and capital, it is everything that is not the product of human labor. (Labor is labor, and capital is the stored product of labor put to use to create more wealth)