[keeda]

This book gets a lot of airtime in discussions of IP but the authors have a narrative they are trying to push and they don't let inconvenient things like facts or history get in the way.

The book cherry-picks its sources, and even then contains several mischaracterizations and exaggerations of those works. There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.

As an example, see this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46556404_Watt_Again...

Yep, the very first chapter of the book starts with patents and steam power, and they got called out on it by actual experts on the topic. Note the “still” in the title – this is after the book was already “revised” once. The book was not revised after this last note, so the exaggerations still stand.

The rest of the book had many similar issues. Once I started digging into their sources, I could not get past the first few chapters, but anecdotally others on HN have also pointed out glaring inaccuracies. I remember thinking wryly that it should be called “Against Intellectual Honesty.”

[alzamos]

When I read the bit on the steam engine, I remember thinking it wasn’t a great argument as it was hard to know how a patent-less world would have developed. I’m not surprised to see there’s a link which talks about how the claim was exaggerated (though not entirely wrong? I’ll have to read it).

Having said that, the bits I found juicy - i.e on the various shock analyses coming from patent introductions or increasing of scope, the studies on how effective first mover advantages was etc. all seemed pretty solid when I checked the sources - admittedly they were deeper into the book, so you may have already abandoned it by then.

> There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.

Any chance you have some to share? When I LLM’d the topic a while ago the best I got was some weak investment effect in Singapore (unaccompanied by TFP/etc).

[keeda]

I last looked into this a decade+ ago so my memory is fuzzy, and there are a lot of economists who looked at a lot of different things, but the authors I recall from the time were Kenneth Sokoloff, Petra Moser, Adam Mossoff, Zorina Khan, Bhaven Sampat, and Bronwyn Hall. Undoubtedly there are dozens more, but I just happen to remember these offhand.