Top all-time · #2204
Gary Becker and Richard Posner
Personal blog · becker-posner-blog.comeconomicspolitics
Gary Becker and Richard Posner's personal blog at becker-posner-blog.com covers economics and politics. Since 2007, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Has the Market Economy Failed?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the co-written blog of economist Gary Becker and judge Richard Posner for economic takes on patents, drug prices, immigration and automation. Discontinued after Becker's 2014 death.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Has the Market Economy Failed?6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2008-10-20
- Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-10-01
- /2012/06/capitalismposner.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-06-08
- Alternatives to the war on drugs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-06
- /2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-01-11
What Hacker News says?
Outside of his nigh-endless legal accomplishments, Posner is also allegedly the basis for the character of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. His blog ( http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ ) is well worth a read. If you're an economic-utilitarian you'll love it, otherwise you'll probably think he's a monster, albeit a very rational one.
Comment linking /
on “Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctional””Submitted Reforming the Patent System Toward a Minimalist System as a story · 71 points
HN discussionAn excellent quote from Posner: "The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave e…
Comment linking /2012/06/capitalismposner.html
on “Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctional””Submitted Has the United States Become Ungovernable? as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThis opinion is both extraordinary and extremely significant. Richard Posner is probably the most prolific legal intellectual not on the supreme court. He co-writes, along with Gary Becker (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) this excellent blog http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ Posner is the author of the 4th most cited Law Review article in the field of intellectual property law[1]. Most telling of all is this stati…
Comment linking /
on “Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctional””Submitted Sell the Right to Immigrate as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe linked blog post from Posner is excellent: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.h...
Comment linking /2012/06/capitalismposner.html
on “Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctional””Submitted Security Surveillance Cameras — Posner as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAn excellent author on US Competition Law is Richard Posner, a federal judge in Chicago and one of the great intellectuals on the bench. He had a blog (together with an economist) at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ (sadly discontinued after his co-author's death in 2014). Posner has literally written the book on the US' Antitrust law, and he is one of the rare writers I enjoy reading even when I vehemently disagr…
Comment linking /
on “Commission fines Qualcomm €997 million for abuse of dominant market position”Submitted Intelligence doping - Commentary by Richard Posner as a story · 6 points
HN discussionBecker-Posner Blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “America's Real Criminal Element: Lead”Submitted Can the United Auto Workers Survive? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYeah, Judge Posner wrote an excellent post about how pharmaceuticals and software were basically polar opposites in their needs for patent protection: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copy...
Comment linking /2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html
on “Court: Google infringed patents, must pay 1.36 percent of AdWords revenue”Submitted Bill Gates on Corporate Philanthropy--Posner as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere are many reports here of people who've taken Adderal without significant issues, suggesting the key is "active medical supervision" (ie, much more than the passive doc just handing Kate Miller pills). In fact, once we have monitoring in place, you might even argue "intelligence doping" could provide such benefits to society that we should even encourage it (though only for those who face minimal side effects):…
Comment linking /2008/03/intelligence-doping--posner.html
on “Adderall Addiction: The Last All-Nighter”Submitted Should Marijuana Be Decriminalized Nationwide? – Posner as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe "disallow trade" for lots of legitimate reasons. One such reason is when government intervention in another country drives prices below market levels ( e.g. we put high tariffs on Chinese steel to counter heavy Chinese government subsidization of that industry). That's exactly what happens in Canada. Because the healthcare system is publicly funded, the government has enormous market power that it can use to driv…
Comment linking /2009/12/should-the-government-use-its-monopsony-power-to-reduce-the-price-of-drugs-posner.html
on “The Hidden Monopolies That Raise Drug Prices”Submitted Becker - Posner advocating eliminating of software patents as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis idea is a special case of Gary Becker's proposal to sell the right to immigrate ( http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/02/sell_the_... ). In this special case, the investors in the immigrant's business would pay the immigration fee. I don't see why the potential benefit to the US of immigrants with startup ideas is necessarily greater than immigrants of similar technical skills with no stated intenti…
Comment linking /archives/2005/02/sell_the_right.html
on “The Founder Visa”Submitted On reforming the patent system - Becker as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe full piece is an interesting read on the Becker-Posner blog as well - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copy...
Comment linking /2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html
on “Judge Posner decries "excessive" copyright and software patent protections”Submitted Patent Trolls - Posner as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Perhaps the United States is already doing enough. Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of 21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive population for global economic dominance. The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over the long te…
Comment linking /2012/06/capitalismposner.html
on “Visas for entrepreneurs”Submitted Alternatives to the war on drugs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCanada has lower drug prices for the same reason Wal-Mart has low prices--exercise of monopsony power: https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2009/12/should-the-govern... . Because the government can set prices for such a huge proportion of the demand, it can drive the price of a product from suppliers to below market prices.[1] That may or may not be a good idea. But the reason it's easier to allow imports from Canada,…
Comment linking /2009/12/should-the-government-use-its-monopsony-power-to-reduce-the-price-of-drugs-posner.html
on “U.S. to set up plan aimed at allowing prescription drugs from Canada”Submitted Sell the right to immigrate to the US for 50k as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not? Different fields of human invention have different economic characteristics. For a field where patents may be more economically useful than they are in software, consider the pharmaceutical industry. Developing a new drug costs a decade and hundreds of millions, and…
Comment linking /2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html
on “The Web’s longest nightmare ends: Eolas patents are dead on appeal”Submitted Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBecker and Posner tend to make pairs of posts on the same subject. The OP is from Becker, here is the corresponding post from Posner: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copy...
Comment linking /2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html
on “Reforming the Patent System Toward a Minimalist System”Submitted Judge Posner on why Americans are more religious than Europeans as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
