#AcademicRunPlaylist - 7/25/25

Looks like the soccer players have similarly taken to exercising at night, and while I was trying not to wilt in the heat I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the final day of the National Bureau of Economic Research personnel economics conference, with notable talks by Bo Cowgill (experimental evidence on noncompete clauses) and Anders Frederiksen (part-time penalty) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw1JB9mlpYo

Last was "Who Owns This Sentence?" by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu. If this book focused solely on the history of the development of copyright and related legal instruments over the centuries it would have been a rousing success. Those parts of the book are enlightening, demonstrating how far the original purpose of copyright and intellectual property law is from its current incarnation and how many modern justifications for it were grafted on ex post. The rest of the book, however, is a fact-free philosophical attack on the need for intellectual property law, with a bunch of deep falsities/misunderstandings of modern technology thrown in for good measure (e.g. claims that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, hilariously wrong definition of "AI").

Most of the arguments against copyright are of the form "person X made Y despite being paid nothing, so clearly intellectual property law is unnecessary" - unconvincing and absurd. These are empirical questions - do intellectual property protections causally lead to more output? To what degree? No data or research here to back up any of the claims. If the next version of this book adds an economist as a coauthor, it'll be an extremely valuable piece of scholarship. As it is, it's a historical jumping off point with skippable analysis. And, despite its invectives against copyright, this book isn't available as a free download https://wwnorton.com/books/who-owns-this-sentence