Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.

Geopolitical storms are raging in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Conflicts have become more complex with misinformation and disinformation, cyber-attacks, terrorism, blockades, missiles, drones, lasers, and nuclear weapons. Building peace and improving lives of people is being eclipsed by higher military spending. US President Donald Trump wants NATO member states to support US-led wars to grab resources of other countries. He wants to hike the annual US military budget by $445bn to $1.45trn, which will ensure bumper profits for the arms industry.

The UK had defence budget to £62.2bn in 2025/26 (about 2.4% of GDP), increasing to £73.5bn in 2028/29. Following the strategic defence review, the government is committed to increasing defence spending to  3.5% of GDP by 2035 though hawks want it to accelerate faster. They want additional spending to be financed by cuts to welfare spending. In 2025/26 the UK spent 10.6% of GDP on social welfare. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research states that “the UK has some of the least generous welfare across the OECD: the UK ranks in the middle of OECD countries for welfare spending (as a per cent of GDP) and third lowest for welfare value (per cent of average wages).” The hawks are silent on cutting corporate welfare, taxing the super-rich, doing quantitative easing for defence or government borrowing. They just want to hit the old, sick, poor, disabled and the unfortunate to establish a new social order.

The government acknowledges that security of the country depends on resilience of the economy, households and society generally. However, delivering is another matter altogether. It can’t be done without declaring war on poverty, inequities and building an economy that works for everyone.

Here is a glimpse of some of the challenges that the UK faces. Years of austerity, real wage and benefit cuts have eroded household resilience. Some 13.4 million people, including 4m children, live in relative poverty. 25.3m people, including 14.9 working age adults and 7.7m children live in households below the minimum income standard. Work is seen as a way out of poverty, but it does not pay enough. 4.4m people earn less than the real living wage. 1.3m Britons are in insecure zero-hour contracts. The real average wage has hardly changed since 2008. 32% of Universal Credit claimants are in work. The full post-2016 state pension (received by about 35% of retirees) is less than 50% of the minimum wage. Millions rely on food banks and charity to survive. 100,000 people a year die in poverty and over 120,000 die in fuel poverty. 

Unchecked profiteering has created insecurity and anxiety. Around 3.8m people have experienced destitution i.e. they cannot afford to stay warm, dry, clean, clothed and fed. One in every two hundred households in the UK is experiencing homelessness, and the homelessness rate is the highest in OECD countries. Affordable council housing has been sold and not replenished. In the city of Liverpool has 12,764 households on its social housing waiting list. It has just five “additional social rent dwellings,” as local authorities have been starved of resources. Successive governments have promised to build more houses, but none have hit the targets as the UK lacks building materials and skilled labour. Deregulation is the vogue, and it is hard to see plans for dealing with effects of new homes on local infrastructure such as provision of gas, water electricity, road, rail, transport, schools, GPs, dentists, schools, nurseries, jobs, parks, shops and more.

Just 56 people hold more than the combined wealth of 27m Britons. The richest 1% owns 456 times more wealth than a person in the poorest 50%. The poorest half holds just 4.6% of the wealth. Yet the poorest 20% of the population pay a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes compared to the richest 20%. Some 16% of UK adults have no savings and 39% have less than £1,000 to negotiate emergencies. It is hard to see any sustained government policies for equitable distribution of income and wealth to underpin resilience of households to wars and economic shocks.

Low incomes and inadequate spending on public services have made lives precarious. The UK has a high rate of infant mortality compared with peer countries. British five-year-olds are up to 7cm shorter than children of the same age in Europe. One in four young people in England have a mental health condition. Victorian illnesses like rickets and scurvy have returned. Around 3 million people in the UK are malnourished or at risk of malnutrition. In 2023, 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies.

Failures of the healthcare system were exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Over 232,000 people died. Currently, 6.11m individuals are waiting for 7.22m hospital appointments in England. Some 300,000 people a year die prematurely whilst awaiting a hospital appointment. Around 100,000 Britons suffer a stroke each year, and between 10,000 and 20,000 die or sustain a serious disability because of treatment delays linked to staff shortages. 16.8m people have a disability.

A combination of poverty, poor housing, food, healthcare and public services has reduced healthy life expectancy (HLE) to average of 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females. Death rates for 25–49-year-olds are rising. The gap between the most and least deprived deciles in England is now 19.4 years for males and 20.3 years for females. HLE for males in affluent Richmond-upon-Thames is 69.3 years, and 70.3 years for females. In sharp contrast, average HLE in Blackpool is 50.9 years for males and 51.2 years for females. Males living in the most deprived areas in Scotland have average healthy life expectancy of 44.8 years, females 44.2 years. Yet hawks want to cut social welfare and effectively launch a programme of social euthanasia.

No country can face external challenges without a resilient economy. Yet under the obsession of privatisations, private finance initiative and outsourcing of public services, the UK economy has become less resilient. The state cannot guarantee people supply of usable water, clean rivers, safe wastewater disposal, affordable energy, timely healthcare, good housing, decent roads, and public transport. The economy is sluggish and the country is not self-sufficient in food, energy, medicines, auto, steel, shipping, bricks, cement, semiconductors and more. Reliance on imports has made the UK the most inflation prone G7 nation, especially as there are no effective curbs on profiteering. There is little effective competition to keep prices down. Very few companies dominate sectors such as banking, internet, mobile phones, grocery, medicines, energy, and water.

Infrastructure woes abound. Since privatisation in 1989, water companies have paid  over £85bn in dividends, and neglected investment. The average age of Thames Water infrastructure is 79 years, and 40% of its assets are over 100 years old. The average for the water industry in England is 56 years. At the current rate of renewal, it would take 700 years to replace water networks. The UK has two days of gas reserves, compared to several weeks for mainland Europe. In times of high winds, the government pays companies to turn-off wind turbines as the UK lacks good electricity transmission and storage facilities. This is expected to cost hit £8bn a year by 2030. To cope with a warlike situation, there are no parallel networks to maintain supply of clean water, energy, or internet. Reliance upon foreign suppliers for essential items means that the governments can be held to ransom. Recently, the government agreed to pay additional £64bn for NHS drugs for US corporations for the period to 2036. Yet there is no national programme to address such issues, and markets cannot deliver national planning. 

A resilient economy needs investment and the UK lags major competitors. In 2025, it invested 18.9% of GDP in productive assets, the lowest amongst G7 nations. It is over 40% for China and 33.5% for India where the state plays an active part in the economy. In recent years, the UK has had low rates of interest, inflation, and corporate taxes, but that did not spur investment. For most of the last thirty years, the UK has languished at or near the bottom of the OECD league of investment. Inevitably, productivity is low. A shrinking middle class and low spending power of the masses does not incentivise private investment. At the same time, direct investment by the state in productive assets in frowned upon. 

The City of London has never had the appetite for long-term investment and risks. It prefers short-term returns to satisfy investors. The government could arrest this by reforming corporate governance, payment of dividends and share buybacks, directors’ duties and through democratisation of corporations but despite promises no reform has materialised.

It is easy for governments to talk about preparedness for wars and mobilise people’s patriotic sentiments, but successive governments have undermined household and economic resilience. The problems caused by neoliberalism cannot be addressed by bigger doses of neoliberal policies which prioritise profits and corporate interests over people’s welfare. War on poverty and exploitation is the key requirement of building a resilient economy and society.

The post Waging war on poverty and exploitation is the only way to build a resilient society appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

It is now clear that the war against Iran is going badly for Donald Trump. Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) may be determined to carry on, but Trump is the war leader in deep trouble.

So radical is this unexpected outcome that the United States may even be facing its Suez moment, like the one that saw France and the UK lose status in 1956, hastening decolonisation in the 1960s. If so, the effects of the Iran conflict could last for decades, well beyond the immediate conflict, and have impacts that change the current world order – with unpredictable consequences.

Consider the past month and a half. Iran’s theocratic leadership had been crippled by assassinations within days of the start of the assault, but leaders were quickly replaced, and the much-anticipated popular uprising simply did not happen.

I recently asked why people seem to hate dating apps so much. In response, 80% of you emailed me some version of the following theory:

The thing about dating apps is that if they do a good job and match people up, then the matched people will quit the app and stop paying. So they have an incentive to string people along but not to actually help people find long-term relationships.

May I explain why I don’t find this type of theory very helpful?

I’m not saying that I think it’s wrong, mind you. Rather, my objection is that while the theory is phrased in terms of dating apps, the same basic pattern applies to basically anyone who is trying to make money by doing anything.

For example, consider a pizza restaurant. Try these theories on for size:

• Pizza: “The thing about pizza restaurants is that if they use expensive ingredients or labor-intensive pizza-making techniques, then it costs more to make pizza. So they have an incentive to use low-cost ingredients and labor-saving shortcuts.”

• Pizza II: “The thing about pizza restaurants is that if they have nice tables separated at a comfortable distance, then they can’t fit as many customers. So they have an incentive to use tiny tables and cram people in cheek by jowl.”

• Pizza III: “The thing about pizza restaurants is that if they sell big pizzas, then people will eat them and stop being hungry, meaning they don’t buy additional pizza. So they have an incentive to serve tiny low-calorie pizzas.”

See what I mean? You can construct similar theories for other domains, too:

• Cars: “The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars.”

• Videos: “The thing about video streaming is that high-resolution video uses more expensive bandwidth. So they have an incentive to use low-resolution.”

• Blogging: “The thing about bloggers is that research is time-consuming. So they have an incentive to be sloppy about the facts.”

• Durability: “The thing about {lightbulb, car, phone, refrigerator, cargo ship} manufacturing is that if you make a {lightbulb, car, phone, refrigerator, cargo ship} that lasts a long time, then people won’t buy new ones. So there’s an incentive to make {lightbulbs, cars, phones, refrigerators, cargo ships} that break quickly.”

All these theories can be thought of as instances of two general patterns:

• Make product worse, get money: “The thing about selling goods or services is that making goods or services better costs money. So people have an incentive to make goods and services worse.”

• Raise price, get money: “The thing about selling goods and services is that if you raise prices, then you get more money. So people have an incentive to raise prices.”

Are these theories wrong? Not exactly. But it sure seems like something is missing.

I’m sure most pizza restauranteurs would be thrilled to sell lukewarm 5 cm cardboard discs for $300 each. They do in fact have an incentive to do that, just as predicted by these theories! Yet, in reality, pizza restaurants usually sell pizzas that are made out of food. So clearly these theories aren’t telling the whole story.

Say you have a lucrative business selling 5 cm cardboard discs for $300. I am likely to think, “I like money. Why don’t I sell pizzas that are only mostly cardboard, but also partly made of flour? And why don’t I sell them for $200, so I can steal Valued Reader’s customers?” But if I did that, then someone else would probably set prices at only $100, or even introduce cardboard-free pizzas, and this would continue until hitting some kind of equilibrium.

Sure, producers want to charge infinity dollars for things that cost them zero dollars to make. But consumers want to pay zero dollars for stuff that’s infinitely valuable. It’s in the conflict between these desires that all interesting theories live.

This is why I don’t think it’s helpful to point out that people have an incentive to make their products worse. Of course they do. The interesting question is, why are they able to get away with it?

Reasons stuff is bad

First reason stuff is bad: People are cheap

Why are seats so cramped on planes? Is it because airlines are greedy? Sure. But while they might be greedy, I don’t think they’re dumb. If you do a little math, you can calculate that if airlines were to remove a single row of seats, they could add perhaps 2.5 cm (1 in) of extra legroom for everyone, while only decreasing the number of paying customers by around 3%. (This is based on a 737 with single-class, but you get the idea.)

So why don’t airlines rip out a row of seats, raise prices by 3% and enjoy the reduced costs for fuel and customer service? The only answer I can see is that people, on average, aren’t actually willing to pay 3% more for 2.5 cm more legroom. We want a worse but cheaper product, and so that’s what we get.

I think this is the most common reason stuff is “bad”. It’s why Subway sandwiches are so soggy, why video games are so buggy, and why IKEA furniture and Primark clothes fall apart so quickly.

It’s good when things are bad for this reason. Or at least, that’s the premise of capitalism: When companies cut costs, that’s the invisible hand redirecting resources to maximize social value, or whatever. Companies may be motivated by greed. And you may not like it, since you want to pay zero dollars for infinite value. But this is markets working as designed.

Second reason stuff is bad: Information asymmetries

Why is it that almost every book / blog / podcast about longevity is such garbage? Well, we don’t actually know many things that will reliably increase longevity. And those things are mostly all boring / hard / non-fun. And even if you do all of them, it probably only adds a couple of years in expectation. And telling people these facts is not a good way to find suckers who will pay you lots of money for your unproven supplements / seminars / etc.

True! But it doesn’t explain why all longevity stuff is so bad. Why don’t honest people tell the true story and drive all the hucksters out of business? I suspect the answer is that unless you have a lot of scientific training and do a lot of research, it’s basically impossible to figure out just how huckstery all the hucksters really are.

I think this same basic phenomenon explains why some supplements contain heavy metals, why some food contains microplastics, why restaurants use so much butter and salt, why rentals often have crappy insulation, and why most cars seem to only be safe along dimensions included in crash test scores. When consumers can’t tell good from evil, evil triumphs.

Third reason stuff is bad: People have bad taste

Sometimes stuff is bad because people just don’t appreciate the stuff you consider good. Examples are definitionally controversial, but I think this includes restaurants in cities where all restaurants are bad, North American tea, and travel pants. This reason has a blurry boundary with information asymmetries, as seen in ultrasonic humidifiers or products that use Sucralose instead of aspartame for “safety”.

Fourth reason stuff is bad: Pricing power

Finally, sometimes stuff is bad because markets aren’t working. Sometimes a company is selling a product but has some kind of “moat” that makes it hard for anyone else to compete with them, e.g. because of some technological or regulatory barrier, control of some key resource or location, intellectual property, a beloved brand, or network effects.

If that’s true, then those companies don’t have to worry as much about someone else stealing their business, and so (because everyone is axiomatically greedy) they will find ways to make their product cheaper and/or raise prices up until the price is equal to the full value it provides to the marginal consumer.

Conclusion

Why is food so expensive at sporting events? Yes, people have no alternatives. But people know food is expensive at sporting events. And they don’t like it. Instead of selling water for $17, why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people.

So of course dating apps would love to string people along for years instead of finding them long-term relationships, so they keep paying money each month. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people at those companies have literally thought, “Maybe we should string people along for years instead of finding them long-term relationships, so they keep paying money each month, I love money so much.”

But if they are actually doing that (which is unclear to me) or if they are bad in some other way, then how do they get away with it? Why doesn’t someone else create a competing app that’s better and thereby steal all their business? It seems like the answer has to be either “because that’s impossible” or “because people don’t really want that”. That’s where the mystery begins.

Here are a few things that seem to be true:

1. Dating apps are very popular.
2. Lots of people hate dating apps.
3. They hate them so much that there’s supposedly a resurgence in alternatives like speed dating.

None of those are too controversial, I think. (Let’s stress supposedly in #3.) But if you stare at them for a while, it’s hard to see how they can all be true at the same time.

Because, why do people hate dating apps? People complain that they’re bad in various ways, such as being ineffective, dehumanizing, or expensive. (And such small portions!) But if they’re bad, then why? Technologically speaking, a dating app is not difficult to make. If dating apps are so bad, why don’t new non-bad ones emerge and outcompete them?

The typical answer is network effects. A dating app’s value depends on how many other people are on it. So everyone gravitates to the popular ones and eventually most of the market is captured by a few winners. To displace them, you’d have to spend a huge amount of money on advertising. So—the theory goes—the winners are an oligopoly that gleefully focus on extracting money from their clients instead of making those clients happy.

That isn’t obviously wrong. Match Group (which owns Tinder, Match, Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid, Hinge, and many others) has recently had an operating margin of ~25%. That’s more like a crazy-profitable entrenched tech company (Apple manages ~30%) than a nervous business in a crowded market.

But wait a second. How many people go to a speed dating event? Maybe 30? I don’t know if the speed dating “resurgence” is real, but it doesn’t matter. Some people definitely do find love at real-life events with small numbers of people. If that’s possible, then shouldn’t it also be possible to create a dating app that’s useful even with only a small number of users? Meaning good apps should have emerged long ago and displaced the crappy incumbents? And so the surviving dating apps should be non-hated?

We’ve got ourselves a contradiction. So something is wrong with that argument. But what?

Theory 1: Selection

Perhaps speed dating attendees are more likely to be good matches than people on dating apps. This might be true because they tend to be similar in terms of income, education, etc., and people tend to mate assortatively. People who go to such events might also have some similarities in terms of personality or what they’re looking for in a relationship.

You could also theorize that people at speed dating events are higher “quality”. For example, maybe it’s easier to conceal negative traits on dating apps than it is in person. If so, this might lead to some kind of adverse selection where people without secret negative traits get frustrated and stop using the apps.

I’m not sure either of those are true. But even if they are, consider the magnitudes. While a speed dating event might have 30 people, a dating app in a large city could easily have 30,000 users. While the fraction of good matches might be lower on a dating app, the absolute number is still surely far higher.

Theory 2: Bandwidth

Perhaps even if you have fewer potential matches at a speed dating event, you have better odds of actually finding them, because in-person interactions reveals information that dating apps don’t.

People often complain that dating apps are superficial, that there’s too much focus on pictures. Personally, I don’t think pictures deserve so much criticism. Yes, they show how hot you are. But pictures also give lots of information about important non-superficial things, like your personality, values, social class, and lifestyle. I’m convinced people use pictures for all that stuff as much as hotness.

But you know what’s even better than pictures? Actually talking to someone!

Many people seem to think that a few minutes of small talk isn’t enough time to learn anything about someone. Personally, I think evolution spent millions of years training us to do exactly that. I’d even claim that this is why small talk exists.

(I have friends with varying levels of extroversion and agreeableness, but all of my friends seem to have high openness to experience. When I meet someone new, I’m convinced I can guess their openness to ±10% by the time they’ve completed five sentences.)

So maybe the information a dating app provides just isn’t all that useful compared to a few minutes of casual conversation. If so, then dating apps might be incredibly inefficient. You have to go through some silly texting courtship ritual, set up a time to meet, physically go there, and then pretend to smile for an hour even if you immediately hate them.

Under this theory, dating apps provide a tiny amount of information about a gigantic pool of people, while speed dating provides a ton of information about a small number of people. Maybe that’s a win, at least sometimes.

Theory 3: Behavior

Maybe the benefit of real-life events isn’t that they provide more information, but that they change how we behave.

For example, maybe people are nicer in person? Because only then can we sense that others are also sentient beings with internal lives and so on?

I’m pretty sure that’s true. But it’s not obvious it helps with our mystery, since people from dating apps eventually meet in person, too. If they’re still nice when they do, then this just resolves into “in-person interactions provide more information”, and is already covered by the previous theory. To help resolve our mystery, you’d need to claim that people at real-life events act differently than they do when meeting up as a result of a dating app.

That could happen as a result of a “behavioral equilibrium”. Some people take dating apps seriously and some take them casually. But it’s hard to tell what category someone else is in, so everyone proceeds with caution. But by showing up at an in-person event, everyone has demonstrated some level of seriousness. And maybe this makes everyone behave differently? Perhaps, but I don’t really see it.

Obscure theories

I can think of a few other possible explanations.

1. Maybe speed dating serves a niche. Just like Fitafy / Bristlr / High There! serve people who love fitness / beards / marijuana, maybe speed dating just serves some small-ish fraction of the population but not others.

2. Maybe the people who succeed at speed dating would also have succeeded no matter what. So they don’t offer any general lessons.

3. Maybe creating a dating app is in fact very technologically difficult. So while the dating apps are profit-extracting oligopolies, that’s because of technological moat, not network effects.

I don’t really buy any of these.

Drumroll

So what’s really happening? I am not confident, but here’s my best guess:

1. Selection is not a major factor.

2. The high bandwidth of in-person interactions is a major factor.

3. The fact that people are nicer or more open-minded in person is not a major factor, other than through making in-person interactions higher bandwidth.

4. None of the obscure theories are major factors.

5. Dating apps are an oligopoly, driven by network effects.

Basically, a key “filter” in finding love is finding someone where you both feel optimistic after talking for five minutes. Speed dating is (somewhat / sometimes) effective because it efficiently crams a lot of people into the top of that filter.

Meanwhile, because dating apps are low-bandwidth, they need a large pool to be viable. Thus, they’re subject to network effects, and the winners can turn the screws to extract maximum profits from their users.

Partly I’m not confident in that story just because it has so many moving parts. But something else worries me too. If it’s true, then why aren’t dating apps trying harder to provide that same information that in-person interactions do?

If anything, I understand they’re moving in the opposite direction. Maybe Match Group would have no interest in that, since they’re busy enjoying their precious network effects. But why not startups? Hell, why not philanthropies? (Think of all the utility you could create!) For the above story to hold together, you have to believe that it’s a very difficult problem.

In a recent post about trading stuff for money, I mentioned:

Europe had a [blood plasma] shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% of all exports by value.

The internet’s reaction was: “TWO PERCENT?” “TWO PERCENT OF U.S. EXPORTS ARE BLOOD!?”

Well, I took that 2% number from a 2024 article in the Economist:

Last year American blood-product exports accounted for 1.8% of the country’s total goods exports, up from just 0.5% a decade ago—and were worth $37bn. That makes blood the country’s ninth-largest goods export, ahead of coal and gold. All told, America now supplies 70% or so of the plasma used to make medicine.

I figured the Economist was trustworthy on matters of economics. But note:

1. That 1.8% number is for blood products, not just blood.
2. It’s a percentage of goods exported, excluding services.
3. It’s wrong.

The article doesn’t explain how they arrived at 1.8%. And since the Economist speaks in the voice of God (without bylines), I can’t corner and harass the actual journalist. I’d have liked to reverse-engineer their calculations, but this was impossible since the world hasn’t yet caught on that they should always show lots of digits.

So what’s the right number? In 2023, total US goods exports were $2,045 billion, almost exactly ⅔ of all exports, including services.

How much of that involves blood? Well, the government keeps statistics on trade based on an insanely detailed classification scheme. All goods get some number. For example, dirigibles fall under HTS 8801.90.0000:

Leg warmers fall under HTS 6406.99.1530:

So what about blood? Well, HTS 3002 is the category for:

Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera and other blood fractions and modified immunological products, whether or not obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products:

The total exports in this category in 2023 were 41.977 billion, or 2.05% of all goods exports. But that category includes many products that don’t require human blood such as most vaccines.

To get the actual data, you need to go through a website maintained by the US Trade Commission. This website has good and bad aspects. On the one hand, it’s slow and clunky and confusing and often randomly fails to deliver any results. On the other hand, when you re-submit, it clears your query and then blocks you for submitting too many requests, which is nice.

But after a lot of tearing of hair, I got what seems to be the most detailed breakdown of that category available. There are some finer subcategories in the taxonomy, but they don’t seem to have any data.

So let’s go through those categories. To start, here are some that would seem to almost always contain human blood:

Next, there are several categories that would seem to essentially never contain human blood:

Finally, there are categories that include some products that might contain human blood:

The biggest contributor here is IMMUNOLOGICAL PRODUCTS (be they MIXED or UNMIXED, PUT UP or NOT PUT UP). The largest fraction of these is probably antibodies.

Antibodies are sometimes made from human blood. You may remember that in 2020, some organizations collected human blood from people who’d recovered from Covid to make antibodies. But it’s important to stress that this is quite rare. Human blood, after all, is expensive. So—because capitalism—whenever possible animals are used instead, often rabbits, goats, sheep, or humanized mice.

I can’t find any hard statistics on this. But I know several people who work in this industry. So I asked them to just guess what fraction might include human blood. Biologists don’t like numbers, so this took a lot of pleading, but my best estimate is 8%.

When looking at similar data a few years ago, Market Design suggested that immunoglobulin products might also fall under this category. But as far as I can tell this is not true. I looked up the tariff codes for a few immunoglobulin products, and they all seem to fall under 3002.90 (“HUMAN BLOOD; ANIMAL BLOOD PREPARED FOR THERAPEUTIC, PROPHYLATIC OR DIAGNOSTIC USES; ANTISERA AND OTHER BLOOD FRACTIONS, ETC. NESOI”).

What about vaccines or cell therapy products? These almost never contain human blood. But they are sometimes made by growing human cell lines, and sometimes those cell lines require human blood serum to grow. More pleading with the biologists produced a guess that this is true for 5% of vaccines and 80% of cell therapies.

Aside: Even if they do require blood serum, it’s somewhat debatable if they should count as “blood products”. How far down the supply chain does that classification apply? If I make cars, and one of my employees gets injured and needs a blood transfusion, are my cars now “blood products”?

Anyway, here’s my best guess for the percentage of products in this middle category that use human blood:

So 0.5298% of goods exports almost certainly use blood, and my best guess is that another 0.1569% of exports also include blood, for a total of 0.6867%.

Obviously, this is a rough cut. But I couldn’t find any other source that shows their work in any detail, so I hoped that by publishing this I could at least prod Cunningham’s law into action. Sorry for all the numbers.

Examples are good. Let’s start with some examples:

1. We all need kidneys, or at least one kidney. Donating a kidney sucks, but having zero working kidneys really sucks. Paying people for kidneys would increase the number available, but it seems gross to pay people for part of their body. Donating a kidney is low-risk, but not zero risk. If you pay for kidneys, the extra kidneys tend to come from poorer people. So we don’t pay, and every day people die for lack of a kidney.

2. Except for Iran. Yes, in Iran you can legally buy or sell a kidney for a few thousand dollars. There is no waiting list for transplants, but most sellers seem driven by desperation and overall it doesn’t sound super awesome.

3. We all need a heart. Paying someone for their heart would mean paying for suicide. If we were to auction off hearts from organ donors, they would tend to go to rich people. People die every day from lack of a heart, but you don’t hear much about trading hearts for money.

4. Many people need blood plasma. For some people (me) donating blood plasma is a psychological nightmare. For other people it’s fine. Not getting plasma when you need it is very bad. Paying people for plasma means more plasma, mostly from low-income people. Much of Europe has long prohibited paying for plasma. Denmark and Italy met their needs with altruistic donors (Edit: Incorrect, Thanks to The Plasma Professor), but overall Europe had a shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% 0.7% of all (goods) exports by value.

5. The EU recently legalized limited payments for blood donations. The French government opposed this change. The French government owns a company that runs paid plasma centers in the United States.

6. Some people want hair. Prohibiting people from selling their hair is stupid. You should be allowed to sell your hair.

7. We all need a liver. You can—amazingly—give away half your liver and re-grow the rest in a few months. This is pretty safe, but compared to donating a kidney is a more complex surgery with a longer recovery period and 3-10× the mortality risk.

8. Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer in 2003. This was a rare form that often responds to treatment, but Jobs initially refused surgery and spent almost a year doing “alternative” treatments. Finally in 2004 he had surgery. In 2009, he had a liver transplant. This may have been needed as a consequence of Jobs’ decision to delay treatment in 2003. Tim Cook offered half his liver, but Jobs angrily refused. Most people in this situation would not have been eligible for a liver from the public donor registry, but Jobs was able to leverage his wealth and connections to both get classified as eligible and jump the queue. Jobs died two years later.

9. We all need food. Food that is healthier or tastier is often more expensive. Rich people get to eat more of it. Our for-profit food production system is really efficient and in rich countries the main problem is eating too much food.

10. We all need somewhere to live. Housing that is closer to high-paying jobs or larger/nicer is more expensive. Richer people get to live in nicer homes. The cost of housing means many people need to accept long commutes or live with lots of roommates or cities with worse job opportunities.

11. Buildings needs roofs. In North America, roofs are most often made of asphalt shingles, which need to be replaced every 10-30 years. Roofing work is exhausting and miserable and dangerous. People would rather not do roofing. Roofing is well-paid given the qualifications. We have the technology to make roofs that last for 100 years, at a lower long-term cost. Nobody suggests making it illegal to pay people to do roofing.

12. Large pink diamonds are rare. Only rich people get to have large pink diamonds. This is fine.

13. If there’s a sudden shortage of fuel, then you can either ration or let prices go up. If you let prices go up, then rich people get to drive more, but if you need fuel to drive grandma to the hospital, you can buy some.

14. Cars need to park. If there’s a shortage of parking, you can either raise prices or let people fight for spots. If you raise prices, then rich people get to park more, but if you need to park next to the hospital to drop off grandma, you can do so. If you don’t raise prices, people drive around endlessly looking for spots, wasting energy, creating pollution, and slowing traffic.

15. We all want to buy goods and services. People sell these to us for money. They do that because they can use the money to buy other stuff they want. If money didn’t provide any advantage, they wouldn’t do that.

16. Many people want babies. The idea of auctioning off babies is gross. Nobody wants to auction off babies.

17. Many people want babies, but can’t biologically carry a baby to term. Carrying a baby to term is hard on your body and deeply personal. In much of the world, it’s illegal to have someone else to do this for you. In most of the rest, it’s illegal to pay someone to do it. In a few places it’s legal to pay. (Contemplate this list: Arkansas, Belarus, California, Florida, Illinois, Kazakhstan, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, Russia, Ukraine, Vermont, Washington.) The people who purchase this service are usually richer than the women they buy it from. If you’re willing to pay a woman to be a surrogate, some third party might coerce her and steal the money. People who live in places where commercial surrogacy is illegal often buy it from places where it’s legal.

18. Most adults want sex. Some have difficulty accessing it. Paying for sex increases the supply of sex. Some people believe paid sex is degrading or has harmful cultural effects. If you’re willing to pay someone for sex, some third party might coerce them and steal the money. Paying for sex is illegal in most of the world. In places where it’s legal, organized brothels are often illegal. In a few places (Canada, France, Ireland, Norway, Sweden) it’s legal to sell sex but not buy it.

19. Sometimes on planes I think about offering the person in front of me some money to not recline their seat. I don’t do this because I’m pretty sure it would end with them either (A) refusing and thinking I’m a huge jerk or (B) doing it for free and thinking I’m a huge jerk.

20. Lots of people want to move to rich countries. Some rich countries let people based on employment, some based on family, and some on “points”. If you auctioned off the right to move to a rich country, you’d get a mixture of people who (A) have lots of money, and (B) would economically benefit from moving. A few places—including arguably the United States—do this already.

21. Lots of people want their kids to get better grades. Lots of people pay for tutors or extra after-school education. You could directly pay your kids to get good grades. This seems strange and possibly bad, though I’m not sure why.

OK, but how do you feel?

After working through these kinds of cases, I feel: Squishy.

I’m attracted to simple rules that can rise to tame the complexity of the real world. But the more I think about these cases, the less optimistic I feel about such rules.

Like every rationalist-adjacent blogger, I lean vaguely libertarian and consequentialist. (I wish I was more unique and interesting.) So I sometimes find myself thinking in high-handed slogans. Things like, “The government should not intrude in arrangements between consenting adults”, or “The right policy is whatever makes the outcome as good as possible.” I like how those words sound. But are they actually useful?

For example: Paid sex is not my thing. But there are some scenarios (e.g. people with certain disabilities) where prohibiting it seems downright cruel and providing this service downright noble.

On the other hand, when you talk about “arrangements between consenting adults”, it seems to call to mind a sort of theoretical idealized society. Like most people, I like to blithely imagine the Netherlands are such a society. After formally legalizing sex work in 2000, they’ve been creative and tenacious in trying to address organized crime and coercion. It sounds like it’s going OK, but not exactly great? I guess almost every other country has lower state capacity and would do somewhat worse.

Or take kidneys again. Say we had a total free market libertarian utopia/dystopia: If a rich person wants a kidney, they can go find a drug addict, hustle them into a clinic, get them to sign some forms, hand them some cash, and then take their kidney. That sounds gross. I’m not 100% confident I could win a debate arguing from first-principles that it’s grosser than our current system in which thousands of people die every year for lack of a kidney. But I’m not too worried about that, because it has zero chance of happening.

The Coalition to modify the National Organ Transplant Act wants to pay people to donate kidneys. They suggest a months-long screening process that only the 10% of people at lowest risk would pass. Donors would get no money up front, but would get $10,000 per year when they file their taxes for the next five years. This seems less gross than the libertarian {u,dys}topia because people couldn’t donate if they were high risk, because there’s a long waiting period, and because the resulting kidneys would be given out according to the current (non-market) system based on need and potential benefit.

The Coalition points also out that lower-income people would benefit the most from extra kidneys, since rich people tend to have healthy friends and family who are willing and able to give a directed donation. They also point out that the lowest-income people are the least likely to qualify as low-risk donors. But common sense still says the extra donors you get by paying people will tend to be lower income.

I don’t love that. But I think it’s silly to look at the flaws of one system without comparing to the flaws of the alternatives. As far as I can tell, those are: (1) Do nothing and let thousands of people continue to die every year. (2) Pay rich people extra when they donate. (3) Force everyone to register for some kind of kidney donation “lottery”. (4) Reeducation campaigns. (5) Marxism. Maybe the Coalition’s proposal is the “worst system other than all the other systems”.

In both cases (paid sex and paid kidneys) rules and slogans are weak. The action is in details.

The grossness spectrum

What makes some things seem grosser than others? There seem to be many factors. Do some people need the stuff more than others? Will trading for money get the stuff to the people who need it more? Will money increase production? Do we want more production?

Here’s a case I find particularly confounding: Why does paying a surrogate mother seem not-that-bad (at worst), but auctioning off a baby seem horrific? Sure, surrogate mothers usually use genetic material from the clients, but even with an embryo from third parties, it still seems OK. Yet, if I buy an embryo and then pay a surrogate mother, haven’t I just bought a baby in advance? I can’t find any clear distinction, but I also can’t get myself to bite the bullet and say the two are equivalent.

But I do have one theory.

In terms of how gross it is to sell body parts like normal market products, I think everyone agrees the order is hair < blood ≪ kidney < liver ≪ heart.

I don’t think that order is controversial. The main way people differ is in terms of where they’d draw the line.

As you’ve surely surmised, I lean somewhere right of “kidney”. While this is a minority view in the world, I suspect it’s a majority view among people reading this. So I thought I should make the case for drawing the line near the left end of the spectrum.

Here goes: When I picture paying someone for a kidney, I picture someone who is healthy and hearty. They’re thriving in life and don’t need money, but they drive a Honda and they really want an Acura, so they sell a kidney and buy an Acura and live happily ever after. When I think of paid surrogates, I picture a woman who loves being pregnant so much she’d almost do it for fun.

Lovely. But in the existing organ industry in Iran sounds grim. Many sellers seem motivated by extreme poverty and financial desperation.

If someone does something out of desperation, you can argue that—almost by definition—this means it helps them, and removing the option would hurt them.

But suppose that if everyone had their basic needs met, then almost no one would donate their kidneys for money. Then you can argue that paying for kidneys is a step in the wrong direction. We should be moving towards a society where no one is desperate and people donate out of altruism. Paying for donations calcifies the current systems and papers over our problems instead of correcting them.

I don’t really agree, because I like incremental progress and I’m allergic to anything that verges on “the worse the better”. But I see where it’s coming from.

If you were in South America 12,000 years ago and you discovered where a bunch of glyptodonts were hiding or you figured out a better glyptodont hunting method, you could tell your tribal band and later they would say, thank you for helping us kill these delicious glyptodonts we now think you are cool and now will treat you slightly better. And that was that. There was no other reward for producing information.

Nowadays, we have new tricks. If you write a book or patent a drug and someone starts selling copies without your permission, you can ask the government to take their money or put them in prison. If you’re a scientist, you can ask the government to give you money so you can do science and then give it away.

Why do these things exist? Well, information is cool because it’s cheap to copy. But for the same reason, it tends to be undersupplied. Say that if I worked hard I could find some new fact, e.g. that ultrasonic humidifiers are bad. This only helps me a little, since they’re not that bad. If I got even 5% of the extra lifespan gained by each person who kills their humidifier, I would spend all day everyday looking for such facts. But I don’t, so I don’t. (Also no one believes me.)

Patents and copyrights and science grants feel inevitable and boring. But take a step back. How close do these things get us to “optimal”, to rewarding someone with $500 when they create information that provides society with $1000 of value?

The answer is not close at all. Because:

1. Yes, we want socially optimal information production.
2. But also, restricting what words people are allowed to say to each other is impossible and tyrannical.

Our tricks are a messy patchwork that try to bridge the yawning chasm between those two realities. We reward information production, but only in a few limited cases where it’s easy to enforce without intruding too much on basic liberties.

In this post, I’ll argue that our existing tricks ingeniously allow “facts” to flow freely (yay liberty) while also creating indirect subsidies for finding new facts (yay information production). But this only works because of certain coincidental facts about the world. And AI is in the process of changing those facts.

So, why do we have the tricks we have? What makes them work? Will they still work in a post-AI world? How could they be changed?

We have ways of making you talk

Roughly speaking, we have five main tricks to reward information production today.

First, you can copyright creative works, like books or music or code. This lasts for your life plus ~70 years.

Second, you can patent new inventions, like drugs or machines or algorithms. This lasts ~20 years.

Third, you can create trade secrets. These aren’t just secrets! If you run a business and you discover basically any useful information, then as long as you make “reasonable efforts” to keep it secret, it’s a crime for someone to steal your secret. Even if everything they do is otherwise legal, just obtaining the information is “economic espionage”. This protection lasts forever.

Fourth, you can get direct subsidies. Journalism is increasingly funded by philanthropy. The government gives money to scientists so they can do science and make the resulting knowledge freely available (to some for-profit publisher who then charges the public $30/article for the same science they already paid for with taxes).

Finally, social norms are as important today as ever. I’m often tempted to take How Much Would You Need to be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island for 1.5 Years and Do Nothing but Kill Seals? and re-post it like I’d written it, but I don’t because I fear that word would spread that I’m a big thieving loser. More prosaically, if one journalist makes a big discovery, it’s totally legal for others to re-report the facts without giving them credit. But journalists have a culture where credit is expected.

These ways seem weird

At first glance, our system seems obvious and inevitable. At second glance, though, it seems very strange. But at third glance, that strangeness can be seen as society having made some shrewd calculations to manage the tradeoff between (a) rewarding information, and (b) not creating dubious restrictions on speech.

So let’s go through those second and third glances.

Why is it that copyright lasts for life plus ~70 years, while patents last for ~20 years?

Perhaps because artistic work usually has lots of substitutes. If I write a book, then I have a monopoly and I’m free to charge $25,000 for it. But if I did that, everyone else would just buy some $25 book instead. My monopoly doesn’t give me that much pricing power. Whereas if I invent a new drug for pancreatic cancer, I can probably charge people $100,000 per treatment. For drugs, a 20 year term still provides plenty of reward.

Why do patents require filing a complicated application and paying gigantic fees, while copyright and trade secrets are automatic?

Probably because it’s easy to determine who wrote a book, but hard to prove who came up with an invention.

Why do patents require publishing how your invention works, while if you create a song, you don’t have to share your pre-mastered multi-track audio?

Probably because creative works don’t have as much “secret sauce”. You can read a book and figure out how it was made much more easily than you can look at a new engine and understand the engineering principles. By forcing people filing patents to publish their ideas, this helps good ideas spread more quickly. Also, many more creative works are created each year. It’s just not worth it.

Why does copyright only cover artistic aspects?

Well, imagine that when Don Daglow created Utopia in 1981, he didn’t just get a copyright on the art and characters and code, but also on the idea of a real-time strategy game. Starcraft wouldn’t exist. The horror.

Why is it that even conspiring to steal a trade secret is illegal?

Say you and I decide to steal Coca-Cola’s secret formula, so we high-five and drive to Atlanta, but then we realize we’re idiots and go home. Believe it or not, we are now guilty of conspiracy to commit economic espionage and could theoretically be imprisoned for up to 15 years. Weird, huh? While this seems ridiculous, I guess prosecutors find (as with regular espionage) that it’s hard to prove actual espionage and only use this power in egregious cases.

And why do trade secrets at all? Why make it illegal for someone to steal them only if you make “reasonable efforts” to keep them secret? Why is it legal to discover trade secrets through reverse engineering, but illegal to discover them by getting engineers drunk? Why does this protection apply to basically any form of information, and why does it last forever?

I think the idea is that people will keep secrets no matter what. But without laws, people would spend vast sums trying to steal and/or secure secrets, and this arms race would have no social benefit. Meanwhile, trying to make it illegal to “steal” things that aren’t really secrets at all would trample on basic freedoms and be impossible to enforce.

Why can you patent inventions but not discoveries? Why can you patent “algorithms” but not “math”?

Well, imagine you could patent math. Would we be like the Pythagoreans and punish anyone who mentioned the wrong theorem? It’s far easier to judge if someone is using math, which is sort of the definition of an algorithm. Better to just pay mathematicians out of taxes and let the math be free.

So, I view these tricks as a very clever and highly evolved solution to a difficult problem. If you take all the possible ways you could reward information and then sort them by (ease of implementation) × (how much ideas are rewarded), you’d probably end up with something close to our current system.

Intermission: No really, they’re weird

While I think our tricks are clever, we shouldn’t forget that they’re highly imperfect and lead lots of perversity. In case you’re a perversity aficionado, I’ve collected here some favorites:

• Say you suspect that some type of fungus might cure cancer, so you spend $50 billion checking each of the 144,000 known fungal species. And say you actually find one that works. Too bad! The fungus already existed, so that’s a “discovery”, not an “invention”. You might be able to patent some extract or something, but if you’re charging $100,000 per cure, people will find ways around the patent. Better not to spend that $50 billion in the first place.

• Information production is sometimes rewarded through bundling. For decades, local newspapers made half their revenue from classified ads. This was a great business, since printing classified ads costs almost nothing. But because economics is weird, they found it was profitable to also pay tons of money for reporters who would create news, and then bundle the news and classified ads together. Then Craigslist was invented and now most of those newspapers are dead.

• You’ve surely noticed that recipe sites have thousands of words of inane blabbering before they show the actual recipe. That’s partly to manipulate search engines and to have more space for ads. But it’s also because inane blabbering is copyrightable but recipes are not.

• Many people find it strange that you can patent “business methods”. But did you know this was already happening in France in 1792? As some people were arresting Louis XVI, others were filing patents for financial inventions. (Though these were later deemed invalid.)

• Believe it or not, you can patent methods for reducing taxes. I’m unsure what public interest is served by rewarding such inventions.

• You’ve probably heard that map makers sometimes add fake “trap cities” or “trap streets”. The idea is that if your traps appear on another map, you’ve got them dead to rights on copyright violation, right? Turns out: Nope. Locations of cities and streets are facts. A fake fact isn’t a form of creative expression and still isn’t copyrightable.

• One of the central concepts of patents is that you must publish your invention. But companies don’t like telling their competitors about their inventions. So many—particularly pharmaceutical companies—pay lawyers gigantic sums to write patents in a way that’s legally valid but impossible for a normal person to read. In response, their competitors pay their lawyers gigantic sums to decode the legal gibberish, and sometimes get patents translated from other countries (often Japan) that are less tolerant of such chicanery.

• When Don Daglow created Utopia in 1981, he couldn’t have copyrighted the idea of real-time strategy game. But he might have been able to patent some version of that idea. I’m glad he didn’t.

About those indirect subsidies

We’re 1900 words in. What is this post about again? Oh yeah:

1. Our current tricks for rewarding information production rely on coincidental facts about how the world works.
2. Artificial intelligence is changing those facts.
3. ???

What are these coincidental facts? Well, “facts” and “discoveries” are important. We want more of them! But legally protecting these things seems terrible, because that requires you to police what words people can say to each other.

But copyright still cleverly provides indirect subsidies for creating facts and making discoveries. I’ll highlight two.

First, while you can’t copyright facts, you can copyright “presentations” of facts. If I write a book, you are free to steal all my facts and write your own book. But, for humans, doing that is hard. If you go way back to, like, three years ago, “unbundling” the facts from their presentation took a ton of work. Now, AI can do this instantly and for near-zero cost.

Second, I suspect that a lot of creation is driven by our old tribal band instincts. Like why am I writing this? Probably because some part of me hopes that after I post it, glowing pixels will show up on my screen which my brain will interpret as meaning that people love me or whatever. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t provide concrete benefits that will increase my chances of passing on my genes, but my brain is still operating on some confused heuristics where “more glowing pixels” means “more sexual opportunities” or “more friends to provide resources in times of need” or something.

AI is overturning both of these. A few months back I did some research into how well LLMs can play chess. My most surprising finding was that if you asked chat-based LLMs to regurgitate the full sequence of moves before choosing a new one, that greatly improved performance. I’m pretty sure I was the first person to show this.

A few weeks later, I asked Google “can llms play chess”.

No credit. Beyond the idea of replaying moves, several quotes were taken from me almost verbatim.

If a human did this, most people would think it was rude. But at least I’d know that they paid a tax on their time, and hypothetically some people might think less of them for having done it. AI does it instantly, for free, and does not care about social approval.

Now, I don’t mean to beat up on poor Google. I actually think they deserve credit for exceptionally good behavior. Many AI companies offer you a way to signal that you don’t want your content used for AI, but then they ignore their own signal and if you try to block them they switch IP addresses. I expected Google to say, “Sure, you can block our AI, we love you, just add the same signal that completely removes your website from our search engine.” But no. They offer a different signal just for AI, and they actually respect it. I added it, and when I checked a few weeks later, Google no longer provided any AI summary at all.

So, good on Google for giving creators some control. But I’m skeptical that this is what the future will look like.

Some people I respect say that they now write for AI. I admire this zen-like detachment from earthly concerns. But really? You’re happy to spend your time creating information just to feed it into a training set, so it can be used for purposes you might hate, and without giving you any reward, neither money nor recognition? For better or for worse, I don’t feel that way.

What could be done?

Option: Do nothing

This is a strong choice! As I see it, our historical compromise was to try to reward information production, but to take a light touch. Only do it in a few places, where it can be done at low cost, with unambiguous rules that don’t involve degrading intrusions on basic human liberty.

Maybe AI changes how well that compromise works. But that doesn’t imply that we should change anything. After all, when Craigslist debundled the news from classified ads, we didn’t make Craigslist illegal. We just left newspapers to their fate. This meant less news, particularly in smaller markets, and I think this has had some bad effects. But tend to think it was the right choice. Even if you ignore “freedom”, people have saved billions of dollars, and people trade far more goods now than when newspapers had a monopoly.

And we shouldn’t forget that AI also has (possibly enormous) positive effects on information production, by making it easier and cheaper.

Change how copyright and/or patents and/or trade secrets work?

I have a couple (possibly bad) ideas for minor tinkering at the margins, below. In principle, we could make some kind of dramatic change. But I don’t see many options without huge problems. Can you think of anything? This all seems under-theorized.

Increase non-market incentives for information production?

After Craigslist killed newspapers, some started adding paywalls. Paywalls are, theoretically, a market-based solution. But I suspect that a lot of people who subscribe to these newspapers (and blogs (not me, money bad)) do it not just out of self-interest, but because they want to support them. They think what they’re doing is good for the world and they want to encourage it. There are also many charities that fund journalism.

And OK, maybe AI decreases the incentives for internet randos to do research and share it with the world. How much information is really lost by this? How hard would it be to provide more grants (or post-hoc “awards”) to make up for what’s lost?

Clarify the meaning of a derivative work.

Say you create a game. You write code and sell me an executable. Then I take the executable, decompile it, replace all your art with new version, and then re-compile it for some other operating system and start selling it. Can you go to court and take my money?

Yes, because your source code was copyrighted, and my new executable would be a “derivative work”.

But say you write a book, and I get an AI to re-write it. Can you take my money? The legal standard here is “substantial similarity” which is just as confusing as it sounds. Courts talk about “total concept and feel test” and “comprehensive non-literal similarity” versus “fragmented literal similarity”. As far as I can tell, this is an incredibly blurry boundary that we’ve only gotten away with because cases are relatively rare.

AI will force us to find a clearer boundary, one that doesn’t require judges to listen to individual pieces of music.

But I’m not sure a clear boundary would do much to incentivize creators. If we had a magic box that perfectly decided what’s infringing and what isn’t, I don’t expect that the response will be for AI companies to pay creators. Rather, they’ll probably just tune their AIs to run right up to that boundary. Instead of re-writing one books, rewrite N books for whatever value of N is legal.

Create a legal opt-out.

Many companies theoretically offer an opt-out. It’s a different opt out for each company, and many of them seem to just ignore it.

In principle, governments could create a legal mandate for this. It could even be fine-grained. Then, companies might compete with each other to make creators happy.

It’s quite possible that such a mandate would be a disaster. For one thing, it would be a headache to enforce—would Federal AI inspectors demand to inspect the training data for all AI companies?

And for any even moderately popular blogger, lots of people steal their articles and re-post them without credit. (Google and Bing usually de-list these sites, but you can find them with Yandex.) If they have different opt-out headers, how are AI companies supposed to know which one is correct?

Most of all, I worry that that this mandate would just hurt “good” companies and/or companies in jurisdictions that actually enforce the mandate. If the effect was to hand AI leadership over to That Other Country, that seems bad.

Go Xanadu

Or maybe we could develop technology that would solve this problem using existing laws.

A while back, I mentioned Project Xanadu, The Original Hypertext Project. I was mostly attracted by their attitude. (“It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON.”) But I couldn’t really understand what the hell it actually was. But then I read Jason Crawford’s The lessons of Xanadu and WIRED magazine’s 1995 piece The Curse of Xanadu.

I now understand that Xanadu was (is?) intended to be a system for interlinked documents. But it also included a crazy “transclusion” feature. This was some kind of distributed copyright scheme where authors could link and copy each other and royalties were somehow apportioned to all upstream documents.

Maybe we don’t need new laws. Maybe a solution exists that uses a combination of technology and existing contract law. There’s a very large space of possibilities, and I don’t pretend to have the answer. But at a high level, there could be some system where people (and AIs?) put their creations. In order to access the system, you have to agree to distribute royalties according to some formula, and to treat anything learned through the system as a trade secret.

In principle, it seems like essentially any combination of technology and laws could be implemented this way? And there could be a competition to find the best one? And we don’t have to rely on the Leviathan? And it might be better than our current crazy hacks?

Seems hard, but it’s the best idea I’ve got.

TLDR

Weird situation, evolving, new ideas needed.

Please understand the differences in what you’re finding online.

It’s March 2025 and eggs — the kind that come out of chickens and are a staple in American breakfasts — are not only in short supply, but more expensive than ever. This is a fact that you can confirm for yourself by visiting any supermarket or grocery store that sells them.

Bird flu is spreading throughout the US. It has caused the death or destruction of millions of commercial egg farm hens. This is also a fact. Here are some recent trustworthy references to support this:

• “USDA rolls out 5-step plan to battle avian flu in poultry,” University of Minnesota
• “ICYMI: Bird Flu Is Roiling Egg Farms Across The Country,” NPR 1A (podcast)
• “Hickman’s Family Farms struggles to meet egg demand after losing a million birds,” Arizona Republic

Hens lay eggs. Fewer hens mean fewer eggs. This is a combination of fact and logic. As someone who has had a backyard flock of hens on and off for the past 30 years, I can assure you that the more hens I have in my flock, the more eggs I get.

The economic concept of supply and demand states that, well, you can read it for yourself in this quote from the Supply and Demand entry in Britannica Money:

supply and demand, in economics, [is the] relationship between the quantity of a commodity that producers wish to sell at various prices and the quantity that consumers wish to buy. It is the main model of price determination used in economic theory. The price of a commodity is determined by the interaction of supply and demand in a market. The resulting price is referred to as the equilibrium price and represents an agreement between producers and consumers of the good. In equilibrium the quantity of a good supplied by producers equals the quantity demanded by consumers.

I was a business major in college so I took Economics 101 and 102. I know this stuff. It makes sense to me. And if you think about it, it should make sense to you. Prices on items that are scarce but in demand are generally higher than the same item if it’s available in higher quantities. This can be a natural result of marketplace economics, as the above paragraph suggests, or it can be manipulated by sellers to either increase profits on scarce commodities or control the sale of them.

An example of using price to control sales is what I recently saw in a local supermarket that had some eggs available for sale. If you bought one or two dozen, they were about $7/dozen. But if you bought more than two dozen, the price went up to about $10/dozen. Hoarding has become a problem with the egg shortage and this supermarket was trying to discourage that behavior by jacking up the prices for hoarders.

That’s not to say that some producers, wholesalers, or retailers aren’t trying to cash in on the shortages. There will always be people and organizations that take advantage of a situation.

In the case of producers, I don’t blame them one bit. If you had a flock of a 10,000 chickens and lost 7,500 of them to bird flu — science says it’s 75% to 100% deadly to birds — you’d not only have to spend a boatload of cash to make sure your facility was free of the pathogens, but you’d have to buy 7,500 replacement birds. Commercial hens might be different, but I know I had to wait four to five months for any of the chicks I obtained to start laying in my backyard. That’s a huge cash outlay and reduced productivity for months. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to cash in on the eggs being laid by the 2,500 birds I have left. Supply and demand supports this, especially since the loss of hens is so widespread.

But this is still an opinion. You might think it’s fine for farmers to take a hit that might actually drive them out of business. That’s your opinion.

The farther you go up the chain from the producer with suddenly less product to sell, the less acceptable it is to cash in on the scarcity. But that’s still a moral judgement or opinion. It is not a fact.

And then there are the conspiracy theories. Big Henhouse is controlling the price of eggs and using bird flu as an excuse. There really isn’t a shortage at all. They’re just pretending it is to separate consumers from their money.

Is this a fact? No. Is it based on facts? Perhaps a few. Maybe egg prices are unreasonably high in an area that hasn’t been hit by bird flu. But maybe those producers are also sending their eggs out to areas that have been devastated by bird flu.

What is the truth? What are the facts? Are these Big Henhouse price gouging conspiracy theories what’s actually going on? Or are they just a tool to focus your hate and anger on big business?

If you’re actually trying to answer what I’ve posed as rhetorical questions, don’t just share the first Google hit that supports your view. Look at the source of the information. Far left? Far right? Anti-big business? Or a news outlet that tends to focus on fact-based reporting? Don’t respond to this post with something you read on the New Republic or in Mother Jones or in a blog post in a popular blog. That’s not news. It’s opinion and/or theory based on cherry-picked data.

I don’t know about you, but now that I’m not producing my own eggs and feeling forced to eat them every day just to keep up with production, a dozen lasts me more than a week. Yes, I’m one person and I understand that larger households probably eat more eggs. Although the prices will never get down to what they used to be — ever heard of inflation? — they should eventually come down as the bird flu problems are resolved and flocks are rebuilt. Until then, if you find them too expensive for your household, eat fewer eggs. You don’t need them for breakfast every morning. And you don’t need as many as you think you might.

Otherwise, just stop stressing over the price of eggs and worrying about who is profiting in the current situation. Despite what your super socialist friends might think, price fixing by the government is not a reasonable long term solution — especially with the current government. Buy only what you need to help prevent scarcity. If everyone did this — remember supply and demand? — the prices will likely come down sooner than later.