"Is intellectual property good?" is the wrong question — an…

"Is intellectual property good?" is the wrong question — and my new essay, The Price of Ideas, is the 7,000-word case for why.
Most writing on IP is a team sport. One side: information is non-rival, copying harms no one, abolish patents and copyright. The other: creators own what they make, piracy is theft, protection is sacred. Each answers half the question and pretends the other half doesn't exist.

The economics takes no side. It takes a measurement.

Everything rests on one fact: the first copy is expensive, the next is nearly free. A new drug costs roughly $1–2.5B to bring to market — failures and cost of capital included — while the pill itself costs cents. A novel takes years; the file copies for nothing. That gap is the entire case FOR intellectual property, and the entire case against too much of it.

So it was never "yes or no." It's "how much," and which side of the optimum you're standing on — and the answer differs by industry. That's not a dodge. That's the finding.

PHARMA — the strongest case for exclusivity, and it cuts against the abolitionist. After patents expire, generic competition drops prices ~80%+. Wonderful — but only AFTER the bargain has paid for the molecule. Allow copying on day one and many billion-dollar drugs are simply never made. Worse, the fixed 20-year clock already warps what gets researched: eight drugs approved for advanced lung cancer, zero ever approved to prevent it — because long trials burn the patent term before the drug even launches.
CREATIVE WORK — the strongest case against maximalism. Basic copyright measurably raised output and quality (Giorcelli–Moser, on Italian opera). Term extensions beyond the creator's lifetime added nothing. When Napster cut music revenue by more than half in real terms, output and quality went UP — because digitisation destroyed the cost of making music at the same moment it destroyed the ability to charge for it. And authors were paid for centuries with no copyright at all, on lead time alone (Plant, 1934).

My essay engages the serious anti-IP case head-on — Kinsella on non-rivalry, Boldrin & Levine on intellectual monopoly — concedes exactly what's right in it, then shows where it breaks: non-rivalry explains why access is valuable; it does not explain how a costly, failure-ridden process gets financed when imitation is free.

Four figures. Around 20 sources, every one read in full text — no abstracts, no invented citations. Arrow, Landes–Posner, Budish–Roin–Williams, DiMasi, Wouters, Acemoglu–Linn, Williams, Biasi–Moser, Waldfogel, and more.
Not pro-monopoly. Not anti-creator. Just the position the evidence actually supports.

Read it: https://singulargrit.substack.com/p/the-price-of-ideas?r=3p2oeg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true