Hayek and Machlup prioritized free knowledge flow over intellectual property incentives
Evidence
Hayek cited Machlup on patents and copyrights until his final book published in 1988, and Machlup cited Hayek on knowledge in his three volumes of a planned ten-volume “Knowledge Project” cut short by his death in 1983. … Because of the importance of the latter, IP becomes relatively less important as the use of knowledge always relies on a certain locally embedded set of understandings and inherited practices to be made operational. The benefits of free knowledge-flow generally outweighed the supposedly incentivizing traits of IP rights. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 190
Categorization
- XREF: This skeptical-neoliberal stance on IP contradicts the crude stereotype of neoliberalism as reflexively pro-property; connects to the book’s fracturing project and to the reader’s map of internal varieties. — connects to: Machlup justified tenure as a market correction for academic-freedom externalities; Hayek grounded free-market economics in a theory of human ignorance — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 278; Hayek justified markets by dispersed knowledge, not happiness maximization — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2195 (+2 more)
- QUESTION: How did this IP-skeptical strand within neoliberalism relate to later pro-IP policy victories? Worth tracing the divergence.
Broader Connections
- Hayek justified markets by dispersed knowledge, not happiness maximization
#expands(0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2195 - Hayek grounded free-market economics in a theory of human ignorance
#expands(0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 278 - Hayek, Machlup, and Haberler all trained under von Mises in interwar Vienna.
#responds-to(0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 996