William Kingston - Böcker

Capitalism has been sustained by inherited moral values that are now all but exhausted. A unique combination of a new belief in individualism and a long tradition of property rights had traditionally ensured that self-interested action also produced public benefit. However, these rights, including the laws underwriting economic and financial innovation and parliamentary democracy, were gradually captured and shaped by those who could benefit most from them. This fascinating book shows that the outcome is a reduced ability to generate real wealth combined with exceptional inequality, as well as a worldwide breach of the vital trust between voters and their representatives. Capitalism's injuries are both self-inflicted and fatal. William Kingston uniquely deals with capitalism from a property rights standpoint, providing the first convincing explanation of economic cycles in terms of changes to these rights. The lucid exploration of the historical evolution of property includes a remarkable precursor of modern capitalism in medieval culture and pays particular attention to intellectual property. The book also calls attention to the harm that inaccurate measurement of economic activity can cause, both at the micro-level (auditing of corporations) and macro-level (the Kuznets GDP/GNP system). In conclusion, it argues that the exceptional levels of inequality today have been caused primarily by allowing financiers to escape from the laws that traditionally prevented them from 'generating money from nothing'. Challenging the orthodox thinking, this is an essential book for economists and political scientists in academia, the public sector and industry. It offers an imperative warning that capitalism's next crash is coming sooner rather than later.

‹Kingston’s history of the evolution of property rights, and on how property rights regimes influence and reflect the kind of economic activity people engage in, and how they regard economic activity, is interesting and provocative in its own right. Others have argued that capitalism seems to have lost much of the power to increase the productivity of economic activity that it once had, and the workings of modern financial systems are a good part of the problem. But no one else has tied these propositions closely to the evolution of property rights›.– Richard R. Nelson, Columbia University, New York‹This sweeping account of the rise and projected fall of capitalism is as original as it is gripping. Kingston locates the hinge that moves capitalism as the institutions governing property rights, and argues persuasively that the system is now undermining itself as innovation shifts from the technological to the financial domain.›– John A. Mathews, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Sydney‹William Kingston is a prolific and thoughtful economic historian who has relied on such longstanding giants as Marx and Schumpeter, and new ones such as Minsky, to show how financial innovation has replaced technological innovation, and how this process is destroying the economic fabric of society. Kingston’s deep understanding of the ‹free-market economy› makes this book a must-read.›– Jorge Niosi, Université du Québec à Montreal, Canada

More than a decade ago, Dublin University Press published a collection of the author’s writings on Irish topics. Their main concerns were issues such as the harmful effects of the unusual Irish voting system and the poor performance of the country’s bureaucracy. It can fairly be claimed for one of them («The Lemmings of Democracy») that it showed well in advance why and how Ireland would be particularly hard hit by the financial crisis of 2009. In this new and expanded edition, more recently written Chapters take up the themes of the earlier ones, but put more emphasis on innovation and history. One of them, «Understanding Britain’s «Brexit» Parliament,» provides an essential clue to the problems with the Irish voting system identified earlier. «The History group» contains an account of the scarcely known but crucial part Ireland played in two scientific revolutions. It also reveals how the law of Limited Liability on which every Corporation in the world depends, had its origin in Dublin’s eighteenth-century independent Parliament. Much of the time intervening between the two editions was devoted to the research and writing of the book, How Capitalism Destroyed Itself: Technology Displaced by Financial Innovation. These Irish articles are in fact a running commentary on the evolution of this global process in one country.

This highly original book represents a major advance in the use of patents to compare countries' technological competitiveness. It tabulates and analyses 280,000 United States patents from countries across the world over a ten year period. Specifically, these patents were granted to 'not-for-profit' entities (mainly universities and research institutes), firms with no more than 500 employees, or to individual inventors. For each of these groups, the book provides statistics and discussion on how long patents are kept in force, the extent to which they are cited, and how far inventions made in different countries are in fact owned in the United States.Inter-country comparisons are provided between groupings of large and small advanced countries and between the sizeable number of countries for which patents are only just beginning to become economically important. The fact that all these patents have been subjected to the same examination process facilitates genuine like-for-like comparisons. Some of the more interesting emergent international differences in inventions are also explored. This book will provide a mine of reliable data for econometric studies of international competitiveness.Believed to be the first ever measurement of the patentable output of universities and research institutes worldwide because it provides the first fully international comparisons, this book will be invaluable to: patent offices and attorneys, university technical transfer offices, national industrial development agencies, as well as economists with an interest in international trade and technology.

Beyond Intellectual Property explores the many means by which information is protected. Based on thorough empirical research in the US and Europe as well as practical experience of economic innovation, it goes far beyond the traditional realm of intellectual property (IP). It also identifies the need for urgent reform of present arrangements and suggests practical ways of achieving this.New instruments for protecting investment in information have been historically important for initiating long-wave economic cycles. William Kingston argues that although IP has been one such method, it is increasingly proving ineffective because its laws have been progressively shaped by the interests that benefit from them, rather than by visions of the public good. He demonstrates that repair will require such visions, which would also underwrite radically new forms of information protection.This insightful book defines, describes and distinguishes between information, knowledge and meaning, and explains why information now needs changed forms of legal protection if it is to be of genuine economic value. As such, it will be of great interest to economic policy-makers, students of IP and innovation, patent agents and attorneys.