There's one more scenario that often occurs in real life: often both sides of a potential patent fight are licensing different patents to each other. If Alpha Corp demands exorbitant licensing fees from Beta Corp, Beta Corp can threaten Alpha Corp with similar licensing fees that would cancel out any increased revenue Alpha Corp could extort from Beta Corp. As a result, neither side ever actually wins a patent fight, so they don't start.
Patent trolls are particularly likely to become predatory because, since they don't manufacture anything, they don't actually use anyone else's patents and are therefore immune to this kind of retaliation. In the United States, it seems as though one of the more common ways to avoid paying a predatory patent troll is to assert that you are not actually infringing upon a vaild patent (because what you are doing is slightly different from what was actually patented or because the patent should never have been granted in the first place) and force the patent troll to attempt to enforce its patent in court.
on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion
Pun intended? ;)
But yeah, it's getting off-topic and there's plenty of other places to discuss that kind of thing.
I believe that Trump is, in fact, exactly that clueless and completely unaware of how clueless he is.
Edit: For the record: my biggest reason for believing this is having read reports of what many mainstream Republicans who worked under him during his first term have said and written about what he was like.
Yeah, in Star Trek, genetic engineering for increased intelligence reliably produces arrogant bastards, but that's just so they don't have to show the consequences of genetic engineering on humans...
Do we have it in any other animal besides cows? Dogs? Housecats? Fruit flies? Guinea pigs? Any other short-lived animal commonly used in laboratory research that still has a decent amount of genetic diversity?
If you do not have compulsory patent licensing with court-set fees, then why should any one patent troll--or even the holder of a rare real patent--stop short of demanding the company's entire profit?
In practice, there are often substitutes for whatever it is that the patent owner has a patent on - if someone has a patent on making wheels out of metal and won't let you license that patent at a reasonable price, you can still make wheels out of wood or stone instead even if they're not nearly as good. So there is a limit to the amount of revenue that a patent holder can demand.
Additionally, if the patent holder and the licensee don't agree on a price, neither of them gets anything, so they each have an incentive to make an offer the other will accept. The game theory of bargaining over a fixed surplus applies here.
And yet you will observe that in all public political discourse that makes it onto TV, all the sober talking heads in business suits are talking as if by subsidizing people with $120 checks we are causing their bank accounts to go up by $120, rather than talking about how many new universities or doctors or houses the $120 checks will cause to exist.
On the bright side, the discourse might be getting a little bit better in places. Some years ago, a California politician proposed helping renters by making rent tax deductible. The proposal was immediately mocked as being a giveaway to landlords.
I have an objection to the section titled "supply and demand are always equal". In my Econ 101 textbook, "quantity supplied" and "quantity demanded" are always equal; the terms "supply" and "demand" only referred to supply curves and demand curves. Maybe this is a nitpick, but I think it's an important one. I'd like to propose some rather significant edits to that section and to the following one about subsidies, but is this the kind of page where it's okay for changes to come from anyone, or is it important that it stay "by Eliezer Yudkowsky"?
It's not agreed among economists which countries today might be suffering from too little aggregate demand, and working under capacity. The economists in my preferred school suspect that it is presently happening inside the European Union due to the European Central Bank being run by lunatics.
This may have been true in 2017, but post-COVID inflation suggests that it's not true anymore.
One case of the changing the level of friction drastically changing things was when, in the late 1990s and 2000s, Napster and successive services made spreading copyrighted files much, much easier than it had been. These days you don't need to pirate your music because you can get almost any recorded song on YouTube whenever you want for free (possibly with an ad) or on Spotify for a cheap subscription fee...