Le radici cristiane dell'Europa

Chi si oppone al riconoscimento delle radici cristiane dell’Europa lo fa in nome dell’illuminismo: la modernità ha realizzato una cesura netta con i secoli bui che l’hanno preceduta.

Jeremy Waldron, nel suo “God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought” fornisce una testimonianza in senso contrario.

D’altronde, chi porre a rappresentante della modernità se non John Locke, il filosofo a cui dobbiamo concetti come quello di “tolleranza” e “uguaglianza”? Ebbene, pochi filosofi sono impregnati quanto lui di “teologia cristiana”. Waldron, ribaltando una tradizione consolidata, sostiene che si tratta di una influenza sostanziale, tale da non poter in alcun modo essere messa tra parentesi. Insomma, Locke non è traducibile in una lingua laica perché è essenzialmente un autore religioso. 

Su cosa ci si concentra?:

… My topic is equality: the proposition that humans are all one another's equals created equal, perhaps, or (whether created or not) just equal, in some fundamental and compelling sense.I propose to explore in the company ofthe seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke…. I believe that Locke's mature … is as well-worked-out a theory of basic equality as we have in the canon of political philosophy….

Nonostante le apparenze l’oggetto del libro è alquanto originale:

… Philosophers ask whether we should be aiming for equality ofwealth, equality ofincome, equality of happiness, or equality of opportunity… Much less has been devoted to the more abstract philosophical question: "What is the character of our deeper commitment to treating all human beings as equals…

Un esempio tra i tanti:

… Ronald Dworkin's work on equality provides a fine illustration. Dworkin has done a tremendous amount to explore and articulate the nature of our commitment to equality in the social and economic realm….He provides a useful account of the relation between equality and market mechanisms, in terms of a distinction between "choice-sensitive" and "luck-sensitive" aspects of social and economic distribution… So the distinction between basic equality and equality as an aim is fundamental to Dworkin's work. Yet Dworkin has said next to nothing about the nature and grounding of the principle of equal respect. '° He has devoted very little energy to the task of considering what that principle amounts to in itself, what (if anything) evokes it in the nature of the beings it proposes to treat as equals… This is not peculiar to Dworkin. He maintains that it is an obvious and generally accepted truth that governments must treat their citizens as equals…

Bè, ma questa è una grave lacuna, inutile girarci attorno:

If he is right and I think he is then there is a failure of argument on a very broad front indeed.

Ma orse c’è una spiegazione legata la “politally correct”:

 

No doubt part of the reason for reticence here has to do with the unpleasantness or offensiveness of the views - sexist and racist views, for example that one would have to pretend to take seriously if one wanted to conduct a serious examination of these matters.

  

Quando mscriveva Locke il contesto era ben diverso:

By contrast John Locke and his…were confronted with such denials, and with real political systems built upon them…. Sir Robert Filmer, the great proponent of patriarchalism and the divine right of kings, wrote, in the 1650s, "that there cannot be any Multitude of Men whatsoever, eithergreat or small, . . . but that in the same Multitude ... there is one Man amongst them, that in Nature hath a Right to be king of all the rest,"… It was the contrary position the principle of equality that seemed radical… It was rather like communism in America in the 195os. There was no denying that people held this position; but those who held it were widely regarded as unsound and dangerous… Locke, beyond doubt, was one of these equality-radicals. Political correctness argued the other way, and Locke knew perfectly well that neither the premise basic equality nor the enterprise of figuring out its ramifications was a passport to political or philosophical respectability…

La tesi del libro:

Locke accorded basic equality the strongest grounding that a principle could have: it was an axiom of theology, understood as perhaps the most important truth about God's way with the world in regard to the social and political implications of His creation of the human person.'… In what follows we will see Locke attempting to think through the consequences of this radicalism. And we will watch him respond to the charge of radical unsoundness, sometimes holding fast to what he knew was a counter-intuitive positionHis writings have nothing to say about affirmative action or universal health insurance or minority culture rights. If we imagine John Locke plonked down among us to talk about equality…

Un pregio del libro è di uniformare piani della discussione eludendo con maestria le trappole dell’anacronismo:

We are not accustomed to debate public controversies about equality using Old Testament sources… So, someone may ask, with all this potential for anachronism and misunderstanding, what could possibly be the point of lining up John Locke alongside an array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers- say, Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen as a leading theorist of equality… Our thinking about equality is undeniably entangled with the issues of the day, and large parts of it or, at the very least, large parts of the way we present it are more or less inseparable from contexts, understandings, and political stakes that would not survive transposition to another time and place…

Oggi molti filosofi, abbiamo visto Dowrkin, trascurano l’essenziale, cosicché un richiamo all’ordine è quanto mai prezioso:

But we are also conscious that part of our discussion addresses something enduring: it addresses the possibility that equality may be grounded on something rather general in human nature and something…

Si tira in ballo anche la natura umana:

And many of us believe that this business of respecting one another as equals might have to be referred, in turn, to the idea of something important in or about human nature… John Locke and his contemporaries were conscious of much the same duality - the duality between surface issues of equal treatment in politics and economy and a deeper idea of respecting people as equals… Locke was exploring the possibility that humans were by nature worthy of respect as one another's equals, not just one another's equals in the politics…

C’è qualcosa d’imbarazzante nel libro di Waldron:

The the sub-title of this book refer to the Christian foundations of Locke's political thought. I am conscious that there is something vaguely embarrassing, even badform, in this characterization. Why "Christian"? Why not just "Religious Foundations of Equality"? Or why not just "Locke's Theory of Equality…

Ma è Locke ad essere un filosofo imbarazzante per molti illuministi:

… Locke was intensely interested in Christian doctrine, and in the Reasonableness he insisted that most men could not hope to understand the detailed requirements of the law of nature without the assistance of the teachings and example of Jesus… John Dunn has argued that the whole frame of discussion in the Two Treatises of Government is "saturated with Christian assumptionsHe wrote in his famous study of Locke: Jesus Christ (and Saint Paul) may not appear in person in the text of the Two Treatises but their presence can hardly be…

In questo libro ci si chiede se Locke puo’ essere recuperato alla laicità, ovvero se anche un ateo puo’ comprendere fini in fondo  i suoi due trattati. La risposta finale sarà “no”, senza la base religiosa il messaggio di Locke perde di peso.

I want to ask, not only whether we can discern the influence of Christian teaching in Locke's normative doctrine of the "equality of all men in virtue of their shared species-membership," but also whether one can even make sense of a position like Locke's… apart from the specifically biblical and Christian teaching that he associated with it…

Non che l’imbarazzo presso gli studiosi non si fosse già manifestato con tentativi piuttosto goffi di liquidarlo:

For Dunn, I suspect, the theological and specifically biblical and Christian aspects ofLockean equality are features of Locke's theory that make it largely irrelevant to our concerns. Teasing out and putting on display the indispensability to Locke's political theory of its theological foundations is a way of confining Locke to the seventeenth century. To paraphrase Dunn's famous title, they are part of "what is dead"…

I concetti che certi autori vorrebbero legare a quelolo di uguaglianza sono ben altri rispetto a quelli religiosi:

… the deep philosophical commitments of a modern theory would likely be oriented to secular values such as autonomy or dignity or human flourishing, values that are thought to command our respect quite independently of any conception of the sacred or of our relation to God…

Purtroppo, con Locke, l’operazione è alquanto difficile, il fondamento religioso è imprescindibile:

I actually don't think it is clear that we now can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation…

Difendere l’uguaglianza tra gli uomini facendo leva sull’utilitarismo è servito a poco:

 

Isaiah Berlin, for example, imagines that there might be a utilitarian defense of basic equality… But that is hopelessly confused…. "Every man to count for one, nobody for more than one" is partly constitutive of utilitarianism, and so cannot be defended on utilitarian grounds except in a question-begging way….

Che in Locke la religione sia centrale uno lo vede a colpo d’occhi, negarlo espone ad anacronismi lampanti:

To treat Locke's argument as though it were a secular argument, and thus on a par with our patterns of secular argumentation, is one sort of anachronism… One has only to read the first of Locke's Two Treatises to become aware that we are in a quite different intellectual world… views the methods and substance of the First Treatise as strange and disconcerting

Ci sono vari motivi per cui la teologia è al centro di tutto:

 

Of course, part of John Locke's interest in the specifically biblical part of his argument is connected with the determination, driving his work in the Two Treatises, to refute the specific claims of Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha and other works were republished in the 167os to provide powerful scriptural support for a thesis of basic inequality…

  I laici pensano di ridurre l’argomento teologico per l’eguaglianza ad un rozzo comando divino ma con questa caricatura s’ingannano:

Secular theorists often assume that they know what a religious argument is like: they present it as a crude prescription from God… they contrast it with the elegant complexity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin… I suspect that it might be as caricatural of religious argumentation in Locke's day as it is of religious argumentation in our own… Religious arguments are more challenging than most, and for many people they are as foreign when they occur in contemporary political theory as they are when they are found in a seventeenth-century tract. One virtue, then, of devoting all this time and all this space to an analysis and elaboration of Locke's religious case for equality is that it promises not only to deepen our understanding of equality, but also to enrich our sense of what it is like to make a religious argument in politics…. awkwardness at the prospect at having to make explicit whatever religious or spiritual assumptions lie behind our conviction that humans are special and that some of the more obvious differences between them are irrelevant to the fundamentals of moral concern and respect…

Il laico è disturbato dal fatto di dover prendere sul serio sessismo e razzismo, cosicché evita una confutazione entrando nel merito.

discomfited at the prospect of having to take seriously, even if only for the sake of clarity and refutation, racist and sexist positions that seem to deny this equality… premises on which racist and sexist doctrines are based.

La distinzione tra i sessi, invece, offre un’esempio paradigmatico di come Locke introduca il concetto di eguaglianza:

…here, however, I would like to introduce the substance of my discussion of Locke's egalitarianism by focusing on what many regard as the most striking difference within the human species the difference between men and women…. The biblical subordination of Eve to Adam can be seen as a privileging of Adam in particular and his particular (male) heirs, or it can be seen as a privileging of men generally…

Due concetti diventano cruciali: l’essere creati entrambi ad immagine di Dio e l’essere entrambi dotati di ragione:

come to terms with the fact that women as much as men are created in the image of God and endowed with the modicum of reason that is, for Locke, the criterion of human equality...

Ma non possiamo fermarci qui. Cosa intendiamo quando diciamo “a immagine di Dio”? E di quale “ragione” parliamo?

E’ per rispondere a queste domande che la teologia diventa centrale nel discorso del “modernista” Locke. Al punto che molti hanno esclamato “troppa religione!”:

Macintyre's observation that, as he read the Two Treatises of Government, the arguments of John Locke concerning basic equality and individual rights were so imbued with religious content that they were not fit, constitutionally, to be taught in the public schools of the United States of America…

In passato non era possibile mettere tra parentesi di Dio, pensiamo solo a come si giungeva alla condanna dell’omicidio:

The commandment to Noah prohibiting murder cites as a reason the fact that potential victims of murder are made in the image of the person (God) who has issued the commandment… There the religious aspect seems to have an internal relation to the commandment…

Non poter uccidere le creature fatte ad immagine di Dio richiedeva che la teologia fosse sempre presente.

Quando proibiamo l’uccisione dell’uomo dobbiamo intenderci cosa intendere per “umano”. Quando diciamo che “gli uomini sono creati uguali” dobbiamo intenderci cosa intendere per “umano”:

… in Locke's account, the shape of human, the way in which the extension of the predicate "human" is determined, is not in the end separable from the religious reasons that Locke cites in support of basic equality. If someone arrives at what purports to be a principle of human equality on other grounds (e.g., non-religious grounds), there is little reason to believe that that principle will have the same shape or texture as the Lockean principle…

Ecco allora far capolino la religione, e con un ruolo sostanziale:

Locke's religious premises help to make sense of or give shape to a certain cluster of human characteristics

Per Locke l’uomo è speciale ma dobbiamo capire di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di uomo:

John Locke asserts as a matter of principle the fundamental equality of all members of the human species.'2 Members of this species have a special status, or occupy a special moral position quite unlike that of any other animal…in a way that also does not have any parallel for the co-members of any other species.

Potremmo affidarci alla scienza ma…:

… But in his philosophy of science… Locke comes very close to saying that there are no such things as species. species are at best just human conventions

La scienza da questo punto di vista usa solo convenzioni ma questo ha conseguenze pesanti sul piano morale:

 

The danger that this poses to the moral and political argument is enormous.

Locke non puo’ cedere su questo punto, non è un pragmatista:

Locke is not a pragmatist, like (say) Richard Rorty, proposing to keep a whole moral system afloat by using some conventional commitments to evaluate others.13 His approach in the Two Treatises and in his other political writings is explicitly foundationalist…

Si è cacciato in un tale ginepraio che molti suoi studiosi (scuola di Cambridge) consigliano di leggere i libri di morale e quelli di scienza separatamente:

Locke's politics can and should be studied in more or less complete isolation from the rest of his philosophy… "Locke is, perhaps, the least consistent scholar…

Nasce così il mito della disgiunzione:

So I guess it is understandable that readers who come up against this difficulty are tempted to take advantage of the myth of a disjunction between Locke the philosopher and Locke the political pamphleteer, and to try and immunize the premises of the political account against the contagion of Locke's philosophical skepticism about species…

Tuttavia, il problema resta insoluto:

Locke's human egalitarianism depends crucially on the clarity and intelligibility of the species-boundaries… we turn to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. What Locke says there about species is almost entirely at odds with the conception of species-hierarchy

Quanto al concetto di razionalità le cose non cambiano di molto:

Some people, he concedes, may add a criterion of rationality: they understand by "man" not just a featherless biped, but a rational animal. .. But again, which internal features caught our attention would be a matter of which were inherently interesting to us, or else which external appearances we wanted to understand the causality of. Either way, it is our interests that would dictate what revisions we made in (what we called) the essence of man…

Riassumendo:

… the implications of Locke's skepticism about species are pretty serious. If the boundaries of species are made by men and not given by our Creator…

Che il problema fosse serio lo testimoniano alcuni passaggi per noi indigeribili:

Locke's comment in Book IV of the Essay, on how an English child might "prove" that a negro is not a man, is really quite disconcerting in this regard…

Eppure, nel rifiutare l’essenzialismo Locke pone anche le basi dell’anti-razzismo:

by rejecting essentialism, Locke is undercutting those theories of human inequality that depend on "essentializing" superficial characteristics like skin color or sex organs. Kathy Squadrito says, for example, that Locke's rejection of external form as real essence means that he doesn't really think there is an important difference between men and women… the point about Locke's anti-essentialism is that it leaves the field wide open for anyone to draw the boundaries… It leaves him with no naturalistic basis whatsoever for distinguishing those creatures one is allowed to hunt, exploit, enslave… 

I punti d’appoggio restati a Locke per capire chi è “uomo” sono pochi:

It is important to see that, at the stage of the argument we have reached, neither God nor scripture can supply the deficiency of science… The species-difficulty arises because even if God has announced that all humans are created equal and commanded us to treat them as such, we still face the problem of defining the class…

Inoltre, Locke pretende su questo punto la massima chiarezza:

Locke says in his political philosophy that any basis for inequality must be evident, clear, and mmnifest…

Non essendoci a disposizione un essenza dobbiamo affidarci alle somiglianze:

Our heuristic now is emphatically… we have to start from the idea of a similarity among faculties that would be robust enough to sustain

Il criterio della razionalità sembra il più promettente ma non risolve certo tutti i problemi. Siamo in tanti ad avere una mente:

Unfortunately, however, imago del does not solve the following problem. On the one hand, non-human animals have minds, at least to the extent of having and acting on ideas and combinations of ideas (E: 2.11.5-7). Since they are "not bare Machins (as some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some Reason"…

Anche la ragione procede per gradi:

There are degrees of rationality, both among those we are pre-theoretically inclined to call humans and in a broader class of animals… On this gradual scale, who gets the benefit of equality?… There is, for example, the human fetus, which, Locke says, "dfers not much from the State of a Vegetable... lunacy, idiocy… Infants are a slightly different case… Locke's argument is that they are to be treated as beings destined for equality, though not our equals at present… And finally there are the familiar distinctions between the wise and the silly… there is a greater distance between some Men and others in this respect than between some Men and some Beasts" (E: 4.20.5), then how can we work with or justify any notion of basic equality?

La chiave di volta sono le “idee astratte”. L’uomo è colui che sa concepire idee astratte.

… In Book II of the Essay, he argued that what distinguishes humans from other animals is not their capacity to reason per se - for brute animals have some sort of reason - but rather the "power of Abstracting," the capacity to reason on the basis of general ideas… So, maybe this is Locke's equality-threshold… But he quickly indicates that many who bear the nominal essence of man lack the ability to abstract. Many of those we call idiots… Locke is not offering this capacity to abstract as the real essence of the species human. He is offering it as an interesting resemblance among all the beings

Noi possediamo questa capacità in vari gradi, per essere uomini ci basta rientrare nello spettro:

…for Locke the real resemblance on which basic equality rests the ability to form and work with abstract ideas must work rather like what modern political philosophers call a range property… A range property may be understood in terms of a region on a scale… we may use the binary property of being within the range… Relative to the interest driving the specification of the range property, the precise location of an entity on the scale is uninteresting. That it is Within the range is all we need to know…

In altre parole, è uomo solo chi è in grado di riconoscere i suoi doveri morali e l’esistenza di un Creatore:

No matter how inadequate the average human intellect is for a "universal, or perfect Comprehension," it yet secures their great Concernments, that they have Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties…

La teologia razionale di Locke non puo’ essere elusa in alcun modo per chi vuole proclamare il principio di eguaglianza:

The existence of God, Locke believes, is something that can be established by the unaided human intellect, whatever that intellect's other limitations…

Proclamare l’esistenza di Dio è garanzia di una presenza ragionevole, Dio infatti non puo’ essere semplicemente intuito:

Some argue, says Locke, that it is "suitable to the goodness of God" (E: 1.4.12) to imprint an idea of His being directly on our minds. But God has used a different strategy. He has conferred on those whom He intends to serve Him the rational power that is required for easy recognition of His existence… Anyone with the capacity for abstraction can reason to the existence of God… he has the minimal capacity to think of himself as a person… The fact that a being can get this far, intellectually, by whatever route, shows that he is a creature with a special moral relation to God.

Chi riconosce l’esistenza di Dio ha una dignità tale che ci obbliga a trattarlo come un pari:

… if I catch a human in full possession of his faculties, I know I should be careful how I deal with him. Because creatures capable of abstraction can be conceived as "all the servants of one Sovereign Master…

E’ chiaro che l’ateo non è in grado di afferrare questa base per l’eguaglianza tra gli uomini:

Someone in denial of or indifferent to the existence of God is not going to be able to come up with anything like the sort of basis for equality that Locke came up with… There is no reason for an atheist to recognize such a threshold, and there is no reason to believe that he could defend it if he did. The atheist has no basis in his philosophy for thinking that beings endowed with the capacity that Locke emphasizes are for that reason to be treated as special and sacred in the way Locke thought…

Ma Locke non è un autore qualsiasi, Locke è l’illuminismo e la modernità.

Così come non è possibile separare la teologia di Locke dal pensiero politico, non è nemmeno possibile separare la religione dal mondo moderno. La modernità ha una solida base cristiana e questo dovrebbe mettere in guardia chi propone per l’Europa radici diverse da quelle cristiane:

… Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them. The theological content cannot simply be bracketed off as a curiosity… Lockean equality is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine; it is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God…

COMMENTO PERSONALE

Un libro di spessore, forse anche troppo accademico per un lettore ordinario come me. Comunque un buon modo per dubitare di chi chiude ogni confronto storico pronunciando la parola magica “illuminismo” alla stregua di una palingenesi. Ci sono almeno due illuminismi: quello anglosassone (che non ha tagliato teste e a cui dobbiamo la rivoluzione industriale che ha arricchito l’intero pianeta) e quello francese che tra alcune cose buone ci ha lasciato in eredità Terrore, guerre napoleoniche, mito rivoluzionario ma soprattutto le “idee assassine” (per dirla con Robert Conquest) che hanno insanguinato il XX secolo.

Assicurazioni genetiche

Tra poco potremo leggere il nostro futuro nel genoma e la cosa non avrà solo aspetti positivi, con le potenzialità in arrivo molti di noi non potranno più permettersi un’assicurazione sanitaria. Di questi problemi si occupa Alexander Tabarrok nel suo “Gene Insurance” proponendo una soluzione abbastanza sorprendente:     

Now, thanks to advances in genetic research, medical practitioners are increasingly able to read your health future from a much more reliable source-your individual genetic code. The correlation between specific genes and some diseases is now well established…However, accurate genetic information also brings fear that health insurance could become unaffordable or even unavailable…

Probabilmente ci saranno discriminazioni sul lavoro, chi desidera assumere lavoratori malaticci destinati ad assentarsi spesso?  

… And because most individuals are insured through their employer, some people worry that knowledge of genetic traits might lead to employment discrimination…

Si potrebbe limitare l’accesso ai test da parte di certi soggetti ma si tratterebbe di una soluzione difficile da applicare, oppure si potrebbe ripartire i costi sulla comunità ma si tratterebbe sempre di soluzioni inefficienti: 

… Solutions that would maintain access to health insurance have been proposed, but most would almost inevitably lead to antiselection and a disruption of the underwriting process, with potentially dire impact on the solvency of insurers….

In casi del genere la soluzione efficiente esiste, si chiama assicurazione genetica.

Di cosa si tratta?  Semplice: ci si assicura contro l’eventualità di geni cattivi.

For a small premium cost, genetic insurance would insure against possessing a "bad" gene. Policies would be sold to all individuals before they underwent genetic testing… For example, if a woman is found to be carrying BRCAI (the gene related to a higher probability of breast cancer), she would be paid enough to purchase actuarially sound risk premiums… We are used to thinking of insuring against sickness; genetic insurance makes it equally possible to insure against a high probability of sickness….

Ci si puo’ assicurare contro un evento negativo ma ci si puo’ assicurare anche contro la probabilità di un evento negativo. Cosa lo vieta?

L’assicurazione genetica porta parecchi benefici: trattamenti mirati, trattamenti anticipati. Se poi è obbligatoria evitiamo dinamiche di selezione avversa.

All the benefits of genetic testing, such as improved treatment and health planning targeted to offset a genetic vulnerability, could be exploited… The single ground rule of mandatory purchase would avoid the problem of adverse selection.

Le possibilità di frode sono comunque ridotte:

… First, most people do not carry serious genetic defects, so the expected gain from concealing a positive result, and thereby cheating an insurer, is small… enforcement would be carried out through medical institutions rather than by individuals… In the near future, genetic testing is likely to be fully integrated into the medical process…

Ma il beneficio migliore riguarda il fatto di avere “geni cattivi” non vi impedirà più di stipulare un’assicurazione sanitaria (paga l’assicurazione, infatti): 

Insurance firms, under this proposal, would no longer have an incentive to drop customers with genetic defects… Individuals with serious genetic defects would buy their insurance individually (or as part of a special genetic group) rather than through their employer. Employers also would have far fewer incentives to genetically discriminate….

L’assicurazione genetica potrebbe avere un impatto negativo sulle polizze vita, ma il problema è risolvibile imponendo l’accesso alle informazioni:

Genetic insurance also could improve the life insurance market. Life insurance contracts usually are written for much longer terms than health insurance contracts… If insurance companies have access to information from genetic tests, many people will want to buy long-term life insurance before the tests are taken. Under this scenario, genetic tests will not cause great difficulties for the life insurance market. But if legislation makes genetic information "private," very serious adverse selection problems could occur…. Genetic information should be accessible by life insurance companies along with other types of health information…

L’assicurazione genetica dovrebbe avere costi modesti perché a guardar bene già oggi si paga un premio di rischio genetico, cosicché il costo totale delle polizze dovrebbe restare invariato. Se poi teniamo conto delle cure mirate e della prevenzione si stima un costo inferiore a quello presente.

… It seems likely that everyone who today purchases health insurance also will be able to purchase genetic insurance… Genetic insurance cannot raise the total cost of health insurance because today's health insurance already covers the possibility of possessing a defective gene, but it does so implicitly, and given today's technology, inefficiently… Separating the genetic and nongenetic health insurance markets cannot raise the total price of health insurance because the same product is being sold… In fact, the total price of health insurance will fall under this proposal. Individuals who gain early knowledge of a genetic defect can seek earlier treatment, which is usually cheaper and more effective…

Perché i pompieri sono pagati meno delle pop star?

Una lamentela ricorrente: “Il mondo in cui viviamo è un posto ingiusto, abbiamo messo su un sistema in cui un pompiere che salva delle vite umane guadagna mille volte meno di una fatua pop star che sculetta su un palco. Dobbiamo fare assolutamente qualcosa per sanare queste insopportabili distorsioni?”

Risponde Donald Bourdeaux dal suo Hypocrites & Half-Wits: A Daily Dose of Sanity from Cafe Hayek: 

Capisco che molti non sopportino bene il fatto che gente come Tom Brady o Jennifer Lawrence guadagnino molto di più di un pompiere o di un insegnante di scuola. Ma questo fastidio non riflette affatto l’incomprensione della gente per un sistema economico fallimentare bensì l’incapacità di capire come funziona un sistema economico di successo. E, purtroppo, riflette anche l’incapacità degli economisti di trasmettere al vasto pubblico i concetti base della loro disciplina.

Ci provo ancora facendoti una domanda retorica: preferisci vivere in un mondo in cui il numero di persone capaci di spegnere un incendio (o il numero di persone capaci di insegnare ad un bimbo della scuola) sia elevato e il numero di persone capace di esibirsi su un palco sia esiguo oppure in un mondo in cui i rapporti quantitativi siano invertiti? 

Sono sicuro che preferisci che abbondino le competenze su come di doma un incendio o su come si insegna ad un bambino piuttosto che le competenze su come si recita o su come si pratica una certa disciplina sportiva. E questo proprio perché salvare le vite domando un incendio o crescere un bambino nel modo migliore è molto più importante che intrattenere le persone nel loro tempo libero. Noi siamo estremamente fortunati di abitare in un posto in cui abbondano le persone in grado di salvare chi è minacciato da un incendio o di far crescere un bambino nel modo migliore, pazienza poi se chi sa recitare bene è solo una ristretta cerchia di persone.

Ebbene, la bassa paga di insegnanti e pompieri riflette solo questa felice realtà.

Ma non dobbiamo parlare solo di fortuna: sono le virtù del sistema stesso che realizzano questo miracolo convogliando più risorse laddove i bisogni sono più urgenti: The lower pay of fire fighters and school teachers simply reflects the happy reality

Il problema della carcerazione preventiva

Nel saggio “A Modest Proposal to Improve Judicial Incentives” l’economista Steven Landsburg affronta il delicato nodo della carcerazione preventiva.

C’è un incubo ricorrente che quando prende corpo guadagna le prime pagine di tutti i giornali:

… The accused criminal out on bail commits a grisly murder while awaiting trial…

Come affrontare il problema? In realtà di problemi ce ne sono almeno due. Il primo:  

… to decide where we stand regarding the trade-off between public safety and rights of the accused…

E il secondo:  

… once the legislature has agreed on a standard, is to induce judges to abide by it…

Il primo problema riflette un giudizio di valore che il parlamento sarà chiamato ad esprimere. Per il secondo problema la cosa più semplice è rendere il magistrato responsabile per i danni dell’imputato che ha deciso di scarcerare:  

Judges will begin to have the right incentives when we make them personally liable for criminal damage done by the defendants they release…

A questo punto i giudici lascerebbero tutti in galera a marcire, ci vuole un contro-incentivo: un premio al giudice per ogni imputato che rilascia. L’entità dei premi dipende dai giudizi di valore di cui al primo problema.   

Judges would be loath to release those defendants whom they believe to be the most dangerous. Unfortunately, they would be loath to release any defendants. So I propose a simultaneous countervailing incentive in the form of a cash bounty to the judge for each defendant he releases… Whether judges would release more or fewer defendants than they do today would depend on the size of the cash bounty, which could be adjusted to reflect the wishes of the legislature.

L’incentivo ha il pregio di spingere ad una discriminazione qualitativa tra imputati. 

The advantage of my proposal is not its effect on the number of defendants who are granted bail but its effect on which defendants are granted bail…

Un altro vantaggio della proposta: la chiarezza.  Quasi sempre lo standard prescelto libertà/sicurezza è oscuro. Ora puo’ riflettersi chiaramente nei premi.

… My proposal's second advantage is that it would encourage clarity. Through ongoing debate about adjustments to the cash bounty, legislators would be forced to take unambiguous stands on fundamental issues of safety versus freedom…

Obiezione: ma la questione è complessa per ridurla ad una somma di denaro. Risposta: ma già ora stiamo riducendo tutto ad una somma di denaro, solo che la manteniamo in un limbo oscuro.

… You might object that we should not trivialize a complex issue by asking legislators to commit themselves to a single number. I respond that they commit themselves to a single number already…

Effetto Peltzman

Regolamentazione in materia di sicurezza stradale-La regolamentazione e la ricchezza delle nazioni. Il rapporto tra la regolamentazione e il progresso economico (FREEdom) (Italian Edition) by Sam Peltzman

Ricordatevi questo numero: 3.5…

… 3,5%. Voglio che vi ricordiate questo numero perché ci ritornerò più avanti. Come potete vedere dal grafico, è la percentuale annua di diminuzione dei decessi per miglio stradale negli Stati Uniti dal 1925 al 1960, ossia dalle origini del mercato automobilistico…

La sicurezza stradale in America ha visto un significativo progresso nel tempo. I miglioramenti sono stati importanti.

A chi dare merito?

Sicuramente alla tecnica…

… una serie di piccoli miglioramenti su innumerevoli fronti, dalla progettazione automobilistica e stradale all’abilità dei conducenti, alle tecniche di pronto intervento medico e così via…

Ma anche alla regolamentazione…

… il Congresso ha varato il Motor Vehicle Safety Act nel 1966…

Le prime regole rimontano a diversi decenni fa…

… Oltre 30 anni fa, decisi di studiare da vicino l’esperienza relativa ai primi standard di sicurezza stradale, pochi anni dopo la loro introduzione. Era stata resa obbligatoria l’installazione di cinture di sicurezza e i piantoni dello sterzo e il parabrezza dovevano essere ad assorbimento d’urto, per proteggere i passeggeri nel caso in cui vi fossero stati sbattuti contro…

Ma forse il merito assegnato alle regole è immeritato, a volte del tutto usurpato.

Perché?

A causa dei cosiddetti comportamenti compensativi. Un esempio mper capire meglio la logica sottostante…

… quando si ha fretta si è tentati di guidare in modo più veloce o più aggressivo; questa tentazione ha un prezzo, cioè un rischio più elevato di fare un incidente e rimanere feriti, se non addirittura di perdere la vita. I dispositivi di sicurezza obbligatori riducono questo prezzo riducendo la gravità delle conseguenze a cui si potrebbe andare incontro in caso di incidente. Se prima dell’entrata in vigore della legge le conseguenze di un incidente erano sufficientemente gravi da scoraggiare una guida veloce o rischiosa, in seguito l’effetto deterrente era meno probabile…

Se noi riteniamo ottimale prendere una certa dose di rischio, qualora ci vincolino certi comportamenti, agiremo su quelli rimasti nella nostra sfera discrezionale.

Non che la riduzione del rischio complessivo sia incomprimibile, ma per ottenerla occorre costruire una gabbia di regole per cui a volte il gioco non vale più la candela.

Esempio: le cinture di sicurezza mi spingono ad andare più veloce per cui se voglio che l’obbligo delle cinture sia efficace devo introdurre anche dei limiti di velocità. E questi sono solo due anelli di una lunga catena.

Le regole sono come le ciliegie: l’una tira l’altra. Vederle in modo isolato non ha senso.

***

Ma dopo aver esposto la logica bisogna passare ai fatti: in che misura opera la compensazione?

Qui ogni regola fa storia a sé.

Spesso – in tema di circolazione - opera una compensazione “completa”…

… A mio avviso alcuni dati sembravano indicare una compensazione totale dei benefici. In particolare, la mortalità dei passeggeri per incidente stradale era effettivamente calata in modo significativo rispetto a quanto sarebbe stato ipotizzabile altrimenti. Tuttavia, questo dato è stato interamente compensato dall’aumento di incidenti e fatalità a carico di “non passeggeri”, ossia pedoni, ciclisti o motociclisti che non erano protetti dai dispositivi di sicurezza obbligatori sulle auto…

Siamo fortunati a possedere una prolifica e continua letteratura empirica nel campo della sicurezza automobilistica.

L’evidenza sembra confermare un ruolo importante della compensazione…

… Nel complesso, ritengo che questa letteratura supporti l’ipotesi del comportamento compensativo. Gli studi divergono a seconda che la compensazione sia totale, come nel mio caso, o riguardi reazioni specifiche; per esempio, se derivi dall’aumento della mortalità tra non passeggeri o da un cambiamento comportamentale più generale. In ogni caso, l’evidenza ricorrente è che l’incidenza della legge sulla sicurezza stradale sul tasso di mortalità è notevolmente inferiore rispetto a quella che sarebbe se le persone in auto si comportassero come i manichini del crash test…

Il caso delle cinture di sicurezza…

… Un esempio recente è rappresentato dal saggio di Alma Cohen e Liran Einav (2003), che tira le fila di questa ricerca trentennale. I due hanno studiato gli effetti delle leggi che impongono l’utilizzo delle cinture di sicurezza e ai loro occhi l’aumento della mortalità tra i non passeggeri non è significativo. Però, in linea con la maggior parte di questi studi, hanno constatato che l’incidenza reale di queste leggi sulla mortalità stradale è sostanzialmente inferiore a quella ipotizzabile in assenza di comportamenti compensativi. Le leggi hanno certamente incrementato l’utilizzo delle cinture di sicurezza, ma Einav e Cohen hanno calcolato che in assenza di comportamenti compensativi un simile incremento di utilizzo avrebbe dovuto salvare più del triplo delle vite di quanto in realtà è accaduto. È importante chiarire che questo risultato deludente non ha nulla a che fare con eventuali difetti tecnici dei dispositivi di sicurezza, i quali sembrano funzionare proprio come dovrebbero…

Hit Parade

C’è qualcosa di impudico nel tentativo di osservare la fruizione di un prodotto estetico, si entra un po’ troppo nell’intimo delle persone. Un approccio alternativo considera solo i fattori più esteriori. E’ l’approccio prediletto da Gabriel Rossman nel suo Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. L’oggetto dell’indagine è la musica commerciale.

Nella musica commerciale la diffusione conta più della produzione, lo si vede ad occhio nudo limitandosi ad un’analisi dei costi:

… Rihanna's label assembled a dream team of songwriters, producers, vocal coaches, and song mixers at a cost of about $78,000 per song. However, this considerable figure was dwarfed by the million dollars it cost to promote a song, about a third of which went to radio promotion….

In questo senso le radio FM sono ancora centrali, questo ancora oggi in presenza dei nuovi media.

… record labels feel it is worth spending in excess of $300,000 to get a song played on the radio. Or perhaps it is better to note that radio airplay is still this valuable…

Il libro tenta di districare il complesso rapporto tra canzoni e radio. La prospettiva è interessante:

… study popular culture not from the perspective of what it means, but how it was made…

Come si diffonde una musica commerciale presso il pubblico?

… This book's substantive concern of how songs become hits on the radio is part of a more general class of problems in social science known as the diffusion of innovation…

La curva di diffusione è lo strumento principale impiegato:

… At the most basic level, one can study diffusion simply by drawing a graph and looking at its shape to see whether it is more concave or more s-shaped…

FIGURA 1

FIGURA 2

Da cosa dipende la diffusione? Se è del tipo illustrato nella figura 1 da elementi esterni, se è del tipo illustrato nella figura 2 da un contagio interno:

… Contagious diffusion can only occur when someone who has experienced the innovation encounters someone who has not. Diffusion is slow early on because there are too few adopters who can promote the innovation… So you may be more likely to buy a book when it becomes a best seller because the book's popularity gives it more conspicuous placement in bookstores, even if you don't personally know a single individual who has read the book or have even observed strangers reading the book in public… the proportion of holdouts who adopt in each period is determined by how many actors are already using the innovation…

Se il motore della diffusione è esogeno (figura 1) il fatto che altri consumino il prodotto non incide sulla voglia di consumarlo.

… In contrast, in the first style a constant proportion of holdouts adopt in every period… For instance, the diffusion of tetracycline was mostly exogenous, the diffusion of hybrid corn almost perfectly endogenous, and the diffusion of postwar consumer appliances a compromise between the two patterns.

Un primo effetto della globalizzazione è quello di produrre sempre meno star di successo sempre maggiore, è l’”effetto rete”:

… through the wonders of electronic reproduction the total volume of fame does not diminish, but grows. That is, at each stage there are fewer successful artists, but those who are successful are so famous that the aggregate of fame increases as one moves downstream… massive inequality nicknamed the “superstar effect” which is made possible by the introduction of electronic reproduction…

Canzonette, mode, “effetto rete”… tutto sembra preludere ad una diffusione virale… e invece, sorpresa! La normale diffusione della musica commerciale è di tipo esogeno, quello illustrato dalla figure 1.

Rossman procede con dei “case study”:

… The central empirical concern of this book is how songs become popular on the radio, so a good place to start is by case study of a particularly successful song. In figure 2.1, I have graphed the diffusion curve for “Umbrella” by Rihanna… this concave growth pattern is consistent with an exogenous process and is entirely inconsistent with the s-shaped curves produced by an endogenous process. It is completely implausible to argue that radio stations decided to play this song because they were imitating each other, as its popularity simply happened too fast for stations to be attentive to each other… That we do not see an s-curve but rather a concave curve implies that this song did not spread across radio as an endogenous process of the kind so beloved by sociologists, popular science writers, and “viral marketing” consultants…  in general, pop songs have concave curves with the same shape that we see for “Umbrella… To explain how so many radio stations came to play “Umbrella,” we cannot resort to arguments about contagion or cascades… may be a trait of the song itself or it may be some actor who is influencing all of the radio stations…

La gente non vuole ascoltare la canzone famosa perché è famosa. Ma qual è allora la molla che fa scattare questa voglia? Vengono sondate due spiegazioni:

… explore two plausible explanations… The first is that stations have unsated demand for new music from pop stars and play songs as soon as they are available… The second is that the large companies who have dominated radio since deregulation coordinate the airplay of their properties…

Vediamo il caso della “voglia di Madonna…”. Ci sono problemi: la curva concava vale anche per i nuovi autori e poi ci sono i successi multipli, ovvero le canzoni tratte dallo stesso album che diventano successi in tempi diversi.

… We might imagine that when a beloved artist releases new music, radio stations would immediately jump at the chance to play it… There are two problems with this interpretation. First, unsated demand sounds plausible for explaining the diffusion of songs by established stars, but we would not imagine that radio stations were eagerly awaiting releases by hitherto unknown performers… contrary to the predictions of the unsated demand hypothesis, songs by unknown artists tend to diffuse by an exogenous pattern, though not as steeply or as widely as those by stars… A more severe problem for the unsated demand explanation is that it cannot explain why multiple songs from the same album become popular at different times… With few exceptions, radio stations began playing “Umbrella” in March, “Shut Up and Drive” in June, “Hate That I Love You” in late summer, and “Don't Stop the Music” within a few weeks of Christmas… If the reason that radio stations tend to start playing a song all at once was that they all gained access to it at the same time, this supposition fails to explain why most radio stations sat on “Hate That I Love You” and “Don't Stop the Music” for weeks or months after the songs became available and then suddenly began playing them during a very short time window…

C’è forse un “grande burattinaio” che governa dall’alto la diffusione presso le radio di certe canzoni?

… Since the simple fact of songs being made available to radio stations is not enough to explain the tremendous conformity of radio stations, we must look for an actor who coordinates radio. Who is it who decides which song is going to spread?…

Negli USA molti hanno fatto l’ipotesi della CCC.

… many people have a strong idea as to exactly who is the central actor who coordinates radio: Clear Channel Communications… The San Antonio-based company owns about one in ten of all commercial American radio stations…

Ma anche dividendo le radio in base alla proprietà, non si osserva alcun effetto virale, non esiste una correlazione particolarmente accentuata tra radio con-sorelle:

… To test this hypothesis, I plotted “Umbrella” again… but this time with a separate curve for each company with an appreciable number of Top 40 stations. As can be seen, the companies each show the same smooth exogenous diffusion curve. This result contrasts strikingly with what we would expect were decisions made at the chain level… no chain shows a step function… each chain shows a smooth diffusion… curves are essentially identical with only trivial and probably random discrepancies between the adoption times of stations in different chains… we can rule out the possibility of strong coordination at the chain

Riassuntino:

… we have seen that pop songs usually spread among radio stations in a way that is inconsistent with the stations imitating one another but is consistent with some central force influencing all of the stations. Because the same pattern applies to later singles on an album, the pattern cannot be explained by album release dates. Likewise, popular speculation attributes conformity among radio stations to corporate ownership, but we have strong evidence that corporate radio chains do not centrally coordinate the decision to add songs to radio playlists…

Ma forse il burattinaio risiede più in alto, non a livello delle radio ma a livello delle case discografiche.

… think of the long-running (but now defunct) trade journal Radio and Records and see the radio industry as part of a broader music industry that includes such actors as instrument manufacturers, live performance promoters and venues, and most important of all, the recorded music industry…

Il comportamento delle radio è decisiva per le case discografiche, controllarle in qualche modo è importantissimo:

… Consider that it is rare for a person to walk into WalMart or Best Buy or to log onto Amazon or iTunes and purchase music that they have never heard before… most of the time we buy music based on having been exposed to it through broadcast media, especially pop music radio… In short, airplay is a major determinant of sales… “There is no better guarantor of a band's success than a hit single on the radio luring listeners into record stores to buy the album.”… supposed impartiality of gatekeepers like radio stations makes their endorsements more valuable than advertising…

E’ chiaro che a questa stregua la casa discografica tenterà in tuttii modi di “ungere le ruote” presso le radio al fine di promuovere la sua hit. E’ il fenomeno che va sotto il nome di payola:

… The most basic practice is that record labels deluge radio programmers and other workers in the music industry with promotional copies of CDs in the hopes that they will be impressed by the music and give it airplay and other exposure… Ultimately though, the most direct way to get airplay is to bribe a radio station (or its employees) to play your music… The most direct form of payola is simply a quid pro quo where a station (or the station's staff) agrees to play a particular song in exchange for cash, intellectual property rights, drugs, or sex…

Molto spesso il fenomeno payola si risolve in un mero spreco di risorse: quando tutti lo attuano, nessuno ne beneficia. Per essere chiari: se tutte le case discografiche inviano campioni gratuiti dei dischi al DJ, quest’ultimo non si sentirà in dovere di favorire nessuno vanificando i doni.

Questo spiega anche il ciclo payola: parte la corruzione che via via diventa un puro spreco di risorse, a questo punto il sistema discografico fa scoppiare lo scandalo e comincia la pulizia, dopo qualche tempo a corruzione zero si ricomincia.

… The most fundamental question is why the payola market continually reestablishes itself and who benefits from the system… It makes sense for stations to accept this payola if they expect that the value of the bribe is greater than the loss of advertising… However, when payola is an accepted business practice it can be an implicit part of compensation which is fungible with direct station expenditures, and may even be preferable for management as it evades taxes… In any case, it's unlikely that a radio station would be asked to take a bribe to play a really unappealing record, since a reasonable record label wouldn't want to waste money promoting music that they know to be terrible… A bidding war for airplay breaks out and this eventually leads to rent dissipation, with the cost of payola equaling the marginal benefit of airplay and this cost being so high that nearly all profits from the recording industry are captured by broadcasting. At this point the volume of the illicit payola market attracts the interest of the state and/or the recording industry grows frustrated and attempts collective action. Whether by state or by trade group, such a response temporarily suppresses payola and brings the system full circle…

Payola inizia come corruzione delle case discografiche e termina come ricatto delle radio: stare nel sistema non ti dà vantaggi ma stare fuori è la morte certa. Se tutti partecipano gli unici beneficiati sono i DJ: liberi di scegliere secondo il loro gusto e di incassare esentasse:

… Thus, payola is something that begins as a bribe paid by labels and artists, but can quickly end up as extortion demanded by broadcasters. A particular record company can benefit tremendously if it provides payola and its rivals do not… However, once payola becomes universal all the record companies pay a high price and have no net promotion advantage for doing so. This incentive structure is the familiar prisoner's dilemma, where an actor's best outcome is to cheat while its partner behaves, followed by them both behaving, followed by them both cheating, and worst of all is for the actor to behave while its partner cheats… The only solution to the prisoner's dilemma is collective action over repeated interaction, but even this is tenuous…

Le case discografiche potrebbero fare cartello e non pagare. Ma…

… Unfortunately for musicians and the record industry, cartels are extremely vulnerable to cheating…

COMMENTO PERSONALE

A questo punto sappiamo che il modello di diffusione “esogeno” in alcuni momenti puo’ essere spiegato da payola ma in altri momenti no: per esempio quando payola non c’è, oppure quando è talmente diffusa da neutralizzare di fatto l’azione corruttrice delle case discografiche. Eppure la curva esogena è un fatto costante, a cosa attribuirla? Se escludiamo il contagio e la corruzione dall’alto non ci resta che dare un peso alla bellezza oggettiva del prodotto commerciale. I DJ e il pubblico la percepisce e la desidera, da qui popolarità e successo.

La fabbrica delle idee

L’argomento che affronta Michael Kremer nel suo saggio “Patent Buyouts” è centrale:

… Economic growth ultimately depends on the production of new ideas, but competitive markets do not provide appropriate incentives for the production of ideas…

Ci si è provato in tutti i modi:

… Historically, societies have used a wide variety of mechanisms to encourage production of ideas. Some, such as patents and copyrights, provide inventors with monopolies over goods produced using their ideas. Others, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the synthetic fuels program, directly subsidize research…

Il sistema dei brevetti e dei diritti d’autore è altamente distorsivo:

… Patents and copyrights create insufficient incentives for original research because inventors cannot fully capture consumer surplus or spillovers of their ideas to other researchers. Patents and copyrights also create static distortions from monopoly pricing and encourage socially wasteful expenditures on reverse engineering to invent around patents…

Anche la ricerca sussidiata dallo stato non funziona:

… before research is conducted, the government may not know the costs and expected benefits of research, and it may not even be able to conceive of some inventions. Allowing government officials wide discretion to set payments to inventors ex post may lead to rent seeking and to expropriation of investors after their research costs are sunk…

Un suggerimento puo’ venirci dalla storia. Avete presente la sorte del dagherrotipo?

… In 1839, the government of France combined elements of the patent system and of direct government support of research by purchasing the patent for daguerreotype photography and placing the technique in the public domain. After the patent was bought out, daguerreotype photography was rapidly adopted worldwide and was subject to myriad technical improvements….

Purtroppo, l’acquisto governativo dei brevetti ha un inconveniente: quanto pagare. E qui viene avanzata una proposta:

… government would offer to buy out patents at this private value times a fixed markup that would roughly cover the difference between the social and private values of inventions. Inventors could decide whether to sell or retain their patents… However, in order to provide auction participants with an incentive to truthfully reveal their valuations, the government would randomly select a few patents that would be sold to the highest bidder. Encouraging innovation through such a mechanism would require more discretion by government officials than the current patent system but substantially less discretion than that exercised by, say, the National Institutes of Health…

Ci sono dei precedenti su cui poter lavorare per una messa a punto del meccanismo al fine di eliminare l’aspetto confiscatorio:

… Macfie (1869), a member of the British Parliament in the nineteenth century, proposed replacing the patent system with a reward system. In this century, Polanyi (1943) suggested replacing patents with rewards based on ex-post estimates of the value of inventions. Guell and Fischbaum (1995) suggest that the government use its power of eminent domain to purchase pharmaceutical patents. They propose that judges determine the buyout price. One problem with allowing broad administrative discretion over the patent buyout price is that this may lead to purchases at confiscatory prices and thus reduce incentives for innovation. Allowing broad discretion may also lead to wasteful expenditures on rent seeking… Patent buyouts would thus supplement, rather than replace, the existing patent system. Inventors would receive a markup over the private value of the patents to bring incentives for invention closer to the social value…

Problemi:

… One problem with a fixed reward is that people could claim rewards for trivial inventions… but perhaps the chief problem with patent buyouts is that they are potentially vulnerable to collusion, because inventors could bribe auction participants to submit high bids…

Come porre rimedio alle collusioni? Ci sono alcuni modi un po’ scontati:

… The government could make collusion more difficult using standard procedures such as requiring bids to be sealed, punishing companies and individuals found guilty of collusion, and rewarding whistle-blowers…

Poi ci sono alcuni modi più legati alla struttura dell’asta. Per esempio quello di considerare solo la terza offerta più alta:

… The government would base the price it offers the inventor on the third highest bid. The original patent holder would therefore have to bribe three companies instead of one to ensure a substantial increase in the buyout price…

Oppure di trasformare il governo in un broker speculativo quando ha sentore di collusione:

… suppose that, based on the other bids and any knowledge of the industry, the government's best estimate of the patent's value was it. If a bidder offered it + x and the agency suspected collusion," the government could offer to buy out the patent at it + $1 and then require the suspected colluding bidder to purchase the patent at its bid of it + x. The government would make a profit of x - 1 from the attempted collusion…

Ci sono poi metodi legati alla trasparenza delle società partecipanti:

… The government could develop lists of suspect bidders by checking whether winning bidders made money… bidders would have to provide information on any ties they had with the inventor…

Si possono istituire dei costi fissi:

… Bidders could be required to pay a licensing fee or deposit allowing them to participate in a number of auctions. This would make it unprofitable for patent holders to set up dummy companies…

Naturalmente sarebbe proibito il riacquisto a cura dell’inventore:

…  inventors would be prohibited from buying back the patent from the winning bidder or making other payments to bidders…

Ci sono poi delle modalità per stabilire un tetto alle offerte governative.

Si consideri comunque che esistono molte istituzioni minacciate dalla collusione e invece immuni dal fenomeno, si pensi alla peer-review:

… it is also important to remember that many institutions that are theoretically vulnerable to collusion operate relatively well. For example, peer review is highly vulnerable to collusion, yet the NSF and NIH seem relatively effective…

E poi il livello ottimale di collusione oltre il quale la soluzione proposta perderebbe di efficienza non è pari a zero.

… Even if collusion raises patent prices above their social value, the social value of inventions may be approximated better by the collusive price than by the existing patent system…

La soluzione dell’asta comunque non è universale, bisognerà studiare i vari casi specifici per valutare l’esistenza di mercati sufficientemente “densi” da rendere anonima l’emersione di un prezzo:

… The auction mechanism described in this chapter may be appropriate for many pharmaceuticals, but it would not be appropriate in industries where markets are too thin for auctions or patents are not an effective means of protecting inventions. In such industries, the government could simply offer to buy out patents for an amount equal to postbuyout sales times an administratively determined estimate of the average consumer surplus per unit of the good consumed…