Suchergebnisse

It was very early in the morning. She was looking at the yard from behind a window. The tree was in full bloom. She removed a lock of white hair from her forehead. It was the forty-first time that she was watching the tree blossom. She was standing in front of the window in her thick white nightgown with long sleeves and closed collar. She was a bit cold. The wind made the blossoms shiver. It seemed that the flowers never felt cold. The woman recalled the very first time she watched them.She has awakened to the sound of her husband's voice, "Wake up! Come and see! The tree has blossomed!" They have stood watching together at the window. Her long white nightgown was sleeveless and thin, with lace around its open collar. She wasn't cold, or perhaps it was her sense of decency that made her forget the cold.

Using a vertical differentiation model of endogenous growth with stochastic R&D activity, we characterise the optimal patent lifetime a government would set in order to maximise economic growth. We show that a finite patent lifetime does exist and is unique provided that the expected rate of return from R&D is sufficiently large. Additionally, we analyse the impact of the level of competition in the R&D sector, the interest rate, the monopoly profit and the productivity parameter of research technology on this optimal patent lifetime.

Freedom is one of the central values in political and moral philosophy. A number of theorists hold that freedom (or, relatedly, opportunity) should either be the only or at least one of the central distribuenda in our theories of distributive justice. Moreover, many follow Mill and hold that a concern for personal freedom should guide, and limit, how paternalist public policy can be. For the most part, theorists have focussed on a person's freedom at one specific point in time but have failed to give proper attention to freedom across time. Given that we care about personal freedom now, we have reason to care about future freedom too. But what kind of distribution of freedom across a person's lifetime should we promote as a matter of legislation and public policy? I argue that none of the candidate principles for the distribution of freedom across time is plausible. Neither a starting gate view, nor a maximisation nor a sufficientarian view is satisfactory, because none adequately reflects our various reasons to value freedom. I show that this result presents a tough challenge for theories of distributive justice and paternalism that set great store by personal freedom.