A Blended Economic System

An area of concern I have regarding any given economic system pertains to its ability to foster technological progress. I believe capitalism excels in this regard, while I remain more than a little skeptical about the capacity of alternative systems, particularly those leaning toward the socialist end of the spectrum.

However, I wonder about a blended system, perhaps not so dissimilar to our current system. What if we reduced the protected amount of time that patents are in place, and then provided some functionality within our government to socialize those technological advances. It seems as though a system like this would make the benefits more available to society as a whole, and perhaps even push private companies to push technological advancement even more quickly, since their patents would run out sooner and they would need to continue to innovate.

As an example, I believe it’s fairly inevitable soon that we will have fully automated farms, where bots and algorithms handle everything from dictating what gets grown and when, to the planting, land management, and harvesting. There is of course great incentive for private enterprise to chase the technology to achieve this, but the savings that such a system would provide to the end customer are a bit nebulous. Will the cost savings be passed onto the consumer? (Probably not).

But what if we reduced the amount that patents are applicable for, and then created some way as a society to fund the development of that known technology, perhaps by voting on what we want to build and utilize as a public good. We would then tax accordingly to fund those things. Perhaps even some of those goods could be distributed to citizens for free (I could envision a certain amount of fruits and vegetables grown for the public good, freely available to anyone).

Of course, many would argue that even after patents run out, the free market would foster competition on that technology, and do just fine at reducing the cost on those goods produced. And perhaps they’re right. However, perhaps there are things that the market wouldn’t optimize, or that we would want to provide for free or below market value.