Perhaps these patent deals that are putting a price on inventions (particularly at the billion dollar valuation level) will encourage companies to spend _more_ on R&D - hiring more highly skilled workers - because they can create relevant patents more cheaply than they can buy them.
The suggestion that abolishing patents will cause companies to spend that money hiring people instead is not intuitively obvious to me. It sounds a lot like trickle-down economics, which may be intellectually appealing but doesn't seem to have worked out as originally expected.
The suggestion that abolishing patents will cause companies to spend that money hiring people instead is not intuitively obvious to me. It sounds a lot like trickle-down economics, which may be intellectually appealing but doesn't seem to have worked out as originally expected.