Book Review: Les brevets de la croissance

"Statistician: A man who believes figures don’t lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won’t stand up either." - Evan Esar

Marc Chauchard, a counselor in industrial property in France, has written Les Brevets de la croissance ou IPness = HAPPYness for the "Collection Survey," described as a vehicle for experts and practitioners connected with multifarious fields of human activity. With a group of professionals from several disciplines to assist him, he sets out to quantify the value of industrial property to an entire national economy.

Mr. Chauchard is aware of the pitfalls in tracing a quantifiable statistical connection between the number of patents affecting French domestic productivity, and the growth of French Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as well as in evaluating the general impact of innovation on French society. He rightly raises the problem of definitions—such as the different components used to calculate national productivity, and the different criteria for patentability in various countries. While offering indications regarding other developed countries, he limits the scope of his overall study to France.

It is not possible to outline Mr. Chauchard’s entire methodology here. But he explains and presents a series of detailed calculations and tables, using such data as annual numbers of patent applications (including certificates for utility models) affecting French domestic productivity, the sums spent on research and development in France with a base year of 1995, and official figures of French domestic productivity also with a base year of 1995.

The devil is not entirely in the details, as Mr. Chauchard realizes, but also in the interpretation of data. Giving an example, he specifically points out that a coefficient of positive co-relation of 97 percent between data on patent applications and GDP in a given period does not mean that patent applications directly contribute 97 percent to GDP growth: his conclusion that the two phenomena that are co-related cannot be interpreted exclusively as cause and effect is...