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72. The Mandate to Innovate
- Author:
- Christina Monaco
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- PRISM
- Institution:
- Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), National Defense University
- Abstract:
- Delivering decision advantage to a policymaker or situational awareness to a warfighter is becoming a more competitive challenge. As geospatial and AAA technologies increase in capability and availability—both within the United States and allied GEOINT enterprise as well as for our adversaries—the complexity of that mission increases. Empowering rapid experimentation and innovation, adapting new business models (particularly those that have proven successful to the business world), and applying the breadth of the means availability to us to acquire new capabilities are ways for us to continuously replenish the nation's GEOINT advantage.
- Topic:
- Intelligence, Science and Technology, Military Strategy, and Innovation
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
73. Learning and Innovation: Jordan at the "Crossroads of Armageddon"
- Author:
- Beth Ellen Cole
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- PRISM
- Institution:
- Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), National Defense University
- Abstract:
- A recurring feature of the past few decades is the presence of the nation’s three principal national security institutions (the 3Ds)—Department of State (DOS), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and Department of Defense (DOD)—operating in complex environments abroad marked by conflict, crisis, and state fragility. This paradigm, dubbed the “new normal” by many, begs a few questions. What are we learning from these critical missions undertaken in pursuit of national security? Are we adjusting our strategies to maximize the prospects for prevention of conflict based on that learning? Is innovation occurring that enables us to work better together to address challenges in these environments? Of keen interest is what the 3D did to address the unique challenges in Jordan, and how. Understanding both the “what” and the “how” might reveal if we are learning and innovating.
- Topic:
- Security, Defense Policy, Military Strategy, Governance, and Innovation
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
74. The Machine Beneath: Implications of Artificial Intelligence in Strategic Decisionmaking
- Author:
- Matthew Price, Stephen Walker, and Will Wiley
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- PRISM
- Institution:
- Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), National Defense University
- Abstract:
- Despite the risks posed by the adaptation of AI to military affairs, the United States must seek to be at the forefront of this technology. It is unthinkable that America will cede this new territory to our competitors, such as China and Russia, who are aggressively pursuing it. Even if the United States decided to opt out of this arms race, it would have little effect, as the technologies described in this paper are inherently dual use, and the private sector around the globe will pursue them with abandon. Ethicists, weapon engineers, and military leaders are already hard at work on the challenges associated with designing and deploying battlefield lethal autonomous weapons systems. With this article, the authors hope to begin a new conversation, highlighting and differentiating the risks posed by employing strategic AI in military decisionmaking, particularly as the pace of warfare accelerates.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Military Strategy, Military Affairs, Innovation, and Artificial Intelligence
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
75. US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model
- Author:
- William Lozonick, Matt Hopkins, Ken Jacobson, Mustafa Erdem Sakinç, and Öner Tulum
- Publication Date:
- 07-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
- Abstract:
- Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades. In 1985 US Representative Henry Waxman, chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, accused the pharmaceutical industry of “gouging the American public” with “outrageous” price increases, driven by “greed on a massive scale.” Even in the wake of the many Congressional inquiries that have taken place since the 1980s, including one inspired by the extortionate prices that Gilead Sciences has placed on its Hepatitis-C drugs Sovaldi since 2013 and Harvoni since 2014, the US government has not seen fit to regulate drug prices. UK Prescription Price Regulation Scheme data for 1996 through 2010 show that, while drug prices in other advanced nations were close to the UK’s regulated prices, those in the United States were between 74 percent and 181 percent higher. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has produced abundant evidence that US drug prices are by far the highest in the world. The US pharmaceutical industry’s invariable response to demands for price regulation has been that it will kill innovation. US drug companies claim that they need higher prices than those that prevail elsewhere so that the extra profits can be used to augment R&D spending. The result, they contend, is more drug innovation that benefits the United States, and indeed the whole world. It is a compelling argument, until one looks at how major US pharmaceutical companies actually use the profits that high drug prices generate. In the name of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV), pharmaceutical companies allocate the profits generated from high drug prices to massive repurchases, or buybacks, of their own corporate stock for the sole purpose of giving manipulative boosts to their stock prices. Incentivizing these buybacks is stock-based compensation that rewards senior executives for stock-price “performance.” Like no other sector, the pharmaceutical industry puts a spotlight on how the political economy of science is a matter of life and death. In this paper, we invoke “the theory of innovative enterprise” to explain how and why high drug prices restrict access to medicines and undermine medical innovation. An innovative enterprise seeks to develop a high-quality product that it can sell to the largest possible market at the most affordable price. In sharp contrast, the MSV-obsessed companies that dominate the US drug industry have become monopolies that restrict output and raise price. These companies need to be regulated.
- Topic:
- Finance, Business, Drugs, Innovation, Pharmaceuticals, and Stock Markets
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
76. Innovative Enterprise or Sweatshop Economics? In Search of Foundations of Economic Analysis
- Author:
- William Lazonick
- Publication Date:
- 10-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
- Abstract:
- By integrating the history of industrial development in Britain and the United States with the ideas of leading economic thinkers, this essay demonstrates the absurdity of perfect competition as the ideal of economic efficiency. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter asserts: “perfect competition is not only impossible but inferior, and has no title to being set up as a model of ideal efficiency.” For neoclassical economists, the large corporation is a “market imperfection” that, compared with “perfect competition,” should result in higher product prices and lower industry output. Yet business history reveals the capability of the most productive enterprises to generate massive quantities of output at low costs to attain large market shares with buyers benefiting from low prices even as employees receive higher pay and shareholders ample dividends. By integrating the history of industrial development in Britain and the United States with the ideas of leading economic thinkers, this essay demonstrates the absurdity of perfect competition as the ideal of economic efficiency. Indeed, I show that, in their desire to make the market rather than the firm the main arbiter of resource allocation, neoclassical economists have enshrined the sweatshop as the foundation of their analysis, with profoundly negative consequences for understanding how a modern economy actually operates and performs. In doing so, neoclassical economists ignore not only the economic history of capitalism but also the intellectual history of their own discipline. I conduct a journey through two hundred years of economic thought – from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) to Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand (1977) – to derive analytical foundations for a theory of innovative enterprise that can explain and explore firm- level sources of productivity growth in the economy. What then do more sophisticated theories of the firm rooted in the neoclassical tradition have to offer? In a section of this essay that I call (borrowing a phrase from Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means) “Economic Theory for ‘an Era of Corporate Plundering’,” I outline the shortcomings of Williamsonian transaction-cost theory and Jensenian agency theory for analyzing the role of the business corporation in the operation and performance of the economy. From the perspective of the theory of innovative enterprise, I demonstrate how the methodology of constrained optimization trivializes the business enterprise while the ideology that companies should be run to maximize shareholder value legitimizes financial predators, many senior corporate executives among them, in the looting of the industrial corporation. The “era of corporate plundering” since the mid-1980s has contributed to extreme concentration of income among the richest households and the erosion of middle- class employment opportunities. Finally, I call for a transformation of economic thinking so that the innovative enterprise is at the center of economic analysis. The theory of innovative enterprise exposes as costly intellectual failures “perfect competition” as the ideal of economic efficiency, “constrained optimization” as the prime tool of economic analysis, and “maximizing shareholder value” as the ideology of superior corporate governance. The theory of innovative enterprise provides, moreover, a clear and compelling rationale for sharing the gains of business enterprise among stakeholders in the broader community, in conjunction with government policies that seek to support sustainable prosperity, characterized by stable and equitable economic growth.
- Topic:
- Economics, Business, Economic Growth, Innovation, and Industry
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
77. Severing the Innovation-Inequality Link: Distribution Sensitive Science, Technology and Innovation Policies in Developed Nations
- Author:
- Amos Zehavi and Dan Breznitz
- Publication Date:
- 04-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
- Abstract:
- Innovation is essential to economic growth. However, it appears that the ways in which we pursue innovation policies have aggravated inequality. Inequality is an increasingly contentious political issue in both wealthy and emerging economies. Yet, it is becoming clear that use of traditional state instruments to alleviate inequality by redistributive means, is no longer sufficient. For those reasons, in this paper we consider other state instruments that are rarely associated with distributive goals. Specifically, we inquire whether we can successfully devise and employ Distributive-Sensitive Science and Technology and Innovation Policies focused on disadvantaged groups of users and consumers of technology. Following an exploratory theoretical approach, the paper first develop four types of such programs, and then utilize a comparative approach to analyze existing programs that fit into these categories, first, in Israel, and then, in the United State, Germany, and Sweden. We conclude by arguing that although these programs are currently driven primarily by economic efficiency concerns and not by distributive ones, they show the promise of our approach of utilizing innovation policy to reach social policy goals.
- Topic:
- Development, Environment, Science and Technology, Inequality, Economic Growth, and Innovation
- Political Geography:
- Israel, Germany, Sweden, and United States of America
78. The New York Times and American Tax Policy: Representing Citizens or Echoing Elites?
- Author:
- Daniel Chomsky
- Publication Date:
- 04-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
- Abstract:
- A recent New York Times article observed that Americans want action to address inequality. 2016 presidential candidates from both parties also acknowledge that inequality is a pressing concern. But not one of the candidates has proposed to do anything meaningful about it, sharing wealthy Americans’ (understandable) opposition to any solution (Scheiber 2015). Perhaps nothing has been done because there is nothing to do about it. Some treat inequality as an inevitable or intractable feature of the global economy, or at least impossible to alter at acceptable cost (Cowen 2013). But inequality may be subject to political circumstances, and public policies including progressive taxes might reduce it without adversely affecting economic growth (Diamond and Saez 2011, Piketty 2014). It may be that Americans are just unwilling to support policies that would reduce inequality. Progressive taxation and other policies may reduce inequality. But policy reflects public preferences (Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 2002), and the American people just hate taxes. Martin Gilens (2012) effectively demonstrated that policy makers favor the wealthy over the majority when opinions diverge. Yet he accepted that the Bush tax cuts in the early 2000s reflected broad consensus opinion. Public opposition to taxes is seen as so powerful that even observers seeking programs to promote economic equality often abandon progressive taxes as a remedy (Kenworthy 2013).
- Topic:
- Race, Science and Technology, History, Culture, Ethics, Philosophy, Tax Systems, and Innovation
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
79. Attack of the Drones: Ethical, Legal and Strategic Implications of UAV Use
- Author:
- Lena Simone Andrews
- Publication Date:
- 02-2013
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- MIT Center for International Studies
- Abstract:
- The United States has dramatically increased the development, acquisition, and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). As these systems have grown, a chorus of skeptics has raised questions about the tactical, ethical, and strategic implications of this technology.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Military Strategy, Drones, and Innovation
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America