Search the archive.

These same voices often claim that doubling American production is a moral imperative, not simply a market opportunity. They say people will go hungry if U.S. farmers don’t respond (see sidebar). In some cases, they imply or even say outright that the collateral damage to natural resources, the environment, human health and ecosystems that would result from meeting this moral imperative would be regrettable but unavoidable. Finally, they argue that “modern” farming systems that rely heavily on biotechnology, fertilizers and chemicals are the only way U.S. farmers can meet this challenge, and that hewing to more agro-ecological methods of producing agricultural bounty will put countless people at risk of hunger and malnutrition.

Many farmers sincerely believe this. Others use this scenario more cynically to pursue political or business objectives. In either case, the “moral imperative” to feed the world has become an important rationale for maintaining the status quo in U.S. farm policy. It has also been deployed to deflect attention from the damage that “modern” agriculture does to the environment and human health, and to discredit calls for reform.

However, current research does not yet indicate a clear link between climate change, food insecurity and conflict, except perhaps where rapidly deteriorating water availability cuts across existing tensions and weak institutions. But a series of interlinked problems – changing global patterns of consumption of energy and scarce resources, increasing demands for food imports (which draw on land, water, and energy inputs) can create pressure on fragile situations.

Food security – and food prices – are a highly political issue, being a very immediate and visible source of popular welfare or popular uncertainty. But their link to conflict (and the wider links between climate change and conflict) is indirect rather than direct.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that there is little scholarly merit in the notion that a short-term reduction in access to food increases the probability that conflict will break out. This is because to start or participate in violent conflict requires people to have both the means and the will. Most people on the brink of starvation are not in the position to resort to violence, whether against the government or other social groups. In fact, the urban middle classes tend to be the most likely to protest against rises in food prices, since they often have the best opportunities, the most energy, and the best skills to coordinate and participate in protests.

Accordingly, there is a widespread misapprehension that social unrest in periods of high food prices relates primarily to food shortages. In reality, the sources of discontent are considerably more complex – linked to political structures, land ownership, corruption, the desire for democratic reforms and general economic problems – where the price of food is seen in the context of general increases in the cost of living. Research has shown that while the international media have a tendency to seek simple resource-related explanations – such as drought or famine – for conflicts in the Global South, debates in the local media are permeated by more complex political relationships.

If you ingest a lot of mainstream media, you are forgiven for wondering at this point “What about bees?” For example Wired ran an article discussing the plight of America’s honeybees: the collapsed colonies and dying hives, threatening pollination services to crops and the future of a much-beloved insect (Keim, 2014). However, Wired also warned that many wild pollinators are also threatened including thousands of species including bees and butterflies and moths. An ecologist warns that nearly 90% of the world’s flowering species require insects or other animals for pollination (Keim, 2014). After all there is a common quote (Often misattributed to Einstein of all people!) “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” This greatly overstates the value of pollinators for human food production. The total loss in agricultural production for a loss of all animal pollinators is only 3–8% (Aizen et al., 2009). Though this percentage is growing, not all animal pollinators are bees. Therefore, the complete loss of bees, although extremely unfortunate, would not be an agricultural disaster of the magnitude focused on in this book.

But you needn't be. The narrative that honeybees, which are actually not even native to North America, Europe or Australia, face mortal danger and will take us down with them has been advanced by environmental groups for years and echoed in media, casual blogs and mainstream science sites. This twist on the news is so pervasive that it’s often accepted without question: bee populations are rapidly declining as a result of pesticide use, particularly the use of neonics, and the crucial pollinators could be edging towards extinction, plunging our entire food system into chaos. "Declining honeybee population could spell trouble for some crops," blared a headline on Fox News last year. "Death and Extinction of the Bees," was the banner claim on the activist Centre for Research on Globalization. "Honey Bees in a Struggle for Survival," claimed a guest columnist writing earlier this month for a Tennessee newspaper. The only problem is that it isn’t true. Myth of Honeybee decline Honeybee populations haven’t “crashed” in the United States or elsewhere. Honeybees are not going "extinct." Crops are not "in trouble." Source: USDA annual report on honey-producing colonies in the U.S. USDA publishes its final statistics one year after its preliminary estimates. USDA also collects a census, taken every five years in December, of honey-producing and non-honey-producing colonies. While not as valuable for tracking annual numbers, the census confirms the upward trend in managed bee colonies, with a 13.1% increase between 2007 and 2012. The overall population of honeybees in the US, Canada and Europe has held steady or increased slightly since the widespread adoption of neonics in the 1990s. The US honeybee population hit a 22-year high in 2016, according to the figures released by the USDA before dipping slightly last year, and globally are at an all-time high.

A potential new antibiotic is highly effective against “superbugs” such as MRSA that are resistant to many existing antibiotics, and kills bacteria in an unusual way that means it will be extremely difficult for resistance to evolve.

The antibiotic, clovibactin, was discovered in a rare bacterium isolated from sandy soil collected in North Carolina. Markus Weingarth at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues have been studying how it works, with promising results. “The activity is even better than for the gold standard, vancomycin,” he says.

Antibiotic-resistant infections kill at least 700,000 people worldwide a year right now, according to an exhaustive report commissioned by the UK in 2014, and without any substantial medical breakthroughs or policy changes that slow down resistance, they may claim some 10 million deaths annually by 2050 — eclipsing cancer in general as a leading cause. These deaths largely won’t come from pan-resistant infections, just tougher ones. A preventable death there, a preventable death here. Leaving that aside, antibiotics, along with proper sanitation and nutrition, gird our entire way of living. Most every invasive surgery, pregnancy, organ transplant and chemotherapy session we go through will become riskier. Other diseases like HIV, malaria or influenza will become deadlier, since bacteria often exploit the opening in our immune system they leave behind. And already precarious populations like those living with cystic fibrosis, prisoners, and the poor will lose years off their lives. For all the warranted gloom, though, Farewell does think there are reasons to be hopeful. “I don’t think we are doing enough, but the scientific community along with many governmental and private foundations are very actively involved in finding not only new antibiotics, but new solutions to this problem,” she said. There’s been a noticeable change in attitude and increased urgency surrounding antibiotic resistance, she said, one that she hadn’t seen even five years ago, let alone twenty. Until recently, that attitude change could be seen from places as high up as the U.S. federal government. In 2014, former President Obama issued an executive order aimed at addressing antibiotic resistance, the first real acknowledgement of the problem from an administration, devoting funding and outlining a national action for combatting resistance. Through its federal agencies, the administration pushed to reduce antibiotic use on farms and encouraged doctors to stop using them in excess. “There has been a lot of work done the last couple of years, much of it spurned by [Obama’s] National Action Plan,” said Dr. David Hyun, a senior officer for Pew Charitable Trusts’ Antibiotic Resistance Project. The CDC, in particular, has used its funding to open up regional labs that allow them to better detect and respond to antibiotic-resistant outbreaks like the Nevada case, he said. They ultimately hope to create an expansive surveillance system that can easily keep track of resistance rates on a national, state and regional level. A parallel system also exists for monitoring resistance in the food chain, shepherded by the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, it was this sort of cooperation between national and local health agencies that enabled Nevada doctors to stop the worst from happening, said Dr. Lei Chen. The swift identification of a possible CRE strain by the hospital, coupled with the woman’s medical history, led to a precautionary quarantine, while also prompting Chen’s public health department and eventually the CDC into action. And it may help prevent future cases from spilling into the public. According to Chen, the CDC has allocated funding this year to all of Nevada’s state public health departments so they can better detect CRE and other dangerous resistant strains. Under the Trump administration, there’s no telling how these small victories will hold up or whether they will advance. All references to antibiotics once found on the Whitehouse.gov site have been removed, including a link to the Obama administration’s national action plan, and the fact that they’re already tried to bar USDA scientists from discussing their work with the public while stripping funding from other public health agencies isn’t encouraging. Even with the best public policy, however, there’s no clear light at the end of the tunnel. Antibiotic resistance has gradually been worsening, even within the last 15 to 20 years, when superbugs like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) first became widely known, said Hyun. The effort needed to develop new drugs has been in short supply, hamstrung by pharmaceutical companies’ inability to recoup the costs of bringing new antibiotics to market. That’s because, unlike the latest heart medication, any new antibiotics will have to be treated like the last drops of water during a drought, used as little as possible — the exact opposite way to make money off a new product. Yet, much like climate change, the financial toll of not doing anything will total in the trillions years down the road. And it already numbers in the billions now, according to the CDC. Of course, we need bacteria to survive. And most need or pay no mind to us in return. Even pan-resistant bacteria don’t really mean harm. Some have been found in perfectly healthy people, a fact that’ll either comfort you or keep you awake at night, only causing problems when our immune system wavers. There’s no army of sentient E. coli that will rise up and someday overthrow the human race. But barring the calvary showing up, a new fear of ours will learn to settle in, almost unnoticed. It’ll creep in when we pick our heads up from a nasty fall that scrapes our skin open or breaks our bones; when we wave goodbye to our loved ones before they enter an operating room, or when we cradle our newborns into a world teeming with the living infinitesimal, wishing there was still a way to shield them from it as our parents once could for us. A fear of naked vulnerability. The antibiotic apocalypse will be gentle, if it fully arrives, but it won’t be any less devastating to the human spirit.

Right now, drug resistant infections are mainly a threat to those that are already sick and/or in medical facilities. But, if we continue down this path, mundane infections in the otherwise healthy could someday morph into life-threatening ordeals, and simple medical procedures and surgeries may be skipped to avoid risk of infection. However, while this threat is real, it’s important to keep in mind that this is an ongoing, gradual challenge; it’s extremely unlikely that a single event will herald with complete certainty the abrupt end of modern medicine as we know it. In this context, those scary headlines are inappropriate, if not numbing and counterproductive. In May, Ars wrote about some alarmist and inaccurate news stories dealing with a newly identified type of drug resistance—one that makes bacteria resistant to a last-resort antibiotic called colistin and can spread between bacteria easily. The headlines blared that it was the “first” time such a dastardly microbe had seeped into the US—which is not true. And they suggested that it would certainly mark the end of antibiotics—also not true. This week, scientists provided updates on tracking that type of resistance, and of course some alarmist headlines followed. Yet, the new data actually suggests that a tempering of concerns about this particular resistance may be in order. It turns out that this “dreaded,” “scary,” “nightmare” of a drug-resistant microbe has been in the US for more than a year and elsewhere in the world since as far back as 2005—it’s just that nobody noticed it. And nobody noticed it because so far it hasn’t been the dreaded, scary nightmare some have feared. “It’s not a huge cause for concern,” Mariana Castanheira, lead author of one of this week’s resistance updates, told Ars. Castanheira is the director for Molecular and Microbiology at JMI Laboratories, a private company that monitors drug resistance microbes in hospitals and medical settings. They and others are finding this new type of resistance now simply because they’re looking for it, she said. Castanheira explains that people initially started digging for this new type of drug resistance—a gene called mcr-1—out of concern that it makes bacteria resistant to the antibiotic colistin, which is a relatively toxic drug used only when nearly all others have failed against a multi-drug resistant infection. Bacteria have shown up with colistin resistance before—in fact, many times in the US and elsewhere around the world. But in those cases, the genes were embedded in the bacteria’s chromosomes and generally passed down through generations. The mcr-1 resistance gene, on the other hand, seems to always sit on a plasmid, a small loop of DNA that bacteria can readily pass around to neighbors. If colistin-resistant bacteria shared their mcr-1 plasmid with others that are already resistant to lots of antibiotics, they could create a long-feared invincible germ—a “pan-resistant” bacteria. “Doesn’t scare me” So far that doesn’t seem to be happening, though, Castanheira said. In more than a decade of skulking around, mcr-1 has made its way into bacteria in animals, people, and soil all over the world. Yet, all of the mcr-1 carrying microbes examined have been susceptible to at least one antibiotic—and often several.

This study provides new evidence that state-level public health policies of marijuana legalization adversely affect regional innovation activity, using a quasi-experimental research design. MMLs have a net negative effect on the overall output of regional innovation activity, which is driven by deteriorating innovation quality. Guided by the process-based view of innovation, we further reveal that MMLs’ positive influence on the innovation process is magnified through innovators’ collaboration and is likely to be driven by the idea generation for “weak” patents. The negative impact, however, is strengthened through individual efforts and is plausibly driven by the implementation of “hit” patents.

The paper makes the following contributions. First, our paper introduces public health policies into the innovation management literature as an external factor that constitutes organizations’ external environment. Scholars have recognized that it is important to extend our understanding of the potentially complex and nuanced implications of wellness and health on managerial challenges (Vakili & McGahan,2016). Nonetheless, recent research mainly focuses on organizations’ internal policies, such as wellness programs or safety rules (Gubler et al., 2018; Pagell et al., 2020), and paysless attention to organizations’ external conditions, such as regional public health policies. Our results imply that external public health policies, such as marijuana legalization, have substantial effects on knowledge workers’ individual and collaborative effectiveness in the innovation process. The findings suggest that managers should consider the potential influence of external public health policies in designing and deploying internal policies. Further, our findings provide a rationale for organizations’ engagement in corporate social responsibility practices and for their lobbying to influence public policymaking and secure a favorable public health environment. Thus, our findings add to research that studies organizations’ corporate social responsibility (Godfrey et al.,2009; Gubler et al., 2018; Pagell et al., 2020) and non-market strategy (Barber & Diestre, 2019). Relatedly, organizations’ strategic location choices also hinge upon favorable local public health policies (Alcácer & Chung, 2014). In sum, this paper adds to the research stream that considers innovation management as a multidisciplinary realm (Gaimon et al.,2017).

Past public ire over high drug prices has recently taken a back seat to a more insidious problem – no drugs at any price.

Patients and their providers increasingly face limited or nonexistent supplies of drugs, many of which treat essential conditions such as cancer, heart disease and bacterial infections. The American Society of Health System Pharmacists now lists over 300 active shortages, primarily of decades-old generic drugs no longer protected by patents.

Gigantic blocs of capital—big pharma, big tech, and showbiz—not only strongly supported it but also played a vital role in its inception and transnational enforcement. Nevertheless, according to Luigi Pellizzoni and Marja Ylönen, “TRIPs [sic] extended the scope of patentability to all commercially exploitable products and processes, including genetically modifed plants and animals” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p.  56). As every piece of written information became copyrighted, the expansion of digitalisation simultaneously meant making intellectual property(private) ubiquitous because all social interactions digitally mediated by writing were now part of the intellectual property system. A further paradox arose. While information could be accessed like never before without the then current constraints of space and time, the “proliferation of intellectual property rights inhibits access to such information in areas (basic research in general, the life sciences, software)”, which were mostly part of the so-called public domain (David & Foray, 2002, p. 13). Accessible knowledge meant it would have to be situated outside capitalist markets, consequently constraining profit (Nelson, 2003, p.  1701). Knowledge expropriation was absolutely pivotal in changing this dynamic. The loss of capitalist dynamism after the so-called Golden Age (after World War II) accelerated the need to impose control over knowledge as a necessary condition of production (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 292)

Te strategy to secure hegemonic control over knowledge did not fundamentally change; the novelty was the new tactics. While governments J. Romeiro Hermeto 23 and universities were already vastly entangled with capital (Conner, 2005, p. 472f), the expansion and universalisation of intellectual property gave capital a tighter grip on knowledge which could endure a greater separation/autonomy within the productive process, enabling an even greater division of labour. “Designed in California, made in China” is one of the many examples in which knowledge production and industrial production have been separated. As such, it required an extension of the powerful protection thus far reserved for the immediate private property of the means of production. On the other hand, producing novel knowledge and technology is an uncertain practice. It is uncertain when it is going to be accomplished and whether it is going to be successful, and how many resources it is going to take before it can yield the expected results. Tis unpredictable character renders private capital an unsuitable candidate for this endeavour. Instead, resources are drawn from society—usually by the capitalist state—enabling the so-called basic research (Hull, 2019, p. 31f)

There are many and complex reasons for both underconsumption and overconsumption. Underconsumption is caused by poverty, marginalisation and inequality, often intensified by environmental hazards and climate change. Overconsumption is intrinsically linked to underconsumption. The high consumption of the rich is in many ways built on the underpaid labour of the poor, an injustice further entrenched by overconsumption being a central cause of climate change and many of the environmental hazards that hit the poor hardest. In other words, modern consumption patterns depend fundamentally on the exploitation of people and nature (Brand and Wissen, 2021).

Although much popular attention tends to be on the extraordinary and conspicuous sides of consumption, most consumption is mundane and inconspicuous. Consumption levels are fundamentally shaped by what is considered normal, and by how and where people live their lives and how and where they acquire their stuff and access to services. It is, in short, shaped by how normality is organised (e.g Shove, 2003). One of the profound challenges the world is facing, is that normality keeps getting increasingly resource intensive. This process takes place constantly in rich countries, enabled by growth, increasing incomes, and global capitalist production networks that allow for a seemingly never-ending access to cheap goods and labour. But perhaps even more dramatically, higher levels of consumption are increasingly normalised in a wide range of emerging economies, particularly in Asia. This chapter has used the cases of two of the fastest growing economies in the world, China and Vietnam, to discuss the complexity of consumption and argue for the importance of political economy for understanding everyday practices. By studying consumption booms in these two ‘socialist market economies’, I have sought to illustrate how the growth imperative of capitalism translates to an imperative for increasing consumption, forcing even conservative communists to embrace capitalist consumer society (although they may not admit to doing so).

In conclusion, the intricate relationship between consumer consumption and environmental degradation is multifaceted and; deeply ingrained in societal structures. To mitigate the devastating impacts of climate change and curb environmental degradation, it is imperative to address consumer overconsumption as a fundamental driver of unsustainable resource depletion and ecological harm. This thesis has probed various dimensions of this complex issue, including an exploration of the psychological motivations for overconsumption, the pervasive influence of advertising, the evolution of sustainable business practices, and the challenges of equitable access to green alternatives. Given the systemic barriers discussed that limit access to sustainable options, it is evident that simply relying on individual consumer choices to mitigate environmental harm is insufficient. Therefore, the proposed policy recommendations offer a promising path forward. By addressing the root causes of overconsumption through legislation to curb advertising, transitioning to a circular economy model, enacting robust national policies for sustainable consumption, and integrating environmental education into curricula, societies can shift towards more sustainable consumption patterns. Ultimately, tackling consumer overconsumption requires a holistic approach that combines regulatory measures with societal awareness and education, paving the way for a more environmentally responsible future.

In this sense, power does not emerge from social relations but is rather located a priori within the law, representing a circular logic. The abstract right appears to be its locus of existence. The socio-historical dynamics giving intellectual property(private) actuality is abstracted to the point of being postulated as an abstract object deprived of concrete existence. Its existence is simply putative. Te concrete boundaries of intellectual property(private) are superseded; its only limit becomes the law in-itself. It is Drahos’ merit, nonetheless, to point out that modern marketing has become highly dependent on intellectual property(private) (which, with digitalisation, becomes even more relevant). “Without trademark law, for instance, advertising could not create the high degree of product diferentiation that exists in many markets” (Drahos, 2016, p. 188). Tis means that contemporary commodity fetishism requires the attribution of uniqueness where there is virtually none; with it, the so-called primitive accumulation enters the realm of behaviour and perception, being shaped and controlled by means of private appropriation.

However, he fails to connect these relations to the socio-ontological dimension of the production and reproduction of life. Consequently, he misses the umbilical connection of property and intellectual property and the fact that the privatisation of the latter has become a means of securing private control over the former. As the value of knowledge production and reproduction abruptly plunges, the value of the property of the means of production also decreases while the contradiction between social production and private appropriation becomes increasingly more explicit. Intellectual property(private) appears as the means of reshaping social perception, reorganising production value, controlling the struggle of classes, and enabling capitalism to persist. It is thus impossible to understand it as something merely abstract and separated from property.

It is worth assessing some elements of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to gain a different perspective on the same problem, namely, the impossibility of privatising language. Language is one form of knowledge. As such, it is not innate but belongs to a continuous historical social process of creation, transformation, and reproduction, thus one particular mode of intellectual appropriation. Tis particular mode, however, entails in-itself an immense resolving power for its generality and abstractness; it is one of the most general forms of a determined type of knowledge and, as such, is contained in most forms of specifc knowledge. On the other hand, forms of knowledge, such as music, which can relinquish language (as distinctive from musical codices), must subordinate itself to language if it is to be privately appropriated because it presupposes specifc forms of normativity, which in turn presumes language.

How can the limits of private intellectual appropriation be demarcated? Can all human intellectual dimensions be privately appropriated? Could language be privatised? Specifc words are already undergoing a process of privatisation in which trademarks, “giving producers exclusive control over the marks or names they used to designate their products” (Hull, 2019, p. 98), expand from their formal scope in a progression of derivative privatisation. Gordon Hull calls this trademark dilution, that is, “the owner of a mark can seek legal redress against noncompeting, nonconfusing uses of similar marks”; this arbitrary manoeuvre is founded in the ever-expansive capitalist logic itself, namely, the protection of brand value (Hull, 2019, p. 98).

Consumer Culture „Consumer Culture‟ within debates concerning whether advanced capitalist societies have entered into postmodernity or an information age by which traditional social structures of meaning have been eroded. In what Jameson (1984) terms late, consumer or multi-national capitalism, consumption may be viewed as: “ a social and cultural process involving cultural signs and symbols, not simply as an economic utilitarian process” (Bocock, 1993:3). This is not to ignore fundamental economic factors impinging on people‟s lives, which may well determine- or limit-, their patterns of consumption. However, it can be argued that consumption in the social formations of late western capitalism is: “based increasingly upon desires, not simply upon need.” (Bocock, 1993:3). The implication is that privatized consumption practices, together with shifting, underlying social changes are having a greater influence upon the construction of personal identity. The work of Veblen, Bourdieu, and Baudrillard is examined to trace the theorization of consumption practices from the satisfaction of utilitarian material needs to symbolic, idealist needs however, to counter any notion of economic or textual determinism, the concept of the „active‟ consumer is explored. One cannot attempt to theorize consumption practices without engaging with the debate as to whether western capitalism has entered into a postmodern phase, resulting in an epochal change from the social formations of „modern‟ society. Proponents of postmodern theory situate its emergence in the rapid growth of consumerism in the U.S. in the 1950‟s. According to Lyotard (1984) and Baudrillard (1988) there has been a major break from capitalism is very difficult to sustain as it continues to perform the dominant mode of production and consumption around the globe, particularly with the collapse of state socialism in the former East European bloc and the rapid embracement of capitalism by China under the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Jameson (1984) explains the new phase in social formations: the postmodern. “It is …, at least in my use, a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order – what is often euphemistically called modernization, post industrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism. This new moment of capitalism can be dated from the post-war boom in the United States in the late 1940‟s and 1950‟s‟ (Jameson, 1984:15). Smith says: “This notion of post modernity implies a phase in the periodization of capitalism characterized as involving a shift towards consumption as a central social, economic and cultural process. It also implies that capitalism is becoming more global in its impact as a result of the expansionist strategies of multi-national or transnational companies with the concomitant collapse of time and space and the social impact on global/local communities. It can be viewed that the term postmodern suggests the idea that social classes are of less importance in the minds of individuals than the construction of individual social identity/identities. However, sweeping theorizations need to be treated with caution, as the economic imbalance of wealth, within nations states and throughout the globe is empirically evident with approx. 1bn of the globes population of 5.5bn consuming approx 80% of production” (Smith, 1997:15). Jean Baudrillard, initially derived from Marxian and Weberian sociology, has developed a more radical theory of consumption. Baudrillard conceptualizes consumption as a process in which consumers purchase goods in order to create and maintain a sense of identity and difference from others through the display of purchase goods. Also, Baudrillard argues that consumption has taken off into a hyper-real, symbolic level so that the idea of purchasing as much as the act of purchasing operates as a motivation for many in doing paid work. The argument therefore is that consumption, as the active ideology of capitalism, promises that the meaning of life will be found in buying things and pre-packaged experiences. Therefore the ideology of consumerism serves both to legitimate capitalism and motivate people to become consumers in fantasy as well as reality. If we accept Baudrillard‟s hypothesis, it is only one further step to assume that through consumption, we can actually transform the sense of who are by purchasing commodities. By consuming clothes, perfume, jeweler, holidays, etc, people can gain access to another lifestyle by sharing the same set of signs signifiers and symbols. It is in this sense that Baudrillard views consumption as the consumption of signs and symbols rather than utilitarian material objects. However, Baudrillard argues that the anticipation of consumption is frequently experienced as being more enjoyable than the act of consumption itself, which sets up a process of a constant desire to consume and an endless deferring of satisfaction. As Baudrillard argues: “there are no limits to consumption… If it was that which is naively taken to be, absorption, a devouring, then we should achieve…satisfaction. But we know that this is not the case: we want to consume more and more…If consumption appears to be irrepressible, this is precisely because it is a total idealist practice which has no longer anything to do (beyond a certain point) with the satisfaction of needs…” (Baudrillard, 1988:24). In summary, according to Baudrillard, consumption cannot be thought of as the satisfaction of a biologically determined set of needs. If the need is food, it is social and cultural factors within advanced capitalist societies that transform this need into a desire (want) for lobster and champagne, tofu stir-fry or a McDonalds hamburger.

3 How Trade Marks Facilitate Consumerism Ownership of a trade mark gives a firm exclusive rights covering two matters.46 One is the exclusive right to use the sign to brand and differentiate products of a kind for which it has been registered as a trade mark and turn them into specific objects of demand. The second is the exclusive right to determine which products can be marketed under the trade mark and thus with the benefit of its power to attract demand.47 The owner’s exclusive right to use a trade mark to attract demand is reinforced by various ancillary rights over the use of the relevant sign and similar signs both for branding products and as reference points in advertising and in other communication. The owner’s exclusive control over the supply of branded products is also reinforced by various ancillary rights. These include the absolute right to authorise the first marketing of products under the trade mark in the European Economic Area (“EEA”);48 and certain rights over the further marketing of branded goods after their first marketing in the EEA, which protect the trade mark’s reputation and power to attract demand.49 Moreover, along its exclusive control over supply, the owner has discretion as to how it arranges for the production or procurement of that supply and to vary these arrangements.50 The owner’s extensive control over the use of its trade mark for demand-attraction and over supply-provision, together with its discretion over the organisation of supply have made crucial contributions to the ability of some firms to exploit the opportunities of consumerism. It has meant that the marketing of products can be separated from their production so that each activity can develop according to its own economic logic in terms of scale and scope. The ability to do this has enabled firms that are well-placed to attract demand from consumers to focus their efforts and resources on marketing and other higher value activities and to compete at this level. Leading firms in many industries no longer engage in the “Fordist” mass production of products,51 but focus on high value “weightless” activities such as design, product development, marketing whilst orchestrating production from fluid and flexible supply chains.52 Innovation in technology and communication has increased the scope for outsourcing production into supply chains, enabling much greater flexibility in production arrangements and facilitating more rapid product development.53 Consumerism has increased the advantage of outsourcing production in a way that combines low costs with a high degree of flexibility.54 The transformation of Clarks Shoes in the 1990s from a large-scale manufacturer of shoes in the United Kingdom to a global marketing firm that orchestrates the manufacture of shoes through a fluctuating global supply network of manufacturers is an example of this.55 It can also be seen in the fast fashion industry with its globally-recognised brands and global supply chains.56 Whilst the control and discretion that trade mark owners have over supply is important to their capacity to seize and exploit the opportunities of consumerism, their demand-side control makes a much more obvious contribution to this capacity. The foundation of this contribution is the owner’s ability to use a trade mark to give products an identity that is distinctive and exclusive. This kind of identity roughly corresponds to the marketing concept of a brand, though a “brand” is not defined in trade mark law and its relationship with a trade mark can be nebulous.57 Trade marks are both the signifiers and the legal anchors of brands. A firm may use more than one trade mark to signify and anchor a specific brand and may vary the combination or change them,58 though consumers must be likely to recognise each signifier on its own as signifying an exclusive connection to one firm for it to be registered as a trade mark.59 The legal definition of a trade mark as a sign that identifies and distinguishes products as those “of one undertaking” understates the full potential of brands and their trade mark signifiers as marketing resources.60 Firms can use trade marks to differentiate products in other ways as well. Firms can, for example, use trade marks to customise products in terms of their quality and other characteristics and to market different versions of the same kind of product.61 Moreover, a brand owner has control over the customisation that its brand reflects, with discretion to vary quality and other characteristics as long as the brand does not become misleading.62 Firms can also use trade marks to establish different layers of brands under their control to signify different layers of information about the products they supply. These may range from broader corporate or umbrella brands to narrower product or niche brands.63 Their owners have discretion as to how far (if at all) they make the connections between different brands under their control apparent to consumers. The ability to use branding to customise products and to establish different product brands means that firms can profit from satisfying consumers with differing preferences.64 This enables firms to compete more effectively in the dimension of product differentiation, especially with the growth of the tendency associated with consumerism for consumers to attach greater value to differentiation, even superficial differentiation, for its own sake.65 The growth of consumerism has also increased the scope for attracting demand to specific brands of products because of their particular intangible content, which may be their only significant difference from other brands.66 Trade mark law has done much to facilitate the capacity of brands to add intangible content to products through protecting the kind of image and other associations that can give them this capacity. The Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) has gone so far as to recognise that an image of prestige and luxury can form part of the “actual quality” of marked products.67 The foundation of a brand’s capacity to add intangible content is its exclusivity since this gives it an institutional character and establishes commercial accountability for branded products. It enables the brand to acquire a reputation concerning the branded products, which can be a source of reassurance to consumers and attract demand accordingly.68 Moreover, as a cohesive entity with some of the attributes of a humanistic personality, a brand can go further and acquire its own unique history and biography along with an image and other associations.69 This can appeal to consumers at the emotional level and help to offset the impersonal nature of artificial legal structures.70 The continuity of this personality can turn what would otherwise be an isolated act of consumption into something that can be repeated or a continuing relationship.71 A brand’s personality can also help to increase the emotional impact of consumption through transforming branded products into sources of self-expression or self-realisation or into symbols of status or of adherence to particular values reflecting the brand’s reputation, image and associations.72 Trade marks can help to develop the personalities of the brands they signify through their ancillary role as reference points. Their owners can use them in advertising and other promotional activity to cultivate or reinforce images and other associations for their brands. Brands with the capacity to add intangible content to products can become something much more than a means of product differentiation and sources of guidance and reassurance about product quality and characteristics. Trade mark law has boosted the potential of brands to attract demand in this way through its calibration of the ancillary rights of their owners. The owner of a trade mark that has acquired a reputation in the minds of consumers is entitled to prohibit third parties who are marketing or supplying products of any kind from using the same or a similar sign in a way that creates a mental “link” with the trade mark (that is bringing the trade mark to the minds of consumers encountering the third party’s sign) and as a consequence of this link has one or more of three designated effects on the trade mark.73 The designated effects are to damage the trade mark’s “distinctive character”, to damage its “repute” and to take “unfair advantage” of these without “due cause”. The CJEU has confirmed that this additional protection for certain trade marks goes beyond the traditional boundary of protection, which requires an infringing sign to be likely to confuse consumers about the commercial origin of the third party’s products or to create a false impression that there is an economic link of some kind with the trade mark or its owner.74 Instead, this additional protection increases the control that the owner has over its trade mark’s presence in the minds of consumers and thereby increases its value as a resource for attracting attention and demand. It protects the prominence that the trade mark may enjoy in the minds of consumers and the factors that enable it to attract demand, which can include an appealing image as well as a good reputation concerning product quality.75 It also enables the owner to prevent unfair exploitation of these features of its trade mark’s presence. In a controversial judgment, the CJEU ruled that a third party can take unfair advantage of such a presence even where it causes no damage to that presence and there is no likelihood of consumers being misled about commercial origin.76 In a similar line of development, the CJEU has ensured that the owner’s control over third parties’ use of its trade mark as a reference point in their own advertising and promotional activity is sufficient to protect its image and associations as well as its meaning as a trade mark.77 As well as facilitating the cultivation of images and associations for the brands they signify through their use as reference points, trade marks can contribute directly to their emotional impact and power to attract demand. A trade mark’s distinctiveness and nature as a sign can boost its potential to gain salience in the minds of consumers.78 Some signs such as logos or shapes may contribute to the aesthetic impact of a brand. However, trade mark law imposes restrictions on the ability of firms to appropriate such signs for their exclusive use as trade marks. The main overriding condition of registration is that a sign must have distinctive character in the sense that relevant consumers must be likely to perceive it as signifying an exclusive connection to one firm and thus as a trade mark.79 This can be a difficult condition for signs not traditionally or typically used as trade marks (such as shapes or colours) to satisfy.80 There are further restrictions on the ability to register shapes as trade marks even if consumers may have come to perceive them as trade marks through their use as such.81 These include a restriction on shapes that add substantial value for reasons that are not brand-related such as their aesthetic appeal,82 though in practice it can be hard to disentangle the inherent allure of a sign from other factors that may give it emotional impact.83 These further restrictions are due to be extended to cover product characteristics in general.84 However, apart from these restrictions, trade mark law does not preclude firms from registering aesthetically-appealing signs as trade marks once consumers have come to perceive them as such even though their owners may thereby gain an extensive zone of exclusivity.85 Trade marks that signify verbally may bring attractive connotations and associations to brands through any alternative meanings or significance they may have and a firm may select a brand name or other trade mark for this reason. Trade mark law places some restrictions on the ability of firms to appropriate words and word-combinations of this kind as trade marks, but these are limited.86 There are restrictions on the registration of signs that are entirely descriptive or have some other entirely non-origin significance for the relevant kind of products, at least not until they have acquired sufficient familiarity through use as trade marks in practice to displace their alternative significance.87 However, these restrictions do not preclude trade marks from having descriptive elements or being suggestive or allusive to the quality or characteristics of the branded products. Cases involving everyday words such as “sky” and “apple” show how firms can gain zones of exclusive control over words with pre-existing meanings through registering them as trade marks.88 Trade mark law does provide for applications to register signs as trade marks to be refused for bad faith and this provision can apply where a firm seeks to register a sign that is likely to have significant emotional impact or attract significant demand for some other reason and where the applicant has no good reason to appropriate this appeal for its exclusive use.89 A further point relevant to consumerism is that a trade mark can be positioned where consumers would not notice them prior to purchase.90 Such trade marks function as a means of subsequent brand authentication, but their invisibility may also add to the allure of products sold under a niche brand to consumers who are seeking the emotional satisfaction of feeling part of a select community.91 Nevertheless, for trade marks used in this way, as with all trade marks that are ancillary contributors to a brand, it is still necessary that relevant consumers should be likely to perceive them on their own as signifying an exclusive connection to one firm even though they are not used on their own in practice.92

Abstract The incentives-for-authors formulation of copyright’s purpose is so deeply ingrained in our discourse and our thought processes that it is astonishingly hard to avoid invoking, even when one is consciously trying not to do so. Yet avoiding that formulation is exactly what we ought to be doing. Everything we know about creativity and creative processes suggests that copyright plays very little role in motivating creative work. In the contemporary information society, the purpose of copyright is to enable the provision of capital and organization so that creative work may be exploited. And the choice of copyright as a principal means of promoting cultural production has consequences for the content of culture as well. This reframing has four important consequences for debates about copyright law and policy. First, abandoning the incentives-for-authors story requires us to talk about cultural progress differently. The incentives-for-authors story has functioned as a smokescreen, enabling scholars, judges, and legislators to conflate economic and creative motivation. Severing the motivational link between creativity and economics requires us to come up with a better understanding of how cultural progress emerges, and a more accurate account of how the economic incentives that copyright provides affect progress more generally. Second, an account of copyright as incentives-for-capital suggests a different approach to conceptualizing the kind of “property” that copyright represents. Copyright scholars habitually compare copyright to property in land, a conceptual move that passes over an important stage in the evolution of economic activity and associated economic rights. There are important benefits to be gained from comparing post-industrial, information property to industrial, corporate property, and copyright law more explicitly to corporate law. Specifically, copyright law in the post-industrial era works to separate authorship from control of creative works so that a set of coordination and governance problems closely associated with information resources can be solved. Third, comparing copyright more explicitly to industrial, corporate property and legal regimes governing its use suggests some different ways of thinking and talking about problems of social welfare that so often bedevil regimes of property law. Fourth, comparing copyright more explicitly to industrial, corporate property foregrounds copyright law’s (largely unrealized) potential to function as a tool for ensuring accountability to the authors without whom the copyright system could not function.

Reward systems have to be financed, and we presume through income taxation, but that involves a labor supply–related distortionary cost, something that was not considered in our model.45 Hence, the potential case for reward is less strong than is suggested by our analysis.

A second, more important consideration against a general prize system has already been mentioned: political palatability. It’s hard enough to imagine Congress (or any other national legislature) adopting in the foreseeable future a prize system that would encompass all pharmaceutical or medical innovations pertaining to the diseases that currently ravage developing countries. The unpopularity of tax increases, coupled with the widespread sentiment that the patent system, outside the sphere of neglected and global diseases, is not yet “broken,” make it extremely unlikely that Congress would be willing to reach even further.