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(Sine and Sara, Com@Roskilde, What Does It Take? Feminist Readings of Innovation Studies In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

“Why can feminists have revolution now, while Marxists have to wait?” writer collective Gibson-Graham (1993, p. 10) asks. The answer, they suggest, is that while the Marxist revolution demands full replacement of the capitalist system with that of socialism, feminist revolution is incremental, counting every advance towards gender equality as a victory. From this perspective, change can happen from within an existing sys tem—indeed, is already happening if one cares to look. This is not to say that the dominant order is about to come tumbling down, but rather that one cannot change the system by means of critique alone. Instead, Gibson-Graham (1996, p. 543) proposes a dual strategy of depicting “…economic discourse as hegemonized while rendering the social world as economically differentiated and complex.” Thus, transformative potential is anchored in the presentation of already existent diverse economies as alternatives to economic hegemony. In claiming the transformative potential of existing alternatives, Gibson-Graham is inspired by Butler’s post-structuralist feminism, gen erally, and her theory of performativity, more specifically. The concept of performativity denotes the process by which dominant social norms are both upheld through the repetition of such norms, which is necessary for the individual subject’s achievement of social recognition, and become subject to change, as the very demand for repetition introduces the possibility of deviation (Allen 1998; Butler 1990, 2004). This focus on norms of recognition leads to an understanding of gender as the result of performative processes rather than the underlying cause of particular actions. As Butler (1990, p. 25) famously puts it: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” Gender is not an explanation of anything (for instance, of a particular perspective on innovation), but is, instead, the result of the repeated enactment of gendered norms (producing, for instance, the subject position of “the female entrepreneur”). Meaning, we should not assume that an individual possesses particular personality traits or professional abilities because of their gender, but study gendered norms and subjectivities as the results of social processes. Beginning from this “reversed causality,” Gibson-Graham (2006b, p. 75) extrapolates three key points from their encounter with post-structuralist feminism: “…a new language, new practices of resubjectiva tion, and a new kind of dispersed collective action that [does] not depend upon the organized revolutionary agendas of more established radical politics.” When applied to the broader context of diverse economies, the latter point implies that alternatives worth exploring are not delimited beforehand. Rather, we might find potential for broader societal transfor mation in any of the many specific ways in which the currently dominant order of the market economy is resisted, negotiated, and/or reformed (Gibson-Graham 2006a, p. xiii). In searching for alternatives, Gibson-Graham links diverse economies specifically to social innovation. Focusing on the change that emanates from and is operative at the level of local communities, they do not define a community economy “…by geographic or social commonality; it is an ethical and political space of decision making in which interdependence is constructed as people transform their livelihoods and lives” (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, p. 25). Here, social innovation—or the pro cess of “making other worlds possible”—is subject to three general principles: visible diversity, distributive justice, and self-determination (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009). These three principles, we believe, may drive innovation in both the economic and the social sphere and, more importantly, bridge the two to produce economics innovations that are also socially beneficial. Returning to the question of gender, this vision of innovation is not anchored in a specific gender identity; to the contrary, it aims at opening up spaces for the expression of diverse (gen der) identities and producing greater (gender) equality.

(Sine and Sara, Com@Roskilde, What Does It Take? Feminist Readings of Innovation Studies In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

Innovation studies tend to ignore gender issues, arguing that the practices and processes of innovation are gender-neutral or gender-blind. However, what such practices are, in fact, blind to is the existence of women in innovation. Thus, the traditional argument that gender is irrelevant to innovation offers male innovators a privileged position and positions women as “other” to innovation. Studies and practices that seek to ameliorate this situation, however, tend to reverse it—making women overly visible and essentializing the “female innovator.” Here, a particular position is carved out for women, which both means that women have to fit a certain stereotype to become recognizable as innovators and that the general field of innovation remains male by default. While the second trend reacts directly to the first, it both reproduces some of its problems and incurs limitations of its own. Noting this dilemma, we ask: what does it take to make the gendered practices of innovation visible without re-confirming essentialized gender dichotomies? In answering this question, we seek to contribute to a “third wave” of feminist readings of innovation studies that take issue with both the assumptions of gender-blindness and gender-visibility, arguing, instead, that gendered norms result from innovation practices. To do so, we use Gibson-Graham’s (2006a) theory of diverse economies to build an alter native vision of innovation; one that is both critical of current gendered norms and actively involved in designing better alternatives. We illustrate the methodological and practical purview of this framework through analyses of three illustrative cases. The first reproduces gender-blindness and, hence, reinforces current structural inequalities. The second focuses exclusively on innovation for and by women, thereby redressing issues of gender-blindness, but also reproducing gendered stereotypes through one-sided visibility. The third adopts a norm-critical perspective that is aligned with Gibson-Graham’s retooling of performative gender theories for practical purposes of social innovation. Critique of current social norms, we conclude, is an effective driver of innovation for gender equal ity, specifically, and may offer new impetus for innovation, generally.

(Sasha, A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons, Critical African Studies, 13:1, 115-126, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881 )

Incentives and innovation IP defenders often make the claim that economic incentive is the key to creativity and innovation and that market mechanisms drive the ‘innovation engine’ (Johnson 2010, 247). However, neither history nor psychology bear this claim out. Pre-modern China, considered one of the most innovative civilizations in history, did not permit any ‘monopolistic rights of exploitation’ over an invention or work (Darch 2017, 44). Similarly, indigenous peoples have produced and stewarded vast vaults of artistic and scientific knowledge for centuries. As Vandana Shiva writes, IP offers distorted ideas of creativity, by denying the role of innovation in traditional systems– such as for instance, the role that farmers play in developing high-yielding, soil fertility-enhancing varieties of crops through traditional practices (Shiva 1999, 29). There is little empirical evidence of the claim that expanded IP regimes result in increased innovation. On the contrary, in the information domain in particular, patents tend to benefit rent-seekers while harming innovation and access to knowledge, owing to increasingly ‘combinatorial’ and ‘incremental’ patents forming ‘patent thickets’, which block the path to innovation (Aigrain 2010, 162). Copyright benefits– increasingly corporatized– are largely allocated amongst a complex web of publishers, distributors, producers, marketers, and advertisers, rather than artists or composers (Greene 2008). Callahan (2017a), musician and activist, likens the music industry to a plantation system, where recording artists are equivalent to sharecroppers and recording companies; the owners of channels of distribution and marketing, are the landlords who extract underpaid labour from artists in exchange for access to distribution (16). He points out that the American music industry was built on ‘slavery, Jim Crow and the perpetuation of racism’ (Callahan 2017a, 19). Conversely, Deborah Halbert documents that in the erstwhile Soviet Union a profusion of literary and artistic work was produced and circulated anonymously, outside state control (samizdat or ‘publishing house of oneself’) and was therefore accorded no protection (Halbert 2017). Emerging behavioural research suggests that monetary incentives do not offer a meaningful account of human motivation and that economic rewards share a more complicated relationship with different types of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation than once thought (Gneezy, Meier, and Rey-Biel 2011).

(Sarah, GlobalDevelopment@NewSouthWales, Naila, Gender&Development@LSE, From economic growth to a wellbeing economy: notes for a feminist foreign policy chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://iwda.org.au/assets/files/Wellbeing-and-Feminist-Foreign-Policy-AFFPC-Issue-Paper-11-1-1.pdf)

This issues paper explores the idea of a feminist economy of wellbeing and how progress towards such an economy might be measured. To understand why a new concept of the economy is being argued for, a good place to start is to ask what it is intended to replace. The answer is, the growth-driven economy. Currently, the dominant approach to measuring a country’s growth is changes in its Gross Domestic Product, a single metric constructed to measure the size of economy and one that, to paraphrase Coyle (2015)i, has come to play a central role in the policies that structure people’s lives and livelihoods, dominates political debates and can make and break governments. In this paper, we discuss the meanings ascribed to the GDP and what it does and does not measure. We track some of the ways in which critics have engaged with GDP as a measure of growth, and the growth paradigm that is both embodied and promoted. We bring a feminist perspective to these debates, examining moves towards wellbeing as an alternative to growth, both as a goal and a measure of progress, and different efforts to measure it. By way of conclusion, we join the calls being made at the international level to find ‘beyond-GDP’ measures of progress. 1. The GDP: the power of a statistic The GDP refers to all the final goods and services in a country that have been exchanged in the marketplace, that can thus be valued at their market price, and their aggregate value expressed as a single number. Per capita GDP is the same statistic averaged across the population. GDP is used not only to measure the marketed value of goods and services produced in a country in a particular period of time but also the size and direction of change over time – whether GDP grew, shrank or remained constant. The concept’s origins date back to the inter-war period when governments in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) sought a unified measure of national output to assist in macro-economic policy making. It took on international significance in the post war period when the UN, drawing on the expertise of a Group of five (male) National Income Experts from the US and the UK, began setting up country-based Systems of National Accounts for the collection of internationally comparable dataii. This required determining the boundary between productive and unproductive activities. The early definition of the boundary reflected its origins in advanced industrial countries: it would include all marketed activities as well as ‘household activities that are clearly akin to those that are usually undertaken in enterprises’ while excluding ‘those for which the analogy with enterprises becomes tenuous’. This excluded a great deal of the non-monetary production that was carried out, most often by women, for their households’ own consumptioniii. In response to subsequent critiques, the production boundary was gradually expanded to include more categories of non-market goods produced for household consumption, with value imputed to them on the basis of market prices. What continued to be excluded were the unpaid services that went into the daily and intergenerational care of family members – cooking, washing, cleaning and looking after children, the elderly, sick and disabled members, the basis of what is now described as the ‘care economy’. These were seen as governed by norms rather than market signals, difficult to assign a value to and considered to have very little impact on the market economy. The reliance on apparently neutral market signals to assign value to production included in GDP led proponents to consider it an objective, value-free indicator. However, as Waring (1988)iv, an early and pioneering feminist economist, pointed out, there was constant slippage between using prices to measure value and using prices to confer value. As a result, who and what was included in GDP served to define who and what was valued. Despite warnings by one of the original architects that ‘the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of the national income as defined by the GDP’v, GDP came to be treated as a measure of national welfare. Principal critiques of GDP focus on its limitations as a measure of national production and its misplaced conflation with national welfare. First, GDP excludes various services that undoubtedly create value for families but are provided on an unpaid basis by family members, most often women, rather than purchased from the market. They include activities such as meal preparation and cleaning, care of family members, and voluntary or community services. Given that GDP uses market prices to impute value to material goods produced for family consumption rather than for sale, the continued exclusion of unpaid care services is highly arbitrary since there are markets in many of these services. It also places those who provide these services on a full-time basis outside the labour force, classifying them as ‘economically inactive’. Feminists have built on Margaret Reid’s idea of the ‘third party principle’ to offer a more consistent definition of work, one that includes tasks that contribute to social reproduction and the maintenance of the labour force but might not be directly connected with market forces. This defines work as purposeful activity that is a) carried out with the objective of producing a valued good or service and b) that can, in principle, be delegated to someone elsevivii. This distinguishes work from other purposeful activities that people have to perform for themselves (such as eating and sleeping) and leisure activities (such as watching a movie or gardening for pleasure). Second, the natural environment is factored into the measurement of GDP on a very partial basis. Natural resources exchanged in market activity are counted, but not the destructive impact of activities such as logging and mining on the environment or the renewability of the resources in question. Likewise, no use value is attached to natural resources not exchanged in the market, such as common property resources that underpin subsistence livelihoods and on which women are often disproportionately dependent given their more limited access to markets, or the ecological services and aesthetic benefits provided by clean air, unpolluted rivers and flourishing forests. Third, by focusing on what is marketed, GDP both excludes goods and services of recognizable value that are not marketed, and includes goods and services of dubious value, and indeed destructive in their impacts, because they are. As Waring put it, GDP valorised a system that 'counts oil spills and wars as contributors to economic growth while child-rearing and housekeeping are deemed valueless' viii And finally, while GDP can be regarded as a reasonably accurate measure of the marketed production of an economy, it provides no insight into the distribution of income generated by this production. It is perfectly possible, and frequently observed, that a rising GDP is accompanied by rising levels of inequality. To this, feminists have added some of the ways in which gender differentiates the income inequalities that are ignored by GDP. For instance, there are gender inequalities in the distribution of paid and unpaid work: women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men.ix This is part of the explanation for the persistence of gender inequalities in wages earned. While the global gender gap in monthly earnings was 21%x, differences varied from a high of 47% in Sierra Leone to a low of -6.6 in the Philippines (one of only two of 73 countries to report a negative gap).

(Sasha, A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons, Critical African Studies, 13:1, 115-126, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881 )

A feminist decolonial public domain The rampant overprotection of intellectual property empowered by the forces of information capitalism is resulting in the growing privatization and enclosure of the public domain, and the marginalization and devaluation (or susceptibility to ‘theft’) of the knowledge produced and held in disempowered communities. The public domain, for our purposes, consists of the types and uses of information and aspects of culture that remain publicly accessible: free to use without permission or payment. Legal scholar Deborah Halbert argues (2006) that the public domain is inherently ‘feminine’ because it rejects dualities: it does not privilege a single way of knowing and doing over another. It builds bridges to alternative ways of knowing, which are not mediated by market-based exchange. Rather, the public domain is built on social bonds– gifts, rather than commodities. It is feminine in the current global gender order (i.e. hegemonic patriarchy) because it recognizes that production is an inescapably communal activity; which makes sharing with the community ‘morally appropriate’ (2006). Halbert’s conception of the public domain is resonant with Nancy Fraser’s ‘sphere of social reproduction’ (Arruzza, Fraser, and Bhattacharya 2019, 8). The social reproduction sphere encompasses sites upon which the young are socialized, communities built, meaning produced and social bonds forged: in ‘households, neighbourhoods, civil society associations, and public institutions, including schools, childcare and eldercare centers’. This sphere– distinct from that of commodity production and waged labour, is what sustains and makes capitalism possible (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). Both conceptions of the social reproduction sphere and the public domain reflect feminist epistemologies; they are sites of subordination– and accordingly, of radical possibility. I invoke these conceptions in proposing what is an expansively feminist, decolonial project: the reclamation of the public domain in service of the social good, rather than in service of commodity production and capital accumulation. There have been movements within IP scholarship to strengthen and protect the public domain against encroachment and enclosure (Benkler 1999). Other scholars caution against a ‘romanticization’ of the public domain, which they point out has been a source for the exploitation of the ‘labour and bodies of the disempowered’ (Chander and Sunder 2004). They propose that there is a dialectical relationship between the public domain and IP, and that the public domain rather than act as a bulwark against propertization, feeds and enables it (Chander and Sunder 2004). Yet, recognizing that differing resources and circumstances shape the capacity to draw advantage from a commons, enables us to also recognize that the forces that produce these differing capabilities are political in nature (Chander and Sunder 2004). In calling for a revolt against IP regimes, I mean to attack the institutions that such a politics of hierarchy and exclusion has produced; and in calling for the reclamation of the public domain, I hope to furnish the soil for a different type of politics– one that has nourished the social reproduction sphere and honours feminist, indigenous, and Southern ways of knowing and doing. We participate in neoliberal capitalism, inter alia, by complying with and honouring the claims of the intellectual property regime– an edifice built on the expropriated labour of indigenous and colonized people, slaves, Dalits and oppressed people everywhere. It is a system built on ownership and exclusion; a means for the forces of financial capital to continuously enclose and appropriate the public domain. Rejecting the constructs and imaginaries of IP law opens possibilities for other organizational forms, knowledge production systems and theories of value that could be de-linked from subordination and extraction. I do not propose a reform of the IP regime or an extension of its protection to the marginal. I do not propose greater use of licenses such as GNU General Public License (Copyleft) or share-alike licenses (Creative Commons), which attempt to expand the public domain without subverting or challenging intellectual property law as an institution. I do not propose to use the master’s tools to create sites of possibility within structures of subjugation. A reimagination of knowledge production from a feminist and decolonial epistemological standpoint would emphasize authorship and creation as acts of reaffirming the interconnectedness of human sociality. It would reject the idea of authorship as ownership and cultural production as a discrete entity with clearly defined borders, and acknowledge the intrinsically communal nature of knowledge production and consumption. In rejecting capitalist epistemologies and theories of value which are rooted in racism and caste-based patriarchy, colonialism and labour oppression, we hope to instantiate new forms of value drawing from community and the ‘raw power of connection’ (Lorde 2018).

(Martha, Prof. Emerita@BufflaoLaw, Law and Economics Against Capitalism BUFFALO Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 2020 – 009 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3815158 )

D. Law and Economics Revives Gendered Separate Spheres The foundational law and economics division between economic productivity and social responsibility is thoroughly entangled with the longstanding ideology of separate gendered spheres (further structured by race, class, sexuality, geography and other status markers). That ideology centers the economy on private production by autonomous interest-maximizing actors, set apart from social “reproduction” associated with hierarchical private relationships of altruism, dependency, and moral authority. Law continually reshapes that separation by designating some labor and interests as components of valuable production deserving public support and authority, while constructing other labor and interests, particularly those associated with feminized domesticity, as non-economic personal qualities, private responsibilities, or costly dependency meriting private sacrifice and submission.61 Even though the efficiency-redistribution binary does not explicitly assign its distinct spheres by gender, it draws on this gendered ideology and history for its narrative force. Nancy Fraser analyzes how unjust and destructive power gets mobilized and masked by defining and enforcing the boundaries of the economy, with those deemed inside entitled to exploit and expend the people, resources, and activities identified as relegated to the outside spheres of social reproduction and nature.62 Similarly, Angela Harris explains that the American political economy “was built on . . . [and] continues to reproduce relations of caste through property, race, kinship in the space marked ’the social.’”63 The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from many U.S. labor law protections is one example of how law sets the economy’s boundaries to reinforce social caste. To instead direct the economy toward human flourishing, Harris urges law to challenge how the “social” determines “[t]he lives that matter and don’t, the populations that are and are not ‘native,’ the poor who are and are not deserving.”64 Law and Economics reinforces this systemic, gendered, subordination of the “social” with its core idea that well-being is inevitably dependent on and subordinate to an economy independent of social quality. During the Covid-19 pandemic, political pressures to support the U.S. economy by lifting public health restrictions regardless of human cost followed an ideal of economic well- being that assumes many people will need to sacrifice both their money and their lives to support wealth for a relatively privileged few.65 As Lynn Parramore explains, the anti-social idea of economic welfare maximizes not real societal wealth, but rather the inverse condition of societal “illth,” the term coined by nineteenth century political economist John Ruskin to describe the harmful effects of the emerging system of industrial capitalism.66 From this perspective, rising contemporary economic insecurity among men does not represent a zero-sum loss resulting from women’s gains. Instead, it reflects an anti-social economy designed to hold most people back from their potential for constructing a better world for themselves and others. What the law and economics model fails to recognize is that the social trust built from political and legal systems designed to broadly provide and reward care and protection for diverse individuals, environments, and communities can produce resilience, adaptability, and solidarity vital to long term economic strength.67 Individualized gain-seeking cannot rationally provide meaningful personal security or freedom in the contemporary context of catastrophic global risks from multiple systemic threats of pandemic, climate disruption, economic inequality and instability, social division, and political authoritarianism. By changing the legal subject from the autonomous individual liberal subject to the embodied human who is universally but uniquely born into physical and social dependency and mortality, Martha Fineman draws on feminism to ground economic welfare in responsibility for social quality and equality, making substantive provisioning for universal human vulnerability the central measure of productivity and legitimacy.68 III. Framing Freedom as an Anti-Feminist Economic Value Building on liberal political theory’s focus on individual autonomy, the law and economics master narrative further undercuts feminism with a neoliberal ideal of freedom severed from public moral governance. It responds to liberalism’s conundrum that advancing liberty through democracy and human rights means individuals must submit to the contested substantive judgments of others by positing an efficient market of formally neutral legal rules where individuals freely pursue self-determined gain through consensual transactions. In this view, the private market fosters diversity and personal agency free from collective control, seemingly compatible with feminist resistance to prescribed gender norms. But by grounding legitimate freedom in individualized, private self-interest, this narrative makes systemic gender-based subordination and violence appear to deserve legal deference—or even fundamental legal protection. A. Reducing Liberty to Individual Self-Interest In her intellectual history of neoliberal “rational choice” theory, S.M. Amadae concludes that the ideal of freedom as calculated individual gain-seeking reduces consent to no more than the act of showing up in a system beyond individual control.69 With a gun at your head, the choice to forfeit your money rather than your life is self-interested, but the opposite of meaningful freedom. A deeper understanding of liberty would turn not on the individual freedom to choose, but on the moral qualities of the collective conditions and processes governing our options. Neither economics nor individualized choice can enable law to impartially settle the questions of justice necessary for meaningful freedom. What conditions, for whom, constitute consent free from force and fraud? What individual gains from imposing harm on others should be protected as legitimate private rights or excused as personal, social, or local discretion or indiscretion? Government inevitably distributes the power to use force by how law defines, punishes, monetizes, and immunizes acts of violence.70 Contrary to the law and economics presumption of markets free of force, the recent #MeToo movement against sexual assault illustrates how the strong arm and insidious shadow of physical force is common, not marginal, to the everyday economic lives of many women, a factor to bargain with in the process of securing opportunities for education, work, housing and health care.71 The Black Lives Matter movement similarly shows that deadly public and private violence, tied to militarized policing, mass incarceration, and racial disenfranchisement, routinely looms over ordinary private activity to reinforce an economy of vastly unequal personal freedom and opportunity. Both of these movements are examples of how laws governing physical force are thoroughly gendered in ways that intersect with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other status markers.72 The law and economics binary frame helps naturalize and legalize this unequal protection by identifying violence as a social or psychological problem or background fact outside an economic realm of self-interested rationality. Steeped in this view, the Supreme Court invalidated federal damage remedies for private gender-motivated violence despite voluminous evidence of its economic harm, claiming that “[g]ender-motivated crimes of violence are not, in any sense of the phrase, economic activity.”73 Philosopher Kate Manne analyzes misogynist violence as a “law enforcement” system aimed at defining and defending an economy structured to support an unequal masculine entitlement to gain from women’s service, sexual or otherwise, as a non-mutual social duty.74 Even though most men don’t assault women, privileged men can nonetheless gain from a system that makes it reasonable or legitimate to advance their own interests by commanding women’s attention, bodies, and labor without mutual obligation or accountability. Feminist legal scholar Robin West explains that sexual harassment continues to be normalized and excused in a legal and cultural context that covertly discounts and discredits women’s freedom to control access to their bodies.75 While tort law in theory assumes that bodies generally are not up for grabs, in practice it makes sexual harassment hard to remedy by assuming some bodies are naturally or normally welcoming or tolerant of intrusion, so that being grabbed by privileged men tends not to be a cognizable injury.76 The idea that law protects individual freedom by insulating private self-interest from moral accountability reinforces gendered and unequal entitlements. Feminist legal scholar Anita Bernstein analyzes how seemingly formal laws pervasively distribute freedom through status- based stereotypes identifying some people’s self-interested agency as presumptively unruly, deserving public and private constraint, while others’ self-interested agency is presumptively productive, deserving legal discretion and deference despite harmful impact on others.77 As Bernstein explains, “If femaleness or blackness makes a person crazy or angry, then the absence of these traits makes him rational, or his behaviors reasonable and comprehensible.”78 West explains that the law and economics goal of maximizing self-interest free from moral governance effectively justifies laws privileging the interests of those wielding the most private power, regardless of inequality, societal costs, or constraining effects on others.79 According to the welfare-maximizing criterion, “might is innocent” as long it appears free from overt collective moral control, because self-interested action by economic winners is by definition productive, rather than malicious, sadistic, irrational or dangerous.80 Furthermore, by identifying liberty with maximizing private interests, the law and economics orthodoxy justifies interpreting and adapting law to further privilege and protect those who can use private power to constrain others’ self- interest. If a firm can increase profits by giving its workers the choice to lose their job or accept working conditions posing a substantial risk to health or life,81 then that choice can appear to advance personal liberty more than stricter government enforcement of workplace health and safety rules. Indeed, this view of liberty as private interest-maximizing strips law of the moral authority to challenge those presumed to be the natural and normal winners,82 so that unequal power to engage in arbitrary lawlessness is compatible with justice.83 By legitimizing the self-interested power to harm others as deference to individual freedom, the law and economics binary undermines individual liberty overall, while reinforcing longstanding subordination based on gender, race, class, and other identities marked as morally suspect. For example, feminist legal theorists June Carbone, Naomi Cahn, and Nancy Levit explain the consequences of replacing the idea that corporate success requires cooperative teamwork and long term institutional commitments with the theory that efficient corporations should reward amoral individualized self-interest maximizing.84 That management model has led to corporate “masculinities contests” that select leaders who are especially ruthless, narcissistic, and unprincipled.85 The result is an economy where competitive pressures steer businesses toward normalizing unproductive and unlawful practices, including sexual harassment and discrimination, wage theft, and fraud,86 thereby eroding individual freedom and agency as well as societal well- being.

(Sandra, Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective, Feminist Economics 1:1)

When the values and interests to be identified by researchers are those that differ between individual researchers or even recognized research communities, the neutrality ideal can be useful. Here feminists have stressed that it has not been vigorously enough pursued. (It has its limits here, too. My point is only that it also has its uses.) But when culture-wide values and interests shape research projects, the neutrality ideal is notjust useless; even worse, it becomes part of the problem. It defends and legitimates the institutions and practices through which the distortions and their often exploitative consequences are generated. It certifies as normal, natural, and therefore not political at all, the policies and practices through which powerful groups can gain the information and explanations that they need to advance their priorities. As two feminist postcolonial critics put the point, modern science's claimed neutrality is "a politics of disvaluing local concerns and knowledge and legitimating 'outside experts"' (Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya and Vandana Shiva 1988: 60). Such information and explanations may well "work" in the sense of enabling prediction and control. However, this obvious fact does not end the matter. One form of explanation that "works" may at the same time obscure or draw attention away from other regularities and their causes that would suggest other possibilities for organizing nature and social relations. One can get information about the natural and social order that makes possible the accumulation of wealth by the few and misery by the many, or other information that makes possible the equitable distribution of means to satisfy basic human needs for food, shelter, health, work and just social relations. Moreover, the regularities of nature and social relations that make possible healing a body, charting the stars, or mining ores may be explained in ways permitting extensive, though not identical, prediction and control within radically different and even conflicting, culturally local, explanatory models. The kinds of explanations favored by modern science are not necessarily the most effective ones for all projects - for example, for achieving environmental balance, preventing chronic bodily malfunctions or distributing access to scarce resources fairly. The fact that societies with massive investments of public resources in natural and social science research have not been interested to prioritize such fundamental human problems is itself illuminating. "It works" is no guarantee that "it" works for explaining all of nature's regularities and their underlying causal tendencies, that "it" is the only reasonable explanation of a given phenomenon, or that "it" does not also generate systematic ignorance. "It works" is no guarantee of cultural neutrality (cf. Harding 1994, forthcoming b). This kind of argument is widespread in U.S. anti-racist analyses and in the postcolonial science studies and development literature, including much work now generated under U.N. auspices as that institution tries to grasp why forty years of conceptualizing "development" primarily as a matter of science and technology transfer from North to South has largely resulted in the dedevelopment (and worse) for the vast majority of the South's peoples. (Cf. Vernon Dixon 1976; Susan Feiner 1994; Goonatilake 1984; Harding 1993, 1994, forthcoming b; Nandy 1990; Petitjean etal. 1992; UNCSTD forthcoming.) The neutrality ideal functions more through what its normalizing procedures and concepts implicitly prioritize than through explicit directives. This kind of politics requires no informed consent by those who exercise it, but only that scientists be "company men" (and women), following the prevailing rules of scientific institutions and their intellectual traditions. This normalizing politics frequently defines the objections of its victims and any criticisms of its institutions, practices or conceptual world as agitation by special interests that threatens to damage the neutrality of science and its "civilizing mission," as an earlier generation saw the matter. Thus, when sciences are already in the service of the mighty, scientific neutrality ensures that "might makes right." Feminists in every discipline have argued that androcentric "might" has all too often appealed to neutrality-maximizing standards in order to justify as "right" distorted descriptions and explanations of natural and social regularities and their underlying causal tendencies. We need a concept of objectivity, and methods for maximizing it, that enable scientific projects to escape containment by the interests and values of the powerful. This only weak concept of objectivity, that remains contained by the neutrality ideal, can't do it. What is the mechanism in scientific processes through which neutrality, and thus objectivity, is supposed to be maximized? Method is supposed to "operationalize" neutrality and, thus, achieve objectivist standards. However, method is conceptualized too narrowly to permit achievement of this goal. For one thing, method - in the sense in which students take methods courses or a research report describes its methods - is conceptualized as functioning only in the context of justification when hypotheses are being tested. It comes into play only after a problem is identified as a scientific one and after central concepts, a hypothesis and research design have already been selected. It is only after a research project is already constituted that methods of research, in this conventional narrow sense of the term, start up. However, as critic after critic has pointed out, it is in the context of discovery that culture-wide assumptions shape the very statement and design of the research project, and therefore select the methods. Moreover, it is well known that the availability of a research technology that was itself selected in earlier contexts of discovery and found productive frequently helps select which scientific problems will be interesting to scientists and to funders (cf., e.g., Strassmann 1993a). And cultural interests, values and relevances always select which problems will get to count as important ones for research. Of course in the "mangle of practice" (Andrew Pickering 1991) during the research process, hypotheses, representations of the object of knowledge and research technologies are adjusted to each other such that an important element of objectivity is produced without the promise of total neutrality. The world constrains our beliefs without uniquely confirming them. The "positive" neutrality ideal has blinded us to the costs of limiting our understanding of "method" only to techniques that standardize or otherwise obscure the values and interests represented in the results of research. Even the U.S. National Academy of Sciences - certainly not a den of wild-eyed radicals now argues that the notion of research method should be enlarged beyond its familiar meaning of techniques to include the judgments scientists make about interpretation or reliability of data, ... the decisions scientists make about which problems to pursue or when to conclude an investigation, ... the ways scientists work with each other and exchange information. (National Academy of Sciences 1989: 5-6) All three of these expansions of the notion of method make dear that methods can themselves be selected because they advance local social values and interests. Thus methods aimed only at eliminating all values and interests from the results of research have no way of detecting the ones that first constitute scientific problems, and then select central concepts, hypotheses to be tested and research designs. The issue I am raising is that some normative influences on research evidently advance the growth of knowledge and others retard it, but the "positivist" understanding of method lacks any way to identify which are which; moreover it is incapable of detecting the most widespread cultural assumptions, such as androcentric, economically elite or Eurocentric ones, that invariably lead to only partial and distorted representations of nature and social relations. (15-18)

As an individual who is pretty heavily entrenched in the world of journalism, both personally and academically, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the future of journalism and the challenges in it. Any time I am asked about this topic, two issues seem to overwhelmingly dominate the conversation: news bias and artificial intelligence.

Discussing news bias has become commonplace in the interactions I have with people about journalism, which comes as no surprise, since polls indicate public trust in media is at a historic low.

What happens when Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, , , and Sundar Pichai walk into a Senate hearing room together?

These giants of the tech world descended on Capitol Hill  to discuss public policy initiatives to try to minimize the risks of artificial intelligence. One of the proposals under consideration is the creation of a federal regulatory commission to monitor AI developments. Altman has already  in favor of such an approach. CEOs in favor of regulation? What is going on?

The last two decades have put pressure on journalists, editors, and newsrooms [1], [2]. On the content side, young digital natives have different news habits from the older media consumers . They rely more on alternative and free information sources and are less likely to pay for news subscriptions , [3]. Other segments of the population shun mainstream media due to perceived political bias and distrust in authorities . These attitudes may become exacerbated by co-ordinated disinformation campaigns [4] and amplified in sealed information enclaves, such as online echo chambers [5] and alleged search and recommendation bubbles [6], [7]. Some population segments also lack the language, reading and other skills that are required to appreciate quality news. They may experience news fatigue or exhibit news avoidance [8], [9]. On the business side, media income from advertising, subscriptions and sales has dropped due to the availability of free online news sources, social media, search engines, and other intermediaries , . In particular, social networking sites exploit their platform power by leveraging information about consumer behaviours to offer individually targeted promotion at lower prices than traditional mass media [10]. As broken business models lead to newsroom layoffs , these challenges become even harder to tackle, creating a vicious cycle. For example, in the US, more than a quarter of all newsroom jobs were lost between 2008 and 2020 [11]. Similar developments have been experienced elsewhere .

At the same time, many of the same mechanisms that put journalists, editors, and newsrooms under pressure make quality journalism more important than ever. Rigorous evidence-based journalism that is based on robust democratic values and open about its positions and values can help to defuse growing populism and distrust in authorities. Indeed, many analyses1 show that countries, such as Norway, which have a very strong quality media sector, have been able to address these issues successfully, showing high percentages of access to quality paid content and high levels of trust in the news. Analogously, international quality outlets like The Guardian have been able to manage the transition to the digital era successfully,2 emphasising a direct relationship with their readers based on trust and high quality content. In a nutshell, it is our view not only that quality journalism is extremely important in this new age of polarisation and fake news, but also that the same mechanisms that fuel these negative trends at the same time create an opportunity for quality news organisations to thrive, by providing both readers and advertisers with a platform characterised by trusted and high quality news content.

Yes, there will be casualties in all of this but one thing is for sure, journalism is not going to die. It will mutate not die off.

The Salem Witch Trials

Like any technology, AI requires what NLP expert Kelly Stone calls the “human in the loop” validation stage. Including humans in the process both to check and refine AI output will ensure that this type of technology continues to learn so that, down the line, it’ll produce even more refined and accurate answers.

AI companies are continuously working to improve their products, and there are a few key ways that these improvements are typically made. Having an abundance of data is a formidable start, but structuring that data in a way that it’s easily accessible and usable is the real challenge. And considering that most companies’ data constantly grows – and sometimes does so exponentially – means a robust structure is incredibly important.

U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office carries out a core constitutional mandate from Section 8, Article 1: “The Congress shall have Power...[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Strong intellectual property (IP) protections form the bedrock of American business and are a key factor in making the U.S. economy the most innovative in the world. As such, a conservative Administration must constantly work to strengthen IP rights and combat the incorrect view that strong IP rights somehow limit innovation. Political leadership in a new conservative Administration should: l Support like-minded countries as candidates for leadership in the World Intellectual Property Organization and build strong relationships with international partners to strengthen intellectual property rights. l Re-examine patent eligibility requirements in Section 101 of the Patent Act7 and support internal and/or legislative reforms to enable U.S. leadership in critical and emerging technologies such as quantum computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence. l Take a balanced approach to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and prioritize rapid and transparent processing of applications and appeals. l Work with Administration partners and Congress to find and punish trademark infringers and counterfeiters. l Oppose efforts to provide intellectual property waivers for cutting-edge technologies, including for COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, through the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement or any other mechanism.

The story of Project 2025 starts with the Heritage Foundation. Since its founding in the 1970s, Heritage has styled itself as the main think tank of the conservative movement. Its goal is to push the Republican Party toward a further right agenda so that GOP officials listen more to ideologues and hardliners, not moderates and the traditional party establishment. Heritage does this partly by crafting and advocating for policy proposals. They also try to be a sort of “administration-in-waiting” when the GOP is out of power, with experts on their payroll who can join a newly elected administration. In some ways, Project 2025 is not new: The Heritage Foundation has been releasing extremely long (and extreme) plans for what the next conservative president should do .

Yet the dynamics this time around are different, in part due to Heritage’s close ties to Trump and in part due to the unusual situation where a former president is trying to regain office.

U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office carries out a core constitutional mandate from Section 8, Article 1: “The Congress shall have Power...[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Strong intellectual property (IP) protections form the bedrock of American business and are a key factor in making the U.S. economy the most innovative in the world. As such, a conservative Administration must constantly work to strengthen IP rights and combat the incorrect view that strong IP rights somehow limit innovation. Political leadership in a new conservative Administration should: l Support like-minded countries as candidates for leadership in the World Intellectual Property Organization and build strong relationships with international partners to strengthen intellectual property rights. l Re-examine patent eligibility requirements in Section 101 of the Patent Act7 and support internal and/or legislative reforms to enable U.S. leadership in critical and emerging technologies such as quantum computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence. l Take a balanced approach to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and prioritize rapid and transparent processing of applications and appeals. l Work with Administration partners and Congress to find and punish trademark infringers and counterfeiters. l Oppose efforts to provide intellectual property waivers for cutting-edge technologies, including for COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, through the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement or any other mechanism.

While COVID-19 is a pandemic in the truest sense—its effects are felt worldwide—national governments have struggled to address it as a global issue or shed state-centric attitudes. In the same way that pharmaceutical companies think first about the interests of their shareholders, national governments tend to think first about the interests of their citizens. History has shown them to be hesitant to invest national funds into international enterprises, even when they might yield significant benefits for citizens. Accordingly, when a nation invests in a vaccine, it tends not to share it across borders.30 Despite initial good intentions—the presidents of both France and China made speeches arguing that COVID-19 vaccines should be treated as “global public goods” and made universally available regardless of their origin31—the COVID-19 vaccines have been no exception to this rule.32 At the outset of the pandemic, wary of the aforementioned temporal problem, wealthy governments created a lucrative market for COVID-19 R&D by setting aside billions of dollars to fund and buy vaccines.33 Spurred into action by the promise of tremendous profits, pharmaceutical companies raced potential vaccines through clinical trials while simultaneously engaging would-be buyers in bidding wars over potential doses. In these bidding wars, the same wealthy countries that put up the initial R&D money unsurprisingly came away victorious, locking up most doses before they were even on the market.34 The U.S. COVID-19 initiative, ambitiously called “Operation Warp Speed,” involved brokering deals with dozens of pharmaceutical companies, offering to contribute money toward research on the condition that the resulting vaccines be made available first to U.S. citizens.35 Other countries followed suit. By November 2020, as the race for a vaccine built toward a climax, the United States, UK, EU, and Japan had agreed to buy more than 300 billion doses between them, and there was little hope that China and India would share the results of their research programs with other nations.36 For poorer countries, vaccines were effectively sold out before they ever even hit the shelves.37

We find that overall health inequalities have decreased globally in the period 1990–2008 (Absolute GiniH down 1.9 years, both sexes combined) (Figure 1a). At the same time overall LE has increased (from 65.9 to 70 years for females and from 61.9 to 65.7 for males). Figure 1b shows the case of Ethiopia, an example of the general trend (LE up 10.1 years and Absolute GiniH down 5.2 years in the period). Globally, females have had greater progression in terms of decreasing within-females absolute health inequality (from 27.4 to 25.2 years) compared to within-men inequality (from 26.7 to 25.1 years). The same overall trend of reduced health inequality applies to all groups of countries stratified by income level (Figure 1c). The low-income, lower middle-income, upper middle-income and highincome group have all seen reduction in disparities in age at death. The lower middle-income group has experienced the greatest improvement (from 27.0 to 23.8 years for females and from 26.0 to 23.7 years for males). Studies of health inequalities related to socioeconomic status frequently present data on quintile gaps, i.e., the gap between health outcome in the upper and lower quintile of wealth. We study overall health inequalities, unassociated with the socioeconomic gradient, and have, therefore, stratified the countries in the world into quintiles based on health outcomes. We find that the gap between the average LE in the upper and lower LE quintiles has increased with 0.7 years (from 27.1 to 27.8 years) in the period 1990–2008. This means that the worse-off group in terms of health is left behind, i.e., that the countries with lowest LE improved more slowly (LE up 3.4 years) than the quintile group of countries with highest LE (LE up 4.2 years). The parabolic shape of the LE-versus-income curve, known as the Preston curve, is mirrored in the Absolute GiniH-versus-income curve (Figure 2). However, when carefully examining this figure, it is evident that the relation between health inequalities and average income is not a perfect correlation of the relation between average health and average income. Consequently, interesting details may appear when examining inter-regional differences or temporal changes in these relations for selected regions and countries.

Walker and Avant (2019) define consequences as incidents or events that happen as a result of the occurrence of a concept. As health equity has not yet been reached, the consequences discussed here are theoretical in nature. There are four categories of consequences for health equity (see Figure 2 and Supplement 2 ). First, at the societal level, a consequence of health equity includes increased multi-sector collaborations and cross-sector networks and enhanced organizational, community, and individual capacity that enable healthy lives ( Adelson et al., 2021 , Cole et al., 2023 , Gertel-Rosenberg et al., 2022 , John et al., 2021 , Srivastav et al., 2020 , Thimm-Kaiser et al., 2023 ). The second consequence of health equity, at the individual level, is health outcomes in which everyone achieves their highest health potential with reduced morbidities, mortalities, disease burden, decreased disease incidence and prevalence, and a better quality of life. Specifically, a person’s physical, cognitive, and psychological abilities are maximized ( Peterson et al., 2021 , Srivastav et al., 2020 ). The third consequence is the cost-saving in U.S. healthcare expenditure, including the use of current and evolving technology ( Carr et al., 2020 , Epstein, 2022 , Kang and Barcelona, 2022 , Sieck et al., 2022 , Szymczak et al., 2023 ). The last consequence is health equity-focused research, which has become visibly prominent with (a) expanding and improving race and ethnicity data collection ( Cash-Gibson et al., 2020 , Kang and Barcelona, 2022 , Wasserman et al., 2019 ), (b) increasing clinical trial participation, and racially and ethnically minoritized participant engagement in collaborative research to adequately reflect their current state and disease burden ( Brownson et al., 2021 , Cash-Gibson et al., 2020 , Diallo et al., 2022 , Lennon et al., 2022 , Milburn et al., 2019 ), and (c) advancing medical and scientific knowledge available for all to reduce health disparities ( Churchwell et al., 2020 , Gee and Ford, 2011 , Jackson and Sadler, 2022 ).

Social determinants of health and health equity There is not a great deal of mystery as to why poor people in low-income countries suffer from high rates of illness, particularly infectious disease and malnutrition: little food, unclean water, low levels of sanitation and shelter, failure to deal with the environments that lead to high exposure to infectious agents, and lack of appropriate medical care. Similarly, we have a great deal of knowledge of the causes of non-communicable diseases that represent the major burden of disease for people at the lower end of the social gradient in middle-income and high-income countries. The WHO Global Burden of Disease study identified underweight, overweight, smoking, alcohol, hypertension, and sexual behaviour as major causes of morbidity and mortality. For both groups of causes the question is how they and their inequitable distribution come about. That is, what are the causes of the causes? The Commission believes that these health inequities are the result of a complex system operating at global, national, and local levels which shapes the way society, at national and local level, organizes its affairs and embodies different forms of social position and hierarchy. The place people occupy on the social hierarchy affects their level of exposure to health-damaging factors, their vulnerability to ill health, and the consequences of ill health. Putting all these levels in context is the natural environment, and the macro-level to micro-level effects of environmental change. Risks to health include heatwaves and other extreme weather events, changes in infectious disease patterns, effects on local food yields and freshwater supplies, impaired vitality of ecosystems, and loss of livelihoods. If present trends continue the adverse health effects from human-induced environmental changes will be distributed unequally. The poor, the geographically vulnerable, the politically weak, and other disadvantaged groups will be mostaffected.26 Addressing the intersection between social determinants of environmental change and the effect of environmental change on health inequities will benefit sustainable ecological and population health alike.

Global justice is an element of normative global health governance dynamics that focuses on all the moral obligations from the world’s rich to the poor. Thus, global justice stands to redistribute wealth to the poor people to eliminate global poverty and other socio-economic concerns. The US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra (while participating in WHA 74) said Universal Health Coverage is “a right and not a privilege.” Even public health has been prioritized and institutionalized, considering global health justice. Several programs, policy initiatives, campaigns have been launched, such as health for all and health equity. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Article 12) had acknowledged, “The right to the highest standard of physical and mental health.” It gives some directives for states to prevent, treat, and control epidemics, endemics, occupational, and other diseases. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 25) conceived health as a human right and postulated to achieve “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family.” The TRIPS agreement also underlined (Article 7) that the exercise of intellectual property rights should be carried out in a “manner conducive to social and economic welfare, and a balance of rights and obligations.” Furthermore, TRIPS Article 8.1 emphasized that the, “Members may, in formulating or amending their laws and regulations, adopt measures necessary to protect public health and nutrition” keeping these measures are in tandem with the TRIPS agreement (WTO, n.d). The WHO says, “the health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being . . . The extension to all peoples of the benefits of medical, psychological and related knowledge is essential to the fullest attainment of health” (Constitution of the WHO) (WHO, 1995).

The above discussion can be summarized as supporting the right to achieve the highest standard of physical and mental health as defined by the WHO. Moreover, to prevent, treat, and control pandemics or diseases for health security and to support or advocate health as a human right, we have to exercise the IPRs in a conducive way to support the social and economic welfare of all the global citizens (Chattu et al., 2021a). Hence, there is an urgent need to adopt necessary measures to protect public health, as health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being, and look through the prism of global justice.