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Matthew Kroenig and Bharath Gopalaswamy, "Will disruptive technology cause nuclear war?," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11-12-2018, 

Rather, we should think more broadly about how new technology might affect global politics, and, for this, it is helpful to turn to scholarly international relations theory. The dominant theory of the causes of war in the academy is the “bargaining model of war.” This theory identifies rapid shifts in the balance of power as a primary cause of conflict.

These are precisely the types of shifts in the balance of power that can lead to war. As mentioned previously, the predominant scholarly theory on the causes of war—the bargaining model—maintains that imperfect information on the balance of power and the balance of resolve and credible commitment problems result in international conflict.52 New technology can exacerbate these causal mechanisms by increasing uncertainty about, or causing rapid shifts in, the balance of power. Indeed as noted above, new military technology and the development of new operational concepts have shifted the balance of power and resulted in military conflict throughout history. Some may argue emerging military technology is more likely to result in a new tech arms race than in conflict. This is possible. But Moscow and Beijing may come to believe (correctly or not) that new technology provides them a usable military advantage over the United States and its Allies and partners. In so doing, they may underestimate Washington. If Moscow or Beijing attacked a vulnerable US Ally or partner in their near abroad, therefore, there would be a risk of major war with the potential for nuclear escalation. The United States has formal treaty commitments with several frontline states as well as an ambiguous defense obligation to Taiwan. If Russia or China were to attack these states, it is likely, or at least possible, that the United States would come to the defense of the victims. While many question the wisdom or credibility of America’s global commitments, it would be difficult for the United States to simply back down. Abandoning a treaty ally could cause fears that America’s global commitments would unravel. Any US president, therefore, would feel great pressure to come to an Ally’s defense and expel Russian or Chinese forces. Once the United States and Russia or China are at war, there would be a risk of nuclear escalation. As noted previously, experts assess the greatest risk of nuclear war today does not come from a bolt-out-of-the-blue strike but from nuclear escalation in a regional, conventional conflict.53 Russian leaders may believe it is in their interest to use nuclear weapons early in a conflict with the United States and NATO.54 Russia possesses a large and diverse arsenal, including thousands of nonstrategic nuclear weapons, to support this nuclear strategy. In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, Washington indicates it could retaliate against any Russian nuclear “de-escalation” strikes with limited nuclear strikes of its own using low-yield nuclear weapons.55 The purpose of US strategy is to deter Russian strikes. If deterrence fails, however, there is a clear pathway to nuclear war between the United States and Russia. As Henry Kissinger pointed out decades ago, there is no guarantee that, once begun, a limited nuclear war stays limited.56 There are similar risks of nuclear escalation in the event of a US-China conflict. China has traditionally possessed a relaxed nuclear posture with a small “lean and effective” deterrent and a formal “no first use” policy. But China is relying more on its strategic forces. It is projected to double—if not triple or quadruple—the size of its nuclear arsenal in the coming decade.57 Chinese experts have acknowledged there is a narrow range of contingencies in which China might use nuclear weapons first.58 As in the case of Russia, the US Nuclear Posture Review recognizes the possibility of limited Chinese nuclear attacks and also holds out the potential of a limited US reprisal with low-yield nuclear weapons as a deterrent.59 If the nuclear threshold is breached in a conflict between the United States and China, the risk of nuclear exchange is real. In short, if a coming revolution in military affairs provides a real or perceived battlefield advantage for Russia or China, such a development raises the likelihood of armed aggression against US regional allies, major power war, and an increased risk of nuclear escalation.

PHARMAVOICE: Can you start by characterizing President Biden’s march-in proposal from your perspective in terms of what it’s trying to accomplish?

ANDREI IANCU: The president’s proposal to march in and seize patents that were derived from federally funded research, or at least in parts from federally funded research, is being touted by the administration as an attempt to reduce drug prices. And whether or not that is the actual intent, that is what they are saying publicly. The reality though, is the march-in proposal would do nothing to actually reduce drug pricing. Instead, it would simply just reduce innovation in all industries in the United States.

I’ve lived through disease outbreaks, and in the previous chapter I showed just how unprepared we are to face a widespread pandemic of flu or another new pathogen like SARS. But a deliberate outbreak caused by an engineered pathogen would be far worse. We would face the same agonizing decisions that must be made during a natural pandemic: whether to ban travel from affected regions, how to keep overburdened hospitals working as the rolls of the sick grew, how to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines and drugs. To that dire list add the terror that would spread once it became clear that the death and disease in our midst was not the random work of nature, but a deliberate act of malice. We’re scared of disease outbreaks and we’re scared of terrorism—put them together and you have a formula for chaos.

As deadly and as disruptive as a conventional bioterror incident would be, an attack that employed existing pathogens could only spread so far, limited by the same laws of evolution that circumscribe natural disease outbreaks. But a virus engineered in a lab to break those laws could spread faster and kill quicker than anything that would emerge out of nature. It can be designed to evade medical countermeasures, frustrating doctors’ attempts to diagnose cases and treat patients. If health officials manage to stamp out the outbreak, it could be reintroduced into the public again and again. It could, with the right mix of genetic traits, even wipe us off the planet, making engineered viruses a genuine existential threat.

(Sonja, directs RAND Europe’s portfolio of research in the field of healthcare innovation, industry and policy, previously led RAND Europe's institutional partnership with The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute at Cambridge University, member of the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research and expert advisor on innovation to the NHS England and NHS Improvement cancer programme, and Carolina Feijao, analyst working in the areas of science and emerging technology at RAND Europe, “Pharmaceutical Innovation for Infectious Disease Management”, Rand Europe, May 2020, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA400/PEA407-1/RAND_PEA407-1.pdf)

We need to ensure scalable and sustainable approaches for pharmaceutical innovation in response to infectious disease threats to public health As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies have been called on to develop medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for pressing public health challenges. The COVID-19 crisis is one such challenge, but there are many others. For example, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Zika and avian and swine flu are also infectious diseases that represent public health threats. Infectious agents such as anthrax, smallpox and tularemia could present threats in a bioterrorism context.1 The general threat to public health that is posed by antimicrobial resistance is also well-recognised as an area in need of pharmaceutical innovation. Innovating in response to these challenges does not always align well with pharmaceutical industry commercial models, shareholder expectations and competition within the industry. However, the expertise, networks and infrastructure that industry has within its reach, as well as public expectations and the moral imperative, make pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences sector an indispensable partner in the search for solutions that save lives. This perspective argues for the need to establish more sustainable and scalable ways of incentivising pharmaceutical innovation in response to infectious disease threats to public health. It considers both past and current examples of efforts to mobilise pharmaceutical innovation in high commercial risk areas, including in the context of current efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In global pandemic crises like COVID-19, the urgency and scale of the crisis – as well as the spotlight placed on pharmaceutical companies – mean that contributing to the search for effective medicines, vaccines or diagnostics is essential for socially responsible companies in the sector. 2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing industry-wide efforts unfold at unprecedented scale and pace. Whereas there is always scope for more activity, industry is currently contributing in a variety of ways. Examples include pharmaceutical companies donating existing compounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating trials for potentially effective medicine or vaccine candidates; and in some cases rapidly accelerating in-house research and development to discover new treatments or vaccine agents and develop diagnostics tests.3,4 Pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with each other in some of these efforts and participating in global R&D partnerships (such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative effort to accelerate the development of potential therapies for COVID-19) and supporting national efforts to expand diagnosis and testing capacity and ensure affordable and ready access to potential solutions.3,5,6 The primary purpose of such innovation is to benefit patients and wider population health. Although there are also reputational benefits from involvement that can be realised across the industry, there are likely to be relatively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pressure not to be seen as profiting from the pandemic. In the United Kingdom for example, GSK has stated that it does not expect to profit from its COVID-19 related activities and that any gains will be invested in supporting research and long-term pandemic preparedness, as well as in developing products that would be affordable in the world’s poorest countries.7 Similarly, in the United States AbbVie has waived intellectual property rights for an existing combination product that is being tested for therapeutic potential against COVID-19, which would support affordability and allow for a supply of generics.8,9 Johnson & Johnson has stated that its potential vaccine – which is expected to begin trials – will be available on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic.10 Pharma is mobilising substantial efforts to rise to the COVID-19 challenge at hand. However, we need to consider how pharmaceutical innovation for responding to emerging infectious diseases can best be enabled beyond the current crisis. Many public health threats (including those associated with other infectious diseases, bioterrorism agents and antimicrobial resistance) are urgently in need of pharmaceutical innovation, even if their impacts are not as visible to society as COVID-19 is in the immediate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infectious disease in recent times – for example those associated with Ebola and Zika outbreaks.11 However, it has done so to a lesser scale than for COVID-19 and with contributions from fewer companies. Similarly, levels of activity in response to the threat of antimicrobial resistance are still low.12 There are important policy questions as to whether – and how – industry could engage with such public health threats to an even greater extent under improved innovation conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic is a game-changer among global public health threats. The risk to human life (both in terms of morbidity and quality of life), the economic risks, the epidemiology of the disease and speed of escalation have led to a crisis-response by many governments around the world. This has in turn influenced the immediate industry efforts. Many other infectious disease threats may not manifest as crises in the short term and in the same way as COVID-19, but they could nevertheless escalate. They are not considered to be crises from a short term perspective because they are contained to specific regions and affect fewer people at present – or are re-emerging (e.g. Ebola) – or their impacts have not yet materialised at a scale that would qualify as an immediate crisis (e.g. growing risks of antimicrobial resistance to some infectious pathogens). However, such diseases and issues are recognised as global threats that could become crises in the future.13 The emerging threats raise important policy questions about how government and the pharmaceutical industry can work together to ensure that pharmaceutical industry innovation is incentivised sustainably and at scale. This is important to help mitigate against current and emerging threats becoming crises further down the line. At present, there are no clear and specific criteria to determine when a disease can trigger the types of healthcare-innovation-related policy actions that have been deployed in response to the COVID-19 crisis. For example, this applies to criteria for securing financial resources for innovation-related activities, reforming regulation to accelerate trials and regulatory approval processes, and securing reimbursement mechanisms that help enable industry engagement and the search for rapid solutions. The WHO guidance on what constitutes a pandemic phase does provide guidance on national policy response options, but not specifically as they relate to healthcare innovation activity.14 There are also questions as to whether such policy initiatives and incentives should only be applied in crisis situations, or also as part of proactive government and industry efforts to innovate in the areas of public health threats in order to prevent future global calamities. A crisis and ‘emergency mode’ response may be inevitable for some diseases, but more can be done to mitigate against the need for such a response – especially in cases where emerging threats and their consequences can be foreseen and are known to be a risk. We need to anticipate and act now in terms of how we plan and incentivise better for the future, and how we distinguish between different types of infectious disease threats and phases in framing incentives and regulation. Innovative financial instruments must be integral to any sustainable and scalable approach to incentivising pharmaceutical innovation for tackling emerging threats to public health from infectious diseases The pharmaceutical industry has a responsibility to both its shareholders and to society at large. Incentivising the pharmaceutical industry to innovate solely on the grounds of being a socially responsible sector is unlikely to lead to a sustainable and scalable approach for innovating in response to emerging infectious disease threats. There are also potential challenges to the types of innovation (i.e. how radical or incremental) a reliance on incentives rooted solely in a social responsibility argument can lead to. Donating existing compounds for testing is important, but it is different to at-scale, industry-wide intensive investment in R&D geared at developing highly innovative diagnostics, medicines and vaccines. Even in the case of COVID-19, there are significant differences in the scale of innovative activity that focuses on repurposing existing products and technologies – for example, through testing existing antiviral compounds for potential therapeutic value – and more radically innovative R&D efforts aimed at developing something that acts on the COVID-19 virus in fundamentally novel ways.

As countries grapple with the worst global pandemic in a century, it’s hard to think about preparing for the next one. But if we don’t, it could be worse than Covid-19. Over the last 30 years, infectious disease outbreaks have emerged with alarming regularity. The World Health Organization lists an influenza pandemic and other high-threat viral diseases such as Ebola and dengue among the top 10 biggest threats to public health. The rate of animal-to-human transmission of viruses has been increasing, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that 75% of new infectious diseases in humans come from animals. These zoonotic infections can have profound effects on human life. The overall infection fatality rate is around 10% for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), between 40% and 75% for Nipah virus, and as high as 88% for Ebola. While the infection fatality rate for Covid-19 is lower — likely less than 1% — the overall burden of death has been significantly higher since it has affected so many people, more than 160 million people as I write this. Luck is not a pandemic strategy Although the Covid-19 pandemic has been a human and health care disaster, by scientific measures the world was lucky this time. Covid-19 was far less lethal than its predecessors, less contagious than previous pandemic viruses, and we were able to quickly develop a cadre of effective vaccines. But luck is not a strategy. The same way the U.S. invests in and prepares for national defense, it must also prepare for another pandemic. Though the next viral outbreak cannot be prevented, the next pandemic can — but only with better preparation. There is no doubt that the global pharmaceutical industry, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and health care systems should have been better prepared for Covid-19 in part because the coronavirus that causes it, known as SARS-CoV-2, is closely related to other coronaviruses, particularly the one that caused the outbreak of SARS in 2003. In fact, coronavirus core proteins often share upward of 95% of their nucleic acid or protein sequences due to their close origins. In some cases, their active sites — the pockets to which antiviral therapies bind — are 100% identical. In short, coronaviruses are highly related, and where it counts they share complete or near complete identity. Had the drug discovery efforts initiated during the 2003 SARS epidemic been continued and come to fruition, antiviral medications to treat Covid-19 would have been on the shelf to help contain the pandemic, or at least better treat Covid-19 patients. Unfortunately, those efforts were abandoned once SARS seemed under control because there was no apparent market and no infrastructure to support ongoing research. The response to Covid-19 — if it can be sustained — suggests hope for the future and a springboard for preparedness, especially immediate and ongoing collaborations across the biopharmaceutical industry, academia, and government. Walls came down. Collaboration flourished. A tremendous amount of good science was conducted in diagnostics and clinical management, and the world witnessed spectacular efforts in vaccine development. The urgency of the crisis and the speed of drug development led the biopharmaceutical industry and governmental bodies to work in concert, streamlining regulatory processes in ways that must continue moving forward once the coronavirus crisis ends. Rethinking traditional practices is essential to pandemic preparedness, which must be approached with the same mindset as countries approach defense, with the goal of establishing a unified global bulwark against future disease outbreaks. Establish and fund infrastructure for collaboration Global health crises require organized structures and leadership. Governments and the biopharma industry need to create and coordinate a joint pandemic preparedness ecosystem. Such a structure would help governments, industry, academia, and others focus on their respective strengths for greater efficiency, partnerships, and preemptive research. Related: Real-time gene sequencing can help control — and may someday prevent — pandemics In March 2020, two dozen R&D leaders from the world’s leading biopharma companies, including my company, Takeda, came together to form the Covid R&D Alliance. It is showing that this type of industry collaboration is possible by rapidly assembling and coordinating therapeutic responses to the pandemic. At the national and international levels, this alliance and others are beginning to undertake early work to get ahead of drug development in advance of the next pandemic. But this effort must quickly be solidified before momentum and motivation are lost. The massive human suffering and economic impact of Covid-19 underscore the significant investment that must be made for future preparedness. Dedicated public and private funding of such an effort would demonstrate a commitment to global health care and create a defense against future pandemics that is founded on science and independent from political rhetoric. Identify leading threats and identify therapies for them The perpetrators of the next pandemic will likely come from the coronavirus or influenza families. Other possible culprits include flaviviruses such as the West Nile virus, filoviruses such as the Ebola virus, and alphaviruses known to associate with a number of human encephalitis diseases. Using a list like this to guide its work, the biopharmaceutical industry needs to begin creating an arsenal of antiviral molecules. Given the impossibility of predicting the future, it will be important to focus on broadly active compounds where possible, and virus-specific compounds to fill in gaps. In the coronavirus family, for example, SARS-CoV-2 is similar in structure to the 2003 SARS virus, and the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome is only slightly different. It should be possible to develop a single antiviral molecule to be effective against all three. If a three-fer isn’t possible, then specific therapies should be developed for each potential pathogen. All therapeutic candidates should be evaluated against diverse viral strains as markers of future potential efficacy in future epidemics. There is no business model for preparing for a future pandemic. Without specific catalysts, interest in preparing for this unknown is likely to wane as Covid-19 comes under control. Whether it’s because businesses are thinking of investors, media, academia, or other audiences, the tendency is to go where the spotlight is shining — which would be a disaster for pandemic preparedness. What’s needed is a competitive environment to stimulate innovation. But without an established or obvious market, the necessary investment and entrepreneurism won’t materialize. Enabling future pandemic therapeutic preparedness will require establishing a novel, collaborative ecosystem in which biopharma companies, nongovernmental organizations, governments, academia, and other stakeholders are able to share information and coordinate areas of focus to maximize the collective efforts. The success of the whole will depend on the willingness and success of each individual piece. To prepare for the next viral pandemic, governments and nongovernmental organizations need to focus on preparing health care infrastructure and viral surveillance to predict the next outbreak. At the same time, academia and the pharmaceutical industry must focus on drug discovery, particularly antiviral therapies. These efforts must seamlessly interface. To enable future preparedness, the biopharmaceutical industry should leverage the ways of working that emerged during Covid-19 that included sharing assays, models, and data while concurrently focusing on competitive innovation. With the right level of coordination, and without massive resources, an arsenal of antiviral molecules can be created and tested on healthy human volunteers so the world has them at the ready for Phase 2 trials when threats emerge. Pandemic readiness will also require agility and an ability to adapt rapidly to the unknown. Estimates suggest the existence of 500,000 animal viruses with spillover potential to humans, with a small fraction of these (250 or so) having already made the jump. We must be ready for the perpetrators from poorly studied or poorly understood viral families, as well as the entirely new threats that evolution will create. Focusing on known pathogens is a critical first step in therapeutic preparedness, but the industry must also be ready to start entirely new programs with minimal notice.

Antimicrobial resistance is already causing huge harm – and the worst is yet to come.To open the panel, Dr. Chan issued a serious warning about the size and scope of the AMR threat: “everyone will be affected if we do not address this problem.” AMR is already responsible for an estimated 700,000 global deaths each year, 50,000 of which take place in the US and Europe. Extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis—cases where the most effective first- and second-line drugs are rendered useless—infected an estimated 47,000 people worldwide in 2014, only one ‘last-line’ antimicrobial is available to reliably treat gonorrhea, and few new antimicrobial drugs are in the development pipeline. According to the latest review, AMR could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050, with knock-on effects draining many trillions from the global economy. Summers suggested that AMR and potential pandemics, alongside climate change and nuclear proliferation, represent the top three existential threats to life on earth as we know it. And as Dr. Chan explained, the worst-case scenario implies the end of modern medicine as we know it. Even worse, Summers suggested that AMR seems like a “quintessential non-linear phenomenon, and therefore more dangerous.” Year by year the effects are small and mostly invisible. But at some point in the future they could suddenly become catastrophic, like a “levee that doesn’t hold and unleashes a flood.” Dr. Chan concurred that “the tipping point is not predictable because…microbes are invisible. We don’t even know when they’re going to make the switch” to become resistant to existing drugs. Antimicrobial efficacy is a global public good threatened by serious market failures. In response to this huge threat, why don’t pharmaceutical companies invest in new antibiotics? “It does not pay” for them to do so, explained Osborne. Pharmaceutical companies want to invest in technologies that will make a lot of money, and soon; so long as other antibiotics remain effective, the market for new options will be tiny and unprofitable.

*Says PASTEUR Acts could solve **Claims we need global action

In 2016, the United States National Security Council drew up a playbook on fighting pandemics so that the next response to an epidemic was better handled than the response to the spread of Ebola. The same year, the G7 put tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on the agenda. Today, the twin global health security threats of viruses and bacteria are very real. Every corner of our health system depends on antibiotics. It’s thanks to antibiotics that illnesses such as pneumonia, meningitis and TB are now treatable. They are used for caesarean sections, routine operations such as arthroscopic knee surgery, and cancer chemotherapy. Worryingly, bacteria mutate, just as viruses do. As a result, increasingly people are dying of diseases where the existing antibiotics did not work. Since 2016, over 3.5 million people have died of a drug-resistant infection. Overuse of antibiotics and declining investment in research for new and novel drugs are the causes of this pandemic hidden in plain sight. Without urgent action, 10 million people globally could die annually as a result of AMR by 2050. The question is, how to make sure that one goes from policy papers, dire projections and simulations to action? In the case of Covid-19, against the odds and in record time, we already have a range of vaccines to protect against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The speed of the response is thanks to decades of research on vaccine technologies. In contrast, research for new antibiotics that could stave off the worst of AMR has been stuck in the doldrums. And whilst there are exciting signs at the early end of the pipeline, this innovation is primarily happening in small companies without the infrastructure to take a promising product all the way to market. Between 2018 and 2020, four companies that had brought new antibiotics to market declared bankruptcy or put themselves up for sale, despite having survived the perilous, decade-long process of development and testing to get a new drug approved. To give a boost to the antibiotics pipeline, the AMR Action Fund has been created to develop two to four new antibiotics by 2030, thanks to close to $US 1 billion from pharmaceutical companies, topped up with support from the European Investment Bank and the Wellcome Trust. To ensure there is a healthy pipeline of antibiotics that keep up with bacteria’s natural evolution to build resistance, we need more than a fund to boost innovation. Once new antibiotics are approved, they need to be used sparingly to preserve effectiveness and slow the development of further resistance. While this makes sense for public health, it doesn’t support the level of investment needed to maintain a robust antibiotic pipeline. Despite the huge societal costs of AMR, our health care systems are not currently designed to recognise the value of new antibiotics. We need adapted market-based policy reforms, including reimbursement reform and new ‘pull’ incentives to create market conditions that enable sustainable investment in antibiotic R&D. We need industry to fully recognise the insurance value that antibiotics provide them. We need healthcare systems to pay their ‘fair share’ for innovation. And most of all, we need governments, researchers and life sciences companies to work together, to put patient needs at the forefront. Some governments have started to take decisive action to revitalise the antibiotics market. The United Kingdom NHS’s ‘Netflix’ model to value antibiotics differently and pay for them by subscription rather than per pill has been designed to empower the health service in England to keep watch over antibiotic use whilst also encouraging investment in developing the new treatments we all need. It is a positive example of what can emerge from collaborative dialogue between government, clinicians and industry. In the United States, the PASTEUR Act that is currently before Congress should create a predictable path to rewarding new antibiotics for their value to society via a subscription contract (valued at $750m to $3bn) that prepays for all US federal use of the drug. This would be a delinked pull incentive that is large enough to move the R&D needle, with powerful support for antibiotic stewardship. More generally, the global community is also moving to take action on AMR – 135 countries have finalised national action plans, but they must be fully funded and implemented. These are good actions and are pointing us in the right direction. But, if Covid-19 has taught us something, it is that global health security, as the name implies, needs to be truly global. As the G7 Health Ministers meet, it is crucial that they give AMR a last push and agree global action to strengthen research and development for new antibiotics, once and for all. Let us not fall into the trap of tunnel vision and squander the opportunity that we have been building up to over the past seven years, to fix this silent pandemic of AMR, which otherwise could have consequences far more deadly than Covid-19.

When it comes to healthcare, a delicate balance exists between fostering innovation and ensuring patient access to life-saving medicines. The Biden administration  plans to establish new rules broadening its authority to seize patents from pharmaceutical companies for new drugs that have benefitted from publicly financed research. These plans are not only controversial but also raise critical questions about the future of pharmaceutical innovation in the United States.

The US pharmaceutical and biotech sector has long been a global leader in innovative drug development—owing much of its success to a combination of effective life-science policies such as federally funded research grants, robust intellectual property protections, and technology transfer policies. These policies have historically, and effectively, provided companies with incentives to invest in high-risk and costly drug development, which has resulted in countless groundbreaking medical advancements that we benefit from today.

Bryan Walsh, “The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past,” Vox, 03-20-2023, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23627382/progress-climate-change-poverty-global-health-doom-industrial-revolution-vaccines

How progress can solve the problem of being human

Bryan Walsh, “The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past,” Vox, 03-20-2023, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23627382/progress-climate-change-poverty-global-health-doom-industrial-revolution-vaccines

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

Rich Barlow, September 17 2020, “Capitalism Isn’t Racist. We Are,” WBUR, https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/09/17/racist-capitalism-rich-barlow

That white capitalists have exploited people of color for centuries is indisputable, from Dixie’s plantations and land theft under Jim Crow to redlined neighborhoods and job discrimination today. Instead of reopening all those capitalist businesses shuttered by COVID-19, should we abolish them?

Matthew Lau, “More capitalism, less government—that’s how you reduce racism”, Fraser Institute, 8 November 2023, https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/more-capitalism-less-government-thats-how-you-reduce-racism

Government anti-racism strategies and programs are today politically fashionable and in wide currency. The stated intentions are good, but if such initiatives actually reduce racism and unfair discrimination in society, these findings have not been widely reported. On the contrary, the best-known anti-racism activity undertaken by the Trudeau government is the former employment (until last year) of an anti-racism contractor known for publishing antisemitic and racist slurs, and whose contract was not terminated until it became national news that he received hundreds of thousands of federal dollars.

Madhavi Sunder, “From Goods to a Good Life”, Yale University Press, Pages 10-12, 2012

To promote development as freedom, in Sen’s words, intellectual property law should seek to enhance people’s capacity to participate in cultural production and shared communities of meaning. Furthermore, we must recognize that cultural production is both an end and a means of development. Recognition of Australian aboriginal artists, African musicians, and Ethiopian farmers as producers of cultural meaning, for example, could potentially direct significant revenues into these countries. As Sen has written, “cultural liberty is important not only in the cultural sphere, but in the successes and failures in social, political, and economic spheres. The different dimensions of human life have strong interrelations.” 13 Here, working through culture has yet another meaning. In the Knowledge Age, cultural work is a promising means of economic development. Concerns about the commodification of culture notwithstanding, working through culture can offer an antidote to alienation by providing recognition and remuneration for meaningful work.

Neil Turkewitz, “Blurry Lines: The Complex Intersection of Race & Intellectual Property”, The Shadow, 16 February 2021, https://medium.com/the-shadow/blurry-lines-the-complex-intersection-of-race-intellectual-property-fe88e64d4058

This underscores that, as Professor Vats has observed, intellectual property standards are built on racial scripts, and that such gaps can — and frequently do — operate to deny ownership on the basis of race, or at least in a manner largely aligned with race. But the point I want to stress is that whether in the halls of WIPO, national capitals around the world seeking to address protection of folklore/traditional cultural expression, or as reflected in the Blurred Lines case, the relevant “racial script” that operates to the disadvantage of people of color relates to limitations on the scope of protection, and not to an excess thereof. This is not to suggest that issues of access and use do not pose special challenges for communities of color — only to highlight that an accurate narrative concerning race and intellectual property is complex, and involves, in large part, the failure to provide adequate protection to cultural productions.

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 156-157, 2020

The three examples discussed here explore how individuals and institutions perform race and ownership so as to exploit the legal porosity in intellectual property law, race, citizenship, national identity, and personhood. The first example considers how Prince Rogers Nelson, when he changed his name to the Love Symbol, eroded the music industry’s monopoly over the identities and (intellectual) property rights of artists of color. While Prince explicitly confronted histories of anti-Blackness in the United States in many ways, the symbolic significance of his name change and his fight to own the copyright to his songs continues to influence generations of artists across racial identities, notably by encouraging them to own their music.

Alexander D. Barder, “Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy”, Oxford University Press, Page 173, 2 August 2021,

Ikenberry’s story of the emergence and expansion of the liberal international order takes for granted the West’s intrinsic universality. “Over the centuries,” as he writes in Liberal Leviathan, “the Westphalian system has evolved as a set of principles and practices and expanded outward from its European origins to encompass the entire world.”6 Centuries of racial hierarchy, empire, and violence appear in his account to seamlessly give way to a consensual process of socializing non-Western elites or states into accepting American hegemony as inherently beneficial.7 Proponents of such accounts of the emergence of the international liberal order tend to assume a global cartography in which the liberal order remains a pacified space, as opposed to the perpetual insecurity beyond its reach. Of course, while Ikenberry does concede that American hegemony often needed to “discipline and coerce weaker states, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East,” there is little or no recognition that under the surface of what appeared tranquility within this liberal order, violence proliferated.8 There is no attempt to take into account the proliferation of social unrest in the 1960s, the civil rights movement within the United States, the anti–Vietnam War movement, or the various social movements that called into question a political order predicated upon racism and patriarchy. Rather than simply creating a line between those who are members of this order and those who, for Ikenberry, are left out in the cold in an illiberal world, the cartography of racial violence in the postwar world imbricated the domestic and international in crucial ways.9 It is not surprising, then, that Inderjeet Parmar notes in his critique of Ikenberry’s account that it fundamentally neglects “the role played by violence and outright war” as a way of reconfiguring imperial practices “trying to maintain a global hierarchy established by centuries of colonial and semi-colonial rule over what is now called the global South.”10 Thus Ikenberry’s account appears as an “ideological legitimation” of the emergence of, and maintenance of, American hegemony, which was “imbued with explicit and implicit racial and colonial/imperial assumptions—in both US domestic and foreign policy.”11

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

Quick and dirty, here is the best way to summarise Terzi’s critique of degrowth. His chapter only references seven texts on the topic, a rather shallow understanding of a literature that spans almost 700 articles. Terzi doesn’t make a difference between degrowth and post-growth and conflates all growth-critical stances with ecosocialism, two approaches that have actually been opposing each other for two decades. The overall result is sloppy – a sneer more than an actual critique. To add arrogance to incompetence, his light-weight arguments are thrown around with the superior attitude of a know-it-all economist (the first two pages of the chapter addresses the “pub economics of degrowth,” shaming degrowth as being “economically illiterate,” p. 17). This argument of authority might intimidate a few activists but it won’t fly very far with a growing community of economists like myself whose daily job it is to research these precise questions.

Anjali Vats, “COLOR OF CREATORSHIP – Author’s Response”, The IP Law Book Review 16 (2022), June 2022, https://scholarship.law.pitt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1528&context=fac_articles

While (racial) capitalism can improve the situations of some, operate as harm mitigation so to speak, it alone cannot, at least in its increasingly unregulated forms, produce equity of any type. In fact, the neoliberalism that Lauren Berlant argues anchors trademarks to nation is an integral part of the superstructure that produces inequity. In this way, Professor Tushnet’s observation that likelihood of consumer confusion is not connected to racialized outcomes is and is not true. On the one hand, she is correct that this is a place in which the argument of the book is underdeveloped, i.e. I do not delve into the cases through which race is mediated via “confusion.” On the other hand, I maintain that the optics of racialization that I am attempting to pin down are built into the larger dynamics of trademarks. Professor Greene writes about how the doctrine of consumer confusion, beginning in the early 1900s, became a tool of (White) robber baron capitalism, shutting out competition in a cutthroat manner. Rosemary Coombe shows this as well, by centering trademarks as important mediators for alterity. In foundational scholarship on trademarks and coloniality, she shows how brand loyalty was a means of encouraging White consumers to invest in the nostalgic racial hierarchies that anchored the post-Emancipation world. I demonstrate how unfair competition cases that evolved into copyright and trademark doctrine, especially those involving Aunt Jemima, normalized White ownership of Black people and their likenesses. Derogatory images perpetuated through (White) judicial interventions relating to consumer confusion were the currency of trademark law. The likelihood of consumer confusion was conceived and produced in a world of (racial) capitalist looking, sustained through the (White) judicial entrenchment of everyday violence. Thus though trademark owners may not be “authorial” or “inventorial” in a literal sense, they play a role in upholding a regime of what Michel Foucault would speak about as power/knowledge in which people of color are systematically diminished by trademarks as well as copyrights and patents. Similarly, as Richard Schur contends, the doctrine of dilution functions as a mediator of purity, one that frequently interfaces with fears of miscegenation. In this respect, dilution cases need not take on race in order to contribute to racial harm. The mere rhetorical invocation of dilution, whether caused or embraced as a result of White racial anxieties, reinforces a fear of mixing that is embedded within narratives of race itself. Professor Tushnet and I seem to be in agreement that the moralization inherent in dilution law is problematic insofar as it adds a layer of potential cultural contempt over top economic concerns. In my mind, the array of issues that Professor Tushnet points to are important ones—but that fact mainly highlights that issues of race deserve more consideration.

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

Degrowth will slow down innovation