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The problems posed by overlapping protection are not confined to the protection of cartoon characters or to the copyright/trademark overlap. Overlapping intellectual property protection has emerged in a variety of contexts, mainly by accretion rather than design. Historically, patent, copyright, and trademark law protected very different types of works; the three areas of law occupied three separate realms and there was little or no overlap between them. When questions of overlapping protection did arise, channeling doctrines-doctrines that served to distinguish between patent, copyright, and trademark subject matter--developed to maintain the boundaries. Although the lines between the three areas may not have been perfectly drawn, it was generally understood that for any particular creative or inventive work only one type of protection (at most) was available. Over time, some of these distinctions have eroded. As the scope of intellectual property protection has expanded, the owners of intellectual property have pressed for, and in most cases received, greater protections. This outward pressure has resulted in the availability of multiple forms of protection for certain works. The Supreme Court has noted some of the problems posed by overlapping intellectual property protection. In Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., the Court rejected the plaintiffs claim for overlapping protection.6 The plaintiff sought trademark protection for its World War II video series that had been, but was no longer, protected by a copyright.7 The Court denied the trademark claim, in part because allowing trademark protection in this case would conflict with copyright law, creating a "species of perpetual... copyright, which Congress may not do." 8 The Court termed this perpetual protection a "mutant" copyright and held that to permit trademark protection following the expiration of a copyright would infringe upon the public's "right to copy" an expired copyright.9 Similarly, in TrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Marketing Displays, Inc., the Court rejected a request to use trademark law to, in effect, extend a patent past its expiration.' 0 Again, the Court upheld the public's "right to copy"--this time in the patent context. An attempt to gain additional protections for an item that falls within the subject matter of patent law may be termed a "backdoor patent.""l l Both mutant copyrights and backdoor patents arise in a variety of situations that the Court has not addressed. Further, the Court's doctrine is both incomplete and flawed when viewed in the larger context of overlapping protection. The Court has failed to address the situation in which well-established trademark rights have developed before the expiration of a copyright or a patent. The doctrine also does not take account of the challenges to the intellectual property system that arise during the period of concurrent protection. In fact, the availability of overlapping intellectual property protection in all of its forms presents a serious threat to the goals and purposes of federal intellectual property policy and must be addressed as a single issue.' 2 Neither the Court nor Congress has adequately addressed the problem of overlapping protection. Federal patent and copyright law is based primarily upon a utilitarian theory. The Constitution contains a patent and copyright clause, granting to Congress the authority "to 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."' 13 Pursuant to this grant, Congress has passed numerous statutes creating copyright and patent rights, in each case attempting to achieve a balance between the rights granted to the creators and inventors and the benefits to the public, and in each case attempting to provide a sufficient incentive for the production of new works. 14 Because monopolies historically have been disfavored, the grant of patent and copyright rights has been viewed as a compromise of sorts. 15 Intellectual property rights are not absolute (and, in fact, are not monopolies in the modem sense), but neither is there a perfectly free market in new books and devices. Instead, the American system falls somewhere in between: we grant rights for limited times and with a variety of limitations on exclusive use. Thus, for example, the patent bargain is intended to spur the invention of new and useful machines, processes, and products while still providing some benefits to competitors, consumers, and the public.' 6 Congress and the courts have tinkered with this bargain over the years, attempting to achieve the desired balance. Likewise, the copyright bargain has been constantly renegotiated. Copyright law is meant to strike a balance between rights granted to authors and the availability of new, creative material for others.' 7 In this Article, I argue that if we wish to take seriously both the Constitution's command and the copyright and patent bargains created by Congress, we must address the possibility that intellectual property owners may obtain overlapping protection for their intellectual property. The availability of overlapping protection disrupts the copyright and patent bargains and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether the incentive structure created by Congress is appropriate. The Article will proceed in four parts. Part II sets forth the foundations and primary justifications for intellectual property law in the United States. Part III describes the expansion of intellectual property rights in the last half century, the erosion of the channeling doctrines, and the emergence in various circumstances of overlapping protection. Parts IV and V of the Article argue that this development-the increasing availability of overlapping protectionthreatens the intellectual property system by undermining the goals of intellectual property law and disrupting the balance struck by Congress in fashioning the system. Finally, the conclusion looks forward and offers suggestions-some practical, others theoretical-for reducing or eliminating the problems presented by overlapping intellectual property protection.

The federal government of the United States is the centralized body established by the . The federal government has three branches: the , , and . Through a system of or "checks and balances", each of these branches has some authority to act on its own, some authority to regulate the other two branches, and has some of its own authority, in turn, regulated by the other branches.[citation needed] In addition, the powers of the federal government as a whole are limited by the Constitution, which leaves a great deal of authority to the individual states.

4 -- used as a function word before a noun or a substantivized adjective to indicate reference to a group as a whole <the elite>

Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.

Judicial decisions are not self-fulfilling directives. Because of institutional limitations, courts cannot implement their own decisions. Thus, the Court must rely on other individuals and institutions to carry out its directives. Because of these potential problems, many argue that the Court should not be active in policymaking. Ultimately, it is an empirical question, like broader notions of capacity. If the justices make decisions that lower courts do not apply or implementers ignore, there is a loss of institutional legitimacy for the Court.

IPR systems comprise of two distinct elements: (a) IPR protection and (b) public IPR enforcement (Khoury et al. 2014; Peng et al. 2017a). The IPR protection element relates to the availability of IPR law as this appears in the statutes of a country’s legislative framework. The range of IPR law in a country determines which intellectual assets can receive IPR protection, the duration of IPR protection (e.g., typically 20 years for patents) and the available legal sanctions that can be used by IPR enforcement agents (OECD 2014). For example, IPR law in a country determines the level and range of fines that IPR infringers may be sentenced with if convicted for IPR violation. Countries offering strong IPR protection generally provide legislative frameworks that offer IPR protection coverage to a wide type of IPR assets and a wide number of legal enforcement mechanisms for use by the IPR enforcement agents (Ginarte and Park 1997). In contrast, weak IPR law protection relates to the provision of some IPR protection however, protection may not be available for many other types of IPR that receive protection in other countries. There are differences in the availability and range of IPR law protection between countries internationally such as country specific legal exemptions or lack of IPR law availability for specific IPR assets e.g., the patentability of software and plant and animal varieties (Park 2008). Therefore, while IPR owners may be awarded IPR protection in one country they may not be able to register and protect their rights in another country. In addition, the available laws related to the enforcement of IPR may not provide a range of legal options to IPR enforcement agents to carry out their operations effectively. For example, this can relate to the potential lack of legislation that allows IPR enforcement agents to award and enforce preliminary injunctions in IPR infringement cases.

The way that law is enforced (or not) in practice is distinct to the existence of law on the books since enforcement depends on the behaviour of public agents (Dixit 2009). While IPR law in a country is codified and evidenced in writing in the legislative books of its IPR system, it is subject to the interpretation of the judiciary and other public IPR enforcement agents such as customs, police and trading standards. This is because the application of IPR law in practice is at the discretion of IPR enforcement agents who are bounded by the legislative norms of their perspective country (Hebert and McLemore 1973). The extent to which the public IPR enforcement agents will effectively engage and enforce IPR will be influenced by their ‘shared sets of beliefs’ about IPR infringement and if they consider an IPR infringing activity to be illegal. Also, even if the IPR legislative framework in a host country includes laws that enable punitive sanctions to IPR infringers, these may never be utilized by the judiciary or not enforced in practice by the customs officials. The same IPR laws available in two different countries may be applied differently depending on the way that the IPR law is decoded and interpreted by the IPR enforcement agents of the country (e.g., punitively in one country and non-punitively in another). Strong public IPR enforcement is expected to prevail in countries where public IPR enforcement agents effectively prosecute IPR infringement and judiciary independently and transparently apply IPR law in practice (Pajunen 2008). In contrast, weak public IPR enforcement is expected to be witnessed in countries with opaque, arbitrary and ineffective judiciary and enforcement authorities who are more receptive to corrupt practices and/or unlikely to enforce the IPR laws in practice because of lack of legislative/social norms conducive to law enforcement (Maskus 2004).

ONE of the major impediments to the judicial protection of collective rights1 is the group of doctrines falling under the rubric *606 of “justiciability” — standing, ripeness, and mootness.2 These are the gatekeeper doctrines; each regulates a different dimension of entrance to the federal courts. The law of standing considers whether the plaintiff is the proper person to assert the claim, the law of ripeness ensures that the plaintiff has not asserted the claim too early,3 and the law of mootness seeks to prevent the plaintiff from asserting the claim too late.4 By keeping certain public-minded plaintiffs and public-law claims out of federal court, these doctrines have shifted much of the battle for collective rights to the more steeply pitched fields of state courts or the political process.5 In particular, defendants in public law litigation have had considerable success keeping such cases out of the federal courts by invoking the “case or controversy” requirement *607 of Article III.6 Under current Supreme Court precedent, if a plaintiff cannot demonstrate that she possesses an ongoing “personal stake” in the outcome of the litigation, a federal court has no jurisdiction to adjudicate the claim on the merits.7 No amount of judicial discretion can overcome this jurisdictional defect, because Article III demarcates the outer limit of federal court power.8 As a result, many attempts to establish entitlements to important collective rights fail before courts can give them full consideration.

Of the three doctrines, standing has received the most scholarly attention,9 perhaps because the case law on standing is so internally inconsistent.10 But the mootness doctrine also constitutes a substantial barrier to the adjudication of collective rights claims. Consider the following examples:

The current 15-year trend of destabilizing US. patent law has significantly contributed to the decrease in innovation certainty. The case law on patent eligibility, as detailed above, is likely the largest contributor to the patent uncertainty, especially for the high-tech computer sector and the medical diagnostics fields. The lingering effects of eBay on injunctive relief also contribute significantly to innovation uncertainty.245 Plus, there is the continuing drumbeat of those who rail against reliable patent rights. And while the PTO is making improvements in how the AIA is implemented by the agency, those constant modifications to the AIA process, in a way, only highlight the fact that patent adjudication is more and more in the hands of the political branch and the large body of administrative patent judges. Ultimately, patent policy must be improved. Ideally, it would be done without the need for additional regulation and new legislation, as any changes to regulation and legislation would most likely create further problems to be resolved by the interested participants and the courts. Ideally, the courts, including the Supreme Court would right the jurisprudential ship in accordance with our above critique of existing precedent. Unfortunately, after almost 15 years, that outcome seems unlikely, and the fate of improvements in the nation's patent policy is increasingly resting with Congress and the PTO.

To rectify this growing policy and economic problem, the Supreme Court should reverse its eBay decision, or at least revisit the case to explain why courts have perhaps misconstrued what the eBay Court was trying to achieve in its decision in 2006. If the Court refuses to do this, then Congress should abrogate eBay and restore injunctions as essential remedies for ongoing and willful infringement of valid patents. In patent law, the Court is only construing the laws enacted by Congress pursuant to its constitutional authority to secure patents with federal legislation.11 See U.S. Const. art 1, § 8, cl 8 (“The Congress shall have Power….To 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.”). Thus Congress can, as it has in the past, abrogate Court decisions that misconstrue the meaning of the Patent Act.12 See Adam Mossoff, Statutes, Common Law Rights, and the Mistaken Classification of Patents as Public Rights, 104 Iowa L. Rev. 2591, 2614 (2019) (identifying examples in the 1952 Patent Act in which Congress abrogated Supreme Court decisions under the previously enacted 1870 Patent Act). Recently introduced bills, such as the Support Technology and Research for Our Nation’s Growth and Economic Resilience (STRONGER) Patents Act and the Restoring America’s Leadership in Innovation (RALI) Act, propose to do just this.13 See STRONGER Patents Act, S. 1390, 115th Cong. (2018); Restoring America’s Leadership In Innovation Act, H.R. 6264, 115th Cong. (2018). Congress should enact these important pieces of legislation to restore injunctive remedies to patent owners. This Legal Memorandum explains why the Court or Congress should abrogate eBay. It first explains why injunctions are proper remedies to rectify the wrongs of ongoing violations of property rights. It then explains the eBay decision and what followed as a result of this decision. The Supreme Court created a new test for issuing injunctions, despite its assertion that it was applying a “longstanding” and “historical” test, and lower federal courts, perhaps lacking controlling precedent with a novel legal test, have radically altered historical practices in remedies for patent infringement by no longer granting injunctions to stop violations of patent rights. Last, it explains the economic function of injunctions, which are a vital backstop to all commercial transactions in the free market.

The theories of social change that dominated American Communication Studies at the close of the twentieth century echoed those of the Western humanities. These theories spurred extensive thought about the performances of individual identity and the relationship of identity to mass media and culture, and they probably had some laudable influence on the broader culture. They are, however, inadequate to the evolving contexts I have described. One can sum up the most widely circulating theories of social change among “critical social theorists” of the twentieth century in the following, admittedly simplified, statement: There is an (evil) Totality (fill in the blank with one or more: patriarchy, whites, the West, the U.S., neo-liberalism, global capitalism) that must be overturned by a Radical Revolution. We don't know the shape of what will come after the Revolution, but The Evil is a construction of the Totality, so anything that comes after will be better. All you need is … (fill in the blank: Love, Courage, Violence, etc.). For an example, read Slavoj Žižek's attack on the evil Totality (“capitalism,”5 pp. 41/49), which requires the “excess” of violence named as “courage”6 (pp. 75, 78, 79), via “a leap”7 (p. 81), to eliminate “democracy” for a yet-to-be-imagined “new collectivity” (p. 85).8 The resilience of this social theory identifies it as a rhetorical attractor; a predispositional symbolic set that readily transmits emotive potency. To appropriate Kenneth Burke's terms, the bio-symbolics of human political relationships readily create a “grammar” and “rhetoric” in the form of a unified enemy that can be imagined as defeated in a singular battle, after which, things in “our” tribe may be harmonious. To identify this fantasy theme in this way is to suggest that it may not merely be the product of “Western” or “capitalist” imaginations, but rather that it arises from an intersection of the structural characteristics of language systems and the nature of human biologies (which readily adopt both tribal social cooperation and inter-tribal competition). Because neither biology nor symbolics are deterministic systems, this fantasy theme is avoidable, even if it is powerfully attractive. Because both biology and symbolics are material, however, specific kinds of work are necessary in order to avoid the lure of that predisposition. This point is crucial, because it invalidates the twentieth century (idealist) approaches to social change, which envisioned a single (violent) leap away from the social as sufficient to create and maintain better worlds. Thus, when Žižek and others urge us to “Act” with violence to destroy the current Reality, without a vision of an alternative, on the grounds that the links between actions and consequences are never certain, we can call his appeal both a failure of imagination and a failure of reality. As for reality, we have dozens of revolutions as models, and the historical record indicates quite clearly that they generally lead not to harmonious cooperation (what I call “AnarchoNiceness” to gently mock the romanticism of Hardt and Negri) but instead to the production of totalitarian states and/or violent factional strife. A materialist constructivist epistemology accounts for this by predicting that it is not possible for symbol-using animals to exist in a symbolic void. All symbolic movement has a trajectory, and if you have not imagined a potentially realizable alternative for that trajectory to take, then what people will leap into is biological predispositions—the first iteration of which is the rule of the strongest primate. Indeed, this is what experience with revolutions has shown to be the most probable outcome of a revolution that is merely against an Evil. The failure of imagination in such rhetorics thereby reveals itself to be critical, so it is worth pondering sources of that failure. The rhetoric of “the kill” in social theory in the past half century has repeatedly reduced to the leap into a void because the symbolized alternative that the context of the twentieth century otherwise predispositionally offers is to the binary opposite of capitalism, i.e., communism. That rhetorical option, however, has been foreclosed by the historical discrediting of the readily imagined forms of communism (e.g., Žižek9). The hard work to invent better alternatives is not as dramatically enticing as the story of the kill: such labor is piecemeal, intellectually difficult, requires multi-disciplinary understandings, and perhaps requires more creativity than the typical academic theorist can muster. In the absence of a viable alternative, the appeals to Radical Revolution seem to have been sustained by the emotional zing of the kill, in many cases amped up by the appeal of autonomy and manliness (Žižek uses the former term and deploys the ethos of the latter). But if one does not provide a viable vision that offers a reasonable chance of leaving most people better off than they are now, then Fox News has a better offering (you'll be free and you'll get rich!). A revolution posited as a void cannot succeed as a horizon of history, other than as constant local scale violent actions, perhaps connected by shifting networks we call “terrorists.” This analysis of the geo-political situation, of the onto-epistemological character of language, and of the limitations of the dominant horizon of social change indicates that the focal project for progressive Left Academics should now include the hard labor to produce alternative visions that appear materially feasible.

It is quite true that it is the system of global capitalism or the market that has created our climate problems (though, as Jared Diamond shows in Collapse, other systems of production have also produced devastating climate problems). In its insistence on profit and expansion in each economic quarter, markets as currently structured provide no brakes for environmental destructive actions. The system is itself pathological.

However, pointing this out and deriding market based solutions doesn’t get us very far. In fact, such a response to proposed market-based solutions is downright dangerous and irresponsible. The fact of the matter is that 1) we currently live in a market based world, 2) there is not, in the foreseeable future an alternative system on the horizon, and 3), above all, we need to do something now. We can’t afford to reject interventions simply because they don’t meet our ideal conceptions of how things should be. We have to work with the world that is here, not the one that we would like to be here. And here it’s crucial to note that pointing this out does not entail that we shouldn’t work for producing that other world. It just means that we have to grapple with the world that is actually there before us.

Today’s best-case ecological scenario was a horror story just three decades ago. In 1993, Bill Clinton declared that global warming presented such a profound threat to civilization that the U.S. would have to bring its “emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000.” Instead, we waited until 2020 to do so; in the interim, humanity burned more carbon than it had since the advent of agriculture. Now, it will take a historically unprecedented, worldwide economic transformation to freeze warming at “only” 2 degrees — a level of temperature rise that will turn “once in a century” storms into annual events, drown entire island nations, and render major cities in the Middle East uninhabitable in summertime (at least for those whose lifestyles involve “walking outdoors without dying of heatstroke”). This is what passes for a utopian vision in 2021. If we confine ourselves to mere optimism — and assume that every Paris Agreement signatory meets its current pledged target for decarbonization — then warming will hit 2.4 degrees by century’s end.

The reality of our ecological predicament invites denial of our political one. Put simply, it is hard to reconcile the scale of the climate crisis with the limits of contemporary American politics. Delusions rush in to fill the gap. Among these is the fantasy of national autonomy; the notion that the United States can save the planet or destroy it, depending on the precise timeline of its domestic decarbonization. A rapid energy transition in the U.S. is a vital cause, not least for its potential to expedite similar transformations abroad. But the battle for a sustainable planet will be won or lost in the developing world. Although American consumption played a central role in the history of the climate crisis, it is peripheral to the planet’s future: Over the coming century, U.S. emissions are expected to account for only 5 percent of the global total.

<True, many evils were perpetrated in the over-zealous spirit of discovery, and whole civilizations were wiped out in the process, but there are two main differences between that era of discovery and this one: first, there are no lives or civilizations to destroy in our solar system (the question of life on Mars has not been totally resolved; I therefore advocate we learn as much as possible about the Martian geography and ecosystem before we engage in any grand plans of terraforming). Secondly, we have the benefit of advanced historical knowledge and appreciation to guide us. We know more about our world and our past than our great exploring forefathers, thanks in part, already, to the increased communications provided by the economic exploitation of space, in the form of communications satellites.>

<The human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus . . . unless we set up colonies in space. Although Sept. 11th was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race like nuclear weapons do," said the Cambridge University Scientist. "In the long term, I'm more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. The danger is that, either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us. I don't think the human race will survive . . unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.>

<Recently, a “Global Foresight Workshop” was convened by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Foresight, and Governance Project (Smitherman, 2002). Organizers solicited goals from key agencies and organizations across the country and internationally through solicitations from United Nations University via the “Millennium Project.” One hundred goals were submitted, which were then combined and condensed to 46 for workshop consideration. The top five goals based on high-ranking for overall global importance were as follows: 1. Provide clean food and water. 2. Provide clean and abundant energy. 3. Eliminate all major diseases. 4. End slavery globally. 5. Provide universal health care. Findings such as these are consistent with a Brookings Institute study that asked a group of academic historians, political scientists, sociologists and economists to forecast the most important achievements for the next 50 years. In this study, space endeavors such as exploration or colonization were not on the major list and were ranked low, among the least important accomplishments, even though the above goals were featured. Although thus not viewed as a beneficial enterprise by many, it is our position that Space Colonization can help lead to solutions to many of the emerging problems of our Earth, such as those listed above, both technical and sociological. The breadth of the enterprise far exceeds our normal single-purpose missions and, therefore, its benefits are greater. Among the technical attributes of Space Colonization are the potential of developing low-cost, nonpolluting energy, enhanced food-production techniques, pollution/waste and water purification, development of disease-amelioration techniques, and the development of techniques to help protect Earth from potential meteoroid impact hazards (Siegfried, 1996).>

<No Ownership, No Responsibility How can such a negligence have happened? It’s simple: no one was the legitimate owner of the resources (water, air, ground). When a property is state-owned – as was the case under communism – government has generally little incentive to sustainably exploit it. In communist Europe, governments wanted to industrialize their country in order, they hoped, to catch up with capitalist economies. Objectives were set, and they had to be met no matter what. This included the use of brown coal, high in sulfur and that creates heavy smoke when burned[4], and questionable farming methods, which depleted the soil. This lack of vision can also be seen in the public sector of capitalist countries. In the US, the Department of Defense creates more dangerous waste than the top five chemical product companies put together. In fact, pollution is such that cleanup costs are estimated at $20 billion. The same goes for agriculture, where Washington encourages overfarming or even farming not adapted for the environment it’s in[5]. Capitalism, the Green Solution In order to solve most of the pollution problems, there exists a simple solution: laissez-faire capitalism, i.e. make sure property rights and profitability can be applied. The latter helped Eastern Europe; when communism fell, capitalism made the countries seek profitable – and not just cheap – ways to produce, which greatly reduced pollution[6]. As for the former, it proved its effectiveness, notably with the Love Canal[7]. Property rights are also thought of in order to protect some resources, be it fish[8] or endangered species[9]. Why such efficiency? Because an owner’s self-interest is directed towards the maximum profitability of his piece of land. By containing pollution – as Hooker Chemicals did with its canal – he keeps away from costly lawsuit for property violation. At the same time, badly managed pollution can diminish the value of the land, and therefore profits. Any entrepreneur with a long-term vision – and whose property is safe from arbitrary government decisions – thinks about all that in order to protect his investment. One isn’t foolish enough to sack one’s property! In conclusion, I have to mention that I agree with environmentalists that it is importance to preserve the environment in order to protect mother nature and humans. However, I strongly disagree with their means, i.e. government intervention. Considering it very seldom has a long-term vision, it is the worst thing that can happen. In fact, one could says that most environmental disasters are, directly or indirectly, caused by the State, mainly by a lack of clear property rights. Were they clearer, they would let each and everyone of us, out of self-interest, protect the environment in a better manner. That way, everyone’s a winner.>

"It is, I promise, worse than you think," David Wallace-Wells wrote in an infamously apocalyptic 2017 New York Magazine article. "Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century." 

The "it" is man-made climate change. Temperatures will become scalding, crops will wither, and rising seas will inundate coastal cities, Wallace-Wells warns. But toward the end of his screed, he somewhat dismissively observes that "by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans….Now we've found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another." 

When we combine environmental quality data with economic freedom data, we see that the story is very different from what we are usually told. The countries with the most freedom are those with the highest environmental quality. There does not seem to be a trade-off between environmental quality and economic development — rather, it shows the opposite.

If we rank the countries from most to least free (by quartiles), we observe how the countries with the highest economic liberty ranking are the same countries with the highest scores in the Environmental Performance Index.

<In my previous post I showed that, notwithstanding the Neo-Malthusian worldview, human well-being has advanced globally since the start of industrialization more than two centuries ago, despite massive increases in population, consumption, affluence, and carbon dioxide emissions. In this post, I will focus on long-term trends in the U.S. for these and other indicators. Figure 1 shows that despite several-fold increases in the use of metals and synthetic organic chemicals, and emissions of CO2 stoked by increasing populations and affluence, life expectancy, the single best measure of human well-being, increased from 1900 to 2006 for the US. Figure 1 reiterates this point with respect to materials use. Part III Figure 1 Figure 1: U.S. metal and chemical use, carbon dioxide emissions, population and affluence compared to life expectancy, 1900–2006. Metals and chemical use exclude their content in imported goods. Sources: Matos (2009), CDIAC (2009), Maddison (2010), US Bureau of the Census (2010). These figures indicate that since 1900, U.S. population has quadrupled, affluence has septupled, their product (GDP) has increased 30-fold, synthetic organic chemical use has increased 85-fold, metals use 14-fold, material use 25-fold, and CO2 emissions 8-fold. Yet life expectancy advanced from 47 to 78 years. Figure 2 shows that during the same period, 1900–2006, emissions of air pollution, represented by sulfur dioxide, waxed and waned. Food and water got safer, as indicated by the virtual elimination of deaths from gastrointestinal (GI) diseases between 1900 and 1970. Cropland, a measure of habitat converted to human uses — the single most important pressure on species, ecosystems, and biodiversity — was more or less unchanged from 1910 onward despite the increase in food demand. For the most part, life expectancy grew more or less steadily for the U.S., except for a brief plunge at the end of the First World War accentuated by the 1918-20 Spanish flu epidemic. As in the rest of the world, today’s U.S. population not only lives longer, it is also healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005 and, despite quantum improvements in diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart and respiratory diseases) now occur 8–11 years later than a century ago. Part III Figure 2 Figure 2: U.S. material use, carbon dioxide emissions, sulfur dioxide emissions, habitat converted to cropland, and deaths from gastrointestinal (GI) diseases compared to life expectancy, 1900–2008. Sources: Matos (2009), CDIAC (2009), US Bureau of the Census (2010), Goklany (2007, 2009). Consistent with this, data for New York City indicate that — despite a population increase from 80,000 in 1800 to 3.4 million in 1900 and 8.0 million in 2000 and any associated increases in economic product, and chemical, fossil fuel and material use that, no doubt, occurred —crude mortality rates have declined more or less steadily since the 1860s (again except for the flu epidemic). Figures 3 and 4 show, once again, that whatever health-related problems accompanied economic development, technological change, material, chemical and fossil fuel consumption, and population growth, they were overwhelmed by the health-related benefits associated with industrialization and modern economic growth. Part III Figure 3 Figure 3: Death Rates (deaths per 1,000 population), New York City, c. 1800-2007. Source: NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, Summary of Vital Statistics (2008). H/T to William Briggs for making me aware of this figure. This figure shows a stylized transition for mortality rate in the middle third of the 19th century consistent with the Environmental Transition Hypothesis This does not mean that fossil fuel, chemical and material consumption have zero impact, but it means that overall benefits have markedly outweighed costs. Part III Figure 4 Figure 4: Infant Mortality Rate (deaths per 1,000 live births), New York City, 1898-2007. In 1898 IMR was estimated to be 140.9. Because of incomplete reporting of early neonatal deaths, this is almost certainly an underestimate. In 2007 IMR was 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. Source: NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, Summary of Vital Statistics (2008) The reductions in rates of deaths and diseases since at least 1900 in the US, despite increased population, energy, and material and chemical use, belie the Neo-Malthusian worldview. The improvements in the human condition can be ascribed to broad dissemination (through education, public health systems, trade and commerce) of numerous new and improved technologies in agriculture, health and medicine supplemented through various ingenious advances in communications, information technology and other energy powered technologies (see here for additional details). The continual increase in life expectancy accompanied by the decline in disease during this period (as shown by Figure 2) indicates that the new technologies reduced risks by a greater amount than any risks that they may have created or exacerbated due to pollutants associated with greater consumption of materials, chemicals and energy, And this is one reason why the Neo-Malthusian vision comes up short. It dwells on the increases in risk that new technologies may create or aggravate but overlooks the larger — and usually more certain — risks that they would also eliminate or reduce. In other words, it focuses on the pixels, but misses the larger picture, despite pretensions to a holistic worldview. It was this mindset — legitimized as the “precautionary principle” — that led, for instance, to the premature reduction in DDT usage even in areas where malaria was endemic and could be reduced through its use. See here and here. In my next post, I will look at the root causes as to why empirical trends have failed to follow a path consistent with the Neo-Malthusian worldview.>

<Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century. Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them. Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why? Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous undertakings.>