Don’t fall for the innovation fetish- negative innovations hurt social welfare- examples from economics and health care prove.

Given the extensive investment that society directs towards innovation, one might conclude that it’s a uniformly wonderful thing. Certainly, we are all grateful for anesthesia, clean drinking water, and indoor plumbing. But just because some innovations improve the quality of life doesn’t mean that all—or even most—do. In this Part, we begin to explore innovation’s dark side, the ways in which new developments and technologies can make people’s lives worse. First, we describe the developing scholarly literature on antisocial innovation in contexts ranging from health and medicine to telecommunications and investing. Our goal here is simply to introduce the fundamental concern. We elaborate on it more thoroughly in the next Part. This Part concludes by addressing the mechanisms that policymakers have used to combat antisocial innovation, including regulation and tort law.

A. ANTISOCIAL INNOVATION

Unconditional love of innovation is a relatively recent phenomenon; innovation was not always viewed in such a positive light.121 Indeed, before the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, innovation often had negative connotations.122 Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, humanity was treated to a series of what Robert J. Gordon calls “Great Inventions.”123 Innovations in electricity, pasteurization, clean running water, transportation, and communication radically altered people’s lives, extending them and making them far more pleasurable.124 According to Gordon, these inventions represent a “unique clustering” that made possible a period of unparalleled economic and social growth.125 Since the 1970s, innovations have not kept up with the transformations brought about by the great inventions, and growth in our standard of living has slowed.126 Recently, a handful of scholars have gone further and pushed back on current notions of innovation as an unalloyed good, or what economist Paul David calls “the innovation fetish.”127 Alex Coad, Paul Nightingale, Jack Stilgoe, and Antonio Vezzani have argued for a more nuanced understanding of innovation, which recognizes that it “can have good and bad effects.”128 They identify various types of harmful innovation, including those unintentionally leading to environmental harm (e.g., pesticides, air conditioning), those intended to be harmful (e.g., the atomic bomb), and those intended to deceive consumers or allow firms to avoid regulation (e.g., certain financial products and e-cigarettes).129 Similarly, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke have recognized that innovation is not inherently good.130 Indeed, they argue, there are many examples of what they term “negative innovation,” which “work[s] against the interests of consumers and society [and] reduces overall welfare.”131

Framing the debate in moral terms, Ned Snow has argued that “some creations promote actions that are wrong, or in other words, they promote immoral behavior.”132 He concludes that “works that are harmful to society should not be incentivized or rewarded.”133 Gianluca Biggi and Elisa Giuliani performed a literature review on scholarship analyzing the “noxious effects of innovation.”134 Using a custom search query, they found 125 articles published between 1991 and 2017 on harmful innovation.135 The authors divided this body of scholarship into five “clusters”: the negative impact of technology on workers; innovation’s unintended negative effects on the environment; innovation’s negative effects on economic growth and economic equality; the dangers of emerging technologies, such as big data and social media; and the negative effects of “open innovation” on firm performance.136

Other scholars have focused on the negative impact of innovation in specific economic sectors, including financial services and health care. After the 2008 financial crisis, which was linked in part to financial innovations like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, some researchers questioned the benefits of financial innovation. Simon Johnson and James Kwak argued that financial innovations are different than many other types of innovation in that they do not necessarily make the world a better place.137 In their view, the “principal purpose” of financial innovation is to facilitate “financial intermediation”—the movement of capital from unproductive uses to productive uses.138 But not all financial intermediation is good for society. When evaluating financial innovation, the authors urged that policy makers consider whether the financial intermediation it facilitates is “beneficial” or “excessive and destructive.”139

Scholars have also studied the effects of harmful innovation in the health care sector. Shobita Parthasarathy has shown how certain health care innovations can be socially harmful, at least in some populations.140 The pulse oximeter is an example. Parthasarathy explained that the company that commercialized this technology failed to test it on patients with different skin tones, with the result that the oximeter is less accurate for Black users than for white users.141 These oximeters sometimes produced results for Black users showing inflated blood oxygen levels, potentially causing those users to decide against seeking medical attention when such attention was warranted.142 Patents on the oximeter prevented competing devices from being developed, exacerbating the problem.143

The foregoing provides a brief sense of the scope and scale of antisocial innovation. But while some recent scholarship has explored the potential for innovation to harm society, the bulk of the scholarly literature across disciplines continues to treat innovation as a purely salutary goal and seeks to unlock ways to increase the production of new inventions.