Directed Innovation CP - Michigan 7 2024 HPP

Grants CP / Antisocial Innovation – MNDI HPP
Notes
1. While this is structured as a grants CP, much of the evidence says “grants or prizes” which means you could do prizes, or both. You could also potentially include other forms of industrial policy, such as advance market commitments. There are some cards in the prizes CP supplement from our lab that support this.
2. The antisocial innovation net benefit assumes that all innovation can be both prosocial and antisocial (for example, prosocial innovation might be vaccines, because they enhance social welfare. Antisocial innovation might be a bump stock, which facilitates mass shootings).
Patents are a form of market-based innovation, because patents involve companies competing over technological development in the market and the first to file gets a patent. While patents create temporary monopolies, patents are given for any technology developed in the market, whether antisocial or prosocial. Patents are approved regardless of social desirability.
The counterplan is directed innovation from the government. It is not (as) market based because the government funds particular innovation priorities, that are hopefully prosocial.
The net benefit claims that innovation is inevitable, but the CP directs it towards socially desirable ends. The plan, and the permutation since it includes patents, includes expanded innovation for both socially desirable ends but also antisocial ends.
This applies best against an affirmative that applies generally to patents, like PERA. Not every patents affirmative will be vulnerable to this net benefit.
3. A lot of the innovation bad section of this file is pretty undeveloped and could use a lot of additional work.
4. The counterplan is subject to a wide range of criticism from market-loving economists. The affirmative answers are very good. If you’re looking for even more, here’s an open access book that I did not have time to cut:
Magnus Henrekson, 2024. Moonshots and the New Industrial Policy: Questioning the Mission Economy
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/87626/1/978-3-031-49196-2.pdf
5. Terminology: “mission-driven” and “directed” innovation mean the same thing, mostly. Mission-seeking is Mazzucato’s term for setting a big social priority (like reducing warming) and then creating government R&D funding for a wide range of targets to accomplish that goal. She refers to it as a portfolio of investment (investing in many companies, many techs, many labs) – so that if one fails, there are still many other projects targeted towards the same goal. “Directed” means the same – targeted governmental R&D or prizes or other investments directed at a social goa.
6. The “other” section at the end includes short sections of cards that are useful in a variety of contexts:
--some miscellaneous arguments for the PERA aff and the e-commerce aff
--some miscellaneous negative arguments against patents generally, and one good card vs. the e-commerce aff
CP
1nc – grants CP
The United States federal government should substantially increase public sector investment in [innovation areas targeted by the plan or specified in their advantages] for the purpose of [solving their impacts – specify the problem in the text].
Public investment can direct innovation to prosocial goals. The plan’s market-based innovation creates path dependence, locking in dangerous tech
Mariana Mazzucato, 2015 - Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London where she is the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. The Entrepreneurial State, p. 3-8 //DH
THINKING BIG
This conventional view of a boring, lethargic State versus a dynamic private sector is as wrong as it is widespread. The book concentrates on telling a very different story: in countries that owe their growth to innovation—and in regions within those countries, like Silicon Valley— the State has historically served not just as an administrator and regulator of the wealth creation process, but a key actor in it, and often a more daring one, willing to take the risks that businesses won't. This has been true not only in the narrow areas that economists call 'public goods' (like funding of basic research) but across the entire innovation chain, from basic research to applied research, commercialization and early-stage financing of companies themselves. Such investments (yes governments invest, not only 'spend') have proved transformative, creating entirely new markets and sectors, including the Internet, nano-technology, biotechnology and clean energy. In other words, the State has been key to creating and shaping markets not only 'fixing' them. Indeed, as is described in one of the longest chapters of the book (Chapter 5), every technology that makes the iPhone smart and not stupid owes its funding to both basic and applied research funded by the State. This of course does not mean that Steve Jobs and his team were not crucial to Apple's success, but that ignoring the 'public' side of that story will prevent future Apples from being born.
Transformational public investments were often fruits of 'mission- oriented' policies, aimed at thinking big: going to the moon or fighting climate change. Getting governments to think big again about innovation is not just about throwing more taxpayer money at more activities. It requires fundamentally reconsidering the traditional role of the State in the economy. In the remainder of this introduction I delineate what this entails.
First, it means empowering governments to envision a direction for technological change and invest in that direction. Creating markets not only fixing them. Different from narrow attempts to identify and pick winners, envisioning a direction for economic development and technical change broadens the technological opportunity landscape and requires that the State creates a network of willing (not necessarily 'winning') agents that are keen to seize this opportunity through public-private partnerships. Second, it means abandoning the short- sighted way public spending is usually evaluated. Public investment should be measured by its courage in pushing markets into new areas, rather than the usual assumption of an existing market that the public and private actors must bump elbows in (one 'crowding out' the other). Third, it means allowing public organizations to experiment, learn and even fail! Fourth, precisely because failure is part of the trial and error process of trying to push markets into new areas, it means figuring out ways for governments and taxpayers to reap some of the rewards from the upside, rather than just de-risking the downside. Only once policy- makers move past the myths about the State's role in innovation will they stop being, as John Maynard Keynes put it in another era, 'the slaves of some defunct economist'.
CREATING MARKETS NOT ONLY FIXING THEM
According to neoclassical economic theory that is taught in most economics departments, the goal of government policy is simply to correct market failures. In this view, once the sources of failure have been addressed—a monopoly reined in, a public good subsidized, or a negative externality taxed—market forces will efficiently allocate resources, enabling the economy to follow a path to growth. But that view forgets that markets are blind, so to speak. They may neglect societal or environmental concerns. And they often head in suboptimal, path-dependent directions that are self-reinforcing. Energy companies, for example, would rather invest in extracting oil from the deepest con- fines of the Earth than in clean energy. In other words, our energy system moves along a carbon-intensive path that was set up more than a century ago. This is not just about market failure, it's about the wrong kind of market getting stuck.
Market-based innovation through patents reinforces antisocial, catastrophic risk. Directed innovation grants promote the good but avoids the bad
Buccafusco, Christopher and Weinstein, Samuel N., 2024 - Christopher Buccafusco is the Edward & Ellen Schwarzman Distinguished Professor at Duke University School of Law. Samuel N. Weinstein is a Professor and Co-Director of the Heyman Center on Corporate Governance at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University "Antisocial Innovation," Georgia Law Review: Vol. 58: No. 2, Article 4. Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/glr/vol58/iss2/4 //DH
As these examples attest, many innovations are, on balance, harmful to people. While we don’t deny the value of lifesaving breakthroughs like the Covid-19 vaccine, it is important for policymakers to recognize that many, and perhaps most, innovations do not fit the rosy image offered by politicians and tech gurus. This Article begins to challenge that image, and it offers a renewed vision of policymaking in a world where innovation can be beneficial but where it can just as easily be awful.
Our first step in this direction is to categorize and taxonomize antisocial innovations. From a legal and policymaking perspective, our concern is with innovations that are privately beneficial to innovators and their clients but socially harmful. For example, some financial innovations, like credit default swaps, made a lot of money for their creators, but wreaked havoc on the global economy.40 Similarly, the pricing algorithms just discussed are principally a means to extract money from consumers for the benefit of suppliers.41 And many chemicals may help firms increase profits at the expense of the environment.42 With this understanding of what makes an innovation a net benefit or harm, we propose a taxonomy of antisocial innovations according to the kinds of harms that they cause. We categorize and elucidate six main varieties of antisocial innovation harms: individual harms to people’s health, wealth, and well-being; environmental harms; harms to competition; harms to labor; privacy harms; and a catch-all category that we label social harms, involving concerns for democracy, stability, and the fair distribution of society’s resources. Of course, some technologies will cause multiple varieties of harm.
The taxonomy’s purpose is to demonstrate antisocial innovation’s distressing breadth. We hope that it offers a valuable corrective to the widely accepted vision of innovation’s beneficence. But our goals are not this modest. We also hope to begin reorienting innovation law and policy, and we conclude with a series of proposals for doing so.
We begin by noting that two of society’s most important tools for promoting innovation—patents and antitrust law—treat all innovation as socially valuable.43 Borrowing from administrative law, we refer to this as the Inverse Precautionary Principle.44 While some regulatory agencies apply the Precautionary Principle, whereby new activities should be regulated if they pose any meaningful risk of harm,45 patent and antitrust law apply the inverse—all innovations should be promoted irrespective of their risks.46 Outside of pharmaceuticals and some other chemicals, our innovation governance approach is one of “beneficial until proven harmful.”
A more nuanced framework, however, is required. Policymakers should realize that innovation governance involves risk-risk tradeoffs.47 While excessive regulation may deprive society of valuable new inventions, insufficient regulation poses serious, even catastrophic risks to society. Innovation necessarily produces new and, thus, unknown pathways. It may be difficult for policymakers and regulators to know, early on, whether an innovation will be salutary, harmful, or neither. But once they recognize that society’s only compelling interest in innovation currently is to generate more of it, their strategies should change.
More concretely, our account of the magnitude of antisocial innovation counsels a shift from patent incentives towards more targeted incentives like grants and prizes. Patent law is agnostic to an invention’s utility.48 A patent on a vaccine is just as valid and lasts just as long as one on a bump stock or a chemical that devastates the planet. Patent law relies on markets to sort out good innovations from bad ones.49 Due to distortions, externalities, and cognitive biases, however, markets are often not great at picking society-wide winners and losers.50 Accordingly, policymakers should consider spending a greater proportion of their innovation-incentivizing dollars on grants and prizes that are devoted to prosocial developments.
Antisocial innovation risks extinction
Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, 2022 - Professor of International and European Intellectual Property Law, University of Cambridge ‒ King’s College “Is IP Good for Our Planet?” GRUR International, 71(8), 2022, 683–684, https://doi.org/10.1093/grurint/ikac056 //DH
Of course, technology has rescued its beneficiaries from hardship and starvation, has enabled improved living conditions for many around the globe, has been the principal driver of human ‘progress’ in terms of advances in all aspects of human life, has often facilitated democracy and liberty, and has led to immense material gains. At the same time, it also has left us with significant negative consequences. To begin with a general point, new technologies brought about since the first industrial revolution have severely impacted on our environment – in the form of air, water, soil and other types of pollution and by depleting a broad range of natural resources (mainly as a result of industrial-scale agriculture, mining, water usage for industry and consumption of fossil fuels, all of which have been enabled by advancements in technology). Individual examples such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the insecticide DDT, nuclear (weapon) technologies and plastics aside, leading scientists estimate that the probability of human extinction before the year 2100 is around 50%, based on the possibility of a malicious or accidental release of destructive technology – or simply because the pace of technological change outstrips our ability to control it (Rees, 2003). The Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge is primarily concerned about ‘risks associated with human technology and activity, such as nuclear war, engineered pandemic, climate change, ecological collapse, or advanced artificial intelligence’.
Taking a look at the looming climate meltdown, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently issued its 6th Assessment Report – where a Working Group II report finds that human-induced climate change has already caused widespread adverse (and in part irreversible) impacts for nature (in the form of a critical loss of biodiversity) and people – with the most vulnerable people and systems disproportionately affected and half of the world’s current population (around 3.5 billion people) living in areas ‘highly vulnerable’ to climate change. Limiting temperature rise to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels therefore constitutes a ‘critical level’ beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and become increasingly irreversible (IPCC, 02/2022). However, the Working Group III report warns that ‘[w]ithout a strengthening of policies beyond those that are implemented by the end of 2020, GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions are projected to rise beyond 2025, leading to a median global warming of 3.2 [2.2 to 3.5] °C by 2100’ (IPCC, 04/2022). Given continued reliance on fossil fuels, the group found that exceeding 1.5C is ‘almost inevitable’, and suggests ‘negative emissions’ technologies (such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) or direct air capture) are likely to be necessary. The problem is that such technologies are often experimental and are likely to involve interventions with the potential for unforeseen consequences – while on the other hand, there is no time to take a pre-cautionary approach.
The sad story of climate change then is emblematic for a common narrative on the impact of modern technology: developed to serve human needs and wants, technologies are applied in ways which have a tendency to produce (at times predictable, at times unforeseeable) severe consequences – here in form of global warming, largely due to CO2 emissions resulting from energy-intensive technology production and consumption patterns. While market mechanisms usually allocate the benefits of technology to those with sufficient means (whose economic potency usually also has the most say in what technologies will be developed), negative impacts often primarily affect the poor. Industrialisation and the technologies it brought about have allowed the global North to develop and, while reaping the benefits of technological progress, colonise most of the remaining ‘other’. Climate change as one of the principal consequences, however, is predominantly felt in the global South and among other peoples on this planet too poor to even attempt to protect themselves against the ensuing climate disasters by means of ‘adaptation technologies’. This reveals another common reflex at play: current humanity’s default response to an identified problem with technology is to rely on ‘better’ technology to fix that ‘glitch’. There is of course nothing wrong in aiming to improve technological solutions, but how can we be so sure that these improved technologies actually are solutions, and not primarily part of the problem? Looking at our track-record over the centuries since industrialisation and the consequences of large-scale deployment of technologies, there is little to suggest that fighting the fire caused by such deployments with fire that again relies on technology will all of a sudden no longer have the side effects which got us into this mess in the first place. In the age of the Anthropocene (where human conduct is the main determinant for the fate of life on Earth), past experience suggests we cannot afford a ‘trial and error’ approach in deploying technology at a scale to save us from the problems earlier technologies have created.
In sum then, based on our historical experience there is no reason to believe that coming up with new technologies and propagating them around the globe for widespread use (at least by those who can afford access to them) will necessarily enhance our welfare, let alone that of other species on this planet. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that, by and large, our use and abuse of technology is a – if not the – principal cause of most of the essential risks to our survival on this planet. That should call into question IP’s uncritical embracing of ‘technological innovation’ as well as its ‘transfer and dissemination’. One might add that to the extent IP incentivises technological development and transfer, as a system, it is normative and political as well, in that IP continuously pushes humanity towards technology and technological solutions (rather than alternative ones – such as reducing consumption and checking one’s own wants). As the meta-system for driving technological innovation, IP protection promotes an approach that singles out technological solutions as the default solutions on which we rely – while history shows that despite its immense benefits, this is by no means justified without qualification.
So what then is the role for IP in acknowledging and possibly addressing the negative consequences of our use of technology? This editorial does not offer the space for any detailed analysis, but suffice it to say that neither existing tools within the IP system (e.g. not to grant patents to inventions whose exploitation is contrary to public order) nor the idea that IP rights as negative rights allow for restrictions on the use of IP-protected subject matter, have been very effective. Until we are able to address these negative consequences of technology effectively, it may come down to individual producers and users of technol

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