Health Care Costs and the Arc of Innovation

Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America’s long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and reinforces this nexus and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze. Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today’s excessive spending, we seek to leverage available legal tools to bend the arc of innovation, away from marginally-beneficial technology and toward high-value advances. To this end, we set forth a novel, value-based approach to pricing and patent protection—one that departs sharply from current practice by rewarding innovators in proportion to the therapeutic benefits new tests and treatments yield. Using cancer therapy as an example, we explain how emerging information technology and large troves of electronic clinical data are opening the way to near-real-time assessment of efficacy. We then show how such assessment can power ongoing adjustment of pricing and patent terms. Finally, we offer a blueprint for how laws governing health care payment and intellectual property can be tailored to realize this value-focused vision. For the reasons we lay out, the transformation of incentives we urge will both slow clinical spending growth and greatly enhance the social value that this spending yields

Energy Conservation as Security

"Energy security" is usually defined as the guarantee of a stable and reliable supply of energy at reasonable prices. However, this definition is often misleading because it equates oil supply as the primary focus of a country's energy security considerations. As a developing country with a limited natural resource endowment China does not rely on oil alone. Instead China is one of the few economies in the world that still uses coal as one of its main sources of energy. Therefore, energy security in China is more comprehensive because it must consider the supply of coal, gas, electricity and nuclear energy along with oil imports

France's search for institutional schemes to promote innovation : the case of genomics

The subject of this paper is the relationship between the policy-making and the innovation performance in genomics and biomedical related biotechnologies in the national research and innovation system in France in 1990'. The aim is to highlight the relative effectiveness of the different public policies and their instruments compared to the action of the non for profit sector. Government policy has recently supported a development of the biotechnology sector by encouraging start-ups and creating favourable framework conditions such as incubators, a specialised stock exchange, financial institutions or technopoles. By studying the co-ordination mechanisms between the different organisations (non for profit organisations, public authorities, public sector research, biotech SMEs and large firms, especially in the biomedical sector), this paper shows that the path dependant institutions and the contradiction between the different policy tools to promote science base knowledge commercialisation can explain the poor development of biotech sector in France in the last few years, in spite of a high investment in the basic scientific researcb in life sciences.innovation system; S§T policy; biotechnology; genomics; Triple Helix model; France; policy-making; diffusion-oriented policy; science base knowledge

"Biological Agriculture in Greece: Constraints and Opportunities for Development"

In the following presentation I will first try to describe the current state of biological agriculture in Greece, and secondly to estimate the constraints and opportunities it faces as an alternative mode of production/consumption in the framework of contemporary EU rural development policies

The Inevitability of Militarization of Outer Space

At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, we witness a progressive increase of strategic importance of artificial satellites and other orbital systems, which is a consequence of the ever-accelerating development of space technologies that include weapons systems. The outer space becomes a theatre for a potential conflict. The states possessing sufficient technological potential will further develop and expand those systems, both defensive (for eliminating threats) and offensive (securing the military advantage and serving as a deterrent) to secure their current and future interests. The main argument of the paper demonstrates the necessity, from the perspective of the strong outer space sector players like the USA, Russia, China, to further develop space weapon systems and military units of space corps

Graduate Catalog, 2002-2003

https://scholar.valpo.edu/gradcatalogs/1029/thumbnail.jp

Filozofija i svjesnost u budućnosti –kiborzi i umjetna inteligencija u iščekivanju besmrtnosti

Natural sciences and technologies place artificial intelligence, robotics and cyborgs at the centre of human attention. However, virtual and augmented reality and the unthinkable possibilities of the future media and communication between individuals and social groups might be deeper and broader than we think, and evolve in forms we have not hoped for. If philosophy wants to focus on the essence of scientific-technical age, it must reflect on the very foundations of computer-operational thinking, because artificial intelligence has already started to develop its own consciousness and may, in the future, devise a strategy of development beyond man and without man.Prirodne znanosti i tehnologije stavljaju u središte ljudske pozornosti umjetnu inteligenciju, robotiku i kiborge. Međutim, virtualna i proširena stvarnost te nezamislive mogućnosti budućih medija i komunikacija između pojedinaca i društvenih skupina mogle bi biti dublje i šire nego što mislimo i razvijati se u oblicima kojima se još ne nadamo. Ako se filozofija želi orjentirati u biti znanstveno – tehničkog doba, ona mora misliti same temelje računalno – operativnog mišljenja jer umjetna inteligencija već danas razvija vlastitu svjesnost a u budućnosti i strategiju razvoja mimo čovjeka i bez čovjeka

Nurturing Breakthroughs: Lessons from Complexity Theory

A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by ubiquitous ``bubbles'', which involve huge risks which would not otherwise be taken using standard cost/benefit analysis. Bubbles result from self-reinforcing positive feedbacks. This leads to explore uncharted territories and niches whose rare successes lead to extraordinary discoveries and provide the base for the observed accelerating development of technology and of the economy. But the returns are very heterogeneous, very risky and may not occur. In other words, bubbles, which are characteristic definitions of human activity, allow huge risks to get huge returns over large scales. We outline some underlying mathematical structure and a few results involving positive feedbacks, emergence, heavy-tailed power laws, outliers/kings/black swans, the problem of predictability and the illusion of control, as well as some policy implications.Comment: 14 pages, Invited talk at the workshop Trans-disciplinary Research Agenda for Societal Dynamics (http://www.uni-lj.si/trasd in Ljubljana), organized by J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Mueller, Ivan Svetlik, 24 - 25 May 2007, Ljubljana, Sloveni