Redefining Progress and the Case for Diversity in Innovation and Inventing

In the United States, women represent 50% of the workforce, but only 27% of STEM workers and 13% of inventors. This article surveys the scientific literature to make the empirical case for diversity in innovation and inventing, finding a growing body of research to show how diverse innovators expand the reach, quality, and quantity of innovation. It then surveys the history of patent law to make the legal case for prioritizing diversity in inventing, and for expanding conventional notions of “progress” in the patent system to include the promotion of a diverse set of innovators, rather than just innovation. It introduces the concept of the “innovator-inventor gap” in patenting to document how across dozens of settings, technical women are participating at 50% or less of the rate of their male counterparts. It then explores how the law and mechanics of inventorship and invention contribute to such gaps. The article concludes by discussing several steps for taking progress, redefined, seriously, including: (1) institutionalizing and broadening the Patent Office’s duties and authorities to promote a diversity of innovators and inventors, (2) launching a public-private innovator diversity pilots clearinghouse to support the rigorous evaluation and refinement of relevant policies, regulations and practices, and (3) creating a periodic, innovator-inventor survey for informing the design of policies and practices for diversifying innovation and inventorship

Sustainable development indicators: the tyranny of methodology revisited

Indicators are increasingly dominating our lives; whether we are aware of it or not. They have been popular tools for sustainable development policy makers, planners and managers, largely because they do the hard work of condensing complexity into single values that can be more easily digested and acted upon. But much power rests with those who select the indicators deemed to be important. This paper explores some of these issues at what is now regarded by some as the new frontier in „indicatorology‟; their use and influence. The authors argue that a new tyranny of methodology may be at play

Beyond GDP: the need for new measures of progress

This repository item contains a single issue of The Pardee Papers, a series papers that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The Pardee Papers series features working papers by Pardee Center Fellows and other invited authors. Papers in this series explore current and future challenges by anticipating the pathways to human progress, human development, and human well-being. This series includes papers on a wide range of topics, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary perspectives and a development orientation.This paper is a call for better indicators of human well-being in nations around the world. We critique the inappropriate use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of national well-being, something for which it was never designed. We also question the idea that economic growth is always synonymous with improved well-being. Useful measures of progress and well-being must be measures of the degree to which society’s goals (i.e., to sustainably provide basic human needs for food, shelter, freedom, participation, etc.) are met, rather than measures of the mere volume of marketed economic activity, which is only one means to that end. Various alternatives and complements to GDP are discussed in terms of their motives, objectives, and limitations. Some of these are revised measures of economic activity while others measure changes in community capital—natural, social, human, and built—in an attempt to measure the extent to which development is using up the principle of community capital rather than living off its interest. We conclude that much useful work has been done; many of the alternative indicators have been used successfully in various levels of community planning. But the continued misuse of GDP as a measure of well-being necessitates an immediate, aggressive, and ongoing campaign to change the indicators that decision makers are using to guide policies and evaluate progress. We need indicators that promote truly sustainable development—development that improves the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of the supporting ecosystems. We end with a call for consensus on appropriate new measures of progress toward this new social goal

Ecological Footprint Calculator

This lesson introduces students to the concept of ecological footprint, the overall impact of an individual on the environment. Topics include how ecological footprints are calculated, how individual footprints translate to entire nations or to the Earth, and the connection between ecological footprint and biodiversity. The students will consult some online resources on ecological footprint and use an online claculator to determine their individual fooprints, make some comparisons, and examine how making some changes in their consumption would reduce their footprints. Educational levels: Undergraduate lower division, High school

A GPI-Based Critique of The Economic Profile of the Lower Mississippi River: an Update

The Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI, is an alternative economic indicator that seeks to measure net economic welfare—the economic welfare that is gained by economic activity after the costs of producing that welfare (such as the costs of air pollution, water pollution, resource depletion, climate change, and the like) are deducted. From a GPI perspective, the economy of the Lower Mississippi River Corridor is not nearly as robust as traditional modes of economic analysis would suggest. There are clear paths to increasing GPI (and human economic wellbeing) that have implications for environmental, economic and river-management policy

Feminist Ecological Economics

This article provides an overview of feminist ecological economics, with special attention to three particular aspects: its theoretical foundations and relation to other schools of thought, its implications for activism and public policy, and directions for future research work.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

The Climate Gap: Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans & How to Close the Gap

By now, virtually all Americans concur that climate change is real, and could pose devastating consequences for our nation and our children. Equally real is the "Climate Gap" -- the sometimes hidden and often-unequal impact climate change will have on people of color and the poor in the United States. This report helps to document the Climate Gap, connecting the dots between research on heat waves, air quality, and other challenges associated with climate change. But we do more than point out an urgent problem; we also explore how we might best combine efforts to both solve climate change and close the Climate Gap -- including an appendix focused on California's global warming policy and a special accompanying analysis of the federal-level American Clean Energy Security Act

Methodological approaches to accounting the depletion of natural resources, changes in the environmental and human capital in the gross regional product

A key indicator of the System of National Accounts of Russia at a regional scale is Gross Regional Product characterizing the value of goods and services produced in all sectors of the economy in a country and intended for final consumption, capital formation and net exports (excluding imports). From a sustainability perspective, the most weakness of GRP is that it ignores depreciation of man-made assets, natural resource depletion, environmental pollution and degradation, and potential social costs such as poorer health due to exposure to occupational hazards. Several types of alternative approaches to measuring socio-economic progress are considering for six administrative units of the Ural Federal District for the period 2006-2014. Proposed alternatives to GRP as a measure of social progress are focused on natural resource depletion, environmental externalities and some human development aspects. The most promising is the use of corrected macroeconomic indicators similar to the “genuine savings” compiled by the World Bank. Genuine savings are defined in this paper as net savings (net gross savings minus consumption of fixed capital) minus the consumption of natural non-renewable resources and the monetary evaluations of damages resulting from air pollution, water pollution and waste disposal. Two main groups of non renewable resources are considered: energy resources (uranium ore, oil and natural gas) and mineral resources (iron ore, copper, and aluminum). In spite of various shortcomings, this indicator represents a considerable improvement over GRP information. For example, while GRP demonstrates steady growth between 2006 and 2014 for the main Russian oil- and gas-producing regions – Hanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs, genuine savings for these regions decreased over all period. It means that their resource-based economy could not be considered as being on a sustainable path even in the framework of “weak” sustainability, i.e. sustainability under the assumption that the accumulation of producible physical capital and of human capital can compensate for losses in natural non reproducible resources.The research has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Project № 14-18-00574 "Anti-crisis information-analytical system: diagnostics of regions, threat assessment and scenario forecasting in order to keep and to strengthen economic security and well-being of Russia")

Health effects and optimal environmental taxes in welfare state countries

Most studies on the green tax reform issue point out that environmental taxes exacerbate pre-existing tax distortions, thereby increasing the welfare costs associated with the overall tax code. As a result, the optimal environmental tax should lie below the Pigovian level (or marginal social damages). This article challenges this finding by arguing that health benefits from reduced pollution may sufficiently affect labor supply to create benefit-side tax interactions which, in turn, may be of the same magnitude as cost-side ones. Using a simple general equilibrium model that assumes the existence of a social security system, this paper shows that the optimal environmental tax rate could be greater than traditionally thought.Environmental tax, double dividend, employment, health, social security.

Sustainability and Well-being Indicators

Geary-Khamis bias, the Afriat index