Where is Behavioral Economics Now? [feedly]

I believe Marxists should pay more attention to Behavioral Economics than they have, at least far as I am aware. Since Danial Kahnneman's Nobel prize, his experimental results and the insights that followed have indeed, as Tim Taylor concludes, below: 

"one of the advantages of behavioral economics is that it helps to drag social science generalities down into the realness of the particular." 

In the history of economics Marx (and the other 'Classical Economists') were definitely "supply-siders" in analysis. The "demand" side of economics is reflected primarily in prices, and "price theory". "Demand side" economics became prominent as DATA about Demand began to accumulate and access was made available to researchers. As the scale of data accumulation advanced, powerful analytical and statistical tools have been developed, and still being perfected with computation,  to  understand variations in both prices, and price expectations.

Marx focused on the essential characteristics of a commodity that explained it's production, and the economic transactions between owners and wage-labor.. What is the worker really selling? What is the employer really buying? Some have taken Marx to task for paying scant attention to demand. However, in truth, there would not have been much to study in 1870 -- so, focusing on demand would have been speculative in the extreme. For Marx prices would fluctuate with supply and demand, and speculation, but would be -- constantly and forever --  converging toward the costs of production plus the average rate of profit. That formulation is a bit Hegelian -- "Value" appears like an Ideal Becoming Real. But c'mon -- there was little good data. Analytical tools, vocabularies, languages, etc were all that was available in the social sciences.

Behavioral Economics changes that

Where is Behavioral Economics Now?

Tim Taylor
https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/07/20/where-is-behavioral-economics-now/

Behavioral economics is the combination of insights from psychology with economic behavior. A usual starting point for models of economic actors is that while they will sometimes make wrong decisions, they will not make the same wrong decisions over and over. To put it another way, they will continually be trying to avoid what they now perceive as the errors of the past, while also committing a range of mistakes.

But psychological research suggests that in certain settings, many people will make the same mistake over and over. For example, many people have personal or economic habits (say, exercise, or eating healthier, or quitting smoking, or saving more) that they would like to change. They know with some part of their mind that if they don't make a change, they are likely to regret it in the future. Nonetheless, they keep deciding they will start the desired change tomorrow, rather than today. There are many of these biases that, while one can learn to overcome them, seem built into cognition. People often do a poor job of thinking about risks that have a low probability of happening. Behavioral economics looks at the outcome of economic situations where some or many people have these biases.

For those who want to learn what behavioral economics is all about, a good starting point is The Behavioral Economics Guide 2021, edited by Alain Samson. It's from the behavioraleconomics.com website, which serves as an online hub for people interested in the topic. I recommend the volume for at several purposes.

There's a 30+ page glossary of behavioral science concepts, for those who would like a little help with the lingo, starting with "action bias" and ending with the "zero price effect." Here's "action bias:"

Some core ideas in behavioral economics focus on people's propensity to do nothing, as evident in default bias and status quo bias. Inaction may be due to a number of factors, including inertia or anticipated regret. However, sometimes people have an impulse to act in order to gain a sense of control over a situation and eliminate a problem. This has been termed the action bias (Patt & Zeckhauser, 2000). For example, a person may opt for a medica treatment rather than a no-treatment alternative, even though clinical trials have not supported the treatment's effectiveness. Action bias is particularly likely to occur if we do something for others or others expect us to act (see social norm), as illustrated by the tendency for soccer goal keepers to jump to left or right on penalty kicks, even though statistically they would be better off if they just stayed in the middle of the goal (Bar-Eli et al., 2007). Action bias may also be more likely among overconfident individuals or if a person has experienced prior negative outcomes (Zeelenberg et al., 2002), where subsequent inaction would be a failure to do something to improve the situation.

Here's the definition of "zero price effect:"

The zero price effect suggests that traditional cost-benefits models cannot account for the psychological effect of getting something for free. A linear model assumes that changes in cost are the same at all price levels and benefits stay the same. As a result, a decrease in price will make a good equally more or less attractive at all price points. The zero price model, on the other hand, suggests that there will be an increase in a good's intrinsic value when the price is reduced to zero (Shampanier et al., 2007). Free goods have extra pulling power, as a reduction in price from $1 to zero is more powerful than a reduction from $2 to $1. This is particularly true for hedonic products—things that give us pleasure or enjoyment (e.g. Hossain & Saini, 2015). A core psychological explanation for the zero price effect has been the affect heuristic, whereby options that have no downside (no cost) trigger a more positive affective response.

If you have a drop of social scientist blood in your veins, descriptions like this will start your pulse pounding. Do these effects really exist? In what context? How would you measure them? Are these effects intertwined with a different or perhaps broader effect? If you need concrete examples, the bulk of the report is 15 short and readable summaries of recent studies in the area, with examples concerning prevention of gender-based violence, banking and insurance, sustainable agriculture, career coaching, and more.

One theme that emerges from several papers in the volume is that behavioral economics effects are often deeply rooted in a particular context: that is, you can't just grab an item from the glossary, plug it into your life or business or organization, and assume you know how it will work. For example, Florian Bauer and Manuel Wätjen write about their research in "Tired of Behavioral Economics? How to Prevent
the Hype Around Behavioral Economics From Turning Into Disillusionment." They write:

Applying the behavioral economics effects found in academic experiments to marketing is becoming more and more popular. However, there is increasing evidence that copy-and-pasting academic effects does not achieve the desired effects in real life. This article aims to show that this is not because customers are becoming wise to nudges or that behavioral economics does not work at all, but because the application of behavioral economics typically ignores the contextual aspects of the actual decision to be influenced. Herein, we present a framework that considers these aspects and helps develop more effective behavioral interventions in marketing, pricing, and sales.

John A. List makes an argument that is similar in tone but broader in his introduction to the volume, "The The Voltage Effect in Behavioral Economics." Listpoints out that it is fairly common for someone to latch on to an academic study in behavior economics, but then are disappointed when it doesn't seem to "scale up" to a real-world context. List writes:

Indeed, most of us think that scalable ideas have some 'silver bullet' feature, i.e., some quality that bestows a 'can't miss' appeal. That kind of thinking is fundamentally wrong. There is no single quality that distinguishes ideas that have the potential to succeed at scale with those that do not do so. In this manner, moving from an initial research study to one that will have an attractive benefit cost profile at scale is much more complex than most imagine. And, in most cases, scaling produces a voltage drop—the original BE [behavioral economics] insights lose considerable voltage when scaled. The problem, ex ante, is determining whether (and why) that voltage drop will occur. … What this lesson inherently means is that scaling, in the end, is a weakest link problem: the endeavor is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

In other words, the connection from an academic study to a real-world application involves a number of links in a chain. List lays out five of them:

1. Infererence. Perhaps the academic study you looked at was a "false positive"–that is, the result won't hold up in other similar studies. List suggests that before believing an effect is real, one should look for "three or four well-powered independent replications of the original finding."
2. Representativeness of the population. If a study was done on a group of college sophomores, or retirees, or people with a certain medical condition, you can't necessarily assume that it apply well on other groups, like working-age adults or high school dropouts.
3. Representativeness of the situation. For example, a small-scale program with a small group of dedicated and trained participants may not scale up well to a larger general population group that is less dedicated and less well-trained.
4. Spillovers and general equilibrium effects of scaling. Say that I start a program in a certain area to teach a highly desirable skill to some workers. Those workers get much higher pay as a result. So then I expand the program very substantially to teach this skill to many more workers. The original group did well in part because it was a small group, and the skill was still scarce. But at some point, as the skill becomes common in that are, the rewards will be lower.
5. Marginal cost considerations. As program expands, there are two possibilities. One is that there are economies of scale: that is, as the program covers more people, average cost per person falls. For example, a web-based program that can be expanded to cover many more people might have this property. However, the other possibility is that as the program covers more people, average cost per person rises. This can happen if the program needs some specific and particular skills that may be hard to get: for example, perhaps I can train a small group of teachers who volunteer to be part of my new specific curriculum, but as I try to train bigger and bigger groups, it gets harder.

List draws on Tolstoy to summarizes his thinking. At the beginning of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously wrote: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." List echoes: "[A]ll successfully scaled ideas are alike; all unsuccessfully scaled ideas fail in their own way." I would just add that from this perspective, one of the advantages of behavioral economics is that it helps to drag social science generalities down into the realness of the particular.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Civil monetary penalties for labor violations are woefully insufficient to protect workers [feedly]

Civil monetary penalties for labor violations are woefully insufficient to protect workers
https://www.epi.org/blog/civil-monetary-penalties-for-labor-violations-are-woefully-insufficient-to-protect-workers/

Key takeaways:

• Workers' rights and safety violations receive significantly lower fines than financial and corporate law violations. And in many cases, these violations involve no monetary penalty at all.
• Because workers' rights and safety violations result in such low financial penalties, these fines function as the cost of doing business rather than as deterrents.
• The ineffective nature of workers' rights enforcement often leads to repeated workers' rights and safety violations with little incentive for employers to improve conditions.

Civil monetary penalties—fines imposed when a law or regulation is violated—are enforcement tools. Agencies utilize them to enforce statutes and regulations, and the minimum and maximum civil penalties may be established administratively or by statute. By examining civil monetary penalties for violations of various key federal laws, we find a striking pattern: Workers' rights and safety violations are assigned a significantly lower penalty value than violations of other laws—characteristic of a system that unjustly undervalues workers. While employers and corporate officials face significant civil monetary penalties for breaking the law related to consumer finance, lobbying, and insider trading regulations, violations of fundamental labor and worker protection laws involve only minimal civil monetary penalties or even no monetary penalty at all.

The Department of Labor (DOL) enforces key worker protection statutes using civil monetary penalties. The maximum penalties range from $1,084 for recordkeeping and administrative violations to $136,532 for repeated safety violations. For example, DOL enforces the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), which protects workers from hazardous workplace environments. All non-willful OSHA violations, including violations which would likely lead to the death of an employee, have a maximum fine of just $13,653. Even a willful violation of OSHA, often issued for repeatedly leaving workers in physical danger, has a maximum penalty of $136,532.

A willful child labor violation under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), including a violation which leads to the death of a minor, incurs a civil monetary penalty of up to $120,230. All other standard child labor violations have a maximum penalty of $13,227. A repeated minimum wage or overtime violation is associated with a penalty of just $2,074.

While the civil monetary penalties included in worker protections statutes enforced by DOL are low, there are no civil monetary penalties for violating our fundamental labor law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The NLRA is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and protects the right of workers to form unions and collectively bargain without retaliation from an employer. However, while the NLRB may in some cases recover back pay for employees who were illegally terminated, such as during a strike, they are unable to assess any civil monetary penalties.

Corporate and financial crimes involve significantly higher civil monetary penalties. These statutes are enforced by a variety of agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The SEC enforces regulations surrounding insider trading with a large civil monetary penalty of up to $2.16 million. Similarly, a penalty imposed by the FTC for market manipulation or providing false information to a federal agency contains a maximum fine of $1.2 million. Comparable penalties for financial crimes, such as violations of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, also stretch well into the millions of dollars.

In nearly every case, the civil monetary penalties for financial crimes significantly exceed the fines for violations of worker protection statutes. The maximum penalty for a willful OSHA violation is just 6.3% of the maximum penalty for insider trading, while a maximum penalty for a standard OSHA violation is well below 1% of the maximum insider trading penalty. Similarly, a minimum wage or overtime violation under the FLSA is less than 0.1% of the insider trading penalty. Even a willful child labor violation makes up only 5.6% of this insider trading fine.

The penalties for violating workers' rights and safety laws are simply not high enough to demand compliance. In fact, a study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics finds that these FLSA fines are minuscule when "compared to the profits that can be earned through noncompliance." While we've referenced the maximum fines for labor violations above, this study maintains that only a "minority of investigations" under FLSA resulted in additional fines outside of worker back pay. The study finds that "only 11% of detected FLSA violations are considered repeat and/or willful, nearly half of these are not required to pay any civil monetary penalty, and, even when levied, typical penalties are relatively small (with only 13% of repeat and/or willful violators required to pay a penalty of more than $1 per dollar of back wages owed)."

Not only can the fine be too low to ensure compliance, but in the majority of cases, DOL doesn't impose a fine at all. The study concludes that a business would need to believe they have between a 78 and 88% chance of being found to be violating FLSA for it to be worth complying with the law. In reality, this chance is significantly lower given the deeply inadequate resources devoted to wage and hour investigations. This study suggests that the true chance of investigation "may be as low as 2%."

The ineffective nature of workers' rights enforcement often leads to repeated violations with little incentive for employers to improve conditions. For example, in the case of Hagel Metal Fabrication, OSHA issued a willful penalty for leaving employees exposed to laser cutting machines, which could have struck and crushed them, despite the obvious risks. Indeed, a 23-year-old worker was fatally crushed by such a machine, prompting the investigation that led to the penalty. However, after three willful violations and six serious citations, OSHA's fines for the company totaled only $317,000. Later, the fine was reduced to $200,000 in total, an average of only $22,222 per violation.

Further, OSHA itself notes that the violating employer had been issued 23 previous citations, including "willful and serious citations for exposing workers to dangerous conditions." Although the company incurred many previous OSHA violations, they continued to violate regulations without extensive fines to deter future violations, leading to these recent penalties and the company being placed on OSHA's Severe Violator Enforcement Program. The company abruptly closed in 2015.

As it stands, civil monetary penalties for financial crimes are significant and stretch into millions of dollars, while in many cases, employers who violate labor laws often still profit after small OSHA or FLSA fines. At the end of the day, these penalties for egregious, often inhumane labor violations aren't true deterrents—they simply represent the cost of doing business for these employers.

Table 1

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Care workers are deeply undervalued and underpaid: Estimating fair and equitable wages in the care sectors [feedly]

Care workers are deeply undervalued and underpaid: Estimating fair and equitable wages in the care sectors
https://www.epi.org/blog/care-workers-are-deeply-undervalued-and-underpaid-estimating-fair-and-equitable-wages-in-the-care-sectors/

The Biden administration has made large investments in care work—both child care and elder care—key planks in its American Jobs Plan (AJP) and American Families Plan (AFP). These investments would be transformative, and a greater public role in providing this care work can make the U.S. economy fairer and more efficient. The administration has also recognized the need to pay workers in these sectors higher wages—which are sorely needed—but setting a fair wage standard for care workers presents unique challenges.

For a variety of systemic reasons, including racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, there has never been a set of institutions that has managed to carve out decent wages and working conditions in care work. For example, the average hourly wages for home health care and child care workers are $13.81 and $13.51, respectively, which is roughly half the average hourly wage for the workforce as a whole. So, unlike sectors like construction, a "prevailing wage" standard would just cement the industry-wide insufficient wages currently experienced in care work.

But just because it's challenging doesn't mean it's impossible to establish strong wage standards in this sector. All wages in the U.S. economy are politically and socially determined, but given that care work is heavily publicly financed, care wages are especially determined by political decisions (via commission or omission). As a result, there is a strong administrative responsibility and opportunity to set equitable wages in this sector. This research memo outlines a number of ways to improve the wage standard for care workers and is a preview to a forthcoming, more comprehensive research report.

Care work enables people to survive and thrive across generations, and it cannot be accomplished without workers. Yet our value systems and social relations acutely undervalue care work and discredit its importance to our lives. These phenomena are deeply rooted in misogyny, xenophobia, and in the U.S. context, anti-Blackness. We cannot recognize and remedy the precarious and immiserating wages of most care work without acknowledging and rectifying the roles these identities have played in shaping the conditions and workforce of care provision.

Care workers are overwhelmingly women and disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrants, groups which have traditionally faced discrimination in labor markets and in the political process. As shown in Figure A, both the home health care and child care sectors are overwhelmingly women, and Black and Hispanic women are largely overrepresented relative to their share in the overall workforce. In addition to facing racism and sexism in the labor market, care workers—particularly home health care workers—are disproportionately more likely to be foreign born (either naturalized or not), which gives them even less power to negotiate for higher wages or better working conditions. This necessitates a look at not only how we undervalue care itself, but also who care workers are and the historical and social discriminations they have faced and still face today.

Figure A

Care work being predominantly borne by women of color, and specifically Black women, dates back to slavery. The racial and gender-motivated maltreatment of these workers translated into a lack of protection and abysmal pay in commodified versions of these roles post-slavery, including in the exclusion of domestic workers in most New Deal reforms. Working conditions and pay for such work reflect the societal views of care jobs and workers, including the extent of scrutiny on whether they are "skilled" jobs. There is a close link between care workers and care recipients, including people who are both. Ableist narratives and policies devalue and dehumanize people needing care and are inextricably linked to the racialized systems of oppression that devalue care workers' labor. Consequently, the fight for better working conditions and pay for care workers is inseparable from also centering and improving conditions for care recipients.

Our forthcoming study aims to provide policymakers a broad economic framework for thinking about how to pay care workers, including both home health care and child care workers, who are extremely undervalued and underpaid in the United States and across the world.

Using the research literature and microdata, we provide several considerations for setting pay standards for both home health care and child care workers: a minimum standard for all workers; an estimated strong wage standard that reduces wage penalties currently faced for performing care work and reduces penalties associated with racial and gender discrimination; an additional estimated union wage premium for care workers; and a look at other countries or professions for reasonable benchmarks (summarized in Table 1). We conclude with a discussion of how these pay penalty calculations can serve to set equitable and sustainable wage standards and combat wage suppression.

Table 1

Key benchmarks for fairer wages:

• A minimum standard for all workers: The minimum starting place for all workers in today's labor market should be no less than $15 an hour, but a full-time, full-year worker making $15 an hour cannot support a family at a decent standard of living anywhere in this country. Given the vital and demanding nature of care jobs and the increasing need for care workers because of demographic trends, care workers should be paid more. They should have the protection and dignity needed to be desirable careers. If we require a care worker to rely solely on their income to make ends meet, then we can assert that any care worker in the United States should at least earn a wage that would allow them to care for a young child on just their own wages in the least expensive metro area. This still-too-modest living wage standard would require full-time hourly wages of at least $21.11.

• Reduction of care and discrimination pay penalties: We adjust current pay for care workers by removing the estimated care pay penalty. Then, we adjust pay using a measure of pay gaps in the labor market at large, which account for lower outside options for historically disadvantaged demographic groups. We calculate a more appropriate wage of $20.20 and $19.87, for home health care and child care workers, respectively.

• Adding the union premium for a stronger wage standard: With additional bargaining power from unionization, reasonable wages for home health care and child care workers should be $22.26 and $21.90, respectively. In addition to boosting wages, unions help reduce gender and racial disparities and unionized workers are more likely to have better benefits such as paid leave and health care.

• International comparisons for home health care workers: Although the undervaluation of care work is a global phenomenon, the situation for U.S. workers is particularly dismal when compared with peer countries. Across the current 27 E.U. member states, non-residential long-term care workers are paid 80% of the average national hourly wage, and among the better performers, they are paid 95% of average wages. Extrapolating to the U.S. context, home health care workers should be paid in the range of $21.85 to $25.95.

• Comparisons with other teachers: Given similar skill sets and experience, child care workers are early educators and should be paid as much as similarly educated teachers of elementary and middle school students. Of course, school teachers face substantial wage penalties vis-à-vis other similarly credentialed workers in the economy. Taking these into account, we estimate a reasonable wage for child care workers in the range of $21.22 to $25.30.

Setting an equitable wage in the care sector—which our wage estimates and discussion above hope to help guide—is a first step in transforming a truly undervalued and undercompensated industry. It is important to note that given wage suppression factors and centuries of entrenched racial and gender discrimination, no single practice is perfect. None are likely to completely eliminate the structural disparities inherent in the care sector. However, reform and significantly higher wages are possible, necessary, and long overdue. Care workers improve countless lives, very often in poor working conditions and for low pay. At the same time, they face a myriad of penalties and have limited other options due to historical and current labor market discrimination. The economic exclusions endured for being a member of subordinated groups across gender, race, and migration status reinforce each other and are reflected in the observed outcomes and demographic breakdowns we see in these industries. These multiple penalties must be considered when determining just how much care workers should be paid. Active policies, such as strong legislative or regulatory wage standards, must be implemented to begin to eliminate these penalties.

Our economic system, left to its own, has failed to recognize the worth of care work and maintain a well-functioning market. Securing living wages, dignity of work, and safe working conditions for care workers is necessary for our collective survival. Better pay and work standards unambiguously improve the lives of workers themselves. Further, they make the care provision better, secure a stable workforce, reduce turnover, and are good for the macroeconomy. These are all necessary amid demographic shifts that will increase the need for care work in coming years. Care work is valuable, demanding, and requires specialized skills, where workers are routinely making highly consequential decisions about and with care recipients. Addressing the wage suppression of care workers is unmistakably an intersectional gender, racial justice, disability, and immigrant rights issue. By making deliberate policy choices rectifying historical and current harms and grounding them in the experiences of the most marginalized of these workers, we are ensuring a shared prosperity for all.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

:The Economist: Hard Look t Biden's China policy

I suspect the economist reflects the dominant Globalist view of China:  They are trashing Biden's policy as a loser. I submit this indicates a big split in the coalition of anti-Trump bourgois forces.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkZQKvchBSvDZNRBpfwPMfjvbW

Optimists long hoped that welcoming China into the global economy would make it a "responsible stakeholder", and bring about political reform. As president, Donald Trump blasted that as weak. Now Joe Biden is converting Trumpian bombast into a doctrine that pits America against China, a struggle between rival political systems which, he says, can have only one winner. Between them, Mr Trump and Mr Biden have engineered the most dramatic break in American foreign policy in the five decades since Richard Nixon went to China.

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Mr Biden and his team base their doctrine on the belief that China is "less interested in coexistence and more interested in dominance". The task of American policy is to blunt Chinese ambitions. America will work with China in areas of common interest, like climate change, but counter its ambitions elsewhere. That means building up the strength at home and working abroad with allies that can supplement its economic, technological, diplomatic, military and moral heft.

Much about Mr Biden's new doctrine makes sense. The optimistic case for engagement has crumbled under the realities of Chinese power. Led by President Xi Jinping, China has garrisoned the South China Sea, imposed party rule on Hong Kong, threatened Taiwan, skirmished with India and has tried to subvert Western values in international bodies. Many countries are alarmed by China's "wolf warrior" diplomacy.

But the details of the Biden doctrine contain much to worry about—not least that it is unlikely to work. One problem is how Mr Biden defines the threat. Because politics in Washington is broken, he seems to feel that he needs the spirit of Pearl Harbour to help rekindle a sense of national purpose. That is a miscalculation.

It is true that Republicans jump on anything they can portray as soft on China (even though every time they say that the presidential election was stolen, they do the work of Chinese propagandists). However, Republicans are unlikely to start backing Mr Biden's domestic agenda just because it has the word "China" stamped on the cover.

Worse, the more Mr Biden uses strident rhetoric to galvanise Americans, the harder he makes his task of galvanising allies and big emerging powers like India and Indonesia. By framing the relationship as a zero-sum contest, he is presenting them with a Manichean struggle between democracy and autocracy, rather than the search for co-existence. Alas, in this he is overestimating America's influence and underestimating how much potential allies have to lose by turning their back on China.

By many economic measures China will become a dominant force, whatever America does. It will have the world's biggest economy and it is already the largest trading goods partner of almost twice as many countries as America. Germany, Europe's export powerhouse, aims to sustain commercial links with China even as political links buckle. In South-East Asia many countries look to America for their security and China for their prosperity. If forced to choose between the superpowers, some may pick China.

Rather than imposing a decision on other countries today, Mr Biden needs to win them around. And his best chance of that is for America to demonstrate that it can thrive at home and be the leader of a successful and open world economy.

Here, too, the details of Mr Biden's scheme are troubling. Rather than build on America's strengths as the champion of global rules, the administration is using the threat of China to further its domestic agenda. Its doctrine is full of industrial policy, government intervention, planning and controls. It is uncomfortably like the decoupling being pursued by China itself.

For a glimpse of what this could entail, look at the administration's report on four crucial supply chains—for semiconductors, batteries, rare earths and vital pharmaceutical ingredients—published last month. The report does not just make the national-security case for government intervention in these industries. It also embraces union representation, social justice and pretty much everything else. More such reports will come later. If this one is a guide, Mr Biden will propose to use subsidies and regulation to ensure that jobs and production remain within America's borders.

Inevitably, Mr Biden's plans have trade-offs. Central to his attack on China is its abuse of human rights, especially of the Uyghurs, subject to internment and forced labour in Xinjiang. Central to his policy on climate change is to shift to renewables. Yet the two are entangled, at least in the short term, because Xinjiang is the origin of 45% of the silicon used in generating solar power.

A more fundamental problem is the China doctrine's soft protectionism. This favours incumbents over competitors and is likely to weigh down the economy rather than supercharge it. The country's new Moon programme is popular largely as a way to show that America has an edge over China. Yet it is vibrant precisely to the degree that it allows the sort of competition in which private firms such as SpaceX and Blue Origin can shine.

A third problem is that Mr Biden's doctrine will make America's allies even more wary. If the purpose of cutting ties with China is to create good union jobs in America, allies will ask themselves what is in it for them.

Mr Biden's plan is a missed opportunity. If America wants to stop China from rebuilding the global order in its image, it should defend the sort of globalisation that always served it well. At the centre of such an approach would be trade and the multilateral system, embodying the faith that openness and the free flow of ideas will create an edge in innovation.

If America really wanted to counter China in Asia, it would join the pan-Asian trade deal it walked away from in 2016. That is highly unlikely now, but it could seek fresh agreements on the environment and digital trade. It should also put money and clout behind new ideas that reinforce the Western order, such as a vaccine programme for future pandemics, digital payment systems, cyber-security and an infrastructure scheme to compete with China's Belt and Road Initiative. Rather than copying China's techno-nationalism, a more confident America should affirm what made the West strong. ■

For more coverage of Joe Biden's presidency, visit our dedicated hub

--
John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
Enlighten Radio
Socialist Economics
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Fwd: 🎉 Dean Baker just shared "The Drug Companies Are Killing People" for patrons only

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Patreon <bingo@patreon.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2021 at 7:14 PM
Subject: 🎉 Dean Baker just shared "The Drug Companies Are Killing People" for patrons only
To: John Case <jcase4218@gmail.com>

Dean Baker The Drug Companies Are Killing People I get to say this about the drug companies, now that President Biden has said that Facebook is killing people because it was allowing people to use its system to spread lies about the vaccines. There is actually a better case against the drug companies. After all, they are using their government-granted patent monopolies, and their control over technical information about the production of vaccines, to limit the supply of vaccines available to the world. As a result, most of the population in the developing world is not yet vaccinated. And, unlike the followers of Donald Trump, people in developing countries are not vaccinated because they can't get vaccines. The TRIPS Waiver Charade The central item in the story about speeding vaccine distribution in the developing world is the proposal put forward at the WTO last October (yes, that would be nine months ago), by India and South Africa, to suspend patents and other intellectual property rules related to vaccines, tests, and treatments for the duration of the pandemic. Since that time, the rich countries have been engaged in a massive filibuster, continually delaying any WTO action on the measure, presumably with the hope that it will become largely irrelevant at some point. The Biden administration breathed new life into the proposal when it endorsed suspending patent rights, albeit just for vaccines. This is the easiest sell for people in the United States and other rich countries, since it is not just about humanitarian concerns for the developing world. If the pandemic is allowed to spread unchecked in the developing world it is likely only a matter of time before a vaccine resistant strain develops. This could mean a whole new round of disease, death, and shutdowns in the rich countries, until a new vaccine can be developed and widely distributed. After the Biden administration indicated its support for this limited waiver, many other rich countries signed on as well. Germany, under longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, has been largely left alone to carry water for the pharmaceutical industry in opposing the vaccine waiver. I had the chance to confront the industry arguments directly last week in a web panel sponsored by the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (link included when it becomes available). It's always educational to see these arguments up close and real people actually making them. The first line of defense is that the waiver of patent rights by itself does not lead to any increase in vaccine production. This is of course true. Vaccines have to be manufactured, eliminating patent rights is not the same thing as manufacturing vaccines. But once we get serious, the point is that many potential manufacturers of vaccines are being prevented from getting into the business by the threat of patent infringement suits. In some cases, this might mean reverse engineering the process, something that might be more feasible with the adenovirus vaccines produced by Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca, than with the mRNA vaccines. The manufacturing process for these vaccines is similar to ones already used by manufacturers in several countries in the developing world, as well as several in the rich countries that are not currently producing vaccines against the pandemic. Another possible outcome from eliminating patent rights is that the drug companies may opt to do more voluntary licensing agreements under the logic that it is better to get something than nothing. If manufacturers are using reverse engineering to produce vaccines, the patent holders get nothing. They would be much better off with a limited royalty on a licensing agreement, even if it is less than they could have expected if they had been able to maintain an unchecked patent monopoly. The other route that suspending patent monopolies may open is one where former employees of the pharmaceutical companies may choose to share their expertise with vaccine manufacturers around the world. In almost all cases these employees would be bound by non-disclosure agreements. This means that sharing their knowledge would subject them to substantial legal liability. But some of them may be willing to take this risk. From the standpoint of potential manufacturers, the patent waiver would mean that they would not face direct liability if they were to go this route, and the countries in which they are based would not face trade sanctions. Open-Sourcing Technology While suspending patent rights by itself could lead to a substantial increase in vaccine production, if we took the pandemic seriously, we would want to go much further. We would want to see the technology for producing vaccines fully open-sourced. This would mean posting the details of the manufacturing process on the web, so that engineers all over the world could benefit from them. Ideally, the engineers from the pharmaceutical companies would also be available to do webinars and even in-person visits to factories around the world, with the goal of assisting them in getting their facilities up-to-speed as quickly as possible. The industry person on my panel didn't seem to understand how governments could even arrange to have this technology open-sourced. He asked rhetorically whether governments can force a company to disclose information. As a legal matter, governments probably cannot force a company to disclose information that it chooses to keep secret. However, governments can offer to pay companies to share this information. This could mean, for example, that the U.S. government (or some set of rich country governments) offer Pfizer $1-$2 billion to fully open-source its manufacturing technology. Suppose Pfizer and the other manufacturers refuse reasonable offers. There is another recourse. The governments can make their offers directly to the company's engineers who have developed the technology. They can offer the engineers say $1-$2 million a month for making their knowledge available to the world. This sharing would almost certainly violate non-disclosure agreements these engineers have signed with their employers. The companies would almost certainly sue engineers for making public disclosures of protected information. Governments can offer to cover all legal expenses and any settlements or penalties that they faced as a result of the disclosure. The key point is that we want the information available as soon as possible. We can worry about the proper level of compensation later. This again gets back to whether we see the pandemic as a real emergency. Suppose that during World War II Lockheed, General Electric, or some other military contractor developed a new sonar system that made it easier to detect the presence of German submarines. What would we do if this company refused to share the technology with the U.S. government so that it was better able to defend its military and merchant vessels against German attacks? While that scenario would have been almost unimaginable – no U.S. corporation would have withheld valuable military technology from the government during the war – it is also almost inconceivable that the government would have just shrugged and said "oh well, I guess there is nothing we can do."  (That's especially hard to imagine since so much public money went into developing the technology.) The point is that the war was seen as a national emergency and the belief that we had to do everything possible to win the war as quickly as possible was widely shared. If we see the pandemic as a similar emergency it would be reasonable to treat it in the same way as World War II. Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is what the industry representative saw as the downside of making their technology widely available. The argument was that the mRNA technology was not actually developed to be used against Covid. Its value against the pandemic was just a fortunate coincidence. The technology was actually intended to be used for vaccines against cancer and other diseases. From the industry perspective, the downside is that if they made their technology more widely available, then other companies may be able to step in and use it to develop their own vaccines against cancer and other diseases. In other words, the big fear is that we will see more advances in health care if the technology is widely available, pretty much the exact opposite of the story about how this would impede further innovation. I gather most of us do not share the industry's concerns that open-sourcing technology could lead to a proliferation of new vaccines against deadly diseases, but it is worth taking a moment to think about the innovation process. The industry has long pushed the line that the way to promote more innovation is to make patent and related monopolies longer and stronger. The idea is that by increasing potential profits, we will see more investment in developing new vaccines, cures, and treatments. But these monopolies are only one way to provide incentives, and even now they are not the only mechanism we use. We also spend over $40 billion a year in the United States alone on supporting biomedical research, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. Most of this money goes to more basic research, but many drugs and vaccines have been developed largely on the government dime, most notably the Moderna vaccine, which was paid for entirely through Operation Warp Speed. If we put up more public money, then we need less private money. I have argued that we would be best off relying pretty much entirely on public money.[1]This would take away the perverse incentives created by patent monopoly pricing, like the pushing of opioids that was a major factor in the country's opioid crisis. It would also allow for the open-sourcing of research, which should be a condition of public funding. This could create the world the industry fears, as many companies could jump ahead and take advantage of developments in mRNA technology to develop vaccines against a variety of diseases. But even if we don't go the full public funding route, it is pretty much definitional that more public funding reduces the need for strong patent monopolies to provide incentives. If we put up more dollars for research, clinical testing, or other aspects of the development process, then we can provide the same incentive to the pharmaceutical industry with shorter and/or weaker monopoly protections. In the vaccine context, open-source means not only sharing existing technology, but creating the opportunity for improving it by allowing engineers all of the world to inspect production techniques. While the industry would like to pretend that it has perfected the production process and possibilities for improvement do not exist, this is hardly plausible based on what is publicly known. To take a few examples, Pfizer announcedback in February that it found that changing its production techniques could cut production time in half. It also discovered that its vaccine did not require super-cold storage. Rather, it could be kept in a normal freezer for up to two weeks. In fact, Pfizer did not even realize that its standard vial contained six doses of the vaccine rather than five. This meant that one sixth of its vaccines were being thrown into the toilet at a time when they were in very short supply. Given this history, it is hard to believe that Pfizer and the other pharmaceutical companies now have an optimal production system that will allow for no further improvements. As the saying goes, when did the drug companies stop making mistakes about their production technology? Has Anyone Heard of China? It is remarkable how discussions of vaccinating the world so often leave out the Chinese vaccines. They are clearly not as effective as the mRNA vaccines, but they are nonetheless hugely more effective in preventing death and serious illness than no vaccines.[2]And, in a context where our drug companies insist that they couldn't possible produce enough vaccines to cover the developing world this year, and possibly not even next year, we should be looking to the Chinese vaccines to fill the gap. China was able to distributemore than 560 million vaccines internally, in the month of June, in addition to the doses it supplied to other countries. Unless the country had a truly massive stockpile at the start of the month, this presumably reflects capacity in the range of 500 million vaccines a month. The Chinese vaccines account for close to 50 percent of the doses given around the world to date. It would be bizarre not to try to take advantage of China's capacity. There obviously are political issues in dealing with China, but the U.S. and other Western countries should try to put these aside, if we are going to be serious about vaccinating the world as quickly as possible. "Mistakes Were Made," Should not be Our National Motto If a vaccine resistant strain of the coronavirus develops, and we have to go through a whole new round of disease, deaths, and shutdowns, it will be an enormous disaster from any perspective. The worst part of the story is that it is a fully avoidable disaster. We could have had the whole world vaccinated by now, if the United States and other major powers had made it a priority. Unfortunately, we were too concerned about pharmaceutical industry profits and scoring points against China to go this route. Nonetheless, we may get lucky. Current infection rates worldwide are down sharply from the peaks hit in April, but they are rising again due to the Delta variant. It is essential to do everything possible to accelerate the distribution of vaccines. It is long past time that we start taking the pandemic seriously. [1] I discuss a mechanism for public funding of drug development in chapter of 5 of Rigged (it's free). [2]The NYT had a peculiar articlelast month celebrating Covid illnesses and death in Seychelles, where most of the population has been vaccinated with one of the Chinese vaccines. Seychelles largely avoided the pandemic until the point where it began large-scale vaccinations. If we take the whole period since the pandemic began, the percent of the population that has died from Covid in Seychelles is 0.08 percent, less than half the 0.19 percent in the United States. 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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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