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On June 23, voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls for a referendum on the country’s membership in the European Union. As one of the EU’s largest and wealthiest member states, Britain’s exit, or “Brexit”, would not only alter the U.K.’s institutional, political, and economic relationships, but would also send shock waves across the entire continent and beyond, with a possible Brexit fundamentally reshaping transatlantic relations.

On May 6, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) at Brookings, in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Stiftung North America, the UK in a Changing Europe Initiative based at King's College London, and Wilton Park USA, will host a discussion to assess the range of implications that could result from the United Kingdom’s referendum. 

After each panel, the participants will take questions from the audience.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #UKReferendum

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• Brexit—in or out? Implications of the United Kingdom’s referendum on EU membership

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160506_uk_eu_brexit_transcript

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Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his fourth visit to China since President Xi Jinping became top party leader in 2012. During this latest meeting, the two countries inked more than 30 deals, including an oil supply contract, and issued numerous joint statements, one of which criticized the United States for its plans to deploy missile defense systems on the Korean Peninsula and in the Balkans. Chinese state media speculate that this year’s China-Russia joint naval exercises, held annually since 2005, will likely be led by the South China Sea Fleet, reinforcing a general perception in China and elsewhere that U.S. policies are pushing Chinese leaders to consolidate ties with Russia.

On July 26, the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings hosted a discussion on the U.S.-China-Russia trilateral relationship, the shape and scope of which carries far-reaching consequences for international order and global economic growth. Brookings President Strobe Talbott, who served as deputy secretary of state and ambassador-at-large on the new independent states following the Soviet breakup, provided an introduction. A panel of experts—J. Stapleton Roy, Fiona Hill, Yun Sun, and Cheng Li—discussed the current and historical dynamics at play, including expectations and recommendations for the future.

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• Is the United States losing China to Russia?

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• Is the United States losing China to Russia?

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160726_china_russia_us_transcript

Introduction

Ninety years after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Ankara appears to be on the verge of a paradigmatic change in its approach to the Kurdish question. It is too early to tell whether the current negotiations between Ankara and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) will manage to accommodate Kurdish cultural and political demands. Yet, for perhaps the first time in its history, the Turkish Republic seems willing to incorporate Kurds into the political system rather than militarily confront them. For decades, Turkey sought to assimilate its sizable Kurdish minority, about 15 million people, or around 20 percent of its total population. From the mid-1920s until the end of the Cold War, Ankara denied the ethnic existence of Kurds and their cultural rights. It took a three-decade-long PKK-led insurgency – which started in 1984 and caused a death toll of 40,000 – for the republic to start accepting the “Kurdish reality” and introduce cultural reforms. This perhaps explains why the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan is a national hero in the eyes of significant segments of Kurdish society.

Of the approximately 30 million Kurds in the Middle East, about half live in Turkey. Kurds also constitute a significant minority in neighboring Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Palestinians are often referred to as the most famous case of a “nation without a state” in the Middle East. But the Kurds, who outnumber the Palestinians by a factor of five, are by far the largest ethnic community in the region seeking national self-determination. The future of Turkey - and the Middle East - is therefore intimately linked to the question of Kurdish nationalism.

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• Turkey and the Kurds: From Predicament to Opportunity

Terrorist attacks with high casualties usually create a sense of national solidarity and patriotic reaction in societies that fall victim to such heinous acts. Not in Turkey, however. Despite a growing number of terrorist attacks by the so-called Islamic State on Turkish soil in the last 12 months, the country remains as polarized as ever under strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In fact, for two reasons, jihadist terrorism is exacerbating the division. First, Turkey's domestic polarization already has an Islamist-versus-secularist dimension. Most secularists hold Erdogan responsible for having created domestic political conditions that turn a blind eye to jihadist activities within Turkey.

It must also be said that polarization between secularists and Islamists in Turkey often fails to capture the complexity of Turkish politics, where not all secularists are democrats and not all Islamists are autocrats. In fact, there was a time when Erdogan was hailed as the great democratic reformer against the old secularist establishment under the guardianship of the military.

Yet, in the last five years, the religiosity and conservatism of the ruling Justice and Development Party, also known by its Turkish acronym AKP, on issues ranging from gender equality to public education has fueled the perception of rapid Islamization. Erdogan's anti-Western foreign policy discourse -- and the fact that Ankara has been strongly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the Arab Spring -- exacerbates the secular-versus-Islamist divide in Turkish society.

Erdogan doesn't fully support the eradication of jihadist groups in Syria.

The days Erdogan represented the great hope of a Turkish model where Islam, secularism, democracy and pro-Western orientation came together are long gone. Despite all this, it is sociologically more accurate to analyze the polarization in Turkey as one between democracy and autocracy rather than one of Islam versus secularism.

The second reason why ISIS terrorism is exacerbating Turkey's polarization is related to foreign policy. A significant segment of Turkish society believes Erdogan's Syria policy has ended up strengthening ISIS. In an attempt to facilitate Syrian President Bashar Assad's overthrow, the AKP turned a blind eye to the flow of foreign volunteers transiting Turkey to join extremist groups in Syria. Until last year, Ankara often allowed Islamists to openly organize and procure equipment and supplies on the Turkish side of the Syria border.

Making things worse is the widely held belief that Turkey's National Intelligence Organization, or MİT, facilitated the supply of weapons to extremist Islamist elements amongst the Syrian rebels. Most of the links were with organizations such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and Islamist extremists from Syria's Turkish-speaking Turkmen minority.

He is trying to present the PKK as enemy number one.

Turkey's support for Islamist groups in Syria had another rationale in addition to facilitating the downfall of the Assad regime: the emerging Kurdish threat in the north of the country. Syria's Kurds are closely linked with Turkey's Kurdish nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which has been conducting an insurgency for greater rights for Turkey's Kurds since 1984.

On the one hand, Ankara has hardened its stance against ISIS by opening the airbase at Incirlik in southern Turkey for use by the U.S-led coalition targeting the organization with air strikes. However, Erdogan doesn't fully support the eradication of jihadist groups in Syria. The reason is simple: the Arab and Turkmen Islamist groups are the main bulwark against the expansion of the de facto autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Syria. The AKP is concerned that the expansion and consolidation of a Kurdish state in Syria would both strengthen the PKK and further fuel similar aspirations amongst Turkey's own Kurds.

Will the most recent ISIS terrorist attack in Istanbul change anything in Turkey's main threat perception? When will the Turkish government finally realize that the jihadist threat in the country needs to be prioritized? If you listen to Erdogan's remarks, you will quickly realize that the real enemy he wants to fight is still the PKK. He tries hard after each ISIS attack to create a "generic" threat of terrorism in which all groups are bundled up together without any clear references to ISIS. He is trying to present the PKK as enemy number one.

Only after a peace process with Kurds will Turkey be able to understand that ISIS is an existential threat to national security.

Under such circumstances, Turkish society will remain deeply polarized between Islamists, secularists, Turkish nationalists and Kurdish rebels. Terrorist attacks, such as the one in Istanbul this week and the one in Ankara in July that killed more than 100 people, will only exacerbate these divisions.

Finally, it is important to note that the Turkish obsession with the Kurdish threat has also created a major impasse in Turkish-American relations in Syria. Unlike Ankara, Washington's top priority in Syria is to defeat ISIS. The fact that U.S. strategy consists of using proxy forces such as Syrian Kurds against ISIS further complicates the situation.

There will be no real progress in Turkey's fight against ISIS unless there is a much more serious strategy to get Ankara to focus on peace with the PKK. Only after a peace process with Kurds will Turkey be able to understand that ISIS is an existential threat to national security.

This piece was originally posted by The Huffington Post.

There's a little more than a week to go before the Democratic National Convention begins in Boston. Senator John Kerry is both raising and spending money at a furious pace. The Kerry campaign raised about $182 million from March through June. Senator Kerry also outspent President George Bush in advertising throughout most of the summer. But the president still has more cash on hand, reportedly $63 million at the end of May. That's the latest figure available. The president also has more time to spend that money before accepting his Republican nomination on September 2. Anthony Corrado is an expert on campaign finance.

Listen to the entire interview

With only a few months remaining before the 2004 elections, national party committees continue to demonstrate financial strength and noteworthy success in adapting to the more stringent fundraising rules imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). A number of factors, including the deep partisan divide in the electorate, the expectations of a close presidential race, and the growing competition in key Senate and House races, have combined with recent party investments in new technology and the emergence of the Internet as a major fundraising tool to produce what one party chairman has described as a "perfect storm" for party fundraising.¹ Consequently, both national parties have exceeded the mid-year fundraising totals achieved in 2000, and both approach the general election with substantial amounts of money in the bank.

After eighteen months of experience under the new rules, the national parties are still outpacing their fundraising efforts of four years ago. As of June 30, the national parties have raised $611.1 million in federally regulated hard money alone, as compared to $535.6 million in hard and soft money combined at a similar point in the 2000 election cycle. The Republicans lead the way, taking in more than $381 million as compared to about $309 million in hard and soft money by the end of June in 2000. The Democrats have also raised more, bringing in $230 million as compared to about $227 million in hard and soft money four years ago. Furthermore, with six months remaining in the election cycle, both national parties have already raised more hard money than they did in the 2000 election cycle.² In fact, by the end of June, every one of the Democratic and Republican national party committees had already exceeded its hard money total for the entire 2000 campaign.³

This surge in hard money fundraising has allowed the national party committees to replace a substantial portion of the revenues they previously received through unlimited soft money contributions. Through June, these committees have already taken in enough additional hard money to compensate for the $254 million of soft money that they had garnered by this point in 2000, which represented a little more than half of their $495 million in total soft money receipts in the 2000 election cycle.

View the accompanying data tables (PDF - 11.4 KB)

¹Terrence McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee Chairman, quoted in Paul Fahri, "Small Donors Grow Into Big Political Force," Washington Post, May 3, 2004, p. A11.
²In 2000, the Republican national party committees raised $361.6 million in hard money, while the Democratic national committees raised $212.9 million. These figures are based on unadjusted data and do not take into account any transfers of funds that may have taken place among the national party committees.
³The election cycle totals for 2000 can be found in Federal Election Commission, "FEC Reports Increase in Party Fundraising for 2000," press release, May 15, 2001. Available at http://www.fec.gov/press/press2001/051501partyfund/051501partyfund.html (viewed July 28, 2004).

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The 2008 elections showcased the power of the Internet to generate voter enthusiasm, mobilize volunteers and increase small-donor contributions. After the political world has been arguing about campaign finance policy for decades, the digital revolution has altered the calculus of participation.

On January 14, a joint project of the Campaign Finance Institute, American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution unveiled a new report that seeks to change the ongoing national dialogue about money in politics. At this event, the four authors of the report will detail their findings and recommendations. Relying on lessons from the record-shattering 2008 elections and the rise of Internet campaigning, experts will present a new vision of how campaign finance and communications policy can help further democracy through broader participation.

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• Thomas Mann
• Michael Malbin
• Anthony Corrado
• Norm Ornstein

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• Campaign Reform in the Networked Age: Fostering Participation through Small Donors and Volunteers

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• Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20090114_campaign_finance

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Despite the attention on the mid-term races, few elections are competitive. Electoral competition, already low at the national level, is in decline in state and primary elections as well. Reformers, who point to gerrymandering and a host of other targets for change, argue that improving competition will produce voters who are more interested in elections, better-informed on issues, and more likely to turn out to the polls.

On October 27, the Brookings Institution—in conjunction with the Cato Institute and The Pew Research Center—presented a discussion and a groundbreaking survey exploring the attitudes and opinions of voters in competitive and noncompetitive congressional districts. The survey, part of Pew's regular polling on voter attitudes, was conducted through the weekend of October 21. A series of questions explored the public's perceptions, knowledge, and opinions about electoral competitiveness.

The discussion also explored a publication that addresses the startling lack of competition in our democratic system. The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition and American Politics (Brookings, 2006), considers the historical development, legal background, and political aspects of a system that is supposed to be responsive and accountable, yet for many is becoming stagnant, self-perpetuating, and tone-deaf. Michael McDonald, editor and Brookings visiting fellow, moderated a discussion among co-editor John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, and Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter from The Pew Research Center, who also discussed the survey.

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Policy makers at all levels, federal and state and local governments, are depositing great faith in innovation as a driver of economic growth and job creation. In the knowledge economy, universities have been called to play a central role as knowledge producers. Universities are actively seeking to accommodate those public demands and many have engaged an ongoing review of their educational programs and their research portfolios to make them more attuned to industrial needs. Technology transfer is a function that universities are seeking to make more efficient in order to better engage with the economy.

By law, universities can elect to take title to patents from federally funded research and then license them to the private sector. For years, the dominant model of technology transfer has been to market university patents with commercial promise to prospect partners in industry. Under this model, very few universities have been able to command high licensing fees while the vast majority has never won the lottery of a “blockbuster” patent. Most technology transfer offices are cost centers for their universities.

However, upon further inspection, the winners of this apparent lottery seem to be an exclusive club. Over the last decade only 37 universities have shuffled in the top 20 of the licensing revenue ranking. What is more, 5 of the top 20 were barely covering the expenses of their tech transfer offices; the rest were not even making ends meet.[i] It may seem that the blockbuster patent lottery is rigged. See more detail in my Brookings report.

That appearance is due to the fact that landing a patent of high commercial value is highly dependent on the resources available to universities. Federal research funding is a good proxy variable to measure those resources. Figure 1 below shows side by side federal funding and net operating income of tech transfer offices. If high licensing revenues are a lottery; then it is one in which only universities with the highest federal funding can participate. Commercial patents may require a critical mass of investment to build the capacity to produce breakthrough discoveries that are at the same time mature enough for the private investors to take an interest.

Figure 1. A rigged lottery?

High federal research funding is the ticket to enter the blockbuster patent lottery

Source: Author elaboration with AUTM data (2013) [ii]

But now, let’s turn onto another view of the asymmetry of resources and licensing revenues of  universities; the geographical dimension. In Figure 2 we can appreciate the degree of dispersion (or concentration) of both, federal research investment and licensing revenue, across the states. It is easy to recognize the well-funded universities on the East and West coast receiving most of federal funds, and it is easy to observe as well that it is around the same regions, albeit more scattered, that licensing revenues are high.

If policymakers are serious about fostering innovation, it is time to discuss the asymmetries of resources among universities across the nation. Licensing revenues is a poor measure of technology transfer activity, because universities engage in a number of interactions with the private sector that do not involve patent licensing contracts. However, this data hints at the larger challenge: If universities are expected to be engines of growth for their regions and if technology transfer is to be streamlined, federal support must be allocated by mechanisms that balance the needs across states. This is not to suggest that research funding should be reallocated from top universities to the rest; that would be misguided policy. But it does suggest that without reform, the engines of growth will not roar throughout the nation, only in a few places.

Figure 2. Tech Transfer Activites Depend on Resources

Bubbles based on Metropolitan Statistical Areas and propotional to size of the variable

Innovation is the driver of long-term economic growth and a key ingredient for improvements in healthcare, safety, and security, not to mention those little comforts and conveniences to which we have grown so accustomed. But innovation is not an unqualified good; it taxes society with costs.

The market system internalizes only a portion of the total costs of innovation. Other costs, however, are not included in market prices. Among the most important sources for those unaccounted costs are creative destruction, externalities, and weak safeguards for unwanted consequences.

Creative Destruction and Innovation

Schumpeter described creative destruction as the process by which innovative entrepreneurs outcompete older firms who unable to adapt to a new productive platform go out of business, laying off their employees and writing off their productive assets. Innovation, thus, also produces job loss and wealth destruction. Externalities are side effects with costs not priced in the marketplace such as environmental degradation and pollution. While externalities are largely invisible in the accounting books, they levy very real costs to society in terms of human health and increased vulnerability to environmental shocks. In addition, new technologies are bound to have unwanted deleterious effects, some of which are harmful to workers and consumers, and often, even to third parties not participating in those markets. Yet, there are little financial or cultural incentives for innovators to design new technologies with safeguards against those effects.

Indeed, innovation imposes unaccounted costs and those costs are not allocated in proportion of the benefits. Nothing in the market system obligates the winners of creative destruction to compensate the unemployed of phased-out industries, nor mandates producers to compensate those shouldering the costs of externalities, nor places incentives to invest in preventing unwanted effects in new production processes and new products. It is the role of policy to create the appropriate incentives for a fair distribution of those social costs. As a matter of national policy we must continue every effort to foster innovation, but we must do so recognizing the trade-offs.

Strengthening the Social Safety Net

Society as a whole benefits from creative destruction; society as a whole must then strengthen the safety net for the unemployed and double up efforts to help workers retrain and find employment in emerging industries. Regulators and industry will always disagree on many things but they could agree to collaborate on a system of regulatory incentives to ease transition to productive platforms with low externality costs. Fostering innovation should also mean promoting a culture of anticipation to better manage unwanted consequences.

Let’s invest in innovation with optimism, but let’s be pragmatic about it. To reap the most net social benefit from innovation, we must work on two fronts, to maximize benefits and to minimize the social costs, particularly those costs not traditionally accounted. The challenge for policymakers is to do it fairly and smartly, creating a correspondence of benefits and costs, and not unnecessarily encumbering innovative activity.

Commentary published in The International Economy magazine, Spring 2014 issue, as part of a symposium of experts responding to the question: Does Innovation Lead to prosperity for all?

An academic-industrial partnership published last January in the prestigious journal Nature the results of the development of antibiotic teixobactin. The reported work is still at an early preclinical stage but it is nevertheless good news. Over the last decades the introduction of new antibiotics has slowed down nearly to a halt and over the same period we have seen a dangerous increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Such is the magnitude of the problem that it has attracted the attention of the U.S. government. Accepting several recommendations presented by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in their comprehensive report, the Obama Administration issued last September an Executive Order establishing an interagency Task Force for combating antibiotic resistant bacteria and directing the Secretary of Human and Health Services (HHS) to establish an Advisory Council on this matter. More recently the White House issued a strategic plan to tackle this problem.

Etiology of antibiotic resistance

Infectious diseases have been a major cause of morbidity and mortality from time immemorial. The early discovery of sulfa drugs in the 1930s and then antibiotics in the 1940s significantly aided the fight against these scourges. Following World War II society experienced extraordinary gains in life expectancy and overall quality of life. During that period, marked by optimism, many people presumed victory over infectious diseases. However, overuse of antibiotics and a slowdown of innovation, allowed bacteria to develop resistance at such a pace that some experts now speak of a post-antibiotic era.

The problem is manifold: overuse of antibiotics, slow innovation, and bacterial evolution.

The overuse of antibiotics in both humans and livestock also facilitated the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Responsibility falls to health care providers who prescribed antibiotics liberally and patients who did not complete their prescribed dosages. Acknowledging this problem, the medical community has been training physicians to avoid pressures to prescribe antibiotics for children (and their parents) with infections that are likely to be viral in origin. Educational efforts are also underway to encourage patients to complete their full course of every prescribed antibiotic and not to halt treatment when symptoms ease. The excessive use of antibiotics in food-producing animals is perhaps less manageable because it affects the bottom line of farm operations. For instance, the FDA reported that even though famers were aware of the risks, antibiotics use in feedstock increased by 16 percent from 2009 to 2012.

The development of antibiotics—perhaps a more adequate term would be anti-bacterial agents—indirectly contributed to the problem by being incremental and by nearly stalling two decades ago. Many revolutionary innovations in antibiotics were introduced in a first period of development that started in the 1940s and lasted about two decades. Building upon scaffolds and mechanisms discovered theretofore, a second period of incremental development followed over three decades, through to 1990s, with roughly three new antibiotics introduced every year. High competition and little differentiations rendered antibiotics less and less profitable and over a third period covering the last 20 years pharmaceutical companies have cut development of new antibiotics down to a trickle.

The misguided overuse and misuse of antibiotics together with the economics of antibiotic innovation compounded the problem taking place in nature: bacteria evolves and adapts rapidly.

Current policy initiatives

The PCAST report recommended federal leadership and investment to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria in three areas: improving surveillance, increasing the longevity of current antibiotics through moderated usage, and picking up the pace of development of new antibiotics and other effective interventions.

To implement this strategy PCAST suggested an oversight structure that includes a Director for National Antibiotic Resistance Policy, an interagency Task Force for Combating Antibiotic Resistance Bacteria, and an Advisory Council to be established by the HHS Secretary. PCAST also recommended increasing federal support from $450 million to $900 million for core activities such as surveillance infrastructure and development of transformative diagnostics and treatments. In addition, it proposed $800 million in funding for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to support public-private partnerships for antibiotics development.

The Obama administration took up many of these recommendations and directed their implementation with the aforementioned Executive Order. More recently, it announced a National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria to implement the recommendations of the PCAST report. The national strategy has five pillars: First, slow the emergence and spread of resistant bacteria by decreasing the abusive usage of antibiotics in health care as well as in farm animals; second, establish national surveillance efforts that build surveillance capability across human and animal environments; third, advance development and usage of rapid and innovative diagnostics to provide more accurate care delivery and data collection; forth, seek to accelerate the invention process for new antibiotics, other therapeutics and vaccines across all stages, including basic and applied research and development; finally, emphasize the importance of international collaboration and endorse the World Health Organization Action Plan to address antimicrobial resistance.

University-Industry partnerships

Therefore, an important cause of our antibiotic woes seems to be driven by economic logic. On one hand, pharmaceutical companies have by and large abandoned investment in antibiotic development; competition and high substitutability have led to low prices and in their financial calculation, pharmaceutical companies cannot justify new developmental efforts. On the other hand, farmers have found the use of antibiotics highly profitable and thus have no financial incentives to halt their use.

There is nevertheless a mirror explanation of a political character.

The federal government allocates about $30 billion for research in medicine and health through the National Institutes of Health. The government does not seek to crowd out private research investment; rather, the goal is to fund research the private sector would not conduct because the financial return of that research is too uncertain. Economic theory prescribes government intervention to address this kind of market failure. However, it is also government policy to privatize patents to discoveries made with public monies in order to facilitate their transfer from public to private organizations. An unanticipated risk of this policy is the rebalancing of the public research portfolio to accommodate the growing demand for the kind of research that feeds into attractive market niches. The risk is that the more aligned public research and private demand become, the less research attention will be directed to medical needs without great market prospects. The development of new antibiotics seems to be just that kind of neglected medical public need. If antibiotics are unattractive to pharmaceutical companies, antibiotic development should be a research priority for the NIH. We know that it is unlikely that Congress will increase public spending for antibiotic R&D in the proportion suggested by PCAST, but the NIH could step in and rebalance its own portfolio to increase antibiotic research. Either increasing NIH funding for antibiotics or NIH rebalancing its own portfolio, are political decisions that are sure to meet organized resistance even stronger than antibiotic resistance.

The second mirror explanation is that farmers have a well-organized lobby. It is no surprise that the Executive Order gingerly walks over recommendations for the farming sector and avoid any hint at an outright ban of antibiotics use, lest the administration is perceived as heavy-handed. Considering the huge magnitude of the problem, a political solution is warranted. Farmers’ cooperation in addressing this national problem will have to be traded for subsidies and other extra-market incentives that compensate for loss revenues or higher costs. The administration will do well to work out the politics with farmer associations first before they organize in strong opposition to any measure to curb antibiotic use in feedstock.

Addressing this challenge adequately will thus require working out solutions to the economic and political dimensions of this problem. Public-private partnerships, including university-industry collaboration, could prove to be a useful mechanism to balance the two dimensions of the equation. The development of teixobactin mentioned above is a good example of this prescription as it resulted from collaboration between the university of Bonn Germany, Northeastern University, and Novobiotic Pharmaceutical, a start-up in Cambridge Mass.

If the NIH cannot secure an increase in research funding for antibiotics development and cannot rebalance substantially its portfolio, it can at least encourage Cooperative Research and Development Agreements as well as university start-ups devoted to develop new antibiotics. In order to promote public-private and university-industry partnerships, policy coordination is advised. The nascent enterprises will be assisted greatly if the government can help them raise capital connecting them to venture funding networks or implementing a loan guarantees programs specific to antibiotics.  It can also allow for an expedited FDA approval which would lessen the regulatory burden. Likewise, farmers may be convinced to discontinue the risky practice if innovation in animal husbandry can effectively replace antibiotic use. Public-private partnerships, particularly through university extension programs, could provide an adequate framework to test alternative methods, scale them up, and subsidize the transition to new sustainable practices that are not financially painful to farmers.

Yikun Chi contributed to this post

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The fiscal budget has become a casualty of political polarization and even functions that had enjoyed bipartisan support, like research and development (R&D), are becoming divisive issues on Capitol Hill. As a result, federal R&D is likely to grow pegged to inflation or worse, decline.

With the size of the pie fixed or shrinking, requests for R&D funding increases will trigger an inter-agency zero-sum game that will play out as pointless comparisons of agencies’ merit, or worse, as a contest to attract the favor of Congress or the White House. This insidious politics will be made even more so by the growing tendency of equating public accountability with the measurement of performance. Political polarization, tight budgets, and pressure for quantifiable results threaten to undermine the sustainability of public R&D. The situation begs the question: What can federal agencies do to deal with the changing politics of federal R&D?

In a new paper, Walter D. Valdivia and Benjamin Y. Clark apply punctuated equilibrium theory to examine the last four decades of federal R&D, both at the aggregate and the agency level. Valdivia and Clark observe a general upward trend driven by gradual increases. In turn, budget leaps or punctuations are few and far in between and do no appear to have lasting effects. As the politics of R&D are stirred up, federal departments and agencies are sure to find that proposing punctuations is becoming more costly and risky. Consequently, agencies will be well advised in securing stable growth in their R&D budgets in the long run rather than pushing for short term budget leaps.

While appropriations history would suggest the stability of R&D spending resulted from the character of the budget politics, in the future, stability will need the stewardship of R&D champions who work to institutionalize gradualism, this time, in spite of the politics.

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Universities cash handsome awards on infringement cases

Last month, a jury found Apple Inc. guilty of infringing a patent of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) and ordered the tech giant to pay $234 million. The university scored a big financial victory, but this hardly meant any gain for the good name of the university.

The plaintiffs argued successfully in court that Apple infringed their 1998 patent on a predictor circuit that greatly improved the efficiency of microchips used in the popular iPhone 5s, 6, and 6 Plus. Apple first responded by challenging the validity of the patent, but the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled in favor of the university. Apple plans to appeal, but the appellate court is not likely to reverse the lower court’s decision.

This is not the first time this university has asserted its patents rights (UW sued Intel in 2008 for this exact same patent and reportedly settled for $110 million). Nor is this the first time universities in general have taken infringers to court. Prominent cases in recent memory include Boston University, which sued several companies for infringement of a patent for blue light-emitting diodes and settled out of court with most of them, and Carnegie Mellon, who was awarded $237 million by the federal appellate court on its infringement suit against Marvell, a semiconductor company, for its use of an enhanced detector of data in hard drives called Kavcic detectors.

Means not always aligned with aims in patent law

When university inventions emerge from federal research grants, universities can also sue the infringers, but in those cases they would be testing the accepted interpretations of current patent law.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 extended patent law and gave small-business and universities the right to take title to patents from federal grants—later it was amended to extend the right to all federal grantees regardless of size. The ostensible aim of this act is to “to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development.” Under the law, a condition for universities to keep their exclusive rights on those patents is that they or their licensees take “effective steps to achieve practical application” of those patents. Bayh-Dole was not designed to create a new source of revenue for universities. If companies are effectively using university technologies, Bayh-Dole’s purpose is served without need of the patents.

To understand this point, consider a counterfactual: What if the text of Bayh-Dole had been originally composed to grant a conditional right to patents for federal research grantees? The condition could be stated like this: “This policy seeks to promote the commercialization of federally funded research and to this end it will use the patent system. Grantees may take title to patents if and only if other mechanisms for disseminating and developing those inventions into useful applications prove unsuccessful.” Under this imagined text, the universities could still take title to patents on their inventions if they or the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office were not aware that the technologies were being used in manufactures.

But no court would find their infringement claim meritorious if the accused companies could demonstrate that, absent of willful infringement, they had in fact used the technologies covered by university patents in their commercial products. In this case, other mechanisms for disseminating and developing the technologies would have proven successful indeed. The reality that Bayh-Dole did not mandate such a contingent assignation of rights creates a contradiction between its aims and the means chosen to advance those aims for the subset of patents that were already in use by industry.

I should clarify that the predictor circuit, the blue-light diode, and the Kavcic detectors are not in that subset of patents. But even in they were, there is no indication that the University of Wisconsin-Madison would have exercised its patent rights with any less vigor just because the original research was funded by public funds. Today, it is fully expected from universities to aggressively assert their patent rights regardless of the source of funding for the original research.

You can have an answer for every question and still lose the debate

It is this litigious attitude that puts off many observers. While the law may very well allow universities to be litigious, universities could still refuse to exercise their rights under circumstances in which those rights are not easily reconciled with the public mission of the university.

Universities administrators, tech transfer personnel, and particularly the legal teams winning infringement cases have legitimate reasons to wonder why universities are publicly scorned. After all, they are acting within the law and simply protecting their patent rights; they are doing what any rational person would do. They may be really surprised when critics accuse universities of becoming allies of patent trolls, or of aiding and abetting their actions. Such accusations are unwarranted. Trolls are truants; the universities are venerable institutions. Patent trolls would exploit the ambiguities of patent law and the burdens of due process to their own benefit and to the detriment of truly productive businesses and persons. In stark contrast, universities are long established partners of democracy, respected beyond ideological divides for their abundant contributions to society.

The critics may not be fully considering the intricacies of patent law. Or they may forget that universities are in need of additional revenue—higher education has not seen public financial support increase in recent years, with federal grants roughly stagnated and state funding falling drastically in some states. Critics may also ignore that revenues collected from licensing of patents, favorable court rulings, and out-of-court settlements, are to a large extent (usually two thirds of the total) plugged back into the research enterprise.

University attorneys may have an answer for every point that critics raise, but the overall concern of critics should not be dismissed outright. Given that many if not most university patents can be traced back to research funded by tax dollars, there is a legitimate reason for observers to expect universities to manage their patents with a degree of restraint. There is also a legitimate reason for public disappointment when universities do not seem to endeavor to balance the tensions between their rights and duties.

Substantive steps to improve the universities’ public image

Universities can become more responsive to public expectations about their character not only by promoting their good work, but also by taking substantive steps to correct misperceptions.

First, when universities discover a case of proven infringement, they should take companies to court as a measure of last resort. If a particular company refuses to negotiate in good faith and an infringement case ends up in court, the universities should be prepared to demonstrate to the court of public opinion that they have tried, with sufficient insistence and time, to negotiate a license and even made concessions in pricing the license. In the case of the predictor circuit patent, it seems that the University of Wisconsin-Madison tried to license the technology and Apple refused, but the university would be in a much better position if it could demonstrate that the licensing deals offered to Apple would have turned to be far less expensive for the tech company.

Second, universities would be well advised not to join any efforts to lobby Congress for stronger patent protection. At least two reasons substantiate this suggestion. First, as a matter of principle, the dogmatic belief that without patents there is no innovation is wrong. Second, as a matter of material interest, universities as a group do not have a financial interest in patenting. It’s worth elaborating these points a bit more.

Neither historians nor social science researchers have settled the question about the net effects of patents on innovation. While there is evidence of social benefits from patent-based innovation, there is also evidence of social costs associated with patent-monopolies, and even more evidence of momentous innovations that required no patents. What’s more, the net social benefit varies across industries and over time. Research shows economic areas in which patents do spur innovation and economic sectors where it actually hinders them. This research explains, for instance, why some computer and Internet giants lobby Congress in the opposite direction to the biotech and big pharma industries. Rigorous industrial surveys of the 1980s and 1990s found that companies in most economic sectors did not use patents as their primary tool to protect their R&D investments.

Yet patenting has increased rapidly over the past four decades. This increase includes industries that once were uninterested in patents. Economic analyses have shown that this new patenting is a business strategy against patent litigation. Companies are building patent portfolios as a defensive strategy, not because they are innovating more. The university’s public position on patent policy should acknowledge that the debate on the impact of patents on innovation is not settled and that this impact cannot be observed in the aggregate, but must be considered in the context of each specific economic sector, industry, or even market. From this vantage point, universities could then turn up or down the intensity with which they negotiate licenses and pursue compensation for infringement. Universities would better assert their commitment to their public mission if they compute on a case by case basis the balance between social benefits and costs for each of its controversial patents.

As to the material interest in patents, it is understandable that some patent attorneys or the biotech lobby publicly espouse the dogma of patents, that there is no innovation without patents. After all, their livelihood depends on it. However, research universities as a group do not have any significant financial interest in stronger patent protection. As I have shown in a previous Brookings paper, the vast majority of research universities earn very little from their patent portfolios and about 87% of tech transfer offices operate in the red. Universities as a group receive so little income from licensing and asserting their patents relative to the generous federal support (below 3%), that if the federal government were to declare that grant reviewers should give a preference to universities that do not patent, all research universities would stop the practice at once. It is true that a few universities (like the University of Wisconsin-Madison) raise significant revenue from their patent portfolio, and they will continue to do so regardless of public protestations. But the majority of universities do not have a material interest in patenting.

Time to get it right on anti-troll legislation

Last year, the House of Representative passed legislation closing loopholes and introducing disincentives for patent trolls. Just as mirror legislation was about to be considered in the Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy withdrew it from the Judiciary Committee. It was reported that Sen. Harry Reid forced the hand of Mr. Leahy to kill the bill in committee. In the public sphere, the shrewd lobbying efforts to derail the bill were perceived to be pro-troll interests. The lobbying came from pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, patent attorneys, and, to the surprise of everyone, universities.  Little wonder that critics overreacted and suggested universities were in partnership with trolls: even if they were wrong, these accusations stung.

University associations took that position out of a sincere belief in the dogma of patents and out of fear that the proposed anti-troll legislation limited their ability to sue patent infringers. However, their convictions stand on shaky ground and their material interests are not those of the vast majority of universities.

A reversal of that position is not only possible, but would be timely. When anti-troll legislation is again introduced in Congress, universities should distance themselves from efforts to protect the policy status quo that so benefits patent trolls. It is not altogether improbable that Congress sees fit to exempt universities from some of the requirements that the law would impose. University associations could show Congress the merit of such exemptions in consideration of the universities’ constant and significant contributions to states, regions, and the nation. However, no such concessions could ever be expected if the universities continue to place themselves in the company of those who profit from patent management.

No asset is more valuable for universities than their prestige. It is the ample recognition of their value in society that guarantees tax dollars will continue to flow into universities. While acting legally to protect their patent rights, universities are nevertheless toying with their own legitimacy. Let those universities that stand to gain from litigation act in their self-interest, but do not let them speak for all universities. When university associations advocate for stronger patent protection, they do the majority of universities a disservice. These associations should better represent the interests of all their members by advocating a more neutral position about patent reform, by publicly praising universities’ restraint on patent litigation, and by promoting a culture and readiness in technology transfer offices to appraise each patent not by its market value but by its social value. At the same time, the majority of universities that obtain neither private nor social benefits from patenting should press their political representatives to adopt a more balanced approach to policy advocacy, lest they squander the reputation of the entire university system.

This post originally appeared on the Center for Technology Innovation’s TechTank blog.

Universities cash handsome awards on infringement cases

This October, a jury found Apple Inc. guilty of infringing a patent of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) and ordered the tech giant to pay $234 million. The university scored a big financial victory, but this hardly meant any gain for the good name of the university.

The plaintiffs argued successfully in court that Apple infringed their 1998 patent on a predictor circuit that greatly improved the efficiency of microchips used in the popular iPhone 5s, 6, and 6 Plus. Apple first responded by challenging the validity of the patent, but the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled in favor of the university. Apple plans to appeal, but the appellate court is not likely to reverse the lower court’s decision.

This is not the first time this university has asserted its patents rights (UW sued Intel in 2008 for this exact same patent and reportedly settled for $110 million). Nor is this the first time universities in general have taken infringers to court. Prominent cases in recent memory include Boston University, which sued several companies for infringement of a patent for blue light-emitting diodes and settled out of court with most of them, and Carnegie Mellon, who was awarded $237 million by the federal appellate court on its infringement suit against Marvell, a semiconductor company, for its use of an enhanced detector of data in hard drives called Kavcic detectors.

Means not always aligned with aims in patent law

When university patented inventions emerge from federal research grants, infringement suits test the accepted interpretations of current patent law.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 extended patent law and gave small-business and universities the right to take title to patents from federal research grants—later it was amended to extend the right to all federal grantees regardless of size. The ostensible aim of this act is to “to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development.” Under the law, a condition for universities (or any other government research performers) to keep their exclusive rights on those patents is that they or their licensees take “effective steps to achieve practical application” of those patents. Bayh-Dole was not designed to create a new source of revenue for universities. If companies are effectively using university technologies, Bayh-Dole’s purpose is served without need of patents.

To understand this point, consider a counterfactual: What if the text of Bayh-Dole had been originally composed to grant a conditional right to patents for federal research grantees? The condition could be stated like this: “This policy seeks to promote the commercialization of federally funded research and to this end it will use the patent system. Grantees may take title to patents if and only if other mechanisms for disseminating and developing those inventions into useful applications prove unsuccessful.” Under this imagined text, the universities could still take title to patents on their inventions if they or the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office were not aware that the technologies were being used in manufactures.

But no court would find their infringement claim meritorious if the accused companies could demonstrate that, absent of willful infringement, they had in fact used the technologies covered by university patents in their commercial products. In this case, other mechanisms for disseminating and developing the technologies would have proven successful indeed. The reality that Bayh-Dole did not mandate such a contingent assignation of rights creates a contradiction between its aims and the means chosen to advance those aims for the subset of patents that were already in use by industry.

I should remark that UW’s predictor circuit resulted from grants from NSF and DARPA and there is no indication that the university exercised its patent rights with any less vigor just because the original research was funded by public funds. In fact, it is fully expected from universities to aggressively assert their patent rights regardless of the source of funding for the original research.

You can have an answer for every question and still lose the debate

It is this litigious attitude that puts off many observers. While the law may very well allow universities to be litigious, universities could still refuse to exercise their rights under circumstances in which those rights are not easily reconciled with the public mission of the university.

Universities administrators, tech transfer personnel, and particularly the legal teams winning infringement cases have legitimate reasons to wonder why universities are publicly scorned. After all, they are acting within the law and simply protecting their patent rights; they are doing what any rational person would do. They may be really surprised when critics accuse universities of becoming allies of patent trolls, or of aiding and abetting their actions. Such accusations are unwarranted. Trolls are truants; the universities are venerable institutions. Patent trolls would exploit the ambiguities of patent law and the burdens of due process to their own benefit and to the detriment of truly productive businesses and persons. In stark contrast, universities are long established partners of democracy, respected beyond ideological divides for their abundant contributions to society.

The critics may not be fully considering the intricacies of patent law. Or they may forget that universities are in need of additional revenue—higher education has not seen public financial support increase in recent years, with federal grants roughly stagnated and state funding falling drastically in some states. Critics may also ignore that revenues collected from licensing of patents, favorable court rulings, and out-of-court settlements, are to a large extent (usually two thirds of the total) plugged back into the research enterprise.

University attorneys may have an answer for every point that critics raise, but the overall concern of critics should not be dismissed outright. Given that many if not most university patents can be traced back to research funded by tax dollars, there is a legitimate reason for observers to expect universities to manage their patents with a degree of restraint. There is also a legitimate reason for public disappointment when universities do not seem to endeavor to balance the tensions between their rights and duties.

Substantive steps to improve the universities’ public image

Universities can become more responsive to public expectations about their character not only by promoting their good work, but also by taking substantive steps to correct misperceptions.

First, when universities discover a case of proven infringement, they should take companies to court as a measure of last resort. If a particular company refuses to negotiate in good faith and an infringement case ends up in court, the universities should be prepared to demonstrate to the court of public opinion that they have tried, with sufficient insistence and time, to negotiate a license and even made concessions in pricing the license. In the case of the predictor circuit patent, it seems that the University of Wisconsin-Madison tried to license the technology and Apple refused, but the university would be in a much better position if it could demonstrate that the licensing deals offered to Apple would have turned to be far less expensive for the tech company.

Second, universities would be well advised not to join any efforts to lobby Congress for stronger patent protection. At least two reasons substantiate this suggestion. First, as a matter of principle, the dogmatic belief that without patents there is no innovation is wrong. Second, as a matter of material interest, universities as a group do not have a financial interest in patenting. It’s worth elaborating these points a bit more.

Neither historians nor social science researchers have settled the question about the net effects of patents on innovation. While there is evidence of social benefits from patent-based innovation, there is also evidence of social costs associated with patent-monopolies, and even more evidence of momentous innovations that required no patents. What’s more, the net social benefit varies across industries and over time. Research shows economic areas in which patents do spur innovation and economic sectors where it actually hinders them. This research explains, for instance, why some computer and Internet giants lobby Congress in the opposite direction to the biotech and big pharma industries. Rigorous industrial surveys of the 1980s and 1990s found that companies in most economic sectors did not use patents as their primary tool to protect their R&D investments.

Yet patenting has increased rapidly over the past four decades. This increase includes industries that once were uninterested in patents. Economic analyses have shown that this new patenting is a business strategy against patent litigation. Companies are building patent portfolios as a defensive strategy, not because they are innovating more. The university’s public position on patent policy should acknowledge that the debate on the impact of patents on innovation is not settled and that this impact cannot be observed in the aggregate, but must be considered in the context of each specific economic sector, industry, or even market. From this vantage point, universities could then turn up or down the intensity with which they negotiate licenses and pursue compensation for infringement. Universities would better assert their commitment to their public mission if they compute on a case by case basis the balance between social benefits and costs for each of its controversial patents.

As to the material interest in patents, it is understandable that some patent attorneys or the biotech lobby publicly espouse the dogma of patents, that there is no innovation without patents. After all, their livelihood depends on it. However, research universities as a group do not have any significant financial interest in stronger patent protection. As I have shown in a previous Brookings paper, the vast majority of research universities earn very little from their patent portfolios and about 87% of tech transfer offices operate in the red. Universities as a group receive so little income from licensing and asserting their patents relative to the generous federal support (below 3%), that if the federal government were to declare that grant reviewers should give a preference to universities that do not patent, all research universities would stop the practice at once. It is true that a few universities (like the University of Wisconsin-Madison) raise significant revenue from their patent portfolio, and they will continue to do so regardless of public protestations. But the majority of universities do not have a material interest in patenting.

Time to get it right on anti-troll legislation

Last year, the House of Representative passed legislation closing loopholes and introducing disincentives for patent trolls. Just as mirror legislation was about to be considered in the Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy withdrew it from the Judiciary Committee. It was reported that Sen. Harry Reid forced the hand of Mr. Leahy to kill the bill in committee. In the public sphere, the shrewd lobbying efforts to derail the bill were perceived to be pro-troll interests. The lobbying came from pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, patent attorneys, and, to the surprise of everyone, universities.  Little wonder that critics overreacted and suggested universities were in partnership with trolls: even if they were wrong, these accusations stung.

University associations took that position out of a sincere belief in the dogma of patents and out of fear that the proposed anti-troll legislation limited the universities’ ability to sue patent infringers. However, their convictions stand on shaky ground and only a few universities sue for infringement. In taking that policy position, university associations are representing neither the interests nor the beliefs of the vast majority of universities.

A reversal of that position is not only possible, but would be timely. When anti-troll legislation is again introduced in Congress, universities should distance themselves from efforts to protect the policy status quo that so benefits patent trolls. It is not altogether improbable that Congress sees fit to exempt universities from some of the requirements that the law would impose. University associations could show Congress the merit of such exemptions in consideration of the universities’ constant and significant contributions to states, regions, and the nation. However, no such concessions could ever be expected if the universities continue to place themselves in the company of those who profit from patent management.

No asset is more valuable for universities than their prestige. It is the ample recognition of their value in society that guarantees tax dollars will continue to flow into universities. While acting legally to protect their patent rights, universities are nevertheless toying with their own legitimacy. Let those universities that stand to gain from litigation act in their self-interest, but do not let them speak for all universities. When university associations advocate for stronger patent protection, they do the majority of universities a disservice. These associations should better represent the interests of all their members by advocating a more neutral position about patent reform, by publicly praising universities’ restraint on patent litigation, and by promoting a culture and readiness in technology transfer offices to appraise each patent not by its market value but by its social value. At the same time, the majority of universities that obtain neither private nor social benefits from patenting should press their political representatives to adopt a more balanced approach to policy advocacy, lest they squander the reputation of the entire university system.

Editor's Note: The post was corrected to state that UW’s predictor circuit did originate from federally funded research.

Tuesday night, President Obama presented four critical questions about the future of America and I should like to comment on the first two:

1. How to produce equal opportunity, emphasizing economic security for all.
2. In his words, “how do we make technology work for us, and not against us,” particularly to meet the “urgent challenges” of our days.

The challenges the president wishes to meet by means of technological development are climate change and cancer. Let’s consider cancer first. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical: this is not the first presidential war against cancer, President Nixon tried that once and, alas cancer still has the upper hand. It is ironic that Mr. Obama chose this particular ”moonshot”, because not only are the technical aspects of cancer more uncertain than those of space travel, political support for the project is vastly different and we cannot be sure that even another Democrat in the White House would see this project to fruition. In effect, neither Mr. Obama nor his appointed “mission control”, Vice President Biden, have time in office to see fruits from their efforts on this front.

The second challenge the president wishes to address with technology is problematic beyond technical and economic feasibility (producing renewable energy at competitive prices); curbing carbon emissions has become politically intractable. The president correctly suggested that being leaders in the renewable energy markets of the future makes perfect business sense, even for global warming skeptics. Nevertheless, markets have a political economy, and current energy giants have a material interest in not allowing any changes to the rules that so favor them (including significant federal subsidies). Only when the costs of exploration, extraction, and distribution of fossil fuels rise above those of renewable sources, we can expect policy changes enabling an energy transition to become feasible. When renewables are competitive on a large scale, it is not very likely that their production will be controlled by new industrial players. Such is the political economy of free markets. What’s more, progressives should be wary of standard solutions that would raise the cost of energy (such as a tax on carbon emissions), because low income families are quite sensitive to energy prices; the cost of electricity, gas, and transportation is a far larger proportion of their income than that of their wealthier neighbors.

It’s odd that the president proposes technological solutions to challenges that call for a political solution. Again, in saying this, I’m allowing for the assumption that the technical side is manageable, which is not necessarily a sound assumption to make. The technical and economic complexity of these problems should only compound political hurdles. If I’m skeptical that technological fixes would curb carbon emissions or cure cancer, I am simply vexed by the president’s answer to the question on economic opportunity and security: expand the safety net. It is not that it wouldn’t work; it worked wonders creating prosperity and enlarging the middle-class in the post-World War II period. The problem is that enacting welfare state policies promises to be a hard political battle that, even if won, could result in pyrrhic victories. The greatest achievement of Mr. Obama expanding the safety net was, of course, the Affordable Care Act. But his policy success came at a very high cost: a majority of the voters have questions about the legitimacy of that policy. Even its eponymous name, Obamacare, was coined as a term of derision. It is bizarre that opposition to this reform is often found amidst people who benefit from it. We can blame the systematic campaign against it in every electoral contest, the legal subterfuges brought up to dismantle it (that ACA survived severely bruised), and the AM radio vitriol, but even controlling for the dirty war on healthcare reform, passing such as monumental legislation strictly across party lines has made it the lighting rod of distrust in government.

Progressives are free to try to increase economic opportunity following the welfare state textbook. They will meet the same opposition that Mr. Obama encountered. However, where progressives and conservatives could agree is about increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs, and nothing gives an edge to free enterprise more than innovation. Market competition is the selection mechanism by which an elite of enterprises rises from a legion created any given year; this elite, equipped with a new productive platform, can arm-wrestle markets from the old guard of incumbents. This is not the only way innovation takes place: monopolies and cartels can produce innovation, but with different outcomes. In competitive markets, innovation is the instrument of product differentiation; therefore, it improves quality and cuts consumer prices. In monopolistic markets, innovation also takes place, but generally as a monopolist’s effort to raise barriers to entry and secure high profits. Innovation can take place preserving social protections to the employees of the new industries, or it can undermine job security of its labor force (a concern with the sharing economy). These different modes of innovation are a function of the institutions that govern innovation, including industrial organization, labor and consumer protections.

What the President did not mention is that question two can answer question one: technological development can improve economic opportunity and security, and that is likely to be more politically feasible than addressing the challenges of climate change and cancer. Shaping the institutions that govern innovative activity to favor modes of innovation that benefit a broad base of society is an achievable goal, and could indeed be a standard by which his and future administrations are measured. This is so because these are not the province of the welfare state. They are policy domains that have historically enjoyed bipartisan consensus (such as federal R&D funding, private R&D tax credits) or low contestation (support for small business, tech transfer, loan guarantees).

As Mr. Obama himself suggested, technology can be indeed be made to work for us, all of us.

After a recent talk about my ISIS book, one of the audience members asked, “What can I read to help me not hate Islam?” I don’t think it’s a scholar’s job to persuade others to love or hate any culture. But the question was sincere, so I suggested some books that have helped me better understand Islam. I also put the question to Twitter. Below is some of what I and others came up with.

Two cautions before we dive in: First, the list is obviously not exhaustive and I’ve left out overly apologetic books—in my experience, they only increase the skeptical reader’s suspicion that she’s being suckered. Second, people on Twitter gave me great suggestions but I’ve only included those I’ve read and can vouch for:

Muhammad and the Quran: Two of the best books you’ll ever read about Muhammad and the Quran are also the shortest: The Koran: A Very Short Introduction and Muhammad, both by Michael Cook. He writes with great wit and deep scholarship.

Other scriptures: Most non-Muslims are unaware that Islamic scripture is more than the Quran. It includes a vast collection of words and deeds attributed to Muhammad by later authors. These scriptures are sort of like the Gospels, and Muslim scholars fight over their authenticity like Christian scholars debate about the accuracy of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These extra Islamic scriptures contain most of the teachings that make modern people (Muslims included) uncomfortable about Islam. One of the world’s experts on these scriptures, Jonathan Brown, has written a terrific book about them, Misquoting Muhammad.

Rumi: The medieval mystic’s poems about life and death are beautiful and moving, no matter your belief system. I loved his poems so much as an undergrad that I went on to study Middle Eastern languages just so I could read his work in the original. I’m glad I first viewed Islam through the eyes of Rumi and not a group like ISIS. Neither is solely representative of Islam but both draw heavily on its scriptures and reach such different conclusions.

The Bible: Many people recommended reading the Bible to decrease hate of Islam. The nerd in me leapt to the least obvious conclusion, “Ah, good idea! Reading some of the rough stuff in the Hebrew Bible is a good way to put a kindred ancient religion like Islam in perspective.” But they meant something a little less complicated:

@will_mccants @jenanmoussa Read the bible and learn to love and not to hate. :-)

— Dirk Lont (@Denkkracht1) December 12, 2015

It’s a worthy perspective today no matter your faith.

Editors' Note: How can the U.S. government better counter ISIS propaganda? As the State Department overhauls its counter messaging program, Will McCants and Clint Watts examine what makes ISIS’s online magazine, Dabiq, so successful, and the obstacles to the U.S. government producing a publication that effective. This piece originally appeared on The Daily Beast.

The Obama administration attributes much of ISIS’s success at communicating to its technological savvy, which has elevated the group to a global media and terrorist phenomenon. The president has gone so far as to say that the Paris attackers were a “bunch of killers with good social media.”

Despite the praise heaped on the so-called Islamic State for its cutting-edge propaganda online, one of its most effective products is decidedly low tech. Dabiq, ISIS’s online news magazine, has a small but devoted readership that spans the globe. News of advances on the battlefield excite them—more evidence that God’s kingdom on earth has returned and grows. Stories of fighters inspire them—more models to emulate as they contemplate what role they can play in the divine drama unfolding.

Journalists and analysts read it with almost the same intensity as ISIS fans; the contents of each volume fill newspapers and think-tank reports soon after it’s released. And no wonder: the magazine clearly states the organization’s goals; provides news of its activities that advance those goals; showcases personal stories of the people engaged in the activities; and announces major developments in the organization’s fight against its enemies. It’s a wealth of information presented between two covers every few months.

Can you name a single U.S. government publication or online platform devoted to the anti-ISIS fight that is as informative or as widely-read as Dabiq? Is there anything that tells us what all these air sorties are for? Who’s fighting this fight on the ground? What advances the coalition has made and why we should we care? We couldn’t come up with one either.

That got us to thinking: why can’t the U.S. government publish something like Dabiq online? Lack of imagination isn’t the reason. A news magazine isn’t a very creative idea—Americans perfected the form, which ISIS copied. And if anything, folks inside the government have too many overly-imaginative ideas, most of them involving whiz-bang technology. If you’ve thought it, they’ve thought it. A social media campaign for youth to come up with ways to counter violent extremism? Check. Sock-puppetry? Check.

The only real obstacle impeding the U.S. government is itself. The executive branch’s complicated bureaucracy, legal strictures, and sensitivity to criticism from media and Congress make it tough to publish a Dabiq-style magazine. To see what we mean, let’s look at two of Dabiq’s regular features and see what would happen if the U.S. government tried to mimic them:

Attack Reports: Each issue of Dabiq details its attacks on its enemies. One entry in issue 12 chronicled ISIS’s efforts to capture an airbase in Dayr al-Zawr, Syria. Another described four suicide attacks on the Saudi-led coalition fighting southern Yemen. Pictures accompany most entries, some quite gruesome.

The U.S. government routinely writes these types of reports for internal consumption. But when they’re public—and thus under the scrutiny of Congress that holds the pursestrings and the media that holds the careerstrings—routine gives way to caution and quarreling.

If the president asks his government to write attack reports for the public, the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Defense will quarrel about who will take the lead in writing and publishing them. Then they and the intelligence agencies will quarrel over which reports should be included. Will this report counter the president’s insistence that we have no boots on the ground? Will that report make it look like our Iraqi partners aren’t carrying their weight? Does this one tell the enemy too much about our game plan? Does that picture make U.S. soldiers look too menacing? Will this report later be discredited by the media? Will these battlefield successes be reversed in the future? Does anyone know if another agency has said this or its opposite? Will anyone trust what we’re saying? Shouldn’t someone else be saying this?

When something finally slides off the serpentine conveyor belt months later, it will be a bland blob devoid of detail and relevance. Meanwhile, ISIS will have added twelve more volumes to its shelves.

Biographies of Fighters: Dabiq sometimes profiles its fighters, including the young men on the front lines dying for ISIS’s cause. The fighters tell their stories and explain their reasons for fighting. In issue 8, for example, there is a Q&A with the man who murdered a prominent politician in Tunisia. He explains why he did it and how it advances the greater goals of the Islamic State.

The United States military used to feature these sorts of stories, too—back when the American war in Iraq was a massive, overt affair. Now, that’s not the case. The identities of the Americans fighting in Syria and Iraq are a well-guarded secret because the government does not want them or their families to become targets. The government would also frown on them for nonchalantly talking about killing lest the American public get upset. And then there’s that boots on the ground thing.

Without personal stories, we’re left with drones buzzing in the sky, and buzz-cut officers droning through stale Pentagon briefings. The human cost on both sides is reduced to numbers on slides, which means Americans can’t appreciate the true costs of war and foreigners can’t appreciate the sacrifices Americans are making on their behalf.

Some readers might feel that the U.S. government should be constrained in these ways. They want the government to be sensitive to public opinion and exceedingly cautious when talking about war and violence. If so, they shouldn’t complain when the U.S. government explains its anti-ISIS fight in the vaguest possible terms—that’s the outcome of extreme caution compounded by bureaucratic bargaining on a mind-boggling scale. Others might feel we need to reform the way government does messaging. If so, don’t propose to change the system first. Rather, ask the system to perform a simple task like the one we’ve described and see where it breaks down. Then you’ll know what to fix.

Making a news magazine probably isn’t the high tech solution the government is looking for, at least judging by Friday’s pilgrimage of senior security officials to Silicon Valley and the revamping of State Department’s online counter messaging campaign. But if our byzantine, poll-sensitive government can’t do something so basic, it won’t perform better when it’s tasked with something more complicated no matter how much technology it uses.

Event Information

The Center for 21st Century Security Intelligence seventh annual military and federal fellow research symposium

On March 1, the seventh annual military and federal fellow research symposium featured the independent research produced by members of the military services and federal agencies who are currently serving at think-tanks and universities across the nation. Organized by the fellows themselves, the symposium provides a platform for building greater awareness of the cutting-edge work that America’s military and governmental leaders are producing on key national security policy issues.

With presidential primary season well underway, it’s clear that whoever emerges in November 2016 as the next commander-in-chief will have their hands full with a number of foreign policy and national security choices. This year’s panels explored these developing issues and their prospects for resolution after the final votes have been counted. During their keynote conversation, the Honorable Michèle Flournoy discussed her assessment of the strategic threat environment with General John Allen, USMC (Ret.), who also provided opening remarks on strategic leadership and the importance of military and other federal fellowship experiences.

Video

• Opening remarks and The future of the All-Volunteer Force
• The next generation of terrorism
• Harnessing technology in the future force
• Keynote discussion: Assessing the strategic environment
• To intervene, or not to intervene?

Audio

• Beyond 2016: Security challenges and opportunities for the next administration

Editors’ Note: The mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Paris and now in Brussels underscore an unsettling truth: Jihadis pose a greater threat to France and Belgium than to the rest of Europe. Research by Will McCants and Chris Meserole reveals that French political culture may play a role. This post originally appeared in Foreign Affairs.

The mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Paris and now in Brussels underscore an unsettling truth: Jihadists pose a greater threat to France and Belgium than to the rest of Europe. The body counts are larger and the disrupted plots are more numerous. The trend might be explained by the nature of the Islamic State (ISIS) networks in Europe or as failures of policing in France and Belgium. Both explanations have merit. However, our research reveals that another factor may be at play: French political culture.

Last fall, we began a project to test empirically the many proposed explanations for Sunni militancy around the globe. The goal was to take common measures of the violence—namely, the number of Sunni foreign fighters from any given country as well as the number of Sunni terror attacks carried out within it—and then crunch the numbers to see which explanations best predicted a country’s rate of Sunni radicalization and violence. (The raw foreign fighter data came from The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence; the original attack data came from the University of Maryland’s START project.)

What we found surprised us, particularly when it came to foreign fighter radicalization. It turns out that the best predictor of foreign fighter radicalization was not a country’s wealth. Nor was it how well-educated its citizens were, how healthy they were, or even how much Internet access they enjoyed. Instead, the top predictor was whether a country was Francophone; that is, whether it currently lists (or previously listed) French as a national language. As strange as it may seem, four of the five countries with the highest rates of radicalization in the world are Francophone, including the top two in Europe (France and Belgium).

Knowledgeable readers will immediately object that the raw numbers tell a different story. The English-speaking United Kingdom, for example, has produced far more foreign fighters than French-speaking Belgium. And fighters from Saudi Arabia number in the several thousands. But the raw numbers are misleading. If you view the foreign fighters as a percentage of the overall Muslim population, you see a different picture. Per Muslim resident, Belgium produces far more foreign fighters than either the United Kingdom or Saudi Arabia. 

[W]hat could the language of love possibly have to do with Islamist violence? We suspect that it is really a proxy for something else: French political culture.

So what could the language of love possibly have to do with Islamist violence? We suspect that it is really a proxy for something else: French political culture. The French approach to secularism is more aggressive than, say, the British approach. France and Belgium, for example, are the only two countries in Europe to ban the full veil in their public schools. They’re also the only two countries in Western Europe not to gain the highest rating for democracy in the well-known Polity score data, which does not include explanations for the markdowns.

Adding support to this story are the top interactions we found between different variables. When you look at which combination of variables is most predictive, it turns out that the “Francophone effect” is actually strongest in the countries that are most developed: French-speaking countries with the highest literacy, best infrastructure, and best health system. This is not a story about French colonial plunder. If anything it’s a story about what happens when French economic and political development has most deeply taken root.

An important subplot within this story concerns the distribution of wealth. In particular, the rate of youth unemployment and urbanization appear to matter a great deal too. Globally, we found that when between 10 and 30 percent of a country’s youth are unemployed, there is a strong relationship between a rise in youth unemployment and a rise in Sunni militancy. Rates outside that range don’t have an effect. Likewise, when urbanization is between 60 and 80 percent, there is a strong relationship.

These findings seem to matter most in Francophone countries. Among the over 1,000 interactions our model looked at, those between Francophone and youth unemployment and Francophone and urbanization both ranked among the 15 most predictive. There’s broad anecdotal support for this idea: consider the rampant radicalization in Molenbeek, in the Parisbanlieus, in Ben Gardane. Each of these contexts have produced a massively disproportionate share of foreign fighters, and each are also urban pockets with high youth unemployment.

As with the Francophone finding overall, we’re left with guesswork as to why exactly the relationships between French politics, urbanization, youth unemployment, and Sunni militancy exist. We suspect that when there are large numbers of unemployed youth, some of them are bound to get up to mischief. When they live in large cities, they have more opportunities to connect with people espousing radical causes. And when those cities are in Francophone countries that adopt the strident French approach to secularism, Sunni radicalism is more appealing.

For now, the relationship needs to be studied and tested by comparing several cases in countries and between countries. We also found other interesting relationships—such as between Sunni violence and prior civil conflict—but they are neither as strong nor as compelling.

Regardless, the latest attacks in Belgium are reason enough to share the initial findings. They may be way off, but at least they are based on the best available data. If the data is wrong or our interpretations skewed, we hope the effort will lead to more rigorous explanations of what is driving jihadist terrorism in Europe. Our initial findings should in no way imply that Francophone countries are responsible for the recent horrible attacks—no country deserves to have its civilians killed, regardless of the perpetrator’s motives. But the magnitude of the violence and the fear it engenders demand that we investigate those motives beyond just the standard boilerplate explanations.