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What happens when dead bodies crop up where they are not supposed to be? How can this allow us to reflect on how we understand security and insecurity? For example, mass graves can be indicators of crimes against humanity. Recent satellite evidence of mass graves analyzed by Amnesty International outside of Bujumbura has led to a focus on the political violence there, a result of turmoil after Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his intention to seek a third term.
The United States faces a paradox: being on the cutting edge of technology seems to have in recent years only a marginal effect on job creation. The history books and our traditional economic theories seem to have failed us – whereas before, technological revolutions usually led to tremendous growth in both GNP and employment, now, on the eve of some of the most impressive innovations we’ve ever seen, the economy and employment are recovering since the 2008 “Great Recession” at the slowest rate since the Depression.
It is said in the domestic practice of law that the facts are sometimes more important than the law. Advocates often win and lose cases on their facts, despite the perception that the law’s formalism and abstraction are to blame for its failures with regards to delivering justice.
There’s a puzzle around economics. On the one hand, economists have the most policy influence of any group of social scientists. In the United States, for example, economics is the only social science that controls a major branch of government policy (through the Federal Reserve), or has an office in the White House (the Council of Economic Advisers). And though they don’t rank up there with lawyers, economists make a fairly strong showing among prime ministers and presidents, as well.
But as any economist will tell you, that doesn’t mean that policymakers commonly take their advice. There are lots of areas where economists broadly agree, but policymakers don’t seem to care. Economists have wide consensus on the need for carbon taxes, but that doesn’t make them an easier political sell. And on topics where there’s a wider range of economic opinions, like over minimum wages, it seems that every politician can find an economist to tell her exactly what she wants to hear.
So if policymakers don’t take economists’ advice, do they actually matter in public policy? Here, it’s useful to distinguish between two different types of influence: direct and indirect.
Direct influence is what we usually think of when we consider how experts might affect policy. A political leader turns to a prominent academic to help him craft new legislation. A president asks economic advisers which of two policy options is preferable. Or, in the case where the expert is herself the decisionmaker, she draws on her own deep knowledge to inform political choices.
This happens, but to a limited extent. Though politicians may listen to economists’ recommendations, their decisions are dominated by political concerns. They pay particular attention to advice that agrees with what they already want to do, and the rise of think tanks has made it even easier to find experts who support a preexisting position.
Research on experts suggests that direct advisory effects are more likely to occur under two conditions. The first is when a policy decision has already been defined as more technical than political—that experts are the appropriate group to be deciding. So we leave it to specialists to determine what inventions can be patented, or which drugs are safe for consumers, or (with occasional exceptions) how best to count the population. In countries with independent central banks, economists often control monetary policy in this way.
Experts can also have direct effects when possible solutions to a problem have not yet been defined. This can happen in crisis situations: think of policymakers desperately casting about for answers during the peak of the financial crisis. Or it can take place early in the policy process: consider economists being brought in at the beginning of an administration to inject new ideas into health care reform.
But though economists have some direct influence, their greatest policy effects may take place through less direct routes—by helping policymakers to think about the world in new ways.
For example, economists help create new forms of measurement and decision-making tools that change public debate. GDP is perhaps the most obvious of these. A hundred years ago, while politicians talked about economic issues, they did not talk about “the economy.” “The economy,” that focal point of so much of today’s chatter, only emerged when national income and product accounts were created in the mid-20th century. GDP changes have political, as well as economic, effects. There were military implications when China’s GDP overtook Japan’s; no doubt the political environment will change more when it surpasses the United States.
Less visible economic tools also shape political debate. When policymakers require cost-benefit analysis of new regulation, conversations change because the costs of regulation become much more visible, while unquantifiable effects may get lost in the debate. Indicators like GDP and methods like cost-benefit analysis are not solely the product of economists, but economists have been central in developing them and encouraging their use.
The spread of technical devices, though, is not the only way economics changes how we think about policy. The spread of an economic style of reasoning has been equally important.
Philosopher Ian Hacking has argued that the emergence of a statistical style of reasoning first made it possible to say that the population of New York on 1 January 1820 was 100,000. Similarly, an economic style of reasoning—a sort of Econ 101-thinking organized around basic concepts like incentives, efficiency, and opportunity costs—has changed the way policymakers think.
While economists might wish economic reasoning were more visible in government, over the past fifty years it has in fact become much more widespread. Organizations like the US Congressional Budget Office (and its equivalents elsewhere) are now formally responsible for quantifying policy tradeoffs. Less formally, other disciplines that train policymakers now include some element of economics. This includes master’s programs in public policy, organized loosely around microeconomics, and law, in which law and economics is an important subfield. These curricular developments have exposed more policymakers to basic economic reasoning.
The policy effects of an economic style of reasoning are harder to pinpoint than, for example, whether policymakers adopted an economist’s tax policy recommendation. But in the last few decades, new policy areas have been reconceptualized in economic terms. As a result, we now see education as an investment in human capital, science as a source of productivity-increasing technological innovations, and the environment as a collection of ecosystem services. This subtle shift in orientation has implications for what policies we consider, as well as our perception of their ultimate goals.
In the end, then, there is no puzzle. Economists do matter in public policy, even though policymakers, in fact, often ignore their advice. If we are interested in understanding how, though, we should pay attention to more than whether politicians take economists’ recommendations—we must also consider how their intellectual tools shape the very ways that policymakers, and all of us, think.
A patent like other property rights is a right to exclude others and not a right or an obligation to make the patented invention. Yet today there is a growing campaign by certain industry sectors and the government against patent holders that do not make any products but enforce their patent rights for licensing revenues, often pejoratively called patent “trolls.” In a recent White House report on the subject, President Barack Obama is quoted as saying that these patent holders “don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.” The government alleges that “trolls” are responsible for a patent litigation crisis. Armed with this narrative, the White House had recently announced executive actions for “taking on patent trolls.”
This narrative of harmful patent assertion by non-practicing entities is not new. A century ago, the Wright aircraft company was accused by US government officials of causing such harm because it had attempted to enforce the Wright airplane patent, which it did not practice, by sending licensing demand letters to alleged infringers. Government officials stated that the assertion of the Wright airplane patent was “injurious to the development of aircraft and the aircraft industry in the United States.” They argued that “any adequate return to the Wright stockholders upon their investment [in the Wright patent] must be through the manufacture and sale of airplanes … and not through patent channels,” and that “any return from patents must necessarily fade into insignificance.”
This myth that the assertion of the Wright patent harmed the development of aviation continues to be propagated and erroneous lessons drawn for patent policy today: In 2014, Goldstone’s book Birdmen was published as the latest in the constant reworking through time of the Wright brothers’ story. The widespread reviews of this book emphasized that the Wright brothers were patent “trolls” – Orville Wright was a “vindictive SOB whose greed and begrudgery [sic] were surpassed only by those of his brother Wilbur” and the brothers were “cursed with an addiction to malice to anyone who challenged their primacy or stood in their path to riches.” The purported tool of their “malice” was, of course, their patent. The ostensible general lesson for today is explicitly and erroneously drawn by Goldstone; “Patent law remains [today] the damper on innovation that it was when airplane development was nearly grounded in its infancy.”
Orville demonstrating the flyer to the U.S. Army, Fort Myer, Virginia September 1908. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
We show using primary evidence that the origins of this century-old myth are factually unsupported letters of government manufacture used to persuade the President and Congress to authorize the appropriation of patented inputs at depressed royalty rates. Today these letters are treated as “primary historical sources” to support the myth that the Wright brothers’ patent retarded US aviation development and that it was therefore necessary for the government to intervene in the market for patents and force patent holders into a patent pool. The story that US government officials manufactured in 1917 is believed by many to be fact and for some people, again there is a simple, general ‘policy lesson’ – sometimes government must intervene in markets because private owners of property rights cannot otherwise strike a bargain and reach the optimum social and economic outcome.
But this entrenched and oft-repeated myth is not true, in any part. The Wright brothers licensed their patent early and with vigour into all developed markets. When they won their suit against the principal infringer of their patent, Glenn Curtiss, they never enjoined Curtiss’ manufacturing activities, leaving him free to develop the leading US aviation business. All the commercial and patenting evidence we collect shows that no patent hold-up or development suppression occurred before the government forced patentees into its preferred patent pool.
The result in 1917 was the government-designed patent pool agreement, which depressed royalties to the Wright patent holder to the extraordinarily low rate of 1% – at a time when Congress recognized in the 1917 ‘Trading with the Enemy Act’ that 5% was a fair royalty to pay for a single patent owned by enemies of the US!
The acceptance of the myth has blinded policymakers to the possibility that the design of the 1917 aircraft patent pool was an abuse of the government’s monopsony power that effectively attenuated the development-incentive provided by aviation patents. Patenting rate declined and aircraft sales exhibited little market growth for a decade after the formation of the aircraft patent pool. We hypothesize that as a result of the government intervention, a period followed when aviation innovation may have been depressed and future research should investigate this hypothesis further.
The government’s past use of the “troll” narrative encourages one to wonder whether today’s “troll” narrative, advanced once again to alleviate another purported patent litigation “crisis,” will have the unintended consequence of suppressing innovation.
Headline image credit: Wilbur making a turn with the Wright Glider, 1902. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In a 1948 election contest to fill a US Senate seat, the wife of one of the candidates took a dim view of her husband’s opponent, Representative Margaret Chase Smith. Why, she wondered publicly, would the voters of Maine want to send “a woman to Washington when you can get a man?”
Margaret Chase Smith. From the US Senate Historical Office. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Well, indeed, the voters of one of Maine’s three congressional districts had already taken a chance on a woman, electing Margaret Smith on five occasions since the death in 1940 of her husband, Representative Clyde Smith, whose dutiful secretary she had once been. During her more than eight years in the House, Mrs. Smith—who never missed an opportunity to associate herself with the 1939 film classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—initially built a record as an independent outsider, mirroring the Hollywood image of Jimmy Stewart’s “Senator Jefferson Smith.”
In 1948 the women of Maine, who constituted nearly two-thirds of that state’s registered voters, appreciated Smith’s efforts during World War II to bring equal status to women in the armed services. Some among them were particularly offended by her opponents’ questioning of women’s ability to hold public office.
With the campaign slogan, “Don’t trade a record for a promise,” Smith overwhelmingly won both the June Republican primary and the general election–at that time held in September. In that latter election, she benefitted from the cluelessness of her opponent, a dermatologist who argued that in a sick world, what the nation most needed were more physicians in government.
The first woman elected to both houses of Congress and the first woman to reach the Senate without previously having been appointed to an unexpired term, Mrs. Smith was the most nationally prominent Republican in her Senate freshmen class. Among her classmates were high-profile Democrats Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota.
It was customary for new senators of her day to remain quietly in the shadows. Not Senator Smith! In office less than a year-and-a-half, she delivered a blistering 15-minute floor speech against the anti-Communist demagoguery of Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. McCarthy responded predictably with a sneering reference to Smith and the co-signers of her “Declaration of Conscience” as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.”
Margaret Smith’s power in the Senate grew out of her independence—no party leader could take her vote for granted; her diligence—she made every roll-call vote for nearly twenty years until hip surgery broke that remarkable streak; her boundless energy; and her eventual seniority on the chamber’s influential committees on Appropriations and Armed Services. She dismissed efforts to brand her as a pioneering feminist. “I was treated fairly in the Senate not because of equal rights but because of seniority.”
From her Armed Services Committee perch, Smith adopted a hawkish approach to US military policy, supporting the war in Vietnam and criticizing the United States for not keeping ahead of the Soviet Union in stockpiling nuclear weapons. That stance provoked Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to denounce her as “the devil in disguise of a woman.”
“Maggie” (a commonly used reference that she disliked) Smith’s path-breaking Senate career ended in 1972 with her defeat by Democrat William Hathaway. His campaign played on her apparent physical frailty, noting that she used a motor scooter to shuttle between her Senate office building suite and the Capitol (she would live for another 23 years), and charges of her remoteness from her constituents. Her retirement left the Senate an all-male bastion for the next five years.
Twenty years after Smith’s departure, the 1992 Senate elections witnessed a major national backlash against the traditionally male Senate. The result was the so-called Year of the Woman. This came in no small degree because of the shabby treatment the men of the Senate Judiciary Committee accorded to Anita Hill, who testified at its hearings in opposition to the US Supreme Court appointment of Clarence Thomas. As a result of that pivotal election, by mid-1993 seven women sat in the Senate. Today, that number stands at 20, including 16 Democrats and 4 Republicans. Currently, in California, New Hampshire, and Washington State, both senators are women, a status held by Smith’s Maine from 1997 until 2013.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of Margaret Chase Smith’s 1948 Senate election is that these 20 women are no longer viewed with the condescending curiosity that greeted the Mrs. Smith who went to Washington 65 years ago. Today, they are not primarily “women” senators; they are just senators.
The Margaret Chase Library in her hometown of Skowhegan, Maine, now serves as a robust research facility for those who wish learn more about her life, her times, and a US Senate largely unrecognizable to her modern successors.
