What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik Audiobook

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• 
  GordonCoon
  May 20th, 2021
  

  We don’t “owe” anything.

  We have seen for hundreds of years now that governments fail to spend our money wisely and are beholden to giant all-powerful commercial behemoths hellbent on destroying individual freedom and choice.

  It’s not time for a new social contract at all, it’s time to tear it up and allow man to be free again.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  fritzreg
  May 20th, 2021
  

  

  Thanks very much– Baroness Shafik is a wise and reasoned thinker with much real world wisdom to offer. I look forward to listening to this.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  howlafist
  May 20th, 2021
  

  The world is a prisoner’s dilemma, but not cooperating only hurts yourself in the end, masked by short-term gain. Cooperate or die. The problem is how to coordinate with the other person and minimise the likelihood of defection, while also not resorting to authoritarianism. Markets are an essential tool to facilitate that cooperation, and governments an essential tool to act as check-and-balance to corporate power and fill the social gaps that cannot be otherwise well dealt with.

  The problem of externalities cannot be solved from within a market. Markets are very inefficient at many things, like healthcare, and bad motivators for many things, like scientific research. For those government involvement or control is necessary.

  The government-corporation balance is at an unstable and shifting equilibrium, and it requires constant effort to maintain. This inevitably fails, devolving into eventual bloody attempts at reset, but it is at least a real possibility. Extremes like “no social contract at all” lay on the graph’s hard slopes.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  caesar963
  May 20th, 2021
  

  

  The prisoner’s dilemma accompanied by the tragedy of the Commons, writ large (with a liberal sprinkling of rogue state actors).

  Crazy libertarianism is clearly, er, crazy, but as to markets being a bad motivator in regard to scientific research? We saw how stagnant was the total governmental control model by authoritarian regimes during the last century.

  Whereas, market systems featured innovation upon innovation, not confined to technology, but also inclusive of medical advances.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  howlafist
  May 20th, 2021
  

  The Big U.S. Innovations of the 20th century; computers, nuclear power and weaponry, space travel and all its accoutrements, the transistor, the internet, and so on; all were developed either in government research programs (like ARPA) or at Bell Labs, which was something like a goodwill project AT&T used to counterweight its predatory monopoly status, with fully-funded job-secure scientists and engineers inventing new things and then (as ordered by the government) giving the knowledge away to everyone for free.

  By contrast, 21st century scientific research has been horribly stifled. Corporate R&D is very tightly focussed and limited, because companies need “safe bets” and “results”, making larger innovations a rarity, and what advances are made are then jealously guarded as patented technologies or trade secrets, limiting their impact. Meanwhile NASA has been reduced to almost nothing and university researchers are subjected to market-oriented policies, with governments cutting funding to state schools and staff forced to climb over each other chasing grants, again stifling the freedom-to-fail, which is necessary for big innovations, and providing perverse incentive for the publication of spurious papers and falsification of data. And then the monetisation of academic publishing limits access to results to only members of well-off schools in well-off countries (and sometimes even *they* cant afford subscription fees).

  Innovation requires a bunch of smart people in a room together thinking freely about stuff, performing experiments, and sharing their results, all without being forced ever to stop and think about money (or only rarely).

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  caesar963
  May 20th, 2021
  

  And yet, the market system did produce those incredibly significant, wholly nonpareil medical/pharmaceutical advances & technologies, which have led to a paradigm shift in treatment & life expectancy. These therapies have been life-saving & life-enhancing.

  Contrariwise, control models have had to rely on IP theft to secure advances in innovation.

  However, it is a fine balance.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  Jiminy Cricket
  May 20th, 2021
  

  The social contract is failing? Which social contract? Marxism is what failed, but not to be outdone, we’re trying our hand at social Marxism. How about returning to the roots of America’s founding and reintroduce responsibility? I’m responsible for my own choices and my life; and I’m responsible for protecting and ensuring your natural rights and am careful not to impede them. That’s called liberty. This was the individualism and collectivism that allowed for human flourishing.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  howlafist
  May 20th, 2021
  

  The significant improvements for health in the last century were hygiene and sanitation, the abundance of food, and antibiotics and vaccinations. The former two owe a lot to market organisation and development, but are something like its benevolent side-effects. Antibiotics were a low-hanging fruit, and market-driven policies in livestock farming and hospitals are hastening (or it might be fair even to say causing) their decline. Vaccine development has required significant research and is maybe the best candidate to list here.

  Modern medical research is characterised by massive entrenched companies that receive government funding and spend it on developing patentable analogues of known small-molecule medications rather than chasing the unsafe bets.

  In general, the ever-increasing scale and complexity and cost of research is making it more and more necessary that efforts be collectively pooled rather than the in-house projects of a single company. Try doing physics without CERN etc. IP (better understood with the more accurate historical labelling, “monopoly”) is a direct impediment to research and development, helpful only to patent trolls and the above-mentioned pharmaceutical companies. See also the modern software ecosystems universal and total reliance on open-source software (with open hardware now on the rise as well, the decline of Intel and birth of RISC-V). The only proprietary-software holdout, Microsoft, has lost again and again in emergent markets (servers, smartphones, etc) because its competitors had the advantage of open-source ecosystems, and by now has been forced to import an entire open-source operating system into Windows in a bid to stay relevant. And then, in the research community more broadly, the bypassing of IP law through platforms like Sci-hub has become necessary for many (most?) to do research at all.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  caesar963
  May 20th, 2021
  

  Where government has been involved in market-oriented countries, it has been to incentivise advances in weaponry, weapons technology, and areas which may be ancillary to, or assisting of, martial objectives. Or innovations in the sphere of prestige projects or vanity ventures, such as, in the past, space travel. This is also the case in control model states, but, for some reason, the market-oriented paradigm was vastly more successful & productive than its rivals (competitors?).

  Here we see the state, theoretically acting in the public interest, essentially directing boffins to “Build us something that will facilitate megadeath, murder on the largest possible scale, you understand - faster, bigger, stronger!” Rather than furthering the actual public interest in support of benign & beneficial medical/pharma innovation.

  (Interestingly, in this vein, Wernher Von Braun’s Nazi rocket programme, the V-1 & V-2 weapons (”Vergeltungswaffe Einz” - Vengeance Weapon) was the basis for NASA’s space exploration. A Nazi boffin, escaping justice on the public payroll. Chillingly innovative.)

  In the US, over the past 40 yrs, 80-90% of all drugs approved by the FDA were discovered by private industry. This sector is the dominant force in drug discovery and development.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  howlafist
  May 23rd, 2021
  

  That simply isn’t true; governments are primary funders for basic research in most any field. The US Government dedicates tens of billions every year to biomedical research:

  https://www.grants.gov/learn-grants/grant-making-agencies/department-of-health-and-human-services.html
  https://grants.nih.gov/grants/about_grants.htm

  Pharmaceutical companies do not have the incentive to pursue such fundamental research, focussing instead on drug development, which (as mentioned above) often means just the manufacturing and testing of another analogue molecule for a known small-molecule drug. Risks are sometimes taken to chase potential high returns, but they are calculated and relatively rare.

  The progressive reduction of this government funding:

  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions

  and the resulting intrusion of “market reasoning” into the field of basic research has had terrible consequences, stifling risk-taking and encouraging trend-chasing, petty squabbling, and fraud. Take a look at Lawrence Busch’s *Knowledge for Sale* and Paula Stephan’s *How Economics Shapes Science*, though both are by now a while out of date and the trends they describe have only progressed, and the more recent *Fraud in the Lab* from Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, and *Science Fictions*, from Stuart Ritchie, for some of the problems this change has exacerbated.

  Also, Von Braun himself was less nazi and more just an amoral guy who just wanted to build space rockets and used whatever means necessary to pursue that goal. The US took him in but was very reluctant to trust him, and ended up relying on other people.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  Bytbiter
  June 1st, 2021
  

  i DoN’t oWE ANyTHinG TaXaTiOn iS thEFT I aM SOVRyn cItAzen I mAde the SuN And mooN AnD eveRy tHing BeNEaTh them

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik
• 
  Bytbiter
  June 1st, 2021
  

  @caesar963

  If you allowed the market to drive science kids would be inspected on arrival at school to ensure their asbestos lunchbox contains the requisite 20 cigarettes.

  What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract - Minouche Shafik

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