Technology & Innovation

Can China lead the way on innovation?

Rising inequality has focused attention on the benefits of new technologies. Do these accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?

In her new book, Don’t Be Evil, Rana Foroohar explores how to confront companies like Google and their under-regulated stampede over all of us.

To make start-ups work for everyone, we need to put power back in the hands of workers.

Big Tech companies are swallowing up nascent competitors. Why aren’t regulators paying attention?

INET’s grantees and Commission on Global Economic Transformation are looking at artificial intelligence and society.

“Facebook is undermining our country, our democracy.”

Facebook engaged in an elaborate bait and switch on user data: Privacy disappeared when competition did. Laws governing competition could change that.

Richard Vague looks at what it’ll take for the U.S. to win the R&D race

As technology and deregulation continue to shape the labor market, maintaining strong worker protections is as important as ever

Instead of rewarding the taxpayers and employees who actually create value for the tech giant, Apple is doling out massive stock buybacks

How corporate raiders coopted “shareholder democracy” for their own ends

The “dean of short sellers” says bitcoin is the last thing he’d want to own in the event of a catastrophe.

In the face of  laissez-faire capitalism at home and resurgent nationalism across the globe, INET offers an innovative look at the causes of—and solutions for—the problems that ail a fissuring world economy.

Economist Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, and his colleague, literary critic and Slavic studies scholar Saul Morson, argue that—contrary to popular belief—studying the humanities is the key to not getting outsourced.

The shocking—but illustrative—example of how an Italian government agency concocted statistics to evaluate scholarship, hid them from the public, and masqueraded them as science. It’s a growing phenomenon

Sen. Tammy Baldwin features arguments in questions to SEC nominees, pharmaceutical industry witness

Austerity measures have battered the region and created instability throughout the Eurozone. Here’s one way out of the mess.

The Idea That Businesses Exist Solely to Enrich Shareholders Is Harmful Nonsense

The prevailing stock market ideology enriches value extractors, not value creators

A look at America’s strange and dangerous approach to medicine, and how to fix it

Despite dismissive comments by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, facing the challenge posed by robotics replacing human labor raises key public policy questions 

The decline in productivity growth has a longer history

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.

Taxing the use of robotics may or may not be the answer, but the question remains how to compensate for the growing inequality created by our changing economies

As part of our “Experts on Trial Series”, Antonella Palumbo argues for stripping away ‘scientific’ shibboleths that mask social and political choices

The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them

Institute scholar Arjun Jayadev argues that while TPP is dead, its damaging legacy on intellectual property rights is likely to shape future bilateral trade agreements

Research by INET-affiliated scholars shows the US lags far behind its peers on inclusive growth, suggesting inequality is not an inevitable consequence of globalization and technology

Evidence thus far questions the assumption that robotics are eliminating jobs. INET Senior Vice President for Programs Rick McGahey says the UBI debate should focus on the long-term weakening of labor’s bargaining power

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

As the world turns upside down, Mariana Mazzucato discusses how to shape an economy that works for everyone

Flows of goods and services, people and capital have overwhelmed the ability of political processes to accommodate them

Mission-oriented public investment is vital to spur a revival of private-sector investment

Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected

Vice President warns that corporate stock buybacks restrict America’s long-term prosperity, citing the research of Institute grantee William Lazonick who has long argued the same

In June of this year, Swiss voters saw an initiative on their ballots calling for an “unconditional basic income” that would “allow the whole population to lead a decent life and participate in public life.” Put on the ballot by a petition drive after it was rejected in parliament, the initiative was rejected by 77 percent of Swiss voters, with 23 percent approving.

A response to Arjun Jayadev’s argument about the impact of automation on our work and life

Anxiety over human labor being replaced by cyborgs may be in vogue, but it’s overblown — machines may help us achieve healthier and more meaningful lives

Industrial journalist Ken Jacobson and economist William Lazonick (both of the Academic-Industry Research Network), call for an end to stock market manipulation through buybacks.

Anyone watching the stock market has seen this: a post hits Twitter containing old news, and investors react as if it were new.

For most economists and indeed for social scientists in general such a question induces shudders as already asking this seems wrong – aren’t governments more prone to failures than markets, and aren’t governments supposed to provide basic and stable institutions for markets to function?

Many Americans have expressed outrage over Pfizer’s plan, through its merger with Allergan, to move its tax home from the United States to Ireland. Now, in a New York Times op-ed, Carl Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider turned hedge fund activist, has joined the chorus. He labels the Pfizer-Allergan deal a “travesty,” blaming the U.S.’s “uncompetitive international tax system.”

How much does the standard theory of externalities and public goods really say?

Public funding behind the technology is the secret ingredient.

Apple should be returning profits to workers who have invested their time and effort into generating its products and to taxpayers who have funded the investments in the physical infrastructure and human knowledge so critical to Apple’s success.

The Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (FMM) organises its 18th annual conference on Inequality and the Future of Capitalism with introductory lectures on heterodox economics for graduate students.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford researchers and collaborators data mine 200 years of US Patent Office records to uncover the true nature of innovation.

When Greece’s sovereign-debt crisis threatened the euro’s survival, U.S. officials called their European counterparts to express bewilderment at their inability to resolve the issue.

Why are we paying for corporate behavior that crushes innovation, cheats taxpayers, cost jobs, and heightens inequality?

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

Few would argue that America’s fortunes rise and fall on its ability to generate technological innovations — to put bold ideas to work and then bring them to market.

An Open Letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

The forthcoming Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. When we think about innovation we tend to imagine the future. But as with so many subjects in economics, it’s also useful to examine the past.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Can China lead the way on innovation?

Where will today’s innovation come from?

is the public sector really sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector?

A review of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, the new book by Mariana Mazzucato

Do the benefits of new technologies accrue primarily to inventors, early investors, and highly skilled users, or to society more widely as their adoption generates employment growth?