As the title of this book suggests, the authors are generally pushing back against the thesis found in Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State (2011). That book, like many other books and essays written recently, lays out a romantic view of industrial policy that sees government as the prime mover of markets and innovation. Mazzucato calls for “a bolder vision for the State’s dynamic role in fostering economic growth” and innovation. She wants the state fully entrenched in technological investments and decision-making throughout the economy because she believes that is the best way to expand the innovative potential of a nation.

The essays in Questioning the Entrepreneurial State offer a different perspective, rooted in the realities on the ground in Europe today. Taken together, the chapters tell a fairly consistent story: Despite the existence of many different industrial policy schemes at the continental and country level, Europe isn’t in very good shape on the tech and innovation front. The heavy-handed policies and volumes of regulations imposed by the European Union and its member states have played a role in that outcome. But these governments have simultaneously been pushing to promote innovation using a variety of technocratic policy levers and industrial policy schemes. Despite all those well-intentioned efforts, the EU has struggled to keep up with the US and China in most important modern tech sectors.

As Wennberg and Sandström note in their introductory chapter:

Grand schemes toward noble outcomes have a disappointing track record in human political and economic history. Conventional wisdom regarding authorities’ inability to selectively pinpoint certain technologies, sectors, or firms as winners, and the fact that large support structures for specific technologies are bound to distort incentives and result in opportunism, seem to have been forgotten.

In summarizing the chapters, they conclude that, “while the idea of aiming high and leveraging large portions of society’s resources to address some fundamental human challenges may sound appealing to many, such ideas have limited scientific credibility.”

Why do governments frequently fail in attempts to be entrepreneurial? Johan P. Larsson gets at the heart of the matter in his chapter when noting how, “[t]he state entrepreneur is not subject to real risk, often faces no market, and cannot be properly evaluated. It pays no price for being wrong and it struggles in assigning responsibility.” Which leads to two questions that are rarely asked, he notes: “[F]irst, how do we ensure that the state pays a price for being wrong? And second, when is that price high enough for us to know it is time to cut our losses?”

The authors of another chapter (Murtinu, Foss & Klein) concur and note how, “even well-intentioned and strongly motivated public actors lack the ability to manage the process of innovation.” “As stewards of resources owned by the public,” they note, “government bureaucrats do not exercise the ultimate responsibility that comes with ownership.” In other words, the state faces problems of misaligned incentives.

Several authors in the book highlight the various public choice problems often associated with large-scale industrial policy initiatives, including rent-seeking and capture. Wennberg and Sandström note how this results in less disruption as established players don’t seek to challenge existing market or technological status quos but instead simply seek to benefit from it. “[S]upport structures, platforms for private-public cooperation, and large volumes of technology-specific money usually end up in the hands of established interest groups,” they note. “Hence, they are not very likely to question these policies but will rather go along with the ride.”

John-Erik Bergkvist and Jerker Moodysson devote an entire chapter to this problem and offer a grim assessment of how past industrial policy schemes have exacerbated it:

Assuming that policies and programs are shaped by the interest groups that are affected by the policies, we highlight the risk that policymaking may end up as support for established interest groups rather than supporting the emergence of those who could act as institutional entrepreneurs or disruptors. Policies and programs may thus be captivated by dominant actors in the established regime, who have superior financial and relational resources. The result would then be that innovation policies sustain the established socio-technical structures of industries rather than contributing to the emergence of new structures.”

Other organizations are incentivized to support the status quo when big money is on the line. One of the most interesting chapters in the book was co-authored by Wennberg and Sandström along with Elias Collin. They examine the conflicts of interest inherent in many evaluations of industrial policy programs by various third parties, including academics and consultants who receive generous state contracts:

the overwhelming majority of evaluations are positive or neutral and that very few evaluations are negative. While this is the case across all categories of evaluators, we note that consulting firms stand out as particularly inclined to provide positive evaluations. The absence of negative or critical reports can be related to the fact that most of the studies do not rely upon methods that make it possible to discuss effects. This discrepancy between so many positive evaluations on the one hand and comparatively weak evaluation methods on the other hand leads us to suspect that evaluators are not sufficiently independent. Consultants and scholars that are funded by a government agency in order to evaluate the agency’s policies and programs are put in a position where it is difficult to maintain objectivity.

This is one reason why industrial policy continues to have such currency in European policy discussions despite a long track record of failure, as documented throughout this new book. The biggest problem for Europe lies in its layers of regulatory bureaucracy and heavy-handed treatment of entrepreneurs.

Later in the book, Zoltan J. Acs offers a grim account of just how bad things have been for Europe on the digital technology front in recent decades, despite the many state-led efforts to promote the sector. “The European Union protected traditional industries and hoped that existing firms would introduce new technologies. This was a policy designed to fail,” Acs argues. “What has been the outcome of E.U. policy in limiting entrepreneurial activity over recent decades?” he asks. Acs concludes that:

It is immediately clear… that the United States and China dominate the platform landscape. Based on the market value of top companies, the United States alone represents 66% of the world’s platform economy with 41 of the top 100 companies. European platform-based companies play a marginal role, with only 3% of market value.

He says that the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” from the European Union was a logical move, “because E.U. regulations were holding back the U.K.’s strong DPE (digital platform economy).” “If the United Kingdom was to realize its economic potential, it had to extricate itself from the European Union,” Acs says, due to the “dysfunctional E.U. bureaucracy.” No amount of industrial policy support is going to allow European firms to overcome those burdens. In fact, many of Europe’s industrial policy programs create the very disincentives that retard innovation and discourage entrepreneurialism in key sectors.

Several of the authors in the collection stress how the better role for the state is usually to set the table for innovation and growth without trying to determine everything that is served on the plate. As Wennberg and Sandström summarize:

the best policies to promote innovation are those that promote productive economic activity more generally: property rights protection, open and contestable markets, a stable monetary system, and legal rules that favor competition and entrepreneurship. Policy should promote an institutional environment in which innovation and entrepreneurship can flourish without trying to anticipate the specific outcomes of those processes—an impossible task in the face of uncertainty, technological change, and a dynamic, knowledge-based economy.

That’s good advice, as is everything found throughout the book. I encourage all those interested in these issues to take a hard look at it because it is particularly relevant even here in the Unites States, as Congress is currently considering a massive new 3,000-page, $350 billion industrial policy bill that I’ve labelled “The Most Corporatist & Wasteful Industrial Policy Ever.” There doesn’t seem to be anything stopping the momentum of this effort with both liberals and conservatives lining up to pass out the pork. I wish I could put a copy of Questioning the Entrepreneurial State in all their hands and ask them to read every word of it before they gamble hundreds of billions on such foolish efforts.

Additional Reading:

• Adam Thierer, “Thoughts on the America COMPETES Act: The Most Corporatist & Wasteful Industrial Policy Ever,” January 26, 2022.
• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Does the US Need a More Targeted Industrial Policy for AI & High-Tech?” Mercatus Center Research Paper, November 17, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “The Coming Industrial Policy Hangover,” The Hill, February 16, 2022.
• Podcast: “What’s Wrong with Industrial Policy,” Hold These Truths with Rep. Dan Crenshw, February 16, 2022.
• Tad DeHaven and Adam Thierer, “The Military-Industrial Complex Offers a Cautionary Tale for Industrial Policy Planning,” Discourse, March 25, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Government Planning and Spending Won’t Replicate Silicon Valley,” Discourse, August 18, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “To Promote Tech Hubs Across the Country, Governments Should Focus on Improving the General Business Environment,” Discourse, September 9, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy as ‘Casino Economics‘,” The Hill, July 12, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse,” Discourse, June 28, 2021.
• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” Discourse, March 11, 2021.
• Connor Haaland & Adam Thierer, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” Discourse, February 11, 2021.
• Matthew D. Mitchell and Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy is a Very Old, New Idea,” Discourse, April 6, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy Advocates Should Learn from Don Lavoie,” Discourse, November 5, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy,’” Technology Liberation Front, September 3, 2020.
• Adam Thierer, “Skeptical Takes on Expansive Industrial Policy Efforts,” Technology Liberation Front, March 15, 2021.

Last week I attended an event on software patents at GW Law School. The event made me uncomfortable because it was—as one would expect at a law school event—dominated by lawyers. The concerns of the legal academics, practitioners, and lobbyists participating in the round table discussion were very different from those one would expect for a policy audience. For example, the participants agreed that there is no elegant way to partition software patents from other patents under current law and that current Supreme Court jurisprudence is unsophisticated, relying on the wrong sections of the U.S. Code.

Missing from the discussion was the single most important fact about patents: that they are negatively correlated with economic growth.

It is pretty easy to eyeball this relationship using data from the USPTO on number of patents granted and from the BLS on real GDP per capita.

Patent grants have exploded in the past two decades or so, and real GDP per capita growth has declined over the same period. Now, patent proponents can argue (rightly) that correlation is not causation—growth could have been  even worse over the past few decades had we not had strong patent protection. But correlation is correlated with causation, so proponents of strong patent laws should have to explicitly make that argument using real evidence.

In addition to U.S. time-series data, we can examine the international cross-sectional evidence. As Petra Moser concludes in her recent JEP article:

Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.

Taken together, absent some additional evidence from patent proponents, this time-series and cross-sectional evidence suggests we are on the wrong side of the Tabarrok Curve.

If there is any evidence that software patents in particular have a positive effect on innovation or growth, I have yet to see it. Here’s hoping proponents of the current system will take up the challenge and respond with such evidence. But if they do not, then we should abolish software patents even if it means adopting some relatively bizarre legal formulations as the lawyers fear.

See my comparison of the state of technology in 2008 versus 1992, during the last Democratic presidential transition.

In mid-2008, the four-gigabyte (or 4,096 megabytes) flash memory chip in an iPod Nano cost $25. Late in 2008, four-gigabyte flash cards and USB drives are selling for $14.99. But back in 1992, four gigabytes of flash memory would have cost $500,000. This means a hypothetical iPod Nano circa 1992 would have set back the teenage Nirvana or Boyz II Men fan around $3 million. Apart from research scientists and a few early adopters of Compuserve and AOL, the Internet essentially didn’t exist in 1992. Monthly Internet traffic was four terabytes. All the data traversing the global net in 1992 totaled 48 terabytes. Today, YouTube alone streams 48 terabytes of data every 21 seconds. . . . The dramatic centralization of money, power, information and influence now under way seriously threatens the entrepreneurial revelations and technological revolutions that drive long-term growth. If we quasi-nationalize the energy, finance, auto and health care markets, and possibly bar dynamic new business models on the Internet, as with possible network neutrality regulation, we will close off many of the most promising paths to needed efficiencies and, more important, new wealth.

See the whole article at Forbes.com: “How Techno-Creativity Will Save Us.”

Peter Ferrara, offering us a taste of the dismal science for the American Spectator in reviewing a recent book’s economic predictions for an Obama Presidency (but what about civil liberties?). Hey, maybe they’ll send out more economic stimulus checks! We used ours this year to pay down a tax bill. It’s like the circle of life. (Other references to the Lion King will be swiftly and severely dealt with).

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/9/26/

Speaking of snakes, I am just returned from a camping trip along the Appalachian trail in the Michaux Forest, quite out of wireless reception range. Several days’ heavy rain had washed the forest clean, left the moss glowing green and the mushrooms, salamanders, crayfish, and frogs quite content. There one combats the same problems confronted by earlier settlers–mice (and the snakes they attract), staying dry and tolerably warm, the production of decent meals, and keeping small children from wandering off into the woods. Why do some people enjoy briefly returning to this world? Despite being one of those people, I can’t say. Now I am back and my day is easy and comfortable (comparatively), with time to spare contemplating the meta-structures of finance, property, and capital. Let’s all hope these structures are not nearly as fragile as our confidence in them, which, judging from the tone of remarks at last week’s ITIF conference on innovation, has fallen quite low.

In particular, the dominant concern seemed to be involve U.S. competitiveness in the face of developments in India and China, low growth in jobs and real wages, and so on. One commentator described the last ten years of liberalized trade as an experiment in moving jobs overseas in the hope that consumers would reap considerable benefits, which he seemed to think had not come about. While every event needs a little pessimism, this particular low mood seemed to have spread to nearly everyone. (Intellectuals seem to be as susceptible to mass psychology effects as anyone else, if anything perhaps more so, because they live in their heads). I would not have been surprised if the attendees had spontaneously all broken into tears (oh, all right, I would have been).

ITIF’s policy proposals for the next administration suffered somewhat from being embedded in this glum context. Nonetheless, there are some good ideas there. In order of merit, the best ideas include:

1. Letting foreign grad students in the sciences and tech fields get green cards.

2. Let companies expense IT investments in the first year.

3. Significantly expand the R&D tax credit (overall tax reform and reductions would be preferable, but that isn’t happening, so this is a third best).

4. Establish a federal office of Information CIO. Not, I hope, to inform what goes on in the private sector, but to follow it, on the off chance that systems and records might be kept so that we might begin to understand how leviathan actually works (or doesn’t work), or even do something about improving it.

Next come ideas that I would count as worth pondering further, with the caveat that one might do more than good:

5. Reform the Patent System. What a can of worms that is…

6. Implement an Innovation-based National Trade Policy. ITIF seems to be supporting more aggressive WTO actions against nations that do not do such a good job of IP enforcement, for example. I think attention to this policy issue makes sense, but until the U.S. winds down agricultural subsidies and pressures Europe to do the same, we had better be wary of starting a more punitive trend. Better to focus on coming up with blueprints for better low-cost enforcement, carrots rather than sticks. Our own enforcement methods are rather archaic, at that.

And a few ideas that are not so good. However much I have benefited from Rob Atkinson’s sense over the years, I am skeptical that we should:

7. Create a national innovation foundation.

OR

8. Implement a national broadband policy by a) adding broadband to universal service coverage (even if reverse auctions are established) b) funding joint federal-state initiatives or c) initiate educational programs on how to use broadband. The idea of making more spectrum available, though, is good sense. (See, for example, a recent paper of mine at http://www.ipi.org/, “Should the U.S. Favor a Free Nationwide Wireless Network Provider.”

Overall, one ought not denigrate the contribution that innovation has made to the economy. But micro-tinkering with federal policy in support of innvation in the technical sense is less likely to yield real growth than a) figuring out how to address problems with the federal budget without increases in taxes b) looking to innovate public institutions so that they do not cause more problems than they solve c) avoiding disastrous commitments to entitlements and d) seeing the opportunity and promise in the growth of India and China (as speaker Kathleen Wallman alone pointed out). Otherwise we go the way of Europe, which has all the national plans, policies, and foundation conceivable, and where they are holding conferences at which speakers ponder why their own innovation is lagging behind that of the United States. Yes, tax rates do matter. And it is not, and never will be, a good thing for the United States to try to return to policies that leave more hungry children in Calcutta.