PUBLISHED:January 13, 2017

Faculty Books

Matthew Adler: The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy moves beyond income as basis for evaluating policy

Matthew AdlerMatthew Adler's latest book is a comprehensive research guide on existing and emerging tools for evaluating public policy in light of  indi- vidual well-being. Adler, the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy, and Public Policy, is co-editor, with Marc Fleurbaey of Princeton University, of The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy. Handbook chapters written by internationally renowned economists and philosophers explore different methodologies for policymaking, from standard approaches such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and gross domestic product (GDP), to newer tools from emerging fields of research such as happiness studies. “The jumping off point for the Handbook is the idea that we really need to move beyond income as the basis for policy evaluation,” said Adler, the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy. “For example, GDP looks at the total value of marketed goods and services in a year, so it’s a kind of income-based measure. There is a lot that happens in a country that affects the quality of life — such as changes in the environment or in health — which is not captured by GDP.” Other traditional measurements of inequality, such as income distribution, also ignore such aspects of well-being as individual health or longevity, he said. The complexity inherent in improved policy-relevant measures of well-being has engendered debate among scholars, which the Handbook addresses at length.

One approach to developing a tool for measuring policy effects on well-being calls for disaggregating multiple quality-of-life dimensions — such as income, longevity, environmental quality, educational attainment, and happiness — and then looking at a given policy’s effect on each of these. Another approach calls for a combined indicator that assesses each individual’s well-being as an aggregate of all of these categories. "This would result in an inclusive measure that would be based on someone’s attributes on all the 'quality-of’ dimensions and would assign, in principle, a single well-being number to each person,” Adler said.

The importance of defining and crafting new policy- evaluation methodologies lies in their application to vital political issues such as income inequality, environmental impacts on health and quality of life, and educational access and attainment, said Adler.

The Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy has convened a series of conferences and workshops the questions addressed in the Handbook, focusing such topics as the equality of opportunity, inequality and the economic analysis of climate change, the social cost of carbon in regulatory analysis, and new scholarship on happiness.

Reconsidering approaches to measuring well-being and developing new ones goes beyond theory, Adler said, noting that some of the newer, more nuanced approaches are gradually being adopted and used by governments and institutions.

“Starting in the 1990s the United Nations has used some of these tools in its World Development Report, looking not just at income, but life expectancy and educational attainment in different countries. More recently it’s adopted a multidimensional approach to measuring poverty, in the Human Development Index.” The United Kingdom, Adler said, has integrated happiness statistics into its official information and statistic gathering, and has started to shift from using traditional CBA to distributionally weighted CBA, which is more sensitive to equity, to shape policy.

Helping governments adopt the more complex tools is among the chief goals the editors have for the book, which is unique in its synthesis of economic, philosophical, and psychological considerations. “Inequality and poverty, and the factors such as the environment that affect them, are important topics that aren’t going away,” Adler said. “There is a lot of discussion in the book about how to measure poverty and how to design policy to be more sensitive to that. Governments don’t really use inequality metrics much, but there is a whole body of research using those right now, and the hope is that the Handbook would be useful in bridging the gap between those two worlds.”

Jerome Reichman: New book offers blueprint for designing a transnational microbial research commons

Jerome ReichmanJerome Reichman's new book examines how scientists share collections of microbes and related data to advance research in such areas as med- icine, agriculture, and climate change, and how current systems for facilitating that transnational exchange can — and should — be improved.

Reichman, the Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law, is the co-author of Governing Digitally Integrated Genetic Resources, Data, and Literature: Global Intellectual Property Strategies for a Redesigned Microbial Research Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2016). A renowned scholar of intellectual property law, he has long focused on legal and policy strategies to resolve challenges arising from the grant of exclusive property rights foundational to intellectual property law. Refining the operation of the scientific infrastructure is just such a  problem.

“A lot of IP law and policy is concerned with profits from downstream inventions,” he said. “In this book, we are dealing with the value of upstream scientific inputs on which all research depends.” Reichman’s co-authors of the book are Paul F. Uhlir, the former director of the Board on Research Data and Information at the National Academies in Washington, D.C., and of the U.S. Committee on Data for Science and Technology, and Tom Dedeurwaerdere, director of the Biodiversity Governance Unit and professor of philosophy of science at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

The specimens in public microbial culture collections are gathered primarily in biodiversity-rich developing countries by scientists. They also often seek out inputs from indigenous people as to how they have traditionally used the organisms, thus gleaning ideas from which genetic research develops and end products, such as foods, medicines, and perfumes, are made.

The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefits Sharing — a 2010 supplement to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which sought to ensure the conservation of the world’s biodiversity resources — is a starting point for Reichman and his co-authors. The Nagoya Protocol provides a framework for ensuring that countries where collections of seeds, microbes, and traditional knowledge originate share in the profits and other benefits gleaned from their use in one of two ways, Reichman said. Researchers can negotiate directly with governments, which would almost certainly overvalue them. Alternatively, under the Nagoya Protocol, the microbial culture collections could enter into a multilateral treaty to establish a transnational exchange and remuneration system, like that established for public seed banks in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the International Treaty) of 2001.

“The Nagoya Protocol was significant in its recognition of a multilateral approach to benefit-sharing,” Reichman said. “It essentially codifies a ‘take-and-pay’ rule for these global public goods: If a plant cultivar put in a collection to be shared freely for research purposes is then used for some commercial objective, the user must pay a small percentage of the resulting proceeds, a tithe, back to the Benefit Sharing Fund of the International Treaty.”

The seed banks, which are essential to world food security, were protected by the International Treaty, known also as the “Crop Commons,” at a time when governments of countries where seeds originated were demanding their return with a view to reaping greater profits through bilateral negotiations for their use, Reichman said. The tithe paid for use of the seeds goes back to the treaty regime to support research.

Reichman and his co-authors argue that participants in the microbial research commons, which is still operating on a national and regional basis, should follow the example of the seed banks in adopting a multilateral take-and-pay approach. They go on to recommend a form of governance for an international commons for microbial culture collections that includes scientists in their leadership.

The authors delve into ways that data derived from genetic resources, which are also subject to the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol, should be organized and shared. In addition to examining how various voluntary and mandatory data-pooling regimes operate, they focus attention on the operations of four highly sophisticated data-sharing arrangements, which they call Transnational Open Knowledge Environments (OKEs). Reichman considers these OKEs, which require a complex legal infrastructure, to be the future for sharing both hypotheses and research inputs, including data.

“We think scientific organizers aiming to design a research commons for microbiology should make it conform not only to the legal requirements of the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol, but also design it to emulate the sharing strategies of these Open Knowledge Environments that are springing up.”

John de Figueiredo: Strategy Beyond Markets parses non-traditional moves to enhance corporate value

John de FigueiredoJohn de Figueiredo, the Edward and Ellen Marie Schwarzman Professor of Law and Professor of Strategy and Economics, has co-edited a new vol- ume of innovative scholarship on the non-market strategies corporations use to enhance their performance and value.

Articles in the collection, titled Strategy Beyond Markets, focus on corporate interactions with entities other than the competitors, customers, and investors that constitute their primary market stakeholders. These “beyond-market” or non-market players include non-governmental organizations, environmental activists, communities, regulators, politicians, and the courts.

Firms’ beyond-market strategies fall into two general categories, explained de Figueiredo, who helped create the field of study in the 1990s: public non-market strategies — “public politics” — involving domestic and international policymakers, legislators, rulemakers, and the courts; and private non-market strategies — “private politics” — involving such special-interest groups as media, activists, and NGOs. Corporate strategy in the first category might include lobbying and litigating, and in the second, negotiating, self-regulating, or mounting public relations campaigns, he said. The collection organizes scholarship around those two broad areas as well as a hybrid “integrated political strategy” that bridges non-market and market-based competitive strategies.

In the volume’s first article, by Professor David Baron of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, three cases illustrate the three approaches: how Uber uses lobbying to influence regulators in the pursuit of market expansion, how Citigroup used negotiation and self-regulation to quell a campaign against its investments in developing countries by environmental activists, and how McDonald’s might respond to a campaign to raise workers’ wages.

“We hope that this book will set the cornerstone for establishing strategy beyond markets or non-market strategy as a mainstream branch of strategic management scholarship and will help to identify paths for future contributions to our understanding of corporate behavior and competitive strategy,” said de Figueiredo, who teaches Business Strategy for Lawyers at Duke Law. He will host a conference on the subject at the Law School next May.

Strategy Beyond Markets is a special issue in the “Advances in Strategic Management” series published by Emerald Group Publishing. de Figueiredo’s co-editors are Michael Lenox of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard Business School, and Richard G. Vanden Bergh of the School of Business Administration at the University of Vermont.

Guy-Uriel Charles: Racial Justice and Law gives students tools to critique and solve race-related controversies 

Guy-Uriel CharlesA new casebook co-authored by Guy-Uriel Charles, the Charles S. Rhyne Professor of Law and senior associate dean for faculty and research, uses a comprehensive survey approach to examine the role of law in reinforcing and ameliorating racial injustice.

Racial Justice and Law, Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 2016) uses cases, statutes, theoretical works, and other sources of law, supplemented by problems, exercises, and empirical data, to equip students to both critique and construct pragmatic solutions to current race-related controversies. Charles and his co-authors, law professors Ralph Richard Banks of Stanford University, Kim Forde-Mazrui of the University of Virginia, and Cristina M. Rodriguez of Yale University, settled on this mix of materials — a novel approach for the field — in order to fully address the numerous situations in which race intersects with law and the varied tools available to address the resulting  issues.

Professor Guy-Uriel Charles was honored, in April, with the Duke Bar Association’s 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award. Presenter Risha Asokan ’17 read from some of his nominators’ statements, noting that the majority came from former students in classes such as Constitutional Law, Race and the Law, and Campaign/Election Law. “I think that says it all,” she said. “‘He was a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and engaging instructor. He was passionate about the subject matter and wanted to see all of his students succeed.’” The Margaret and Lanty Smith ’67 family made an additional tribute to Charles in the form of a $10,000 gift to the Center on Law, Race and Politics, which he directs.

The large body of case-based statutory law established over decades of civil rights advocacy is only part of any full examination of race and the law, they write in the forword. Even laws that do not specifically reference race, such as those blocking felons from voting or tying school funding to local property taxes, involve racial conflict and tensions, said Charles, a scholar of constitutional law, election law, campaign finance, redistricting, politics, and race.

The authors employ problems, role-plays, and other exercises that require students to approach a controversy from the vantage point of different actors in the legal system who affect and interpret the content of cases, statutes, and regulations — judges; federal, state, and local legislators; government lawyers; non-elected government officials; private attorneys; business owners; and private citizens. “Law school graduates are less likely to produce social change through changing constitutional law than through one of the other mechanisms that our book identifies,” said Charles, the founding director of the Center on Law, Race and Politics. He will teach from the casebook in his spring-semester Race and the Law course.

“We hope to contribute to the maturity of the field of race and the law with this casebook,” he said.