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The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
“The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain” addresses one of the most heated policy debates of our day: Access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits. Seven scholars – an anthropologist, an economist, a sociologist, and four lawyers – discuss how a museum can flesh out the relevant ethical issues that frustrate any purely technical solution.
Title: The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain: A Place, A Process, A Philosophy
Editor: Joseph Henry Vogel, Ph.D., is a 1978 Thunderbird graduate and professor of economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras.
Publisher: Anthem Press (June 2010)
Price: $99 (£60)
Description: 174 pages
ISBN: 978-1843318620
Information: www.anthempress.com
Climate change lends itself to both political economy and humor. Joseph Henry Vogel argues that mainstream economics fails to recognize the thermodynamic nature of climate change, thereby missing the point of Northern appropriation of the atmospheric sink. The switch to thermodynamics brings into focus the legitimacy of a “carbon debt” that starts to tick with the first report of the IPCC in 1990. Through the lens of economic theory, the understandable intransigence of poor countries to assume the “cap” in “cap and trade” is a distortion to the economic system. But by that same economics, one distortion can justify another – and that other distortion is the payment Ecuador seeks for not drilling in the Yasuní Biosphere. Heeding the call of Deidre (formerly Donald) McCloskey that economics needs more humor, Vogel has written a piercing critique of economics-as-usual which also entertains.