In processing Pogge’s comparison of push and pull programs both designed to incentivize potential medical innovators within the broader, public-good strategy, I want to avoid the kind of false dichotomy that Pogge warns of in his discussion of the argument from beneficial consequences (p. 8, bottom). I think that considering the push and pull methods only in isolation from each other is too binary. By combining the two approaches, in a pull, then push program, an optimal combination of the advantages of each can be harnessed, and some disadvantages of each method implemented alone can be shed.
This hybrid program’s first stage would be a pull that rewards all potential innovators able to achieve meaningful progress on an important medical innovation. Then, the reward for any potential innovator deemed to have made significant progress would be a commitment to push the innovator’s continued work as – hopefully – that innovator’s promising early results come to fruition.
In this hybrid program, the pull approach’s clear incentive to achieve early success would be present, and assuming that the program judged meaningful progress accurately, a lot of failed research efforts could be weeded out without being paid for. However, the push that rewards success would not have to be as large as the purse offered by normal pull programs because the innovators competing for this hybrid program’s prize would have less risk of failure than they would have if they were competing in a normal pull program for two key reasons: 1) Reward-worthy solutions would be less elusive and more obtainable since partial solutions and progress are accepted and 2) Competition with other innovators would be less cutthroat because the hybrid program would almost certainly have to accept a variety of different medical innovations as “meaningful progress” towards a final solution.
Skeptics might criticize the potential for non-productively vague or partial innovative solutions to be rewarded by such a program, but I would respond by pointing out that this hybrid program’s openness in its initial pull phase could be an important positive for a reason not mentioned by Pogge: Each innovator, knowing that multiple different partial solutions are acceptable, and that no single person or party is being held accountable for solving the entire problem might be encouraged to specialize, concentrating his efforts on a more tangible (but necessarily still meaningful) segment of the problem. By pulling multiple innovators that each solve a different part of the problem, this hybrid program may be able to facilitate extremely productive collaboration in the latter push phase.
Eli, the challenge, it seems to me, is to flesh out how the push component could work, entering in at that post-pull point.
ReplyDelete