¹ Elhanan Helpman, The Mystery of Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 43–46.

² Suzanne Scotchmer, Innovation and Incentives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 34–39.

³ Lerner, Josh, “The Empirical Impact of Intellectual Property Rights on Innovation: Puzzles and Clues,” American Economic Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 343–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Adam B. Jaffe and Manuel Trajtenberg, Patents, Citations, and Innovations: A Window on the Knowledge Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 1; Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

⁵ The strongest voices against this trend have been Susan Sell and Mark Schwartz. Susan K. Sell, Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Schwartz, Herman Mark, “Corporate Profit Strategies and U.S. Economic Stagnation,” American Affairs 4, no. 3 (2020)Google Scholar.

⁶ Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974).

⁷ Ben Ansell and Jane Gingrich, “Concentration and Commodification: The Political Economy of Postindustrialism in America and Beyond,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

⁸ Torben Iversen and David Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

⁹ Ibid., 12–13, 39–41; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

¹⁰ Iversen and Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity, 2–3, 12–13, 31.

¹¹ Iversen and Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity; Jacob S. Hacker, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen, “Introduction: The American Political Economy: A Framework and Agenda for Research,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

¹² Iversen and Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity, 20–21.

¹³ Ibid., 11–12, 19,3 9.

¹⁴ Hacker et al., “Introduction: The American Political Economy.”

¹⁵ Ibid., 3.

¹⁶ Ibid., 41–42; Lucy Barnes, “Public Investment in the Knowledge Economy,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

¹⁷ Roper Organization, Roper Reports 1981-01: Politics/Media/Environment/Business, Question 9, USROPER.81-1.R03G (Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University, 1980); National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey 1989, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Question 2161, USNORC.GSS89.R069G (Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University, 1989); Time Magazine, Yankelovich/Time Magazine Poll: Time Soundings–Economy/Reagan/Foreign Affairs, Question 48, USYANK.818609.Q09EG, Yankelovich, Skelly & White (Ithaca, NY: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University, 1981).

¹⁸ Iversen and Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity.

¹⁹ Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, “An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism,” in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, ed. Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–68; Hall, Peter A., “From Keynesianism to the Knowledge Economy: The Rise and Fall of Growth Regimes,” Business Economics, no. 54 (2019): 122–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66.

²¹ Marian Negoita, “To Hide or Not to Hide? The Advanced Technology Program and Future of U.S. Civilian Technology Policy,” in State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development, ed. Fred Block and Matthew R. Keller (Boulder: Paradigm, 2011); Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig, “Solyndra: Politics Infused Obama Energy Programs,” The Washington Post, December 14, 2011, accessed April 9, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/solyndra-politics-infused-obama-energy-programs/2011/12/14/gIQA4HllHP_story.html; Ashe Schow, “President Obama's Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures,” The Daily Signal, October 18, 2012, accessed August 6, 2021, https://www.dailysignal.com/2012/10/18/president-obamas-taxpayer-backed-green-energy-failures/.

²² Patents on new technologies have value because they provide, for a limited time, a legal monopoly within a technological domain. The monopoly power inherent in each patent therefore provides its owner or producer with a temporary opportunity to generate rents or substantial economic returns beyond what would otherwise be observed in a more competitive economic environment. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2013), 54. Though a single blockbuster patent can confer tremendous economic power to its owner, a more conventional source of power lies in the ability of corporations to aggregate many patents into large portfolios, either through sustained in-house R&D or by purchasing or licensing patents developed by other firms. While a start-up firm may develop one or a handful of patents, the IP producers that dominate the AKE today hold tens of thousands of patents.

²³ Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball, and Beth L. Leech, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). The state's participation makes it difficult to raise causal claims about business influence, but the story of IP producer lobbying from 1980 to 1994 potentially contravenes those studies which find that business interests have limited influence on government policy, that business power depends on economic crisis, or that business’ lobbying successes in the 1980s were mostly defensive. See, e.g., David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); on the importance of the counterfactual perspective, see Daniel Carpenter and David A. Moss, eds., Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–22.

²⁴ Alan Greenspan, “Antitrust,” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Penguin, 1986); Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Change (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 145–53.

²⁵ Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019), 386–89.

²⁶ Sara Miles, The Democrats and Silicon Valley: How to Hack a Party Line (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).

²⁷ Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 21.

²⁸ David M. Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 6.

²⁹ Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

³⁰ Daniel Lee Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Hart, Forged Consensus.

³¹ Maryann P. Feldman, Alessandra Colaianni, and Connie Kang Liu, “Lessons from the Commercialization of the Cohen-Boyer Patents: The Stanford University Licensing Program,” in Intellectual Property Management in Health and Agricultural Innovation: A Handbook of Best Practices (Oxford, UK: Centre for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research and Development, 2007), accessed August 6, 2021, http://www.iphandbook.org/handbook/chPDFs/ch17/ipHandbook-Ch%2017%2022%20Feldman-Colaianni0Liu%20Cohen-Boyer%20Patents%20and%20Licenses.pdf.

³² Hart, Forged Consensus, 171–72.

³³ Fred Block, “Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States,” Politics and Society 36, no. 2 (2008): 169–206.

³⁴ Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier, 152, 176–77.

³⁵ Shelley L. Hurt, “The Military's Hidden Hand: Examining the Dual-Use Origins of Biotechnology in the American Context, 1969–1972,” in State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development, ed. Fred Block and Matthew R. Keller (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011); Linda Weiss, America Inc.? Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

³⁶ Fred Block, “Innovation and the Invisible Hand of Government,” in State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technology Development, ed. Fred Block and Matthew R. Keller (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2011).

³⁷ Hart, Forged Consensus, 172.

³⁸ Ibid.; David M. Hart, “Antitrust and Technological Innovation in the US: Ideas, Institutions, Decisions, and Impacts, 1890–2000,” Research Policy 30 (2001): 923–36.

³⁹ Scherer, F. M., “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States,” Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law 7 (2009): 167Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Whittemore v. Cutter, 29 F. Cas. 1120 (Cir. Ct. Mass 1813).

⁴¹ Atascadero State Hosp. v. Scanlon, 473 U.S. 234, 242 (1985).

⁴² Feldman, Robin C., “The Insufficiency of Antitrust Analysis for Patent Misuse,” Hastings Law Journal 55 (2003): 399Google Scholar.

⁴³ Lear, Inc. v. Adkins, 395 U.S. 653, 663 (1969).

⁴⁴ Peter K. Eisinger, The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State: State and Local Development Policy in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Otis L. Graham, Losing Time: The Industrial Policy Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

⁴⁵ Stein, Pivotal Decade.

⁴⁶ Walter S. Salant, “The Spread of Keynesian Doctrines and Practices in the United States,” in The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations, ed. Peter A. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

⁴⁷ Stein, Pivotal Decade; Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (New York: Little Brown, 2019).

⁴⁸ Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour, ch. 6; Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1984), ch. 7.

⁴⁹ Gerald M. Boyd, “Reagan Hails U.S. Technology's Role,” New York Times, April 10, 1987, section A, p. 12.

⁵⁰ Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), ch. 6.

⁵¹ “One Nation, One People (The 1964 Democratic Party Platform),” The American Presidency Project, 1964, accessed August 6, 2021, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1964-democratic-party-platform.

⁵² Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); “The Terms of Our Duty (The 1968 Democratic Party Platform),” The American Presidency Project, 1968, accessed August 6, 2016, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1968-democratic-party-platform.

⁵³ “New Directions: 1972–76 (The 1972 Democratic Party Platform),” The American Presidency Project, 1972, accessed August 6, 2016, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1972-democratic-party-platform.

⁵⁴ “The 1976 Democratic Party Platform,” The American Presidency Project, 1976, accessed August 6, 2016, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1976-democratic-party-platform.

⁵⁵ Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes.

⁵⁶ Stein, Pivotal Decade; Waterhouse, Lobbying America.

⁵⁷ Randall Rothenberg, The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 15–25, 79–91; Geismer, Don't Blame Us, 268–71; for an account emphasizing the New Deal roots of the Atari Democrats’ supply-side liberalism, see Cebul, Brent, “Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats,” Modern American History 2 (2019): 139–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, 16th ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012); David G.W. Birch, The Job Generation Process (Cambridge, MA: MIT Program on Neighborhood and Regional Change, 1979); Rothenberg, The Neoliberals, chs. 6–7.

⁵⁹ Rothenberg, The Neoliberals, 64–67, 81–83.

⁶⁰ Edward Cowan, “Democrats Offer New Policy to Sustain National Growth,” The New York Times, September 19, 1982, section 1, p. 28; Edward Cowan, “Washington Watch; A Democratic Rift,” The New York Times, May 30, 1983, section 1, p. 36.

⁶¹ Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2012).

⁶² Graham, Losing Time, ch. 7.

⁶³ Kristol, Irving, “On Corporate Capitalism in America,” The Public Interest 41 (1975): 134–35Google Scholar; Waterhouse, Lobbying America, 42.

⁶⁴ Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 1.

⁶⁵ Paul E. Tsongas, Letter to J. S. Marshall from Senator Paul E. Tsongas Requesting Help on a Matter of Great Importance to The High Technology Industry of Massachusetts, Paul Tsongas Digital Archives, accessed October 21, 2021, https://ptsongasuml.omeka.net/items/show/3725.

⁶⁶ Mitchell G. Tyson, “Tsongas Record in High Technology,” Paul Tsongas Digital Archives, accessed October 21, 2021, https://ptsongasuml.omeka.net/items/show/1244.

⁶⁷ Fred W. Garry, Letter to Paul E. Tsongas from Fred W. Garry: Improving Federal Policies Affecting Technological Innovation and Industrial Competitiveness, Paul Tsongas Digital Archives, accessed October 21, 2021, https://ptsongas uml.omeka.net/items/show/3299.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Tyson, “Tsongas Record in High Technology.”

⁷¹ Ibid.

⁷² Paul E. Tsongas, Letter Urging Support for National Coalition for Science and Technology, Paul Tsongas Digital Archives, accessed October 21, 2021, https://ptsongasuml.omeka.net/items/show/3248.

⁷³ Michael P. Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition and the Politics of Intellectual Property (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 11, 67–68; Scherer, “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States,” 204.

⁷⁴ If one uses IFI Claims patent data hosted by Google BigQuery to identify the largest patent holders in 1980, General Motors ranks fifth behind General Electric, DuPont, IBM, and Westinghouse Electric.

⁷⁵ Sell, Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, chs. 4–5.

⁷⁶ Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy, 106–11; Scherer, “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States,” 204–206.

⁷⁷ Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy, 68.

⁷⁸ Scherer, “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States.”

⁷⁹ Stein, Pivotal Decade, 95.

⁸⁰ Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy, 12–13, 73–79.

⁸¹ Scherer, “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States,” 203–204.

⁸² Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? (New York: The New Press, 2003), 94–98, 141.

⁸³ Ibid., 119.

⁸⁴ Chalmers A. Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982).

⁸⁵ Graham, Losing Time.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ Turner, James, “The Next Innovation Revolution: Laying the Groundwork for the United States,” Innovations: Technology, Governance, and Globalization, 1, no. 2 (2006)Google Scholar, accessed August 6, 2021, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/itgg.2006.1.2.123.

⁸⁸ Advisory Committee on Industrial Innovation: The Industrial Advisory Subcommittee on Patent and Information Policy, Report on Patent Policy (technical report, Department of Commerce, 1979), 148–49.

⁸⁹ Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980).

⁹⁰ Advisory Committee on Industrial Innovation, Report on Patent Policy, 164.

⁹¹ Nicholas Short, “Antitrust Deregulation and the Politics of the American Knowledge Economy” (working paper, December 2019), https://scholar.harvard.edu/nickshort/publications/antitrust-deregulation-and-politics-american knowledge-economy.

⁹² Antitrust Enforcement and Intellectual Property Rights (technical report, U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, 1995), section 1, https://www.justice.gov/atr/archived-1995-antitrust-guidelines-licensing-intellectual property.

⁹³ Hart, “Antitrust and Technological Innovation in the US”; Brett Christophers, The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

⁹⁴ Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

⁹⁵ Khan, Lina, “The Ideological Roots of America's Market Power Problem,” The Yale Law Journal Forum 127 (2018): 960–79Google Scholar; Stoller, Goliath.

⁹⁶ Arti Rai and Bhaven Sampat, “Accountability in Patenting of Federally Funded Research,” Nature Biotechnology 30, no. 10 (2012): 953–56.

⁹⁷ Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

⁹⁸ Short, Nicholas, “The Political Economy of the Research Exemption in American Patent Law,” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media, and Entertainment Law Journal 26 (2016): 573Google Scholar.

⁹⁹ Elizabeth Popp Berman, Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

¹⁰⁰ U.S. Congress, House, Committee on the Judiciary, Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Act Of, 1981 WL 404308, 97th Congress, 1st Sess., 1981, H. Rep. 97-312; Rachel Sachs, “The New Model of Interest Group Representation in Patent Law,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2013): 344.

¹⁰¹ Meador, Daniel J., “Origin of the Federal Circuit: A Personal Account,” American University Law Review 41 (1992): 581–620Google Scholar; Newman, Pauline, “Origins of the Federal Circuit: The Role of Industry,” Federal Circuit Bar Journal 11 (2002): 541–43Google Scholar; Scherer, “The Political Economy of Patent Policy Reform in the United States.”

¹⁰² William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, “An Empirical Analysis of the Patent Court,” University of Chicago Law Review 71 (2004): 111–28.

¹⁰³ Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capabilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Christophers, The Great Leveler; Thelen, Kathleen, “Employer Organization and the Law: American Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective,” Law and Contemporary Problems 83, no. 2 (2020): 23–47Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Graham, Losing Time.

¹⁰⁵ Block, “Swimming Against the Current.”

¹⁰⁶ Eisinger, The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State; William Lazonick and Mariana Mazzucato, “The Risk-Reward Nexus in the Innovation-Inequality Relationship: Who Takes the Risks? Who Gets the Rewards?,” Industrial and Corporate Change 22, no. 4 (2013): 1093–128.

¹⁰⁷ Block, “Innovation and the Invisible Hand of Government.”

¹⁰⁸ Eisinger, The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State, chs. 1–4.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 249–65.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 275–89.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 294.

¹¹² Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism.”

¹¹³ Executive Advisory Council, Winning Technologies: A New Industrial Strategy for California and the Nation (technical report, California Commission on Industrial Innovation, 1982).

¹¹⁴ Geismer, Don't Blame Us, 268.

¹¹⁵ Eisinger, The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State, 67–69.

¹¹⁶ Geismer, Don't Blame Us, 270.

¹¹⁷ David Lampe, “Introduction,” in The Massachusetts Miracle: High Technology and Economic Revitalization, ed. David Lampe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 11.

¹¹⁸ United States Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (technical report, Washington, DC, 1985), 278.

¹¹⁹ Lampe, “Introduction,” 16.

¹²⁰ Geismer, Don't Blame Us, 278–79.

¹²¹ Margaret O'Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin, 2019), 292–96.

¹²² Ibid., 192–95.

¹²³ Ibid., 213–15.

¹²⁴ Graham, Losing Time, 168–69, 220.

¹²⁵ O'Mara, The Code, 223–26.

¹²⁶ Khan, “The Ideological Roots of America's Market Power Problem”; Stoller, Goliath.

¹²⁷ Nicholas Short, “The Distributional Consequences of the American Knowledge Economy” (working paper, January 2022), https://scholar.harvard.edu/nickshort/publications/distributional-consequences-american-knowledge-economy.