Netflix as an Example of Clay Christensen's 'Disruptive Innovation'

I am a great admirer both of Clay Christensen personally and of his theory of disruptive innovation. “Disruptive innovation” doesn’t mean simply a big innovation, it means an innovation for which doing a good job at giving your usual customers what they want and will pay for is not enough. You can see posts I have written referencing Clay here:

https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/?tag=clay

Netflix is a fascinating example of disruptive innovation. I urge you to read the entire article by Alex Sherman shown above:

How Netflix sent the biggest media companies into a frenzy, and why Netflix thinks some are getting it wrong

As teasers, here are the two passages most relevant to the idea of disruptive innovation. I added boldface to the most important sentence in each:

While traditional media is racing to catch up, Netflix CEO Reed Hastingsis not looking back at the runners he's passed.

Hastings has never really feared legacy media, said Neil Rothstein, who worked at Netflix from 2001 to 2012 and eventually ran digital global advertising for the company. That's because Hastings bought into the fundamental principle of "The Innovator's Dilemma," the 1997 business strategy book by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

That book, often cited in tech circles, explains how disruptive businesses often start off as cheaper alternatives with lesser functionality, making it difficult for big incumbents to respond without cannibalizing their cash-rich businesses. Over time, the newcomer adds features and builds customer loyalty until it's just as good or better than the incumbent's product. By the time the old guard wakes up, it's too late.

"Reed brought 25 or 30 of us together, and we discussed the book," Rothstein said of an executive retreat he remembered nearly a decade ago. "We studied AOL and Blockbuster as cautionary tales. We knew we had to disrupt, including disrupting ourselves, or someone else would do it."

 

Hastings derived many of his strategy lessons from a Stanford instructor named Hamilton Helmer. Hastings even invited him to Netflix in 2010 to teach other executives.

One of Helmer's key concepts is called counter-positioning, which Helmer defines as: "A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business."

"Throughout my business career, I have often observed powerful incumbents, once lauded for their business acumen, failing to adjust to a new competitive reality," Hastings writes in the forward to Helmer's book "7 Powers," published in 2016.

Clay Christensen: Religion as a Foundation of Democracy

This is a nice video of Clay talking about the benefits of religion. An atheist group complained about it. But they don’t understand:

Quartz #57-->In Defense of Clay Christensen: Even the 'Nicest Man Ever to Lecture' at Harvard Can't Innovate Without Upsetting a Few People

Here is the full text of my 57th Quartz column, “Defending Clay Christensen: Even the ‘nicest man ever to lecture’ at Harvard can’t innovate without upsetting a few people,“ now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on December 23, 2014. Links to all my other columns can be found here.

I wrote a version of this first as a blog post. I am delighted that my new editor at Quartz, Paul Smalera, liked it enough to publish it in Quartz. (My previous editor, Mitra Kalita, is now overseeing key aspects of Quartz’s global expansion.)

By the way, since I am blogging through Clay’s books (as I have been blogging through John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty) I have a virtual sub-blog on Clay Christensen:

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/tagged/clay

In the column, I give my take on Clay’s theory as well as defending him personally. 

If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:

© December 23, 2014: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2017. All rights reserved.

**************************************************************************

Clay Christensen is not only the most famous management guru in the world, he is one of the few public figures—other than full time humanitarians or religious leaders—whom people go out of their way to describe as a good person. For example, in the Financial Times in November 2013, Andrew Hill described Clay Christensen, who had just won an award for most influential management thinker for the second time in a row, as “perhaps the nicest man ever to lecture at Harvard Business School.”

So I was surprised to see key Apple executive-turned-tech-entrepreneur Jean-Louis Gassée criticize not only Clay’s theories but also Clay’s character in his Nov. 25, 2014 Quartz article Clayton Christensen should really disrupt his own innovation theories. I want to defend Clay and his theories.

To be clear about where I am coming from, let me say that I can personally vouch for both Clay’s brilliance as a business thinker and his positive personal qualities. On the personal side, I carpooled across the country from Utah to Boston with Clay back in 1977 when I was beginning my freshman year at Harvard College and Clay was beginning to work toward his MBA from Harvard Business School. I have had relatively little contact with Clay since then, but still remember that trip as a bright moment in my life, and consider Clay a friend to this day. My daughter Diana’s experience as a Harvard MBA student in Clay’s class only reinforced my impression that Clay is one of the best human beings I have met.

My views on Clay as a thinker come from reading six of Clay’s books this year:

As an economist, I found them fascinating. One of the hottest areas of economics in the last twenty years has been the border between economics and psychology. One basic idea at that intersection is that people have limitations in their ability to process information and make decisions. This idea that cognition is finite is a key issue in macroeconomics, as Noah Smith and I wrote about in “The Shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed and the Battle for the Soul of Macroeconomics—Again.” But the idea of finite cognition also matters a lot for businesses. Some decisions are hard even for people who spend their careers making those kinds of decisions, and the support of teams of experts.

Clay, in the management theory he has developed with various coauthors, identifies one key factor in how hard a decision is for a generally well-run business: whether it involves taking care of what are already the business’s core customers, or trying to sell to either peripheral customers or people who have never bought from the business before. No business is successful for any significant length of time if it doesn’t do a reasonably good job of taking care of its core customers. But being good at understanding and serving its core customers may make it bad as an organization at understanding and serving peripheral or potential customers.

Clay’s famous warnings about “disruptive innovation” boil down to saying that any set of peripheral or potential customers a business doesn’t serve well—even if those non-core customers look relatively unprofitable—might provide a ladder for a competitor to climb up and eventually overtake that business. And since the main part of a business is designed to serve its core customers, it may need to set up a separate unit to act like a start-up and focus on other potential customers.

When Clay turns to public policy issues in education and health care, the idea of innovative upstarts overtaking an established business by starting with underserved customers or non-customers morphs into the idea of reforming education and health care by finding chinks in the armor of the status quo. The key public policy recommendation I draw from Clay’s logic is that policy should be supportive of organizations doing things in new ways that help people on the margins who find the current systems difficult to navigate, even if those new approaches don’t improve quality for those who are currently well served by the status quo.

Here is Gassée’s own summary of Clay’s theory:

The incumbency of your established company is forever threatened by lower-cost versions of the products and services you provide. To avoid impending doom, you must enrich your offering and engorge your price tag. As you abandon the low end, the interloper gains business, muscles up, and chases you farther up the price ladder. Some day—and it’s simply a matter of time—the disruptor will displace you.

The first charge Gassée makes against Clay is that Clay is a very persuasive, high-priced consultant who advises rival companies:

… in the mid-to-late 1980s, parlayed his position into a consulting money pump. He advised—terrorized, actually—big company CEOs with vivid descriptions of their impending failure, and then offered them salvation if they followed his advice. His fee was about $200,000 per year, per company; he saw no ethical problem in consulting for competing organizations.

In Clay’s case, I get the sense that he is giving almost every company a variant of the same advice, which is more concerned with potential competitors who might not even be in the picture yet, rather than existing competitors. So I can see why two rival companies might both feel comfortable hiring Clay. As to the price, I also find Clay’s insights valuable, so I am willing to go with the default view of economists that if someone is willing to pay a lot of money for something, it is an indication that they find it quite valuable.

Gassée’s next charge is that Clay is arrogant:

The guru and I got into a heated argument while walking around the pool at one of Apple’s regular off-sites. When I disagreed with one of his wild fantasies, his retort never varied: I’m never wrong.

Had I been back in France, I would have told him, in unambiguous and colorful words, what I really thought, but I had acclimated myself to the polite, passive-aggressive California culture and used therapy-speak to “share my feelings of discomfort and puzzlement” at his Never Wrong posture. “I’ve always been proved right…sometimes it simply takes longer than expected,” was his comeback.

Hyperbole—”exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally”—has its place in conversation (for example, there is every indication that the historical Jesus frequently used hyperbole). So the exact tone of voice and context matter a lot. The management consulting context is one in which hyperbole might be appropriate in order to help counteract an attachment by someone one is advising to the status quo. In that context, saying “I’m never wrong” might mean simply “You should really, really, listen to my advice.” Given the magnitude of Clay’s claims, if Clay sincerely believes in the advice he is giving, as I suspect he does, the sentiment “You should really, really, listen to my advice” is understandable.

Gassée’s last charge is that Clay became defensive and lashed out when his work was challenged by Jill Lepore. Here is what Gassée has to say about that:

Christensen is admired for his towering intellect and also for his courage facing health challenges—one of my children has witnessed both and can vouch for the scholar’s inspiring presence. Unfortunately, his reaction to Lepore’s criticism was less admirable. In a Businessweek interview Christensen sounds miffed and entitled:

“I hope you can understand why I am mad that a woman of her stature could perform such a criminal act of dishonesty”

In this case, fortunately, the context is known. You can see Drake Bennett’s Businessweek interview “Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of ‘Disruptive Innovation‘” here. Clay told Drake

… she starts instead to try to discredit Clay Christensen, in a really mean way. And mean is fine, but in order to discredit me, Jill had to break all of the rules of scholarship that she accused me of breaking—in just egregious ways, truly egregious ways. In fact, every one—every one—of those points that she attempted to make [about The Innovator’s Dilemma] has been addressed in a subsequent book or article. Every one! And if she was truly a scholar as she pretends, she would have read [those]. I hope you can understand why I am mad that a woman of her stature could perform such a criminal act of dishonesty …

So Clay’s intemperate phrase “criminal act of dishonesty” is about Jill Lepore writing as if Clay hadn’t ever given any answer to the kinds of questions she raises. A specific case later in the interview clarifies what is angering Clay. Here is Drake Bennett’s question:

Another point Lepore makes is that you leave out relevant factors that would challenge your thesis. In the case of the steel industry, you don’t talk about unionization, which was a major difference between U.S. Steel and upstart minimills.

Clay replied:

Yes and no. The world is actually very complicated and big huge books are written about unionization and the impact that it has, and so … other people have addressed that.

If she’s interested, there’s a case that I use in my course about U.S. Steel that occurred in 1989. There the union contract in Mon Valley Works [one of U.S. Steel’s plants] was a huge factor. So, again, if she were thorough on this issue and she Googled it and put in my name and U.S. Steel, that would have come up. But because her purpose was to discredit me rather than look for the truth, she didn’t even look. Are you feeling a little bit about how she’s caused me to feel?

That is, Clay thinks Jill Lepore did not do even the most basic homework to see if Clay had any subtlety to his views. Here, actually, Lepore’s point is about how differential unionization might weaken the evidence for Clay’s theory of disruptive innovation, which Clay’s Harvard Business School case might not have done anything to address, so Lepore’s fundamental point might stand, but she should have made that argument. And while it may be unreasonable to expect someone writing a magazine article to know one’s whole body of work before vigorously criticizing a piece of it, it is reasonable to expect her to try to talk to Clay to get his side before publishing a traditional-style long-read article attacking Clay’s work. This is a point Clay himself makes:

… if she’s interested and wants to help me—she’s just an extraordinary writer—and if she’s interested in the theory or its impact, I mean, come over! I would love to have you openly invite her to come do this, if she’s interested.

(Like Clay, Jill Lepore is at Harvard.)

I think Drake Bennett is right that Clay was quite angry at Jill Lepore’s article:

Consistently described by those who know him as a generous and thoughtful and upbeat person, he is also capable of fury. “Keep asking me questions,” [Clay] said, “it’s helping me.”

But, I am not going to change my view of Clay as one of the best human beings I have met for controlled anger in a situation like that.

No one is perfect. But in order for us to have a hope of becoming better human beings, we need to at least know which direction is up. Despite his flaws, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t do well to become a little more like Clay in at least some respect.

Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang: How to Divide and Conquer Our Health Care Problems

As I discussed in my post “Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Three Basic Types of Business Models,” Clay Christensen and his coauthors in all his business strategy books use a model of three basic types of business models:

  • solution shops
  • value-added processing (VAP)
  • facilitated networks.

In The Innovator’s Prescription (location 375), Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang point out how these different types of business models default to different types of payment structures. Adding some headings:

Solution Shops 

Payment almost always is made to solution shop businesses in the form of fee for service. We’ve observed that consulting firms such as Bain and Company occasionally agree to be paid in part based upon the results of the diagnosis and recommendations their teams have made. But that rarely sticks, because the outcome depends on many factors beyond the correctness of the diagnosis and recommendations, so guarantees about total costs and ultimate outcomes can rarely be made. …

Value Added Processing

VAP businesses typically charge their customers for the output of their processes, whereas solution shops must bill for the cost of their inputs. Most of them even guarantee the result. They can do this because the ability to deliver the outcome is embedded in repeatable and controllable processes and the equipment used in those processes. Hence, restaurants can print prices on their menus, and universities can sell credit hours at guaranteed prices. Manufacturers of most products publish their prices and guarantee the result for the period of warranty.

Since they operate in the realms of empirical and precision medicine, VAP businesses in the health-care industry can do the same thing. MinuteClinic posts the prices of every procedure it offers. Eye surgery centers advertise their prices; and Geisinger’s heart hospitals can specify in advance not just the price of an angioplasty procedure, but can guarantee the result. In a new and remarkable agreement with several European governments, Johnson & Johnson has guaranteed that its new drug Velcade will effectively treat a specific form of multiple myeloma that can be diagnosed with a particular biomarker—or it will refund to the health ministry the cost of the full course of therapy. J&J can do this because the treatment is undertaken after a definitive diagnosis has been made. …

Facilitated Networks

Facilitated network business models in health care can be structured to make money by keeping people well; whereas solution shop and VAP business models make money when people are sick. 

In particular, facilitated networks often work on some kind of subscription or annual fee for payment. 

Clay, Jerome and Jason argue that there are two key steps to making health care less expensive:

  1. separating out the components of health care according to the most appropriate type of business model, and
  2. developing better ways of doing things within each category, building on that higher level of focus within each part of health care. 

Here is how they say it (with my headings):

The need to separate out components of health care according to appropriate business model:

Many who have written about the problems of health care decry the fact that the value of health-care services being offered by hospitals and doctors is not being measured. To them, we would explain that the reason isn’t that these providers don’t want to provide measurable value; they simply can’t, because under the same roof they have conflated fundamentally different business models whose metrics of output, value, and payment are incompatible with one another. …

Using the clear metrics within each category of health care to innovate further:

The reason why this basic segregation of business models must occur from the outset of disruption is that it will enable accurate measurements of value, costs, pricing, and profit for each type of business. A second wave of disruptive business models can then emerge within each of these three types. Powerful online tools can walk physicians through the process of interpreting symptoms and test results to formulate hypotheses, then help them define the additional data they need to converge upon definitive diagnoses. This will enable lower-cost primary care physicians to access the expertise of—and thereby disrupt—specialist practitioners of intuitive medicine. Likewise, ambulatory clinics will disrupt inpatient VAP hospitals. Retail providers like MinuteClinic, which employ nurse practitioners rather than physicians, need to disrupt physicians’ practices.

Avoiding the trap of thinking everything needs to be done in the solution shop business model: 

Hospitals and physicians’ practices have long defended themselves under the banner, “For the good of the patient.” Yet, for the good of the patient, do we really need to leave all care in the realm of intuitive medicine? Much technology has moved past this point, and health-care business models need to catch up. Two landmark reports from the Institute of Medicine—Crossing the Quality Chasm and To Err Is Human—shattered the myth that ever-escalating cost was the price Americans must pay to have the high-quality care that only full-service hospitals staffed by the best doctors can provide.

I find Clay, Jerome and Jason’s indictment of our current health care system as mixing together care appropriate to different business models trenchant. I wish this insight made it into more of the commentary about health care reform.  

You can see the rest of my posts tagged “Clay Christensen” here.

Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Three Basic Types of Business Models

In The Innovator’s Prescription, Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang make good use of a typology of business models laid out by C. B. Stabell and Øystein Fjeldstad in their May, 1998 Strategic Management Journal article “Configuring Value for Competitive Advantage: On Chains, Shops and Networks.” Modifying Stabell and Fjeldstad’s terminology a bit for clarity, Clay and his coauthors call the three types of business models solutions shops, value-adding processes, and facilitated networks. Clay, Jerome and Jason argue that these three types of business models are so different that it is difficult to efficiently house them under one roof. They give these definitions for these three types of business models (from about location 360):

Solution Shops

These “shops” are businesses that are structured to diagnose and solve unstructured problems. Consulting firms, advertising agencies, research and development organizations, and certain law firms fall into this category. Solution shops deliver value primarily through the people they employ—experts who draw upon their intuition and analytical and problem-solving skills to diagnose the cause of complicated problems. After diagnosis, these experts recommend solutions. Because diagnosing the cause of complex problems and devising workable solutions has such high subsequent leverage, customers typically are willing to pay very high prices for the services of the professionals in solution shops. 

The diagnostic work performed in general hospitals and in some specialist physicians’ practices are solution shops of sorts. …

Value-Adding Processes

Organizations with value-adding process business models take in incomplete or broken things and then transform them into more complete outputs of higher value. Retailing, restaurants, automobile manufacturing, petroleum refining, and the work of many educational institutions are examples of VAP businesses. Some VAP organizations are highly efficient and consistent, while others are less so.

Many medical procedures that occur after a definitive diagnosis has been made are value-adding process activities….

Facilitated Networks

These are enterprises in which people exchange things with one another. Mutual insurance companies are facilitators of networks: customers deposit their premiums into the pool, and they take claims out of it. Participants in telecommunications networks send and receive calls and data among themselves; eBay and craigslist are network businesses. In this type of business, the companies that make money tend to be those that facilitate the effective operation of the network. They typically make money through membership or user fees.

Networks can also be an effective business model for the care of many chronic illnesses that rely heavily on modifications in patient behavior for successful treatment. Until recently, however, there have been few facilitated network businesses to address this growing portion of the world’s health-care burden. …

Clay, Jerome and Jason’s central idea is that medicine will be more efficient if there is one medical institution designed for inherently expensive “solution shop” activities such as difficult diagnoses, other much more convenient and inexpensive clinics for the routine treatment of well-diagnosed diseases, and online networks for patients to discuss their contribution as patients to disease management with others who have the same disease. What wouldn’t survive would be the current hospital model where the solution shop aspect of what they do confers high expense on many other activities that don’t have to be so expensive. Here is the way Clay, Jerome and Jason say it:

The two dominant provider institutions in health care—general hospitals and physicians’ practices—emerged originally as solution shops. But over time they have mixed in value-adding process and facilitated network activities as well. This has resulted in complex, confused institutions in which much of the cost is spent in overhead activities, rather than in direct patient care. For each to function properly, these business models must be separated in as “pure” a way as possible.

This is not just a matter of static efficiency:

The health-care system has trapped many disruption-enabling technologies in high-cost institutions that have conflated two and often three business models under the same roof. The situation screams for business model innovation. The first wave of innovation must separate different business models into separate institutions whose resources, processes, and profit models are matched to the nature and degree of precision by which the disease is understood. Solution shops need to become focused so they can deliver and price the services of intuitive medicine accurately. Focused value-adding process hospitals need to absorb those procedures that general hospitals have historically performed after definitive diagnosis. And facilitated networks need to be cultivated to manage the care of many behavior-dependent chronic diseases. Solution shops and VAP hospitals can be created as hospitals-within-hospitals if done correctly.

Further Musings: Even apart from this application to health care, I have found the typology of solution shop, value-adding process and facilitated network very interesting to think about for understanding my own work life (as a complement to the kind of analysis I talked about in my post “Prioritization”).  

I work at the University of Michigan. Universities combine research–which is quintessentially a solution shop activity–with teaching, which has a big component of value-adding processes. And of course, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, where I put in effort as a blogger, are facilitated networks.

The idea of a value-adding process highlights the gains to be had from routinizing something. It is good to periodically ask oneself if there is anything in my daily activities that I can make more routine and streamlined.  

The idea of a facilitated network highlights the gains to be had by having users do a lot of the work. That in turn is related both to the benefits of laissez faire under a decent system of rules and the idea of delegation, which typically involves giving up some control at the detailed level.  

I find for me, however, that I love the “solution-shop” aspect of life so much that I think I resist routinization. I don’t know if this is what I should be doing, but I would rather keep thinking about how I am doing things than have everything fade into the background of routine. That does cost me extra time, as I do things inefficiently because I am thinking too much about them as I do them.  

Here is a link to a sub-blog of all of my posts tagged as being about Clay Christensen’s work

Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on Intuitive Medicine vs. Precision Medicine

I found the passage below from The Innovator’s Prescription (location 333), by Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang especially insightful. It puts diagnosis at the center of medicine, especially when viewing medicine from a business point of view. Better and better diagnosis opens up the possibility of more cost-efficient treatments for those diseases that are precisely identified. But that possibility must be seized.

Our bodies have a limited vocabulary to draw upon when they need to express that something is wrong. The vocabulary is comprised of physical symptoms, and there aren’t nearly enough symptoms to go around for all of the diseases that exist—so diseases essentially have to share symptoms. When a disease is only diagnosed by physical symptoms, therefore, a rules-based therapy for that diagnosis is typically impossible—because the symptom is typically just an umbrella manifestation of any one of a number of distinctly different disorders.

The technological enablers of disruption in health care are those that provide the ability to precisely diagnose by the cause of a patient’s condition, rather than by physical symptom. These technologies include molecular diagnostics, diagnostic imaging technology, and ubiquitous telecommunication. When precise diagnosis isn’t possible, then treatment must be provided through what we call intuitive medicine, where highly trained and expensive professionals solve medical problems through intuitive experimentation and pattern recognition. As these patterns become clearer, care evolves into the realm of evidence-based medicine, or empirical medicine—where data are amassed to show that certain ways of treating patients are, on average, better than others. Only when diseases are diagnosed precisely, however, can therapy that is predictably effective for each patient be developed and standardized. We term this domain precision medicine.

… disruption-enabling diagnostic technologies long ago shifted the care of most infectious diseases from intuitive medicine (when diseases were given labels such as “consumption”) to the realm of precision medicine (where they can be defined as precisely as different types of infection, different categories of lung disease, and so on). To the extent that we know what type of bacterium, virus, or parasite causes one of these diseases—and when we know the mechanism by which the infection propagates—predictably effective therapies can be developed—therapies that address the cause, not just the symptom. As a result, nurses can now provide care for many infectious diseases, and patients with these diseases rarely require hospitalization. Diagnostics technologies are enabling similar transformations, disease by disease, for families of much more complicated conditions that historically have been lumped into categories we have called cancer, hypertension, Type II diabetes, asthma, and so on.

When I was a kid, we talked about “curing cancer” as the prototypical world-shaking accomplishment. The reason there is no one “cure for cancer” is that cancer is not one disease but hundreds of different diseases involving different genes going awry in the direction of too much growth. A cure needs to be found for each one of those diseases in order for there to be a cure for the amorphous notion of “cancer.” Many of these diseases have been cured and others are well on their way to being cured. But other diseases under the general heading of “cancer” have not even been identified yet (in the sense of carefully distinguishing them from other diseases with similar symptoms). Once they have been identified at the level of the particular gene that goes awry to produce that particular disease, they will be halfway to being cured.

The term “personalized medicine” is sometimes used for what I would call “treating the disease someone actually has instead of some other disease.” A better phrase for that is the phrase Clay, Jerome and Jason use: “precision medicine.”

Quartz 49—>Will Narendra Modi’s Economic Reforms Put India on the Road to Being a Superpower?

Link to the Column on Quartz

Here is the full text of my 49th Quartz column, “Why you really want India to join the US and China as a superpower" now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on June 13, 2014. Links to all my other columns can be found here.

I kept my working title as the title of this companion post, since it better reflects the content of the column.

If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:

© June 13, 2014: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2017. All rights reserved.

Iraq joined Syria in civil war and Ukraine’s crisis persisted this week. And yet let me argue that this week’s most important geopolitical news is the economic program of India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Any increase in the chances for a full-scale supply-side transformation of India’s economy is cause to cheer for many reasons. First and foremost, faster economic growth in India would lift hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty. But its geopolitical significance should not be underestimated. India is the only nation that rivals China in its population–and is on track to surpass China’s population. As I wrote in a previous Quartz piece, “Benjamin Franklin’s strategy to make the US a superpower worked once, why not try it again?”:

The reason China’s economic rise matters for US grand strategy is that China has a much larger population than the United States. … if China has ¼ the per capita GDP, but four times as many people, its total GDP will be the same size. …  Power corrupts. So … it should surprise no one that the US has done some bad things as a superpower. Yet I am convinced that the combination of Chinese nationalism and “Communist” oligarchy—or the combination of Chinese nationalism with some tumultuous future political transition in China—would lead a dominant China to behave much worse than the US has.

I believe a future in which India joins China and the US as a superpower would be a safer world than one in which China and the United States are the only superpowers. News of Chinese saber-rattling over territorial disputes has become a commonplace in the last few years. Here is a recent example. And the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is a reminder of the ugliness of China’s politics now and the tough road China has ahead even in the best-case scenario in which it does become more democratic.

Narendra Modi’s own past is a reminder that India has its own political ugliness. He is the only person to ever have been denied a US visa based on a law designed to punish foreign officials for “severe violations of religious freedom,” since as the head of the Indian state of Gujarat, he failed to stop a Hindu vs. Muslim riot that left more than 1,000 people dead.

Yet, India has been a functioning democracy since 1950, with genuine handoffs of power between different political parties since 1977. And both the religious tensions Modi fatally mishandled and the welfare state he now challenges point to the orientation of Indian politics primarily toward domestic issues, rather than territorial disputes with neighboring countries. What ideological gap exists between the Indian electorate and the US electorate would be narrowed further if further economic liberalization in India is successful. So I do not worry about what India might do as a future superpower the way I worry about what China might do.

What does India’s new government plan to do to make the Indian economy as big as possible, as fast as possible? One key element of the policy address by India’s president Pranab Mukherjee earlier this week, reflecting the prime minister’s agenda, is to make making agricultural markets more competitive, so that farmers can get a better price for their crops. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Subsidies and make-work schemes discourage farmers from concentrating on maximizing yields. Under the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee Act, they are required to sell produce to monopolistic middlemen. As a result, much of India’s harvest rots before it gets to consumers, further driving up food prices.

The policy address outlines the rest of Modi’s agenda:

  1. “Minimum government, maximum governance;”
  2. “basic infrastructure such as roads, shelter, power and drinking water” in rural areas;
  3. helping farmers to farm better in order to raise yields;
  4. pursuing irrigation projects;
  5. more use of massively open online courses (MOOCs) for education with the most bang for the buck;
  6. toilets for everyone;
  7. garbage collection;
  8. making sure girls receive an education and are protected from violence;
  9. encouraging groups of states within India to cooperate on economic development;
  10. combating corruption with “transparent systems and timebound delivery of government services;”
  11. trying to eliminate “obsolete laws, regulations, administrative structures and practices;”
  12. digitization of government records;
  13. “Wi-Fi zones in critical public areas” and broad-band in every village;
  14. social media as a way of getting feedback about how government is doing;
  15. “rationalisation and simplification of the tax regime to make it non-adversarial and conducive to investment, enterprise and growth” including reducing taxation of saving and investment by shifting toward a value added tax;
  16. reducing red tape to “enhance the ease of doing business;”
  17. providing workers with “access to modern financial services;”
  18. creating “dedicated freight corridors and industrial corridors” as attractive destinations for investment;
  19. more airports and upgraded seaports;
  20. 100 newly developed cities;
  21. allowing more foreign investment in making military equipment to make this sector more efficient.

There is always a big gap between government promises and government performance. But this list of initiatives is remarkable for what it doesn’t emphasize. There is not much in the way of direct handouts. By contrast, I learned at a “Cashless Society” workshop, sponsored by New York University’s Urbanization Project, that under the previous Indian government, when government officials came to take the biometric measurements to make it possible to establish identitywithout needing an identity card, people were happy to cooperate because they see government officials coming to town as a sign that some new handout, subsidy, or goody is on the way.

Most of the things Modi’s government is promising are things that, if delivered, will foster the quantity and quality of private economic activity. To give just two examples, more toilets would not only reduce the number of girls who get raped while going out to the fields to relieve themselves, it would save those girls a lot of time every day that they could devote to their schoolwork. And pushing the educational system heavily in the direction of massively open online courses could speed India toward the kind of low-cost, effective education that ace management guru Clay Christensen and his coauthors predict is the future of education everywhere in the world.

The policy address by the new Indian government is also relatively sophisticated in realizing the obstacles to rolling out new policies. It recognizes that, as a practical matter, many things that need to be done for economic development need to be done at the level of Indian states or groups of Indian states, rather than at the national level. If some states are more willing to work with the national government to foster economic development than others, those states can move ahead faster, and hopefully at some point, citizens of the remaining states will insist on policies like the successful policies of neighboring states.

In a previous election, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began using the slogan “India Shining.” If the new Indian government is able to implement even half of its policy agenda, and subsequent Indian governments continue to push further along the road of supply-side improvement, it won’t be long before “India Shining” is no longer just a slogan. It will be an accurate description of the world’s newest superpower.

Populations of the Most Populous Nations. I found the population figures in Wikipedia’s “World population” for the most populous countries very interesting.

  • China: 1,364,970,000
  • India: 1,245,280,000
  • United States: 318,201,000
  • Indonesia: 247,008,052
  • Brazil: 201,032,714
  • Pakistan: 186,709,000
  • Nigeria: 173,615,000
  • Bangladesh: 152,518,015
  • Russia: 143,657,134
  • Japan: 127,180,000

I hadn’t realized that the US was the third most populous nation. All of Europe, including 110,000,000 in the European part of Russia, is only listed at 742,000,000. The reason it makes sense to focus on population figures is that catch-up economic growth up to the cutting-edge level of income per capita is much easier than the economic goal of the US of pushing income per capita to levels the world has never seen before for any large nation.

I was clued into India being headed for beating out China in overall population by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. It is a fat enough book that I am only partway through. And I am glad I am reading it on a Kindle.

Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Personal Computer Revolution

I saw the personal computer revolution firsthand. It all went down very fast. In December 1973, when I was 13, I got a chance to use a calculator for the first time. I was visiting my brother Christian Kimball (1, 2), who was then an undergraduate at Harvard; there was a calculator in one of the Harvard libraries that allowed me to do conversions between 3-dimensional radial coordinates of nearby stars to xyz coordinates so I could better understand the layout of our interstellar neighborhood. A year and half later, in 1975, I learned a little computer programming at an NSF supported math camp at Utah State University. In 1978 and 1979 I had to get special access to Harvard Business School computers in order to run some regressions. But in August 1983, I convinced my father (1, 2)  to help me buy a used Osborne “portable” computer. It wasn’t easy to learn to use, but I did ultimately write my Harvard Ph.D. program economic history paper “Farmer’s Cooperatives as Behavior Towards Risk” (which was ultimately published in the American Economic Review). In 1986 and 1987, when I wrote my dissertation, I was only able to manage to typeset all of the equations because my wife Gail was an ace scientific secretary with access to the needed computers and software. (After I convinced her to marry me and move to Massachusetts, she found a job working as a secretary first for professors at Harvard Business School and then later for Eric Maskin, Mike Whinston in the Economics Department.) But by Fall of 1987, as a new assistant professor at the University of Michigan, I could typeset equations myself using TeX (not yet LaTeX) on the new desktop computer the University of Michigan had given me.  

In The Innovator’s Prescription (location 316), Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang give this analytical account of the personal computer revolution:

Until the 1970s there were only a few thousand engineers in the world who possessed the expertise required to design mainframe computers, and it took deep expertise to operate them. The business model required to make and market these machines required gross profit margins of 60 percent just to cover the inherent overhead. The personal computer disrupted this industry by making computing so affordable and accessible that hundreds of millions of people could own and use computers.

The technological enabler of this disruption was the microprocessor, which so simplified the problems of computer design and assembly that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs could slap together an Apple computer in a garage. And Michael Dell could build them in his dorm room.

However, by itself, the microprocessor was not sufficient. IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) both had this technological enabler inside their companies, for example. DEC eschewed business model innovation and tried instead to commercialize the personal computer from within its minicomputer business model, a model that simply could not make money if computers were priced below $50,000. IBM, in contrast, set up an innovative business model in Florida, far from its mainframe and minicomputer business units in New York and Minnesota. In its PC business model, IBM could make money with low margins, low overhead costs, and high unit volumes. By coupling the technological and business model enablers, IBM transformed the computing industry and much of the world with it, while DEC was swept away.

And it wasn’t just the makers of expensive computers that were swept away. The systems of component and software suppliers, and the sales and service channels that had sustained the mainframe and minicomputer industries, were all disrupted by a new supporting cast of companies whose economics, technologies, and competitive rhythms matched those of the personal computer makers. An entire new value network displaced the old network.

The analogy Clay, Jerome and Jason draw to health care is that one need not despair when seeing how the bulk of health care providers are set up to do things in a very expensive way. As long as we don’t let regulations smother new providers, doing things in new, less expensive ways–though perhaps at first in somewhat lower quality ways–there is hope. (See “Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Agenda for the Transformation of Health Care” and “Tyler Cowen: Regulations Hinder Development of Driverless Cars.”)

Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on How the History of Other Industries Gives Hope for Health Care

Things start hard and then get easier. This can be true even for health care. Here are the examples that Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang give in The Innovator’s Prescription:

The problems facing the health-care industry actually aren’t unique. The products and services offered in nearly every industry, at their outset, are so complicated and expensive that only people with a lot of money can afford them, and only people with a lot of expertise can provide or use them. Only the wealthy had access to telephones, photography, air travel, and automobiles in the first decades of those industries. Only the rich could own diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds, and paid handsome fees to professionals who had the expertise to buy and sell those securities. Quality higher education was limited to the wealthy who could pay for it and the elite professors who could provide it. And more recently, mainframe computers were so expensive and complicated that only the largest corporations and universities could own them, and only highly trained experts could operate them. (We will come back to this last example, below.)

It’s the same with health care. Today, it’s very expensive to receive care from highly trained professionals. Without the largesse of well-heeled employers and governments that are willing to pay for much of it, most health care would be inaccessible to most of us.

At some point, however, these industries were transformed, making their products and services so much more affordable and accessible that a much larger population of people could purchase them, and people with less training could competently provide them and use them. We have termed this agent of transformation disruptive innovation. It consists of three elements (shown in Figure I.1). Technological enabler. Typically, sophisticated technology whose purpose is to simplify, it routinizes the solution to problems that previously required unstructured processes of intuitive experimentation to resolve. Business model innovation. Can profitably deliver these simplified solutions to customers in ways that make them affordable and conveniently accessible. Value network. A commercial infrastructure whose constituent companies have consistently disruptive, mutually reinforcing economic models.

Using some terminology Clay Christensen uses in all of his books, the key problem with health care is that so much of it is set up on the “solution shop” business model. The “solution shop” business model is familiar to academics in research universities because the kind of research done in academic is almost always done in a solution-shop way, by specialized crafting of ways to get a scientific job done. The only way to make health care significantly cheaper is to routinize and “deskill” or at least “downskill” much of it so that the job for at least the easy cases can be done in a way that is more in the spirit of mass-production: as a “value-added process.”

Tyler Cowen: Regulations Hinder Development of Driverless Cars →

Here is a key passage from Tyler Cowen’s 2011 piece on driverless cars that applies to a lot more than driverless cars:

The point is not that such cars could be on the road in large numbers tomorrow, but that we ought to give the cars — and other potential innovations — a fair shot so that a prototype can become a commercial product someday. Michael Mandel, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, compares government regulation of innovation to the accumulation of pebbles in a stream. At some point too many pebbles block off the water flow, yet no single pebble is to blame for the slowdown. Right now the pebbles are limiting investment in future innovation.

The lesson here is the one I emphasized in my post yesterday, “Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Agenda for the Transformation of Health Care”: allowing experimentation with innovations that at first seem like lower quality ways to do things (except for their cost and convenience) is crucial to many of the economic transformations that will do the most to improve overall standards of living. Needing a path through what seems at first like lower quality is exactly what Clay Christensen means when he says that an innovation is “disruptive.” Driverless cars provide a wonderful example. Ultimately, driverless cars will be much safer than human-driven cars, since it is unlikely that the overall skill and care of human drivers will dramatically improve from where it is now, while computers and sensors for cars can continue to get better and better and better. But we will get to those driverless cars that dominate human-driven cars in all respects (except for those who find driving recreational) if right now we allow driverless cars on the road that are better than human-driven cars in some respects and worse (within reason) in other respects.

I am saying that, because they are likely to ultimately be much safer that driverless cars should be allowed even if at first they are somewhat less safe, but in fact the relevant situation is more like this. At some point driverless cars will have a good safety performance in small-scale tests, but there will be some uncertainty about how they will do in substantial numbers in real world situations on the road. Even if at that point they would in fact have a better safety record if allowed on the road, opponents will argue that the uncertainty about how they will do means they should be banned. Such a ban–and its counterparts in other domains–are a very effective method to  slow down technological progress.

Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Agenda for the Transformation of Health Care

As I said in my post “Saint Clay," I plan to feature the work of Clay Christensen and his coauthors in a slow, thoroughgoing, methodical way, much as I have featured John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Because of its urgency in the policy debate, I will start with Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang’s book, "The Innovator’s Prescription.” Here is how they lay out their agenda in the introduction to the book:

  1. The growth in health-care spending in the United States regularly outpaces the growth of the overall economy. Over the last 35 years, while the nation’s spending on all goods and services has risen at an average annual rate of 7.2 percent, the amount spent on health care has grown at a rate of 9.8 percent.1 As a consequence, an increasing proportion of Americans simply cannot afford adequate care. Many efforts to contain overall costs have the effect of making care inaccessible on a convenient and timely basis for all of us—even for those who can pay for it.
  2. Second, if federal government spending remains a relatively constant percentage of GDP, the rising cost of Medicare within that budget will crowd out all other spending except defense within 20 years.
  3. The third factor that engenders fear is that the burden of covering the costs of health care for employees, retirees, and their families is forcing some of America’s most economically important companies to become uncompetitive in world markets. Health-care costs add over $1,500 to the cost of every car our automakers sell, for example.
  4. The fourth frightening factor, about which few people are aware, is that if governments were forced to report on their financial statements the liabilities they face resulting from contractual commitments to provide health care for retired employees, nearly every city and town in the United States would be bankrupt. There is no way for them to pay for what they are obligated to pay, except by denying funding for schools, roads, and public safety, or by raising taxes to extreme levels.

What can be done? It isn’t easy:

Those fighting for reform have few weapons for systemic change. Most can only work on improving the cost and efficacy of their piece of the system. There are very few system architects among these forces that have the scope and power of a commanding general to reconfigure the elements of the system.
Perhaps most discouraging of all, however, is that there is no credible map of the terrain ahead that reformers agree upon and trust. They are armed with data about the past, and they have become accustomed to reaching consensus for action when the data are conclusive. But because there are no data about the future, there is no map available to convincingly show these reformers which of the pathways ahead of them lead to a dead end and which constitute a promising road to reform. And few have a sense for the interconnectedness of these pathways. As the prophet of Proverbs said, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
So why this book? There is little dispute that we need a system that is competitive, responsive, and consumer-driven, with clear metrics of value per dollar being spent.9 Our hope is that The Innovator’s Prescription can provide a road map for those seeking innovation and reform—an accurate description of the terrain ahead, about which data are not yet available. Much of today’s political dialogue on health-care reform centers on how to pay for the cost of health care in the future. This book offers the other half of the equation: how to innovate to reduce costs and improve the quality and accessibility of care. We don’t simply ask how we can afford health care. We show how to make it affordable—less costly and of better quality.

To preview the main message, the number one policy in order to foster progress in most any area is to make sure that new entrants, who may initially do things worse in some dimensions, but more cheaply or more conveniently than the established incumbents, have a chance to gain a foothold in the market. Then what the new entrants do has a chance to improve in quality until in the end they bring down prices even at high quality, just as personal computers, which initially were not very good, became more powerful–as well as less expensive and more convenient–than the mainframes of old (only to be challenged in turn by smartphones and tablets).

One possible reaction to this would be to object to the idea of having anyone get medical care that is cheaper and more convenient, but is otherwise of somewhat worse quality. But the result of acting as if cost does not matter is the startling fact discussed in "Another Quality Control Failure on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page?“ that real after-tax, after-transfer income for the poorest 20% of the population has increased by 49% since 1979. As the title of my post suggests, I thought this was a mistake. But it is not. What the Congressional Budget Office did to come up with this number was to count as part of after-tax, after-transfer income the full cost of both medical care paid for by employers and medical care paid for by the government (much of it through Medicaid). If you don’t feel that the poorest 20% of the population is as much better off since 1979 as a 49% increase in income would suggest, it is an indication that all of that money spent on medical care has not gotten the value that one would think it should have been able to purchase.

Our current medical system has too few good paths for finding ways to do things more cheaply and conveniently. If we block all paths that lead even temporarily through a region of lower cost at lower quality and greater convenience, the next 35 years may see another 49% increase in the after-tax, after-transfer income of the bottom 20% of the population that hardly feels like an improvement in living standards at all, as we head toward more and more expensive medicine that is only marginally better in quality. Alternatively, we can allow disruptive innovation that will get much better quality, much lower cost and much greater convenience 35 years from now if we avoid crushing in their infancy ways of doing things that right now are much cheaper and more convenient, but slightly lower in other dimensions of quality.

Right now, many people would gladly choose lower expense and greater convenience for some types of medical care even at slightly lower quality in other dimensions, if they were allowed (by any of half of dozen different possible mechanisms) to get a true signal about the actual tradeoffs that society faces in this regard. Too often, discussion about these tradeoffs only points out the static welfare gains from helping people to incorporate the cost of various types of health care into their decisions. I am persuaded by Clay, Jerome and Jason’s arguments that the dynamic gains are much more important.

Saint Clay

Update: Here is a link to my sub-blog of posts about Clay’s work. 

There are many Supply-Side Liberal Heroes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and with some additional fortitude, 7), but up until now, there was only one declared Supply-Side Liberal saint: Adam Smith, the Patron Saint of Supply-Side Liberalism. (Since July 30, 2012 no one has ventured a serious devil’s advocate case about Adam Smith.) Today, I want to declare another: Clay Christensen. To be a Supply-Side Liberal Saint, one must be both a Supply-Side Liberal hero and of unimpeachable character.

From conversations, I have found that Clay Christensen is not well known among economists, but he should be. First of all, in our sister field of business, Clay is at the very top. For example, in November 2013, Clay won the award for top management thinker in the world for the second time in a row in the once-every-two-years Thinkers50 award. Andrew Hill described it this way in the Financial Times: 

But the climax was Thinkers50′s “Best Picture” award – for the management thinker judged most influential – which went to Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and perhaps the nicest man ever to lecture at Harvard Business School.

Second, Clay’s theory of disruptive innovation counts as powerful economic theory that explains much about the world we live in. There is a rigor to it that goes far beyond all the other bits of management theory I have encountered. But it is reading his books that will convince you. Here is not only great insight, but also helpful approaches to many of our most pressing problems. In the last few months I have devoured this much of his body of work:

All of that is enough to make Clay a hero, but how does Clay pass the devil’s advocate’s gauntlet to be made a saint? That is, how can I be so confident I won’t be embarrassed by a future revelation about some skeleton in Clay’s closet? First, as you can see from the quotation above, many people think Clay is one of the nicest men they have ever met. I am among them. Back in 1977, when I was headed to Harvard as a freshman, and Clay was headed to the first year of his MBA program,  I carpooled across the country from Utah with him, and then stayed with him for a week or so until I could get into my new dorm room. That time with Clay made an unforgettable impression on me. I had no idea how eminent he would become, but I knew how good he was. I have hardly seen Clay since then, and haven’t had any serious conversations with Clay since 1977, but other observers (including my daughter, Diana, who was a student in his class in the second year of her MBA program) still attest to his goodness. And I have the advantage of the vetting he has undergone for relatively high office in the Mormon church, which screens for many types (though not all types) of sins.

In the coming months (which may stretch into years given the volume of his work) I plan to feature the work of Clay and his coauthors in a slow, thoroughgoing, methodical way, much as I have featured John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Like On Liberty, Clay’s work is worth cutting to pieces–blog-post-sized morsels, ready for delectation.

Schumpeter: Digital Disruption on the Farm | The Economist →

It is always good to see real-world examples of technology shocks. Here are some key excerpts from this article:

Farmers can be among the most hidebound of managers, so it is no surprise that they are nervous about a new idea called prescriptive planting, which is set to disrupt their business. In essence, it is a system that tells them with great precision which seeds to plant and how to cultivate them in each patch of land. …

Prescriptive planting is catching on fast. …

The benefits are clear. Farmers who have tried Monsanto’s system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5% over two years, a feat no other single intervention could match. The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America’s maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushels—giving a terrific boost to growers’ meagre margins. …

Farmers might be expected to have mixed feelings about the technology anyway: although it boosts yields, it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farming—their core competence. However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method. They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused. Their commercial secrets could be sold, or leak to rival farmers; the prescriptive-planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms and run them in competition with the farmers; or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets, to the detriment of farmers who sell into those markets.

I view aggregate technology shocks as primarily representing the steep part of an S-shaped adoption curve for a technology. As such, most aggregate technology shocks should be predictable in advance if the natural logarithms of [(market share/ (1 - market share)]  for promising techniques are graphed against time. (Such graphs are something Clay Christensen and coauthors recommend to predict the future course of disruptive innovations. Watch for my post on Clay Christensen, tomorrow morning, at half-past midnight EDT.)

 

Robert Graboyes on Enabling Supply-Side Innovation in Health Care

When my column “Don’t Believe Anyone Who Claims to Understand the Economics of Obamacare” appeared, Robert Graboyes sent me a link to his October 2, 2013 post in the Mercatus Center’s “McClatchy Tribune” blog also emphasizing the importance of innovation: “Paging Dr. Jobs.” (Here is a link to the article in the Dallas Morning News.) I liked it so much I asked to reprint it here. He kindly gave me permission. Here it is. One action Robert caused me to take is that I bought the Kindle edition of  “The Innovator’s Prescription” by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang.

American health care has no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. No Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Burt Rutan, or Henry Ford. No innovator whose genius and sweat deliver the twin lightning bolts of cost-reduction and quality improvement across the broad landscape of health care. Why not? Either we answer that question soon and uncork the genie, or we consign our health care to a prolonged, unaffordable stagnation.

America leads the world in health-care innovation — but not the innovation that sends costs plunging and unleashes previously undreamed-of quality improvements. That kind of innovation occurs only in isolated pockets of health care. In the aggregate, health care spending rises rapidly and relentlessly.

If implemented as planned, the Affordable Care Act ensures the health-care industry will never have the flexibility it needs to generate a Steve Jobs. Tightly constricted, top-down micromanagement will deprive health care of the oxygen essential to attract and incentivize cost-cutting innovators. This suffocating environment predated the ACA, but the law worsens things considerably by tightly controlling providers, patients, and employers.

Unfortunately, advocates of decentralized, market-oriented approaches have never offered the electorate convincing alternatives to centralized, bureaucratic command and control.

If the ACA crumbles, market-oriented health care reformers have one more chance to articulate a vision. A quick Internet search already churns up chatter (some gleeful, some mournful) about replacing a failed ACA with a single-payer system. Decentralizers will need to formulate and articulate — quickly — why American health care never produces a Steve Jobs and how markets could usher in cost-cutting innovation. Importantly, their narratives would need to ring true to people who are not already persuaded that markets can function in health care.

To illustrate the conceptual and rhetorical rut we are in, imagine if people in early 1964 had discussed computers the way we in 2013 discuss health care. (At that time, computers were mostly room-size mainframes costing millions in 2013 dollars, at least). Discussing computers as we today discuss health care, all the parties in 1964 would agree there is a “computer crisis” — out-of-control prices, a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Only rich companies, they fret, can afford computers.

Some would offer an array of solutions: The government could become the sole manufacturer of mainframes. Alternatively, the government could become the sole purchaser of mainframes — using its great market clout to force IBM to sell its mainframes for, say, $950,000 rather than $1 million. Or the government could tightly regulate mainframe manufacturers — prohibiting them, say, from charging more than $900,000 for a computer.

Others, conversely, would argue that the answer to the hypothetical computer crisis is a more open market. We need more stores, they say, in which to buy mainframes. Mainframe stores in every shopping mall — and a greater capacity to buy and sell mainframes across state lines.

Apolitical business end-users would seek to band together in purchasing cooperatives — demanding as one that IBM moderate its mainframe prices.

Meanwhile, the industry would still be mainframes, mainframes, mainframes all the way down. No minis, micros, laptops, or smartphones. In fact, in our allegorical world of 1964, everyone would agree to laws and regulations and institutions that virtually forbid the emergence of a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.

Let’s return, now, to 2013 and health care. To unleash innovators, we have to recognize what leashes them in the first place. Consider some candidates: Medicare’s reimbursement formula muffles prices and distorts resource allocation in ways that impact private insurance. Tax laws effectively bind employees to their employers’ health plans. State regulations protect insiders through scope-of-practice regulations, protectionist licensing, and certificate-of-need requirements. The structure of medical education (heavily influenced by state regulations) locks obsolete management practices in place. Tort law discourages heterodox innovation. Even more challenging, fixing one of these at a time may not do the trick.

Building the case for market solutions in health care, then, demands that market advocates think large. For inspiration, they should look beyond their usual array of reading sources. Cost-cutting innovation, also known as “disruptive innovation” is brilliantly described in “The Innovator’s Prescription” by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang.

A key insight from that literature is that cost-cutting innovation almost always comes from the supply side, not the demand side. It emerges from the protean genius of previously unknown people who see our wishes and hopes before we ourselves do. Tellingly, most of today’s policy prescriptions from the left, right, and center focus on the demand-side incentives. But the problem is that consumers can’t visualize what the disruptive innovations in health care will be — any more than they could have known in 1964 how the laptop, smartphone, and internet would soon restructure their lives.

Message to market enthusiasts: The clock is ticking. One more chance to get health care right may be in the offing. There’s no time to waste. And you had best learn to persuade those who don’t already agree with you.

Clay Christensen, Jeffrey Flier and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan on How to Make Health Care More Cost Effective

Clay Christensen, Jeffrey Flier and Vineeta Vijaraghavan argue in their Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Coming Failure of Accountable Care” a few days ago that Obamacare’s “accountable care organizations” will have trouble changing doctors’ behavior in the dramatic ways envisioned. They will have even more trouble changing patients’ behavior, since accountable care organizations provide few incentives for patients to change their behavior.  

In the debates over health care reform, advocates of Obamacare have made a great deal of the lower per-patient costs of medical care in other advanced countries. Those lower per-patient costs of medical care in other advanced countries have a lot to do with lower pay for doctors and other medical-care providers. If something on the Obamacare model  succeeds in lowering medical costs significantly, I suspect it will be because it forces down doctors’ pay, as government budget constraints lead to tighter and tighter price controls.

Clay, Jeffrey and Vineeta’s list of recommendations would instead use market liberalization to lower the amount paid for medical services. Here is their prescription:  

• Consider opportunities to shift more care to less-expensive venues, including, for example, “Minute Clinics” where nurse practitioners can deliver excellent care and do limited prescribing. New technology has made sophisticated care possible at various sites other than acute-care, high-overhead hospitals.

• Consider regulatory and payment changes that will enable doctors and all medical providers to do everything that their license allows them to do, rather than passing on patients to more highly trained and expensive specialists.

• Going beyond current licensing, consider changing many anticompetitive regulations and licensure statutes that practitioners have used to protect their guilds. An example can be found in states like California that have revised statutes to enable highly trained nurses to substitute for anesthesiologists to administer anesthesia for some types of procedures.

• Make fuller use of technology to enable more scalable and customized ways to manage patient populations. These include home care with patient self-monitoring of blood pressure and other indexes, and far more widespread use of “telehealth,” where, for example, photos of a skin condition could be uploaded to a physician. Some leading U.S. hospitals have created such outreach tools that let them deliver care to Europe. Yet they can’t offer this same benefit in adjacent states because of U.S. regulation.

Free market advocates have been calling for such approaches for some time. Doctors have understandably lobbied for a continuation of market restrictions that boost their pay. Now that doctors face reduced pay under budget pressures created by Obamacare as well, such market liberalization in medical care may begin to seem like the lesser of two evils for doctors. And it could be a great boon to the rest of us.

For the record, here is my position on health care reform, quoted from my post “Evan Soltas on Medical Reform Federalism–in Canada”: 

Let’s abolish the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance, with all of the money that would have been spent on this tax exemption going instead to block grants for each state to use for its own plan to provide universal access to medical care for its residents.

This recommendation is based on what I said in my first post about health care, “Health Economics”:

I am slow to post about health care because I don’t know the answers. But then I don’t think anyone knows the answers. There are many excellent ideas for trying to improve health care, but we just don’t know how different changes will work in practice at the level of entire health care systems.

The more the Washington encourages a diversity of approaches to health care, the more we will learn about what works. On the other hand, the more Washington does to force health care policy into the same mold in each state, the more likely it is that we will only learn one thing at the systems-level: that the first try in the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work very well.