Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun. How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun. How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun. How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun. How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on...

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few centuries, but much of that progress is still limited to the richest countries. Why don't new technologies spread quickly throughout the world, benefiting billions of people? In this podcast, we’ll focus on one particular answer: new technologies improve productivity, but they improve productivity more when paired with knowledge on how to use them. If this is true, new technologies will be less beneficial to recipients who don’t have...

Correction: In this podcast, I misspoke towards the end and referred to Eesley and Lee (2020) as Eesley and Wang (a 2017 paper I wrote about earlier here). Apologies to the authors. A lot of particularly interesting innovation happens at startups. Suppose we want more of this. One way we could try to get more is by giving entrepreneurship training to people who are likely to found innovative startups. Does that work? This post takes a look at some meta-analyses on the effects of...

Here’s a striking fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine also had a Nobel prize winner as their academic advisor.undefined What accounts for this extraordinary transmission rate of scientific excellence? In this podcast I’ll focus one potential explanation: what do we know about how innovative teachers influence their students, and their students’ subsequent innovative career? I’ll focus on two strands of literatures: roughly speaking, how...

Much of the world’s population lives in countries in which little research happens. Is this a problem? According to classical economic models of the “ideas production function,” ideas are universal; ideas developed in one place are applicable everywhere.  This is probably true enough for some contexts; but not all. In this post we’ll look at four domains - agriculture, health, the behavioral sciences, and program evaluation research - where new discoveries do not seem to have universal...

This week, Arnaud Dyèvre (@ArnaudDyevre) and I follow up on a previous podcast, where we documented a puzzle: larger firms conduct R&D at the same rate as smaller firms, despite getting fewer (and more incremental) innovations per R&D dollar. Why wouldn’t firms decelerate their research spending as the return on R&D apparently declines? In this follow-up podcast, we look at one explanation: firms of different sizes face different incentives when it comes to innovation. This...

How do academic researchers decide what to work on?  Part of it comes down to what you judge to be important and valuable; and that can come from exposure to problems in your local community. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article "Geography and What Gets Researched", originally published on New Things Under the Sun.

Most of the time, we think of innovation policy as a problem of how to accelerate desirable forms of technological progress. But there are other times when we may wish to actively slow technological progress. The AI pause letter is a recent example, but less controversial examples abound. A lot of energy policy acts as a brake on the rate of technological advance in conventional fossil fuel innovation. Geopolitical rivals often seek to impede the advance of rivals’ military technology. Today...

This is not the usual podcast on New Things Under the Sun. For the third issue of Asterisk Magazine, Tamay Besiroglu and I were asked to write an article on how likely it is that artificial intelligence will lead to not just faster economic growth, but explosive economic growth. (Tamay will introduce himself in a minute here). Since we wrote that article as a literal dialogue, we thought it would be fun to also record ourselves performing the parts we wrote for ourselves and that is what...

We’ve got something new this week! This is post, which is on how the size of firms is related to the kind of innovation they do, is the first ever collaboration published on New Things Under the Sun. My coauthor is Arnaud Dyèvre (@ArnaudDyevre), a PhD student at the London School of Economics working on growth and the economic returns to publicly funded R&D. Going into this post, Arnaud knew this literature better than me and drew up an initial reading plan. We iterated on that for...

Innovation has, historically, been pretty good for humanity. But technology is just a tool, and tools can be used for good or evil purposes. So far, technology has skewed towards “good” rather than evil but there are some reasons to worry things may differ in the future. What does science and technology policy look like in a world where we can no longer assume that more innovation generally leads to more human flourishing? It’s hard to say too much about such an abstract question, but a...

Scientific peer review is widely used as a way to distribute scarce resources in academic science, whether those are scarce research dollars or scarce journal pages. At the same time, peer review has several potential short-comings. One alternative is to empower individuals to make decisions about how to allocate scientific resources. Indeed, we do this with journal editors and grant makers, though generally in consultation with peer review. Under what conditions might we expect individuals...

People rag on peer review a lot (including, occasionally, New Things Under the Sun). Yet it remains one of the most common ways to allocate scientific resources, whether those be R&D dollars or slots in journals. Is this all a mistake? Or does peer review help in its purported goal to identify the science most likely to have an impact and hence, perhaps most deserving of some of those limited scientific resources? A simple way to check is to compare peer review scores to other metrics of...

A frequent worry is that our scientific institutions are risk-averse and shy away from funding transformative research projects that are high risk, in favor of relatively safe and incremental science. Why might that be? Let’s start with the assumption that high-risk, high-reward research proposals are polarizing: some people love them, some hate them. If this is true, and if our scientific institutions pay closer attention to bad reviews than good reviews, then that could be a driver of risk...

Talent is spread equally over the planet, but opportunity is not. Today I want to look at some papers that try to quantify the costs to science and innovation from barriers to immigration. Specifically, let’s look at a set of papers on what happens to individuals with the potential to innovate when they immigrate versus when they do not. (See my post Importing Knowledge for some discussion on the impact of immigration on native scientists and inventors) This podcast is an audio read through...

Are there some kinds of discoveries that are easier to make when young, and some that are easier to make when older? This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Age and the Nature of Innovation, originally published on New Things Under the Sun. Articles Mentioned: Yu, Huifeng, Gerald Marschke, Matthew B. Ross, Joseph Staudt and Bruce Weinberg. 2022. Publish or Perish: Selective Attrition as a Unifying Explanation for Patterns in Innovation over the Career....

Scientists are getting older. Is this a problem? What’s the relationship between age and innovation? This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Age and the Impact of Innovations, originally published on New Things Under the Sun. Articles Mentioned Cui, Haochuan, Lingfei Wu, and James A. Evans. 2022. Aging Scientists and Slowed Advance. arXiv 2202.04044. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.04044 Jones, Benjamin, E.J. Reedy, and Bruce A. Weinberg. 2014. Age...

Suppose in some parallel universe history proceeded down a quite different path from our own, shortly after Homo sapiens evolved. If we fast forward to 2022 of that universe, how different would the technological stratum of that parallel universe be from our own? Would they have invented the wheel? Steam engines? Railroads? Cars? Computers? Internet? Social media? Or would their technologies rely on principles entirely alien to us? In other words, once humans find themselves in a place where...

Remote work seems to be well suited for some kinds of knowledge work, but it’s less clear that it’s well suited for the kind of collaborative creativity that results in breakthrough innovations. A series of new papers suggests breakthrough innovation by distributed teams has traditionally been quite difficult, but also that things have changed, possibly dramatically, as remote collaboration technology has improved. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial draft of the) post...

These are weird times. On the one hand, scientific and technological progress seem to be getting harder. Add to that slowing population growth, and it’s possible economic growth over the next century or two might slow to a halt. On the other hand, one area where we seem to be observing rapid technological progress is in artificial intelligence. If that goes far enough, it’s easy to imagine machines being able to do all the things human inventors and scientists do, possibly better than us....

For decades, the office was the default way to organize workers, but that default is being re-examined. Many workers (including me) prefer working remotely, and seem to be at least as productive working remotely as they are in the office. Remote capable organizations can hire from a bigger pool of workers than is available locally. All in all, remote work seems to have been underrated, relative to just a few years ago. But there are tradeoffs. I’ve written before that physical proximity seems...