New Things Under the Sun

What’s the return on government funding for research? There are a few places in the academic literature you can look to for insight. Jones and Summers (2021) uses a hypothetical thought experiment to make the case that, on average, every dollar of R&D spent probably generates several dollars in benefits via its long-run impact on economic growth (see What are the returns to R&D? for more d...

Which kind of inventor (or scientist) is going to benefit more from artificial intelligence: novices or experts? In theory, it can go either way. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Do prediction technologies help novices or experts more? , originally published on New Things Under the Sun . Articles Cited Nagaraj, Abhishek. 2021. The private impact of publ...

Some inventions and discoveries make the inventive process itself more efficient. One such class of invention is the prediction technology. These can take a lot of forms. AI is one example of a technology that can help scientists and inventors make better predictions about what is worth trying as a candidate solution to a problem, but as we’ll see, there are many other kinds of prediction technolo...

New Things Under the Sun is once again putting together a list of dissertation papers related to innovation. If you want your paper to be included, email the title, an abstract, and a link to the paper, to matt@newthingsunderthesun.com by the end of November. In this post, coauthored with Caroline Fry, we look at the evidence on the effects of training programs for scientists in lower and middle i...

The frequency of words associated with "progress" in English, German, and French books rose during the era of industrialization, but is down since the 1950s, at least according to google. Is this a signal of declining cultural interest in progress, as a concept? Or just an artifact of how google constructed its text corpus? This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of...

Prior to the 2000s, many European countries practiced something called “the professor’s privilege” wherein university professors retained patent rights to inventions they made while employed at the university. This was a “privilege” because the norm is for patent ownership to be assigned to the organization that employs an inventor; professors were an exception to this norm. American universities,...

A classic topic in the study of innovation is the link between physical proximity and the exchange of ideas. But I’ve long been interested in a relatively new kind of serendipity engine, which isn’t constrained by physical proximity: Twitter. Lots of academics use twitter to talk about new discoveries and research. Today I want to look at whether twitter serves as a novel kind of knowledge diffusi...

Note: Economists typically think that labor and capital are complementary - more of the one makes the other more productive. But there’s a flourishing literature that looks at the consequences of capital that replaces, rather than augments, human workers. In this post, I want to talk about a very simple equation that is inspired by the ideas in these papers, and which I think is a useful thinking...

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 zero Patents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between pa...

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 zero Patents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between pa...

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 zero Patents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between pa...

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 zero Patents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between pa...

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 h...

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 star...

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’ su...

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 scien...

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 expl...

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 innova...

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...

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...

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...

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, thoug...

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...

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 institu...