New Things Under the Sun

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...

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 Pe...

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:/...

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...

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 techno...

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 machin...

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 t...

A huge quantity of academic research that seeks to understand how science works relies on citation counts to measure the value of knowledge created by scientists. This measure of scientific impact is so deeply embedded in the literature that it's absolutely crucial to know if it’s reliable. So today I want to look at a few recent articles that look into this foundational question: are citatio...

An old divide in the study of innovation is whether ideas come primarily from individual/group creativity, or whether they are “in the air”, so that anyone with the right set of background knowledge will be able to see them. In this episode, I look at how much redundancy there is in innovation: if the discoverer of some idea had failed to find it, would someone else have figured it out later? This...

A basket of indicators all seem to document a similar trend. Even as the number of scientists and publications rises substantially, we do not appear to be seeing a concomitant rise in new discoveries that supplant older ones. Science is getting harder. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial draft of the) post Science is getting harder , published on New Things Under the Sun . Articl...

We all know the proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention.” This proverb is overly simplistic, but it gets at something true. One place you can see this really clearly is in global crises, which vividly illustrate the linkage between need and innovation, without the need for any fancy statistical techniques. Let’s look at three examples. This is an audio read through of the (initial version of...

New scientific research topics can sometimes face a chicken-and-egg problem. Professional success requires a critical mass of scholars to be active in a field, so that they can serve as open-minded peer reviewers and can validate (or at least cite!) new discoveries. Without that critical mass,undefined working on a new topic topic might be professionally risky . But if everyone thinks this way, th...

Evolution via natural selection is a really good explanation for how we gradually got successively more complex biological organisms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there have long been efforts to apply the same general mechanism to the development of ever more complex technologies. One domain where this has been studied a bit is in computer programming. Let’s take a look at that literature to see how we...

If you want to shape the direction of technology, you can try to pull the kinds of technology you want into existence by shaping how markets will receive different kinds of technology. One specific context where we have some really nice evidence about the efficacy of pull policies is the automobile market. Making fuel more expensive or just flat out mandating carmakers meet certain emissions stand...

There’s this idea that technology is characterized by path dependency: once you start going down one technology trajectory, you kind of get locked in and it’s hard to switch to another, possibly better trajectory. That can happen for lots of reasons, but one possibility is that it’s something about the nature of knowledge itself. The more you know, the more you can learn: knowledge begets more kno...

It might seem obvious that we want bold new ideas in science. But in fact, really novel work poses a tradeoff. While novel ideas might sometimes be much better than the status quo, they might usually be much worse. Moreover, it is hard to assess the quality of novel ideas because they’re so, well, novel. Existing knowledge is not as applicable to sizing them up. For those reasons, it might be bett...

We can say very little about the long-run outlook of technological change, and even less about the exact form such change might take. But a certain class of models of innovation - models of combinatorial innovation - does provide some insight about how technological progress may look over very long time frames. Let’s have a look. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the...

Suppose we think there should be more research on some topic: asteroid deflection, the efficacy of social distancing, building safe artificial intelligence, etc. How do we get scientists to work more on the topic? This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article , published on New Things Under the Sun .  Articles mentioned: Myers, Kyle. 2020. The Elasticity of Science....

Publication bias is when academic journals make publication of a paper contingent on the results obtained. How big of an issue is this really? This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Publication Bias is Real , published on New Things Under the Sun . Articles mentioned: Frankel, Alexander and Maximilian Kasy. Forthcoming. Which findings should be published? Ame...

Two studies suggest the social sciences have bigger problems with publication bias than do the biological sciences, which tend to have more problems than the hard sciences. Why? This podcast is a read through of the (initial version of the) article Why is publication bias worse in some fields than others? , published on New Things Under the Sun . Articles mentioned: Fanelli, Daniele, Rodrigo Costa...

One of the most influential economics of innovation papers from the last decade is “ Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find ” by Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb, ultimately published in 2020 but in earlier draft circulation for years. While the paper is ostensibly concerned with testing a prediction of some economic growth models, it’s broader fame is attributable to it’s documentation of a striking...

Publication bias can distort our picture of scientific evidence. One plausible solution to publication bias is to create a home for work that for, whatever reason, struggles to find a home in a good journal. Would that work? One place to get some evidence on this is to look at our experience with preprint servers. This podcast is a read through of the (initial version of the) article Publication b...

 It’s long been assumed that the best sorts of innovation happen when smart people work in an environment where spontaneous face-to-face interaction is the norm. Importantly, if that’s true, it implies the widespread transition to more remote work - where spontaneous face-to-face interaction is not possible - poses a threat to innovation. In this podcast, I want to look at a case study for a secto...

The universe of knowledge is vast. Is there any rhyme or reason to searching through it? What kind of knowledge is most likely to be useful for an innovator? This is a big literature, but today I want to look at three papers that use different metrics to suggest knowledge which is distinct but close to your existing knowledge tends to be most useful. This is an audio read through of the (initial v...

Getting an academic field to change its ways is hard. But it does happen. And I think changes in the field of economics are a good illustration of some of the dynamics that make that possible. This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article How a field fixes itself: the applied turn in economics , published on New Things Under the Sun . Articles mentioned: Leamer, Edw...