Institute for Progress (IFP) — August 2024 Update
Some big announcements this month:
We're hiring! Join our editorial team, or recommend a friend. If we hire them, we’ll pay you a $3,000 referral bounty.
Willy Chertman joined our team as a Biotechnology Fellow. Willy is a medical doctor by training and most recently worked in Senator Todd Young’s office.
✍️ Written Work
In a new paper, Distinguished Immigration Counsel Amy Nice and Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld join GMU Professor Michael Clemens to examine a little-known restriction on skilled foreign professionals:
“Over the last decade, an average of between 35,000 and 44,000 high-skill visitors per year have been subject to the home residency requirement via the Skills List. Despite the stated purpose of the List, these restrictions fall more heavily on relatively advanced economies than on the poorest countries. We describe how a proposed revision to the List can address key concerns.”
Co-founder Alec Stapp, Biotechnology Fellow Arielle D’Souza, Non-Resident Senior Fellow Chris Snyder, and Dartmouth Professor Kendall Hoyt published a new NBER working paper on Operation Warp Speed:
“Operation Warp Speed (OWS) cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a year after launch. OWS’s success has led to calls for a similar mission model to accelerate innovations addressing other pressing social needs, including a cure for Alzheimer’s disease or atmospheric-carbon removal to combat global warming. We provide a framework to understand which innovations call for a mission approach and apply economic principles to identify key design features that contributed to the success of OWS.”
For the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Jeremy and co-author Divyansh Kaushik wrote a data-driven examination of international talent flows into the United States, with a specific focus on STEM talent:
"Nevertheless, the data reveal important challenges facing international recruitment and retention of foreign-born scientists, engineers, researchers, and other high-skilled individuals driving American technological leadership: The immigration status of international graduates has grown more tenuous as the share of international graduates on temporary visas has grown, while the share with permanent residency has fallen."
🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz
President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought broke down his view of presidential authority.
“A president and chief of staff can organize the White House however they want. But when you let the White House Counsel run it and act as a sort of deputy chief of staff — and I’m not arguing for OMB to fill that role — the president gets policy options that are very, very… risk-free. The lawyers need to consider what’s legal and show the art of the possible, but they are not their own philosopher kings. They shouldn’t allocate risk and capital on behalf of the president, which I saw a lot in the administration.”
Matt Lira explained why Congress is such a dowdy institution, and how it can grow:
“For the sake of simplicity, let's say an office has 10 working hours for the week across the entire staff, and four of those working hours are legislative correspondents (LCs) filtering inbound messages and categorizing them for different kinds of responses. That’s 40% of your capacity getting spent on a repetitive task.”
Two managers of a Department of Energy field office walked through accident cleanup at a nuclear waste facility:
“At the time of the accidents, WIPP had been operating for 15 years with an extremely good safety record. With sites like that, you sometimes get lulled into a false sense of security. “There are little things that you should take care of right away: an alarm set point that's not quite right, a piece of equipment that's broken but still usable. You start accepting those. It's just human nature… You start accepting things you wouldn't have before.”
And on Statecraft’s first anniversary, Santi assessed some lessons learned:
“Another key strategy is snowballing interviews. Anybody you talk to for anything, ask them, "Can you give me three names? Who else do you think would be interested? Who would you be interested in reading?" Use every touch point as an opportunity to generate more.”
🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter
Brian investigated why California turned against growth in the last half-century.
“Unfortunately, the trajectory of California doesn’t give many obvious ideas on finding our way back to the pro-growth, pro-building path. In some cases, burdensome restrictions on building more homes and infrastructure weren’t actually chosen, but were more of a historical accident.”
Is land-use regulation holding back construction productivity? Brian evaluated the evidence from a new Ed Glaeser paper.
“This theory neatly ties together a lot of issues we’ve looked at previously: construction’s poor productivity record, the rise and fall of Levittown-style construction, the problem of land-use regulation, the question of why there are so few economies of scale in construction, and so on. I think the thesis here is broadly, directionally correct. But I have issues with some of the various measures the authors use to demonstrate it, and I think their use weakens the paper’s findings.”
And Brian traced the history of the Air Force Heavy Press Program, which built the remarkably large machines that make other machines.
“Not only did the large parts produced by the presses greatly reduce the cost and increase the performance of military aircraft, but the presses proved useful for making parts for things like helicopters, submarines, spacecraft, and commercial jets. Within roughly a decade the presses had returned more than double their investment in reduced manufacturing costs, and they continued to produce complex, high-quality forged and extruded parts over the subsequent decades. Six of the ten presses are still operational today.”
🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang
Here’s a conundrum for science reformers: If the best researchers march to the beat of their own drum, doesn’t that mean it’s hard to design incentives to shape what they research?
“Metascience therefore proposes interventions that are least likely to influence the behavior of the kinds of researchers it loves best.”
What is a scientific field? Tim proposes some mental models.
“In Macroscience, I’ve often leaned in favor of a ruthless form of field pragmatism. But, whatever your point of view, these deeper philosophical differences will need to come into sharper focus as metascience increasingly confronts questions around the kind of science and scientists it wants to champion.”
📰 Media
Grist cited Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie on a major permitting reform bill:
“Aidan Mackenzie, a researcher at the Institute for Progress, a think tank that supports the bill, told Grist that Manchin and Barrasso’s bill seeks to ‘fix the incentives for utilities to build interregional transmission’ by ensuring that new interstate power lines are paid for by those who benefit most from them. It also requires neighboring power grids to proactively plan for new transmission. And it would speed up the permitting process by giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ‘backstop’ authority to step in and approve or deny new interregional transmission lines if states take more than a year to do so.”
The Daily Caller quoted Arnab Datta on regulations affecting antimony mining.
“‘There are legitimate environmental challenges that need to be mitigated for projects like this,’ Arnab Datta, the Institute for Progress’ director of infrastructure policy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. ‘The uncertainty from permitting and litigation compounds the challenge of reaching production in what's often a volatile and uncertain market environment for these commodities,’ said Datta.”
Nature referenced IFP’s partnership with the NSF in a piece on British metascience:
“In September, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it is partnering with the Institute for Progress, a think tank based in Washington DC, to find new ways of funding research. A standout feature of the deal is that it sought to give academics better access to internal NSF data, which is typically not released to external entities, even if it is to analyze their own processes.”
Not Boring cited Brian’s work in their piece on Radiant:
“And as Brian Potter highlights in his series on solar, at a time when solar PV electricity was 5x more expensive than batteries and 10,000 more expensive than electricity from utilities, satellites ‘would be the main customer for solar PV for the next 20 years,’ kicking off the technology’s earth-altering descent down the cost curve.”
Brian was also quoted in a Yahoo News article about manufactured housing:
“‘The most interesting and attractive thing about the HUD code is that HUD code homes tend to be much, much less expensive than single-family homes,’ says Potter.”
👋 Tweet for the Road
