Institute for Progress (IFP) — May 2024 Update

One announcement this month: We’re co-organizing the Bottlenecks Summit with the Abundance Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, Brooke Bowman, Mark Lutter, Nadia Asparouhova, and Patrick Blumenthal. The event is a one-day unconference in San Francisco on September 6th and will focus on identifying barriers to technological progress. Applications to participate are open now!

Here’s what else we’ve been working on:

✍️ Written Work

• Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta and Infrastructure Fellow Aidan Mackenzie coauthored “A Cheat Sheet for NEPA Judicial Reform,” which outlines the strengths and weaknesses of various proposals on the table.

• Senior Immigration Fellow Jeremy Neufeld and Fellow Hamidah Oderinwale published “The Talent Scout State,” an investigation into ways for America to secure more top-level young international talent.

• Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams coauthored an NBER working paper examining place-based variation in the commercialization of academic research:

  • “About one-fifth of the geographic variation in the commercialization of academic research is related to differences in the extent to which campuses foster commercialization and the proximity of venture capital.” 

• Fellow Janika Schmitt coauthored an op-ed in Time on how to stop bird flu from becoming the next pandemic:

  • “Testing isn’t just about diagnosing people with the virus. Containing the spread of this highly pathogenic bird flu strain in cattle hinges on our ability to detect and track it.”

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• Santi interviewed the Niskanen Center’s Jennifer Pahlka on how to actually implement a policy:

  • “I don’t want leaders to tell their people to be flexible with the letter of the law. Generally, the law is written in a way that's highly flexible and gives bureaucrats enormous amounts of ability to exercise judgment. It's maximalist interpretations of the procedures that derive from that law that are the problem.”

• In a four-part series, Statecraft interviewed current and former leads at various Congressional support agencies, starting with Kevin Kosar at the Congressional Research Service:

  • “I’ve suggested that CRS should be separated from the Library of Congress. It’s been embedded within the Library of Congress since it was created as the Legislative Reference Service in 1914. It's the only legislative branch support agency that's stuck in another agency. GAO is freestanding, CBO is freestanding. Administratively, it creates a lot of hassles for CRS. If you want to hire somebody at CRS, you have to go through Library of Congress hoops to do it.”

• Santi spoke to Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Director of the Congressional Budget Office:

  • “I was asked to score terrorism risk insurance… in the event it went bankrupt from the implications of an unknown terrorist attack at an unknown time in an unknown location with an unknown weapon. There is no model. We made a judgment about the cost of that Act and that was our job.”

• And interviewed Peter Douglas Blair, former Assistant Director of the (now-defunct) Office of Technology Assessment:

  • “Since the agency's actually already authorized, all you have to do is appropriate the funds. Even so, the agency would have to be very different than it was a quarter of a century ago. The context for how it would function has changed, the needs have changed, and the access to advice and expertise has improved.”

• The series closed with Orice Williams Brown, Managing Director of the Government Accountability Office’s Congressional Relations team:

  • “Sometimes folks who are unfamiliar with GAO and its access authority will not fully appreciate how broad our authority is. So our attorneys will have to educate them about our audit authority and what we actually have access to. It's not a question of whether we'll get the information; it's how hard we are going to have to work to get it.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• Brian investigated how to build a $20 billion semiconductor fab:

  • “The enormous expense of a modern semiconductor fab boils down to the intersection of two things. One is that semiconductor fabs are mass production factories, with modern “gigafabs” producing hundreds of millions of chips per year, each chip containing billions of transistors. The second is that producing semiconductors requires almost unfathomable levels of precision.” 

• He addressed a fascinating construction materials debate: Will stone replace steel and concrete?

  • “Stone has an arguably simpler supply chain than concrete or steel, and it can potentially eliminate certain on-site construction tasks. But it’s far from obvious that these advantages would be enough to overcome the benefits of concrete or steel, or the many disadvantages of working with stone.”

• And explained how America managed to build 300,000 airplanes in five years during WWII:

  • “World War II aircraft production shows that it's possible for a complex manufacturing industry to grow incredibly rapidly. But it also shows the limits of that scale up; that even in an emergency some things can only be accelerated so much, and success depends on what preparations have been taken beforehand.”

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

• Tim is launching a new podcast!

  • “We’ll be interviewing researchers, scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other good people working in and around this broad, shifting community that we call ‘metascience.’”

• He also wrote about the concept of “negative metascience”:

  • “While how to rev up the engine of science is still unclear, the world is full of striking examples of the kinds of dynamics that inhibit progress. For instance, rigid research orthodoxies appear to have inhibited progress in addressing Alzheimer’s. Market failures in testing and evaluation played a role in slowing the development of mRNA vaccines.”

📰 Media

• Jeremy was quoted in The Atlantic, on the value of high-skilled immigrants:

  • “As Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants.”

• Alec was mentioned in Marginal Revolution, discussing America’s relatively few free trade agreements with its allies.

• The Daily Caller referenced a report from Aidan, Arnab, and Alec on the bipartisan appeal of permitting reform:

  • “Comprehensive permitting reform is a potential area for bipartisan compromise because reasonably streamlining the permitting process would benefit all types of energy projects, according to the Institute for Progress.”

• And it quoted Brian on nuclear energy:

  • “‘I think the fundamental issue with nuclear power is a question of risk aversion. People have a very strong association of nuclear power with nuclear accidents and radiation leaks and very severe health hazards. And there is debate,’ Brian Potter, a senior infrastructure fellow with the Institute for Progress, told the DCNF.”

• Aidan was quoted extensively in a Mother Jones story about the planned Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line:

  • “‘Transmission lines are an especially difficult thing to build,’ says Aidan Mackenzie, a fellow at Institute for Progress who supports the project. ‘It’s complex linear infrastructure that just cuts through many different jurisdictions. You’re affecting a lot of different communities…There are just way more chances that people will have to take issue with their projects.’”

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