Institute for Progress (IFP) — October 2024 Update

Hope you all have been enjoying the beginning of fall and the end of conference season (at least for the IFP team).

In October, we co-hosted our final two events of the year: the Abundance 2024 conference in Washington, D.C. and the Progress 2024 conference in Berkeley, CA. It was wonderful to see the East Coast and West Coast versions of these two overlapping communities come together, and we’re honored we could play a role in helping make them happen.

✍️ Published Work

• Senior Technology Fellow Tim Fist and Director of Infrastructure Policy Arnab Datta published the second installment of IFP’s research series Compute in America, which explores the challenges and opportunities in building gigawatt-scale AI data centers in the United States.

  • “US energy generation will not keep pace with the AI infrastructure build-out on its current trajectory. By 2030, global power demand for AI could grow by as much as 130 GW, whereas U.S. electricity generation is set to grow by only 30 GW, about 5 GW per year. Contrast this to China, which since 2010 has added an average of 50 GW of electricity generation per year.”

🔭 Macroscience, by Senior Technology Fellow Tim Hwang

The Metascience 101 podcast series continued this month, with five new episodes (the final one will be published next week!). As a reminder, this is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. A star-studded group investigates why building a genuine “science of science” matters, and how research in metascience is translating into real-world policy changes.

• Episode 4: "ARPAs, FROs, and Fast Grants, Oh My!"

  • Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter talks through the broad range of scientific funding institutions with guests Professor Tyler Cowen, Arc Institute Co-founder Patrick Hsu, and Convergent Research CEO Adam Marblestone. They pay special attention to the renaissance in new, exploratory scientific funding models.

• Episode 5: "How and Why to Run an Experiment"

  • Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams, Non-Resident Senior Fellow Paul Niehaus, Emily Oehlsen, and Jim Savage dive in on a practical “how-to” for experimentation and evaluation in metascience. They discuss how to keep metascience experimentation and evaluation relevant to policymakers.

• Episode 6: “Safety and Science”

  • Vox’s Dylan Matthews sits down with Tyler Cowen, Non-Resident Senior Fellow Matt Clancy, and Jacob Trefethen to discuss whether there are tensions between accelerating science and safety. With case studies where society has faced this tradeoff between progress in science and safety, they work through strategies we can use to accelerate science safely.

• Episode 7: “Science and Political Legitimacy”

  • Dylan Matthews leads a conversation with Open Philanthropy CEO Alexander Berger, Tyler Cowen, and IFP Co-founder Caleb Watney. Together, they explore the relationship between effective, robust scientific institutions and notions of political legitimacy.

• Episode 8: “Invention vs. Diffusion”

  • The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and economist Eli Dourado investigate the bottlenecks standing in the way of the invention vs. the diffusion of ideas. They discuss whether new ideas are getting harder to find, how to get these new ideas to scale, and how a crisis can spur effective implementation.

🏛️ Statecraft, by Senior Editor Santi Ruiz

• Statecraft held a live recording at the Bottlenecks Conference in San Francisco. Santi interviewed two state capacity experts from different sides of the political aisle (Jen Pahlka and Sam Hammond) to see if there is a viable bipartisan political project going forward (spoiler: seems like there is).

  • Samuel Hammond: “If you look at people like Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein, you can interpret their role as translating things that are already taken for granted by the right for progressive Democrats. They did that for housing and a few other issues, and now they're doing it for state capacity. So I think there's a freebased version of state capacity. They’re helping folks who are part of a coalition that is the main inhibitor to state capacity to assimilate those ideas.”

• Next, Statecraft interviewed John D. Graham, who was the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) under President George W. Bush.

  • “Here's the big change that happened under Reagan. Suppose you're at the Food and Drug Administration, writing a regulation on food labels. You put out your proposal, you get comments from the public and the interest groups, you finalize it based upon what you think the best way to design the regulation is, and you publish it in the Federal Register. President Reagan said, ‘No, you don't publish it in the Federal Register. You send it to OIRA, and OIRA will review it, and they'll approve or disapprove or suggest changes.’ This was a sea change in the power structure of the federal government.”

• Santi spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Freeman, director of the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (NCDMPH), about how we would treat casualties in the event of a hot war with a peer or near-peer nation such as China.

  • “Vietnam was certainly a large-scale combat operation, Korea was large, but none of those were at this scale. And in neither of those instances did the U.S. homeland come under attack. There's a reasonable expectation that if we're at war with a peer, we probably can't assume a sovereign homeland. In the same way that we probably can't assume air superiority in theater, a war at that scale is going to look very different. The kind of thing we are preparing for now is something closer to the scale of World War II.”

• And in another live recording of Statecraft, Santi chatted with Non-Resident Senior Fellow Ben Jones about how the U.S. government thinks about (or doesn’t think about) improving productivity growth.

  • “So when you think of what really drives our strength — and I mean our income, our health, the competitiveness of our workforce, the ability to succeed in the global economy, our national security — at its heart, all of that is really science and technology. And the government plays an incredibly important role in that. But when you get to the center of the thing in the White House, and the economic policy that most closely surrounds the president, you're thinking more about the Treasury. It’s very important, very influential, but it’s dealing more with crises, finance, and not really thinking about long-run investment.”

🏗️ Construction Physics, by Senior Infrastructure Fellow Brian Potter

• In the wake of the short-lived strike by longshoremen on the East Coast, Brian did a deep dive on port automation.

  • “Since 2020, the World Bank has released a Container Port Performance Index, which ranks ports around the world based on how long vessels stay in port. Since a ship waiting in port isn’t making money by transporting cargo, shipowners want them in and out of ports as quickly as possible. Major American ports routinely rank near the bottom of this list. Los Angeles, the largest port in the U.S. by container volume, ranked #375 in 2023, and Long Beach (the second-largest) ranked #373. Savannah ranked #395, and Seattle ranked #360. Of the five largest American container ports, only New York-New Jersey cracked the top 100 (at #92). On average, per this index the U.S. has the worst-performing ports of any country in the world.”

• Brian also looked into one global manufacturing industry that has managed (thus far) to escape disruption by China: commercial aircraft.

  • “One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines). Commercial aircraft must couple a high level of performance in some of the most advanced technologies in existence with a high level of reliability; both of these are needed not only for safety reasons but also to minimize maintenance costs and make the economics of air travel work. A modern commercial jet engine, for instance, needs to operate for tens of thousands of hours before being overhauled. Building a successful commercial aircraft is more difficult than building spacecraft. In fact, China had built a successful and reliable space launch program by the late 1990s, long before it came anywhere close to building its own successful commercial aircraft.”

📰 Media

• Caleb was interviewed by Politico for their Future In Five Questions series.

  • “This week I spoke with Caleb Watney, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank whose goal is to “accelerate and shape the direction of scientific, technological, and industrial progress.” Caleb discussed why he thinks America’s future depends on actively recruiting the world’s best scientific minds into a “superteam,” why federal scientists should be paid more — and the prescience of his favorite 1959 post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel.”

• Alec was quoted by The New York Times in an article about bringing manufacturing jobs back to declining regions in the U.S.

  • “Across-the-board tariffs ‘cause all sorts of indirect costs and damage for manufacturers,’ said Alec Stapp, an economist and co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a think tank. He cited research that found tariffs from Mr. Trump’s presidency had hurt more than helped American manufacturers.”

• And Alec was mentioned by Vox in their write-up of the Progress 2024 conference.

  • “In part because of its Bay Area orientation, the progress movement sometimes gets tagged as sci-fi utopians who are overly focused on frontier technological innovation. And while I love a talk on fusion energy as much as the next Star Trek geek, what I saw in Berkeley was a movement with aspirations much broader than just technological moonshots. There was Our World in Data’s Saloni Dattani (another Future Perfect 50 honoree), giving a talk on how we could save millions of lives — most in the Global South — by accelerating the timeline for trials of new vaccines and drugs. There was the Institute for Progress’s Alec Stapp (same here) getting everyone excited about how rapid the solar energy revolution has been, and how much faster it could get.”

• Director of Science Policy Heidi Williams was interviewed by The Financial Times about the relationship between R&D and productivity growth.

  • “There’s actually a lot of really good theoretical work and good case studies, but economists have generally not been doing a very good job of partnering with the funding agencies in a way that would let us examine their historical data or partner with them on doing some prospective research to try to understand these questions. And so, a few years ago, I took leave from my academic job to try to go work with some of the science agencies directly on, you know, would they be interested in learning the answers to some of these questions? And so, one thing that came out of that is that the National Science Foundation formed a partnership with the Institute for Progress, which is a think-tank that I work very closely with. And they have shared their data with the Institute for Progress and a group of economists that work with them in exchange for wanting ideas on how to improve their grant-making.”

👋 Tweet for the Road