Institute for Progress — July 2022 Update
Hello!
Hope everyone is coping with the global heat wave — things have definitely been hot in DC recently (literally and politically!).
But first, an update on the IFP team: We added four new senior fellows to our metascience team!
Pierre Azoulay from MIT Sloan
Ina Ganguli from UMass Amherst
Ben Jones from Northwestern Kellogg
Paul Niehaus from UCSD
Paul has been collaborating closely with Heidi Williams on a J-PAL Science for Progress initiative that is closely linked with IFP’s metascience agenda. Pierre, Ina, and Ben will be jointly teaching a new online PhD course hosted by IFP on the economics of ideas, science, and innovation alongside Heidi and Matt Clancy. Current or recent students who have completed at least one year of an economics PhD program are eligible to apply. Applications are due by September 6th — apply here!
On to the rest of the update…
🎤 Interviews & Events
Heidi co-hosted the conference on Innovation at the NBER Summer Institute with Ben Jones and Adam Jaffe. You can watch the full conference here.
Heidi also co-organized the Innovation Research Boot Camp for PhD students at the Summer Institute along with Ben Jones and Kevin Bryan
Caleb spoke at the same NBER conference on the challenges and opportunities of translating innovation research into public policy
Jeremy appeared on NPR’s All Sides with Ann Fisher to talk about the need for international talent in the semiconductor industry
📰 Media
Matt Yglesias gave IFP a shoutout in a reader mailbag for his Slow Boring newsletter:
“Thomas L. Hutcheson: Your opinion on Progress Studies? I’m for it. If you have no idea what this means, check out the Institute for Progress, a cool new think tank dedicated to finding ways to accelerate science and technological progress. Personally, I think there’s a real opportunity in this polarized world for the creation of a bunch of old-fashioned, non-partisan, narrow-pressure groups oriented around growth and progress themes. The idea would be to stay aloof from both of the two big partisan/ideological coalitions, but just enthusiastically support whatever grab-bag of candidates was willing to back core elements of the growth agenda.”
Jeremy spoke with Politico about the connection between immigration and semiconductor manufacturing:
“With a short window to attract global chip companies already starting to close, a growing chorus is warning Congress they’re running out of time. ‘These semiconductor investments won’t pay off if Congress doesn’t fix the talent bottleneck,’ said Jeremy Neufeld, a senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress think tank.”
Brian spoke with The Atlantic about the housing crisis:
“’I think the simplest, high-level way of explaining the lack of productivity [is] it’s hard to make money trying new ideas in construction, and strategies that improve productivity in other industries don’t really seem to work in construction very well,’ Brian Potter, whose Construction Physics newsletter analyzes the building industry, told me… I asked Potter whether videos of super-fast apartment-construction projects in China suggested that other countries might be cracking the code of housing innovation... ‘Just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it’s productive,’ he said. ‘These things basically work by just throwing a huge amount of resources and labor at the problem. If you watch the buildings going up, they’re using, like, three to four cranes at once just to keep things moving.’”
Jeremy spoke with Vox about H-1B visa backlog:
“Historically, immigrants have played a vital role in American innovation. As Jeremy Neufeld, an immigration policy fellow with the Institute for Progress, a new innovation-focused think tank, remarked to me, ‘It’s always been the case that immigrants have been a secret ingredient in US dynamism.’ … As Neufeld points out, the Covid-19 pandemic might have gone much worse if immigration had always been as restrictive as it is now. A number of co-founders and critical researchers with Moderna are immigrants, as is Katalin Karikó, a pioneer of mRNA research — who, if she had tried to immigrate after the 1990 H-1B reforms to the skilled guest worker program, might not have been able to come to the US at all… Can an incremental approach work? Neufeld believes that changes to the H-1B system will be more likely to pass in isolation.”
Nikki spoke with The Atlantic about what our lackluster public health response to monkeypox means for future pandemics:
“Nikki Teran, a geneticist and senior biosecurity fellow at the Institute for Progress, explained to me that our lackluster response to monkeypox outbreaks is largely because of administrative failures. ‘We have treatments and vaccines, but they haven’t been able to be mobilized in an effective way,’ she explained… Just last month Bill Gates told Time that we got ‘lucky’ with COVID-19. He wasn’t downplaying the horror of the disease. Instead, he was pointing out just how much deadlier it could have been. Even now, this monkeypox outbreak looks to be less deadly than worst-case scenarios. But eventually, as Teran warns, ‘we’re going to run out of luck.’”
Jeremy spoke with Science|Business about how international talent plays into the US and Europe’s strategies to onshore chip production:
“What’s more, ‘the EU faces an even bigger uphill challenge than the US,’ said Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Washington DC-based Institute for Progress (IFP), a think tank hoping to speed up scientific and technology advancement. ‘Chip manufacturing tends to be a winner-take-all industry and the EU is behind the US, let alone Asia,’ he said. The semiconductor workforce in the EU is roughly 200,000, smaller than the US’s 300,000. The EU also lacks the US’s leading chip design industry, which can cross-fertilise manufacturing, Neufeld pointed out… ‘Investing in domestic education and upskilling initiatives is definitely necessary for the long-term health of the workforce but it's a long-term strategy that will not yield dividends within the quick timeline that Congress wants new semiconductor plants to be up and running,’ said the IFP’s Neufeld.”
☀️ New Things Under the Sun by IFP Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy
🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter
👀 Progress Is Possible in DC (what we’re watching)
The Chips and Science Act (formerly the Bipartisan Innovation Act formerly the Make It in America Act formerly USICA and America COMPETES née Endless Frontier Act) was passed by the Senate and then the House
A key part of the Congressional mandate given to the new TIP directorate at NSF is to experiment with diverse funding models for science
Manchin and Schumer announced a deal on reconciliation, now branded as the Inflation Reduction Act
As part of this deal, Manchin has also secured a commitment from Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi to advance permitting reform in a separate bill this fall
👋 Tweet for the Road
