Institute for Progress — October 2022 Update
Hello!
Hope you had a fun Halloween weekend. Two announcements up front: Kyle Myers, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is joining the IFP team as a senior fellow! We look forward to working with him on metascience policy projects in the future.
Speaking of which… today we launched the Metascience Working Group with our friends at FAS and in collaboration with the new J-PAL Science for Progress Initiative (co-chaired by IFP fellows Paul Niehaus and Heidi Williams). We’re working to have this group be a new forum for surfacing ideas and insights that could inform the design of science funding programs.
🎃 Here are some other treats from the IFP team:
✍️ Published Work
Doug Elmendorf, a former CBO director and current dean at Harvard Kennedy School, wrote an essay about how to translate research findings into policy
Heidi Williams also wrote a related Twitter thread about how research can better serve public policy by interfacing with organizations like CBO
Austin Vernon wrote a piece for us arguing that some land use estimates for decarbonization are wildly overblown
“Groups like Rewiring America are working backwards from goals of near 100% wind and solar, rather than investigating the full spectrum of clean energy solutions. When looking at our wide array of clean technologies, there’s tremendous cause for optimism. We can reach net zero emissions without devoting hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land to energy farms.”
Arielle D'Souza wrote a call to action for the Department of Defense to invest in biosurveillance
“Our recommendations focus on the need to invest in core infrastructure and layered capabilities that will enable the DoD to rapidly detect, identify, attribute, and characterize any pathogen, regardless of adversarial engineering efforts or non-deliberate outbreaks of novel pathogens.”
Jeremy Neufeld published a paper with colleagues from the Center for Global Development and the Niskanen Center about how the executive branch can implement a Global Skills Partnership with partner countries
🎤 Interviews & Events
IFP is partnering with the USPTO and Santa Clara University School of Law on the Innovator Diversity Pilots Conference on November 18th
Caleb and Heidi will be speaking on a panel about policy pilots
You can register to attend in person or online here
Alec participated in a panel discussion about permitting reform hosted by Humanity Forward
Brian was interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel for the Lunar Society podcast
Alec participated in a panel about policy issues related to technology at an event hosted by Prime Movers Lab in Scottsdale, Arizona
📰 Media
Heidi and Matt were quoted in an Economist article about how we can escape scientific stagnation
“Despite the uncertainty about exactly how best to fund scientific research, economists are confident of two things. The first is that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the right answer, says Heidi Williams of Stanford University. darpa models, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s curiosity-driven method, and even handing out grants by lottery, as the New Zealand Health Research Council has tried, all have their uses. Evaluation of them can then build knowledge of what works, says Matt Clancy, an economist who curates a continuously updated online literature survey on innovation, itself an experiment in how to improve science.”
Caleb was quoted in an Economist article about the race between China and the West to lead the world in science and technology
“America may also be more daring in its investments. The Institute for Progress (IFP), an American think-tank, is helping government agencies distribute grants more effectively, says Caleb Watney, a co-founder. Erwin Gianchandani of the NSF cites “golden tickets” as an example. Rather than the standard consensus-based process to allocate funding, a single reviewer can champion a project.”
Jeremy was quoted in an article in Roll Call about the amendments expanding visas for advanced STEM talent being left out of the NDAA:
“‘I think lawmakers are going to find themselves regretting letting this opportunity pass by when the new chips investments run into the labor crunch on the ground,’ Neufeld said.”
IFP’s work on next generation COVID vaccines was mentioned in this Future Perfect article from Vox about Josh Morrison
“But Morrison and 1Day Sooner are just getting started. They are working with partners at the Institute for Progress and Schmidt Futures on a project called ‘Operation Warp Speed 2.0 to accelerate the development of the next generation of Covid vaccines, including universal vaccines that could cover all variants, as well as intranasal options that could lead to better protection from airborne pathogens that enter the body through the nose and throat.”
☀️ New Things Under the Sun by IFP Senior Innovation Economist Matt Clancy
🏗️ Construction Physics by IFP Senior Fellow Brian Potter
Debunking the "housing variety as a barrier to mass production" hypothesis
Why did we wait so long for wind power? Part III - offshore wind
👋 Tweet for the Road
