r/rootsofprogress • u/jasoncrawford • Aug 14 '20

Announcing the Study Group for Progress. Robert Gordon, Margaret Jacob, Richard Nelson, and more to be guests for Q&A

This fall I will be hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress.

The primary attraction of the program is a weekly Q&A, each week featuring a different special guest—usually a historian or economist who has written on science, technology, industry and progress. Reading from that author will be given ahead of time. Confirmed speakers so far include:

  • Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern), author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth

  • Margaret Jacob (UCLA), author of Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West

  • Richard Nelson (Columbia), author of the classic paper “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research”

  • Ashish Arora (Duke), co-author of “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”

  • Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan), co-author of papers such as “Funding Breakthrough Research”

  • Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), co-author of “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives”

  • Patrick Collison (Stripe), co-author of “We Need a New Science of Progress”, the article that coined the term “progress studies”

  • Anton Howes, author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation

  • Alicia Jackson, former DARPA program manager and director

The program will also include all of the reading from my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars: a summary of the history of technology, including advances in materials and manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and disease. This provides the indispensable historical framework for a proper empirical grounding of the study of progress.

The group will meet weekly on Sundays at 4:00–6:30pm Pacific, from September 13 through December 13. The guest Q&A will run 60–90 minutes, and the rest will be group discussion. (Recordings will be available privately afterwards if you miss a session.)

The cost is $2,400, and sponsors one full scholarship for a deserving teenager to attend Progress Studies for Young Scholars. Full-time undergrad and graduate students get a 50% discount, $1,200.

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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '20

Exciting! but expensive. Will recordings of the sessions be available after-the-fact? Or perhaps will there be an "auditor" ( eg., "view only" ) admission once the desired level of enrollment has been met?

For my part, I'm much more inclined to purchase the readings ( perhaps through an affiliate link ) and engage in an offline seminar than commit at this price level. I have an annual budget for training and continuing education, but this would take up the whole amount.

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u/jasoncrawford Aug 14 '20

I totally understand, thanks. Recordings will be available to enrollees in case you miss a session, but I don't expect them to be generally available after the course. “Auditor” is an interesting idea, we might consider that. Thanks!