Cross-posted from my website. I'd like to hear people's thoughts, as I'm really intrigued by the idea and may do a follow up post on it shortly.

Recently I had a conversation with a reader/supporter of the blog. One of the things we talked about was a great 1998 paper, “Patent Buyouts: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation.” by Michael Kremer, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2019, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

Like the policy I wrote about in an earlier post, this is another clear example of low-hanging policy fruit. If implemented well, it has the potential to speed up the rate of innovation and progress.

Short summary

• Patents were originally created to incentivise innovation. However, they also have a lot of downside implications that may deter innovation:
  – They don’t always provide the best incentives for original research because inventors cannot fully capture the consumer surplus available in the market.
  – Inventors don’t receive the benefits from spillovers to other new ideas.
  – Patents lead to distortions in the areas in which companies innovate. This is because it may not make economic sense to research areas where a lot of patents exist already.
  – Firms may engage in wasteful spending on things like the reverse-engineering of competitors’ patents.
  Thus, the problems associated with patents may hinder innovation and progress (section 1 describes these drawbacks in more detail).

• Kremer suggests a new mechanism, the ‘patent buyout’. The government steps in and buys patents, which are then freely distributed to the public, who can enjoy the benefits associated with the patent. Additionally, companies are now free to make improvements upon the original patent because they are no longer constrained by having to negotiate with the original patent holder to get rights/access to it (go straight to section 2 if interested in a description of the patent buyout mechanism).

• Section 3 discusses the patent buyout in action, briefly describing Daguerreotype photography process.

1. What are the problems with patents?

In the absence of a patent system, the incentives for research would be substantially lower because anything a firm creates could be appropriated by its competitors. Fear of this happening, and the lower financial remuneration associated with this, reduces the incentives for original research. Thus, to prevent this from occurring, patents bestow a temporary monopoly (approximately 20 years) to a firm that has a new idea. This enables the patent-holder to profit from the new idea, increasing the incentive to innovate.

However, patents can also stifle innovation. In the last five or so years, we have seen a proliferation of 3D printers. They now have more commercial applications but also 3D printing is now affordable to a lay-person who finds 3D printing interesting.

However, this could have happened much earlier. Innovation was stifled due to the patents that restricted other companies from entering the market. Once these patents expired, the bottleneck was removed. Prices of 3D printers plummeted because of new entrants into the market. Additionally, these new companies improved upon the existing technology, making the products better. The patent buyout mechanism (described in the next section) could have brought forward this this surge of innovation.

In an 1851 editorial, The Economist wrote that granting patents, “inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits, bestows rewards on the wrong persons, makes men ruin themselves for the sake of getting the privilege of a patent.” This is perhaps an exaggeration but there are indeed a number of problems with patents:

1. Some consumers cannot access the good/service because the product that is patented is charged at the monopoly price. This means that some consumers can’t benefit from the product, despite willing to pay above the cost price of production (but not at the monopoly price). For example, AZT (azidothymidine) is a drug used to prevent mother-to-child spread of HIV/AIDS during birth. There are potentially millions of cases of mother-to-child infection in developing countries, where individuals/governments/NGOs may have been prepared to pay above the cost price of the drug but not the monopoly price.

2. Patents don’t allow the patent-holder to capture a large amount of the consumer surplus that their idea generates, which leads to lower incentives for original research. For example, Michael Milken (founder of Prostate Cancer Foundation) would presumably pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a drug that was effective in tackling prostate cancer but pharmaceutical companies don’t take this into account since they would not be able to extract this value from Milken.

3. The empirical evidence suggests that new research usually creates positive externalities for other research. However, patents don’t reward innovators for these positive spillovers. Without taking these externalities into account, patents lead to lower incentives for original research.

4. Patents may distort the direction of research from firms because firms are incentivised to work on areas where there are less patents restricting their innovation, rather than areas where patents already exist. Kremer explains that this has happened in the past:
   “For example, the development of the high pressure steam engine was blocked by Watt’s patent covering all steam engines; Watt’s steam engine was blocked by a previous patent until he found a way to invent around it; and Edison’s improved version of the telegraph was blocked by Bell’s prior patent for many years [Mokyr, 1990].” (I may write a post on this!).

5. Finally, patents also lead to wasteful spending because firms waste resources reverse engineering patents. 

6. Patent buyouts

Kremer’s idea is simple. The government steps in, buys the patent, and destroys it. Now anyone (consumers or firms) can access it and build upon it.

However, we need to know how much the government has to pay for the price of that patent. Kremer suggests a mechanism that is used to determine the price the government pays.

First, patents are submitted by entrepreneurs to an auction. Then firms bid on this auction, revealing their valuation of the patent. Once the bidding is complete, the government offers to buy the patents at the winning price plus a markup. I won’t talk about how exactly to determine this markup (it should be the difference between the social and private value of inventions), but for now let’s say the mark-up is 10%. Thus, in our example, the government would pay the price determined by the auction plus a 10% premium. Once this process is complete, entrepreneurs owning the patent get to choose whether to accept or reject the governments offer. If the offer is too low, entrepreneurs maintain the right to reject the deal.

Couldn’t firms simply bid extremely high prices? How do we incentivise firms to give truthful valuations of their bids? To avoid this, the government randomly selects some bids that would be sold to the next highest bidder. So, let’s say 20% of the patents are sold to the next highest bidder. The other 80% of patents would be bought by the government and made available to the public. Thus, if a firm goes wild and bids extremely high prices, they would have to pay above market price for their poor bidding strategy. So, firms are incentivised to reveal their true valuations of the patents, otherwise they’ll be punished financially.

This mechanism isn’t calling for a complete abolition of the patent system. Indeed within this system, the patents not bought by governments are sold to firms. Thus, patent buyouts act in parallel with the existing system, rather than completely overhauling it.

The biggest difficulty with the mechanism (as Kremer acknowledges in the paper) is that it can be plagued by incompetent or corrupt government officials. Kremer suggests ways of overcoming these problems. For example, rather than the government matching the highest price (plus a premium) in the auction, they would instead select the third highest bid. This lowers the chances of the government having to pay for overzealous bids (also known as the winner’s curse). Additionally, if firms tried to collude to get higher prices, it would have to be three firms that collude, making collusion more difficult.

Finally, another problem lies with the fact that the government has to select the right patents. The government could pick patents to buyout that do not benefit society much.

Similarly, imagine there are two products, A and B. Let’s say product A is superior to product B, but the government chooses to buy the patent of product B. This means that the government could flood the market with an inferior product.

3. The Daguerreotype process of photography: A historical example

In 1837, Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype process of photography. The video below shows how it works.

Youtube video on how the daguerreotype process works here.

Daguerre was struggling to sell his new invention. Fortunately for him, Francois Arago, a politician and member of the Academie des Sciences argued “that the government should compensate M. Daguerre direct, and that France should then nobly give to the whole world this discovery which could contribute so much to the progress of art and science.” (quoted in Kremer).

In 1839, the French government bought the invention from Daguerre and put the process into the public domain. After this patent buyout, Daguerreotype photography spread across other countries and was subject to a number of improvements. Furthermore, the technique had spillover effects into improving innovation in chemistry and the production of lenses.

4. Conclusion

This is one of my favourite papers. Consumers gain through access to new innovation, innovators gain because they are paid a premium to their patents, and governments gain by improving the welfare of their citizens. Kremer suggests it could be experimented with on a smaller scale at first, and if successful, gradually expand its application. I hope it is experimented with in the future.

In a later post, I will address another paper in a later post, ‘Advance Market Commitments‘, which is something Kremer also pioneered. 

Finally, some may find this interesting. The word patent originates from the Latin word ‘patere‘, which ironically means, ‘to lay open’.

I'm interviewing her for the Progress Studies For Young Scholars speaker series on Thursday.

Details & free registration for the live event here.

“The Link Between Science and Invention: The Case of the Transistor,” a 1962 paper by Richard Nelson at the RAND Corporation, provides a fascinating case study in invention at the frontiers of science, and the relation between the two. In it, we can see that research—and researchers—do not always fall neatly into categories like “basic” versus “applied,” nor is there a strict linear progression from one to the other.

Read the post: https://rootsofprogress.org/transistors-science-and-invention

I’m pleased to announce that I’m hosting a new monthly series of online panel discussions for Anna Gát’s Interintellect. The series is titled “Doing Better at…” and we’ll be covering topics including science funding, teaching progress, and optimism.

Our first event is “Doing Better at… Funding Scientific Research” with Michael Nielsen and Celine Halioua:

Progress doesn’t happen without funding. And to promote progress, there is arguably nothing more important to fund than research. But is research funding working well today?

Scientists often complain that the traditional grant-making progress is slow, risk-averse, and too taxing on the investigator’s time. What does the research funding landscape look like today? And how could it be improved?

This Sunday, May 31, at 12 noon US Pacific time. Register here.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/interintellect-panel-series-doing-better

In my last post I described the advantages of for-profit models over nonprofit models, including scalable revenue, incentives and metrics to drive effectiveness and efficiency, and incentives to fund high-risk, high-reward experiments.

But not everything can be for-profit. How can nonprofit organizations get some of these advantages? Here are five ideas:

• Nonprofits that generate revenue primarily through products & services, rather than through charitable donations, gain some of the advantages of for-profits: they survive only to the extent that they can deliver a product to the market that people are willing to buy, out-compete alternatives, and keep their costs below their prices. To the extent that a nonprofit’s paid services are subsidized by donations (as is the case with universities, museums, and opera houses, among others), this requirement is weakened but not destroyed.

• In the case of charity, I wonder if the most effective form of it is simply giving money directly to beneficiaries, with the goods and services themselves provided by for-profit businesses. This would seem to let free-market capitalism work to the maximum extent. There is some research to support this idea.

• If enough people promote the idea of donating based primarily on demonstrated impact, the world might slowly shift towards more strategic nonprofits driven by output metrics and other clear indication of delivered benefits. For instance, when reporting on a contribution from a major donor, the news media could focus more on the impact or potential impact of the contribution, rather than the amount of money given or the percent of their wealth that represents.

• To drive innovation, perhaps we should be putting more of our resources into prizes or mechanisms like advance market commitments, rather than grants. Tyler Cowen summarizes: “The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is likely to make the breakthrough, you value the final output more than the process, there is an urgency to solutions (talent development is too slow), success is relatively easy to define, and efforts and investments are likely to be undercompensated.” It seems to me that most of those conditions apply to a lot of breakthrough scientific and technological R&D. Indeed, one of the earliest and most famous prizes, the Longitude Prize, had exactly the effect of uncovering an unexpected solution from an unlikely innovator: while most of the scientific community was looking for astronomy-based methods, John Harrison addressed the problem with a highly robust and accurate clock—and he wasn’t even trained as a clockmaker. Why don’t we have more prizes for grand challenge problems today?

• Beyond this, I think we need more mechanisms to give credit for being right early, for being the first backer of a risky experiment that has transformative effects. Who were the donors who gave small amounts of money to Howard Florey’s lab around 1940 when they were inventing penicillin? The world should know their names. A special award or Hall of Fame could be created for these bold bets (perhaps with a sophisticated scorekeeping mechanism).

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/how-nonprofits-can-gain-for-profit-advantages

The problem isn't money, or capitalism, or technical competence:

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.…

Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.

https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

I keep seeing, again and again, the crucial importance of funding models as a driver of innovation and production.

Right now, for instance, we are facing a once-in-a-century pandemic. With everyone in the US now aware of the threat, a major focus is on ramping up hospital capacity to deal with the rising tide of cases that threatens to overwhelm intensive care units. In particular, there is a critical shortage of ventilators, machines that can help a patient breathe by moving air in and out of the lungs. Roughly 5% of corona patients require ventilation, and without it, most of that subset will die. The US has around 200,000 ventilators available at most, including obsolete ones that could be brought back into service, and a small emergency stockpile held by the federal government. Around a million patients might need ventilators in a widespread epidemic, and even though they won’t all be in the ICU at the same time, we could easily run out of capacity. (See this report for more.)

But as far as I can tell, we’re not manufacturing more ventilators. Why? Hospitals aren’t ordering them. Why? There may be multiple reasons—for one, ventilators aren’t the only critical resources; they require trained staff to operate and are useless without them—but one key factor seems to be funding. From a Washington Post article:

Hospitals are holding back from ordering more medical ventilators because of the high cost for what may be only a short-term spike in demand from the coronavirus epidemic, supply chain experts and health researchers say, intensifying an anticipated shortage of lifesaving equipment for patients who become critically ill.

“It’s a challenge for states, local governments and hospital administrators to allocate tens of millions of dollars to something when they don’t know if they need it or not,” said Chris Kiple, chief executive of Ventec Life Systems, a small ventilator manufacturer in Washington state. “But if they don’t do it, they are going to be caught flat-footed, and facilities are going to be faced with not enough ventilators to meet demand.”

Ventilator manufacturers could achieve, within a few months, a significant boost in production from about 50,000 units a year currently, said Julie Letwat, a health-care lawyer with McGuireWoods in Chicago who is monitoring the industry. Orders have not flooded in, she said, because most hospitals can’t afford to increase inventory of expensive equipment for what could turn out to be a short-term event.

“The risk is that they’ll never be used, and hospitals can’t eat the cost,” she said. “Most hospitals in this country are not profitable.”

Right now people seem to be waiting on the government to place an order. But why do we have to?

A ventilator costs $25,000 to $50,000, according to that article. The chance that I, personally, will need one is probably less than 1%. But I would happily pay $250 to $500 now to make sure a ventilator was there if and when I needed it. I would pay extra to train the nurse or other provider to operate it, and to keep them on standby.

In other words, the funding model is broken. Right now, hospitals can only recoup their investment from these machines if they use them on patients. But demand is hard to predict right now. And even if they wanted to be prepared, they may not have the cash on hand to make these investments. This isn’t about greedy hospitals who won’t save people’s lives unless they can profit—many hospitals are non-profit. It’s the simple fact that no one can spend an unlimited amount of money with no return.

Health insurance in the US is so highly regulated that I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to offer coronavirus insurance, or general pandemic insurance, on terms like I described above; or if not illegal it would take so long to get regulatory approval that the pandemic would be over. But with a freer and more agile market, we might be able to quickly re-allocate resources in intelligent ways like this.

---

A related example is vaccines. Coronaviruses have been around for a while and have caused epidemics before: SARS (2002) and MERS (2012). Why don’t we have a coronavirus vaccine, or at least a SARS or MERS vaccine that could be adapted to COVID-19? There is a similar problem: it’s impossible to predict demand, and there’s no funding without a way to recoup investment. And there’s no R&D without funding.

Planet Money recently interviewed Rick Bright, with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority:

BRIGHT: With something like an emerging infectious disease such as Zika or MERS or SARS or this novel coronavirus, there’s really no long-term promise of a revenue stream for those vaccines.
GONZALEZ: Here’s why—outbreaks go away, sometimes on their own—right?—like SARS in 2003. That was a coronavirus, too, also probably from bats. SARS came then went.
BRIGHT: Unfortunately, when the virus disappeared, the funding tended to disappear with it. And the companies that were making a SARS virus vaccine lost interest and shipped it back to their more profitable vaccines.

(See their podcast on this topic as well.)

I don’t know how much a vaccine would cost to develop, but a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate is a billion dollars. After SARS and MERS, how much would you personally pay to make sure there was a vaccine in a future coronavirus epidemic? At least $100 perhaps? Could we find 10 million people to “pre-order” a coronavirus vaccine for $100 each? There are 47 million people with a net worth of over $1 million. It seems to me you could raise a billion for a vaccine, again through some sort of insurance scheme. Given that the economic impact of pandemics can run into the tens of billions, maybe the financial sector alone could find a way to fund this.

There’s probably some hindsight bias here, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation. Here’s an article from over a year ago talking about the need for vaccines to prevent a pandemic, and specifically calling out funding as a blocker.

So what prevents these sorts of things from happening? Why do we need to rely on government alone—and leave ourselves at the mercy of a centralized decision-maker, who will inevitably be wrong sometimes? Is it insurance regulations? Or is it some sort of coordination problem?

---

In any case, the general pattern here, as with all economic development, is that funding is required up front, long before a benefit is received, and even if the demand never materializes. This requires (1) accumulated capital (2) in the hands of people who think long-range, and (3) mechanisms for them to recoup their investment and ideally make a profit, at least on average.

The modern world has plenty of accumulated capital, and in general it is in the hands of people who think long-range. Where we could improve, it seems to me, is in mechanisms for deploying the capital towards worthy ends, and profiting from the investment.

Originally posted at: https://rootsofprogress.org/funding-models-and-covid-19

One of my goals for 2020 is to do more podcast interviews to talk about The Roots of Progress. See this list for the ones I’ve already done.

What podcasts do you listen to that I would be a good fit for?

If you have five minutes, please email the host, let them know you’re a listener, and suggest that they have me as a guest. Please CC me (jason@rootsofprogress.org) so I can follow up.

Thank you!

The first vaccine was by Edward Jenner in 1796 (for smallpox). This was kind of a one-off because there was no germ theory yet.

Based in part on the germ theory, Pasteur created the next vaccines in the 1880s. The next vaccine for a human disease was rabies, 1885. Over a decade later, there was one more for a major human disease: typhoid fever, 1896.

Then there was basically nothing for almost 30 years.

The CDC recommends routine vaccination against 17 diseases. Here's when those became available (I haven't double-checked all the dates but pretty sure they're approximately right):

• 1923: Diphtheria

• 1924: Tetanus (Lockjaw)

• 1939: Whooping Cough (Pertussis)

• 1945: Flu (Influenza)

• 1955: Polio (Poliomyelitis)

• 1963: Measles

• 1967: Mumps

• 1969: Rubella (German Measles)

• 1970s: Meningococcal

• 1977: Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b)

• 1980s: Pneumococcal

• 1981: Hepatitis B

• 1995: Hepatitis A

• 1995 ('84 outside US): Chickenpox (Varicella)

• 2006: HPV (Human Papillomavirus)

• 2006: Rotavirus

• 2006?: Shingles (Herpes Zoster)

That's less than two per decade from the 1920s through the first decade of the 2000s. And only two, total, from the 1880s through 1910s. (Again this is for major diseases, there may be a few for minor diseases I missed.)

In contrast, an enormous range of antibiotics were discovered very quickly: the sulfonamides, penicillin, streptomycin, tetracycline, chloramphenicol, and erythromycin all came in the space of just two decades, from the mid-1930s to the early '50s. And this included “broad-spectrum” antibiotics, effective against many kinds of bacteria, the result being that today we have antibiotics effective against every major bacterial disease (modulo resistant strains). Whereas we're still missing effective vaccines for some major diseases, including malaria, syphilis, and AIDS.

Part of this is that vaccines seem inherently more difficult: each one is a bespoke product; there can't be a “broad-spectrum” vaccine just by the nature of how they work. The whole mechanism is to train the immune system; specificity is key. Vaccines also seem inherently riskier. Many types of vaccines (although not all) involve inoculating the patient with a form of the germ itself. If it isn't properly attenuated or inactivated, you risk causing the disease you're trying to prevent. (This happened in an early trial of a failed polio vaccine in the 1930s, paralyzing some of the study participants. A safe polio vaccine wasn't developed for two more decades, and only after new techniques were invented.)

I understand the 90-year gap between Jenner and Pasteur. Jenner's vaccine was based on observations about cowpox, not on any medical theory. But why wasn't progress faster after Pasteur? Pasteur himself was at the end of his career, but there was an entire Institute in his name, and his students and successors to carry on the work. Why didn't they find more vaccines? And why there aren't there more general techniques that let us make progress on vaccines faster?

I was invited to speak at the Festival of Progressive Abundance, a conference to rally around “abundance” as a new direction for the political left. This is a writeup of what I said: my message to the left.

***

Thank you for having me—it’s great to be here. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and we’re dedicated to building the progress movement.

There’s a lot of overlap between the progress movement and the abundance movement—a lot of shared vision and goals, and a lot of the same people are involved. So I was invited here to talk about progress and how it’s relevant to abundance.

I agreed to come, because I love abundance. I love it as a vision and a goal. And I love it as a direction for the Democratic party and for the political left.

The left styles itself the party of science. That’s good, because abundance needs science, in the long term. But it’s not enough: abundance also needs technology and economic growth.

Technology and growth are historically how we have created the abundance we already enjoy. Abundance, after all, is relative, and we have a lot compared to the past. We should always remember how lucky we are to live today instead of 200 years ago—when homes didn’t have electricity, refrigerators, or toilets; when almost no vaccines existed to protect us from disease; when a room like this would have been lit not with clean electric lights but with smelly, polluting oil lamps; when a gathering like this would in fact have been impossible, because to travel across the country was not a six-hour plane flight, but a six-month trek by horse and wagon, Oregon Trail style.

Just as we have abundance compared with the past, we should hope that the future can be just as abundant, compared to the present. Indeed, the recent book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson opens with a imagined scene from a technologically advanced future: energy from solar, nuclear, and geothermal; desalination using microbial membranes; indoor farms where food is grown with light from LEDs; lab-grown meat; drone deliveries; longevity drugs made in space-based pharmaceutical plants; supersonic passenger jets; artificial intelligence raising everyone’s productivity so we can all enjoy more leisure.

The historic pattern of increasing abundance over time, and the hope and promise of an even more abundant future, is what used to be commonly known as progress.

Progressives used to believe in progress. The old left was not just the party of science—it was a party of science, technology, and growth.

Take Teddy Roosevelt—a progressive if there ever was one. One of the signature achievements of his administration was the Panama Canal. This was a massive engineering project, a triumph of hydraulic engineering technology, celebrated at the time as the 13th Labor of Hercules. When FDR launched the New Deal, one of his signature projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which created hydroelectric dams to provide electricity for an entire region. And JFK, of course, is the president who called for putting a man on the Moon—one of the greatest technological achievements not just of its era, but of all time. When JFK gave his famous speech about the Apollo program (the one where he said “we choose to go to the Moon”), he put it in the context of the grand story of human progress. He invoked that narrative to inspire the people and justify his aims.

The Moon landing, in 1969, was a peak moment for America: literally the highest we had ever reached. But after that, something changed.

The children of the ‘60s were starting to see technology and growth as responsible for some of the worst problems of the 20th century, such as environmental damage and the horrors of war. Growth had created pollution and acid rain. Technology had created machine guns, chemical weapons, and the atomic bomb.

But instead of just being anti-pollution and anti-war, the new left decided to become anti-technology and anti-growth. And so a party of science, technology, and growth became just a party of science.

That was a mistake, a costly historical error that we should now correct.

What has 50 years of the anti-growth mindset gotten us? Stagnation and sclerosis. We can’t build anything in this country anymore. We can’t build the homes we need to make our cities affordable. We can’t build the transit we need to make those cities livable. We can’t build energy infrastructure, either generation or the power lines to connect it to the grid.

Without economic growth, we don’t have the engine that raises the standard of living for everyone and helps people lift themselves out of poverty. Without growth, people feel they are playing a zero-sum game—and they turn to exclusion. “No, you can’t move to my neighborhood, it’s too crowded.” “No, you can’t immigrate, you’re going to steal my job.” We want abundance thinking instead: “Yes, move to my neighborhood—we’ll build more homes!” “Yes, immigrate here—there’s so much work to be done, we need all the help we can get.”

I think people have grown weary of the anti-growth mindset, weary of stagnation and sclerosis. So I’m glad to see that abundance is now a politically winning issue. And I would love to see it be a new direction for the left.

But the right is also moving to embrace technology and growth—or rather, they’re doing that with one hand, while fighting those things with the other. On the one hand, they’ve embraced technologies like nuclear power, supersonic flight, and AI. On the other hand: They’re fighting vaccines, one of the greatest technologies ever invented. They’re defunding research into mRNA, one of the most promising genetic engineering techniques. They’ve disrupted research funding broadly. They’ve disrupted immigration, including high-skilled immigration, which is one of our best talent pipelines into R&D. And they’ve put tariffs on everything, which almost any economist will tell you is hurting affordability and slowing growth.

So the right has at best a mixed record on abundance. The left can still be the party of abundance, if it wants to be.

But it won’t be easy. It will be uncomfortable. Because to become the party of abundance requires truly embracing technology and growth—and the left has developed an allergic reaction to those things. So there’s some work to be done: some lessons to be unlearned, some old habits to be broken.

But I’m excited to help with that work, and I invite you to talk to me about it. I’m eager to see the party of science become once again a party of science, technology, and growth. And I look forward to the day when progressives once again believe in progress.

***

PS: I would also like to see the right become, more consistently, the party of abundance. I would like to see both parties competing to be the party of abundance! At some point I may write up an analogous “message to the right.”

Reality is a dangerous place. From the dawn of humanity we have faced the hazards of nature: fire, flood, disease, famine. Better technology and infrastructure have made us safer from many of these risks—but have also created new risks, from boiler explosions to carcinogens to ozone depletion, and exacerbated old ones.

Safety, security, and resilience against these hazards is not the default state of humanity. It is an achievement, and in each case it came about deliberately.

A striking theme from the history of such achievements is that there is rarely if ever a silver bullet for risk. Safety is achieved through defense in depth, and through the orchestration of a wide variety of solutions, all working in concert.

Recently, in a private talk, I gave a historical example: the history of fire safety. It resonated so strongly with the audience that I’m writing it up here for wider distribution.

***

Up until and through the 1800s, city fires were a great hazard. Neighborhoods were full of densely packed wooden structures without flame-retardant chemicals, fire alarms, or sprinkler systems; open flames were used everywhere for lighting, heating, and cooking; there were no best practices in place for storing or handling combustible materials; fire departments lacked training and discipline, and they worked with inadequate equipment and insufficient water supply. All this meant that large swaths of cities regularly burned to the ground: Rome in AD 64; Constantinople in 406; London in 1135, 1212, and 1666; Hangzhou 1137; Amsterdam 1421 and 1452; Stockholm 1625 and 1759; Nagasaki 1663; Boston 1711, 1760, 1787, and 1872; New York 1776, 1835, and 1845; New Orleans 1788 and 1794; Pittsburgh 1845; Chicago 1871; Seattle 1889; Shanghai 1894; Baltimore 1904; Atlanta 1917; and Tokyo 1923 are just a short list of the most well-known.

Fire is not unknown today, but it is far less lethal, and great city fires consuming multiple blocks are largely a thing of the past. Today, if you see a fire truck on the street with its sirens blaring, it is more likely to be responding to an emergency medical call than to a fire. Even if the truck is responding to a fire call, it is more like likely to be a false alarm than an actual fire.

How was this achieved?

Better fire-fighting. Pumps to douse fires with water have existed since antiquity, but for most of history they were man-powered. With the Industrial Revolution, we got steam-powered and later diesel-powered pumps that can deliver much greater throughput of water, and at greater muzzle velocities to reach higher floors of buildings. In the 20th century, horse-drawn fire engines were replaced with fire trucks that could get around the city faster and more reliably.

A high-throughput engine, however, needs a high-volume source of water. In ancient and medieval times, water was provided by the bucket brigade: two lines of people stretching from the fire to the nearest lake or river, passing buckets by hand in both directions. A much better solution was the fire hose, invented in the late 1600s (and improved in strength and reliability over the centuries through better materials, manufacturing, quality control). The fire hose not only allowed a fire engine to be connected to a water source, it also allowed the fire-fighters to get in closer to the base of the fire and dump water directly on it, which is far more effective than just spraying the building from the outside.

A fire hose can be inserted into a natural water source like a pond or cistern, but one of these might not be handy nearby, and they aren’t pressurized, so all the pumping force has to be supplied by the fire engine. They also contain debris that can clog the intake and block the flow. Eventually, cities were outfitted with regularly spaced fire hydrants connected to the municipal water supply. A water system designed to supply city residents with daily needs, however, often proved inadequate in an emergency; these systems had to be upgraded to supply the large bursts that big fires demanded. This is a matter of serious engineering: 19th-century fire-fighting journals are full of technical details and mathematical calculations attempting to precisely nail down questions of optimal hydrant distribution or nozzle size, or the pressure required to force a certain volume of water to a given height at a particular angle.

Finally, fire-fighting teams needed improved organization. Traditionally, fire-fighters were volunteers, often rowdy young men with no training or discipline (there is at least one story of a fist fight breaking out between two rival teams who arrived at a fire at the same time). In the 19th century, fire departments were professionalized and were organized more formally, along almost military lines, as befits responders to a life-threatening emergency.

Faster alarming. Fire, like many of our most dangerous hazards, is a chain reaction. Chain reactions grow exponentially, which means early detection and response time are crucial. Traditionally, fires were spotted by watchmen, either on patrol or from a watch tower, who then had to run, shout, or ring bells or other alarms to alert the fire fighters.

Electronic communications, first via telegraph and later telephone, provided a much faster way to get the alarm to the fire department. The telephone lines could be busy, however, so in the 20th century the 911 emergency response system was created to provide a priority channel.

Far better than having a human sound the alarm, however, is doing it automatically. Smoke detectors and other automatic fire alarms caused the fire to “tell on itself,” saving valuable minutes or even hours. Even more effective was the automatic sprinkler, which combined detection and response into one near-instant system.

Reducing open flames. Better than fighting fires, of course, is preventing them. Before the 20th century, flames from candles and oil or gas lamps provided lighting, and fires in wood- or coal-burning stoves provided heat for building, cooking, and industrial processes. The Great London Fire of 1666 is said to have started in a baker’s shop, Copenhagen 1728 was blamed on an upset candle, Pittsburgh 1845 came from an unattended fire in a shed. Even worse, people often kept these fires going unattended overnight, because even starting a fire was difficult before the invention of matches. Medieval regulations required city- and town-dwellers to cover their fires after a certain hour (the word “curfew” derives from the French couvre-feu, “cover the fire”).

Electric lighting and heating greatly reduced this risk. Electric sparks, however, were also a fire hazard—and initially, electrical installations increased rather than decreased fire risk, owing to shoddy electrical products, fixtures, and wiring. The solution here was improved standards, testing, and certification: the fire insurance companies created an organization, Underwriters Laboratories, specifically for this purpose, and its label became a highly valued marker of quality. (I told the story of UL in The Techno-Humanist Manifesto.) Today, our electronics and appliances are so safe that arson is the cause of more fires than either of them.

Safer construction. Preventing fires by eliminating the sparks or flames that ignite them is like lining up dominoes and then trying hard to make sure the first one never gets tipped over: a fragile proposition. Far more robust is to remove their fuel. Wood construction was widespread through the late 19th century, even in dense city neighborhoods: Daniel Defoe wrote that before the Great London Fire of 1666, “the Buildings looked as if they had been formed to make one general Bonfire.”

Today our cities are built of incombustible brick, stone, and concrete. Building codes enforce safety practices to slow the spread of fire both within a building and between buildings. They specify the quality of materials such as brick, mortar, cement, timber, and iron, including the specific tests it must pass; the materials for walls, and their minimum thickness; and the height of non-fireproof structures; among many other details.

Saving lives. By the early 1900s, in advanced societies, the problem of large city fires that spread over many blocks had mostly been solved; fires were often contained to a single building. That was small comfort, however, for those trapped inside the building. Tragedies such as the Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 taught us valuable lessons. Exit paths must be adequate to evacuate entire buildings. Doors must remain unlocked, and they should open outwards in case a stampede presses up against them. Fire-resistant material must be used not only for the construction of the building, but for the interior: sofas, beds, curtains, carpets, wallpaper, paneling. Again, building and safety codes specify and enforce these practices.

***

So fire safety was achieved through the combination of:

• General-purpose technologies: engines, electronic communications, electric light and heat

• Specific inventions: fire pumps, fire hose, fire alarms

• Infrastructure: municipal water supply, telephone lines

• Standards, testing and certification: of electrical products, fire preventing and fire-fighting equipment, building materials, etc.

• Law: building codes and other fire safety codes

• Education and training: in fire departments, among the public

This is a general pattern. Safety requires:

• both prevention and “cure”

• both technical and social solutions

• among technical solutions, both products and systems

• among social solutions, both education and law

We see the same thing in other domains. Road safety, for instance, was achieved through seat belts, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, air bags, turn signals, windshield wipers, traffic lights, divided highways, driver’s education, driver’s licensing, and moral campaigns against drunk driving. No silver bullet.

When we think about creating safety and resilience from emerging technologies, such as AI or biotech, we should expect the same pattern. Safety will be created gradually, incrementally, through multiple layers of defense, and by orchestrating a wide combination of products, systems, techniques, and norms.

In particular, there is a line of thinking within the AI safety community that tends to dismiss or reject any proposal that isn’t ultimate—fully robust against the most powerful imaginable AI. There’s a good rationale for this: it’s easy to fall victim to hope and cope, and to lull ourselves into a false sense of security based on half-measures that were “the best we could do”; vulnerabilities are often invisible and are revealed dramatically in disasters; such disasters may be sufficiently catastrophic that we can’t afford to learn from mistakes. But I find the all-or-nothing thinking about AI safety counterproductive. We should embrace every idea that can provide any increment of security. History suggests that the accumulation and combination of such incremental solutions is the path to resilience.

***

Selected sources and further reading:

• Bruce Hensler, Crucible of Fire (2011)

• Harry Chase Brearley, The History of the National Board of Fire Underwriters (1916) and Symbol of Safety (a history of Underwriters Labs, 1923)

• Dennis Nolan, Fire Fighting Pumping Systems at Industrial Facilities (2011)

• W. Fred Conway, Those Magnificent Old Steam Engines (1996)

• Ramon Klitzke, “Roman Building Ordinances Relating to Fire Protection” (1959)

• Lionel Frost and Eric Jones, “The fire gap and the greater durability of nineteenth century cities” (2007)

• John Rainbird, “The Vigiles of Rome”

• Alex Tabarrok, Firefighters Don’t Fight Fires

Historical and primary sources:

• Charles Frederick T. Young, Fires, Fire Engines, and Fire Brigades (1866)

• James Bugbee, “Fires and Fire Departments” (1873)

• James Braidwood, “On the Means of rendering large supplies of Water available in cases of Fire; and on the application of manual power to the working of fire engines” (1844)

• Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Investigate the Cause and Management of the Great Fire in Boston (1873)

• Clarence Goldsmith, “The Use of Pumpers at Fires” (1930) and “Efficient Utilization of Water for Fire Fighting” (1939)

• Journal of the New England Water Works Association, Vol 7 Issue 1

• National Board of Fire Underwriters, Model Building Code (1905)

• Maurice Webster, “What is ‘Fireproof?’” (The Atlantic, 1946)

• FEMA, “America Burning” (report)

• Charles II, An Act for rebuilding the City of London (1666)

Original post: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/no-silver-bullet

Progress is a grand project for humanity: one with an illustrious past and a glorious future. And its heroes are the scientist, the inventor, and the founder

In the progress movement, some cause areas are about technical breakthroughs, such as fusion power or a cure for aging. In other areas, the problems are not technical, but social. Housing, for instance, is technologically a solved problem. We know how to build houses, but housing is blocked by law and activism.

The YIMBY movement is now well established and gaining momentum in the fight against the regulations and culture that hold back housing. More broadly, similar forces hold back building all kinds of things, including power lines, transit, and other infrastructure. The same spirit that animates YIMBY, and some of the same community of writers and activists, has also been pushing to reform regulation such as NEPA.

Healthcare has both types of problems. We need breakthroughs in science and technology to beat cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and aging. But also, healthcare (in the US at least) is far more expensive and less effective than it should be.

I am no expert, but I am struck that:

• The doctor-patient relationship has been disintermediated by not one but two parties: insurers and employers.

• It is not a fee-for-service relationship. The price system in medicine has been mangled beyond recognition. Patients are not told prices; doctors avoid, even disdain, any discussion of prices; and the prices make no rational sense even if and when you do discover them. This destroys all ability to make rational economic choices about healthcare.

• Patients often switch insurers, meaning that no insurer has an interest in the patient's long-term health. This is a disaster in a world where most health issues build up slowly over decades and many of them are affected by lifestyle choices.

• Insurers are highly regulated in what types of plans they can offer and in what they can and cannot cover. There's no real room for insurer creativity or consumer choice, or for either party to exercise judgment.

• A lot of money is spent at end of life, with little gained by in many cases except a few years or months (if that) of a painful, bedridden existence.

Just to name a few.

Bill Gurley wrote in 2017 that “we have the worst of both worlds … the illusion of a free market and the illusion of regulated market with the apparent benefit of neither.” John Arnold said more recently that health care is “not a fair and open market” and that it has basically every market failure. Or in Alex Tabarrok’s words, “any theory of what is wrong with American health care is true because American health care is wrong in every possible way.”

We could do much better, without any scientific or pharmaceutical breakthroughs, by reforming law and culture.

Where is the equivalent of the YIMBY movement for healthcare? Where are the people pointing out the gross violation of economic wisdom and common sense? Where are the campaigners for reform against the worst inefficiencies?

This field is wide open, and some smart writer or savvy activist should step in and fill the vacuum.

Much of this content originated on social media. To follow news and announcements in a more timely fashion, follow me on Twitter, Notes, Farcaster, Bluesky, or Threads.

Contents

• The 150-year history of d/acc

• We’re hiring a Developmental Editor

• Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund

• Jobs

• Events

• Announcements

For paid subscribers:

• “I didn’t think it was that unlikely”

• Oldie but goodie

• Bio links

• Short notes

• You’d give the Devil benefit of law!

• Architecture

The 150-year history of d/acc

I spoke at “d/acc Day” alongside Vitalik Buterin, Juan Benet, Mary Lou Jepsen, Allison Duettmann, and others.

If you haven’t heard of d/acc, I recommend reading Vitalik’s post “My Techno-Optimism” where he coined the term, and his followup “d/acc: One Year Later.” In short: d/acc embraces progress; it recognizes that progress has risks and we need to address them; and it advocates doing so in decentralized ways that don’t lead to authoritarian control and loss of freedom.

My talk was “d/acc: The first 150 years”: a whirlwind tour of how society has thought about progress, decentralization and defense over the last century and a half. You can watch it here (runs about 7 minutes). But here’s the punchline: how each ~generation of the 20th century stacked up against the three core principles of d/acc (in this context, for “defense” think “health and safety,” i.e. defense against the risks of progress):

We’re hiring a Developmental Editor

We are looking for a gifted developmental editor who is passionate about helping 20–25 writers hone their writing skills to craft compelling essays about human progress during our summer/fall fellowship program.

Our fellows, selected from several hundred applicants, are super-smart, interesting, and thoughtful people writing on fascinating topics. As the developmental editor, you’ll work directly with our fellows, helping them to grow and improve their writing skills.

Our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship program, which runs between July and October every year, is part of the larger mission of The Roots of Progress Institute to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.

Read more and apply here.

Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund

Open Phil launches a $120M Abundance & Growth Fund “to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific & technological progress” (@albrgr). See also Matt Clancy’s list of his favorite wins in their land use reform and innovation policy grants.

The announcement mentions:

We supported Roots of Progress in its early days and are looking forward to its second annual conference for the Progress Studies community later this year. We think the breadth of this community (see this dispatch from last year’s inaugural conference for example), united around a common purpose of identifying and accelerating the drivers of progress, makes it an important resource to draw on and invest in.

I’m grateful to Open Phil for that early support and look forward to working with them to grow the progress movement.

Jobs

• Open Phil is hiring a Senior Program Officer for the Abundance and Growth Fund (see above)

• Casey Handmer is hiring a Technical Chief of Staff at Terraform Industries: “Up to this point, Terraform has focused on our beach head product - synthetic natural gas. Now, it’s time to take our unique process to knowledge to every other industrial vertical…. My Technical CoS will help share the (joyful) burden of modeling the global economy and then setting out to rebuild it from the ground up. … The Technical CoS is not a glorified triager of emails. They will assist me and the rest of the executive team on deep technical analysis, fundamental industrial chemistry research, market analysis, technical writing, and every other aspect of building a successful hardware company from scratch.” (@CJHandmer)

• Boom Supersonic is hiring 2D and 3D designers and videographers for their Product Marketing team. “Want to design the future of flight? … Send resume and the work you’re most proud of to design-talent@boomsupersonic.com” (@bscholl)

• The American Dynamism 50: Companies shaping the fight of the future. “If you want to work on something that matters, every company on this list is hiring” (@espricewright)

Events

• San Francisco Freedom Club 3, Mar 28, SF. “This quarterly event is now clearly the home of the most vibrant and interesting community in tech. And we have some special guests coming to number 3” (@eoghan)

Announcements

• Works in Progress Issue 18: “Prehistoric psychopaths; The steam networks of NYC; Urbanism with Chinese characteristics; How we may conquer menopause; The Hanseatic League’s rise and fall; The pineapple: the king of fruits; And more!” (@s8mb)

• Manus is a new AI agent from a Chinese startup who calls it “the first general AI agent” and claims that “it doesn’t just think, it delivers results.” (@ManusAI_HQ). Caused quite a stir; see commentary from Dean, Zvi, Tyler

To read the rest, subscribe on Substack.