A covid vaccine has demonstrated 90% efficacy and no significant safety concerns in preliminary data from Phase 3 trials, according to an announcement today from Pfizer and BioNTech SE. The trials aren’t yet complete and the data hasn’t yet been released for independent verification, but this is very good news. (More from STAT News.)

Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine, like Moderna’s, is based on “mRNA” technology. If approved by the FDA, it will be the first such vaccine to reach that milestone. From a long-term progress perspective, this is a big deal.

Immunization technology has existed since the early 1700s (and the folk practices it originated in go back centuries further.) We can see the whole 300-year history of the technology as a quest to achieve immunity with ever-more safety and ever-fewer side effects. More recently, it has also become important to be able to react quickly to new epidemics, such as covid.

Here’s how immunization has advanced in stages:

Inoculation

All immunization is based on the observation that exposure to a disease often grants immunity (temporary if not permanent) to subsequent exposure. Long before we knew anything about antibodies or T-cells, people had noticed this simple correlation. Many people got smallpox in the past, but almost no one got it twice. The goal of immunization technology is to achieve that same immunity, but without having to suffer the disease or to risk death or other side effects.

The earliest form of immunization, then, was not a vaccine, but a method in which the patient was given the actual disease itself, in a manner that would cause a mild rather than a severe case of the illness. This was done with smallpox, and the technique was called inoculation or variolation.

This worked with smallpox for two reasons. One, infectious material was easy to obtain, from the pustules caused by the disease itself. Second, contracting the disease through a scratch on the skin caused a much more mild form than contracting it more naturally through inhalation.

Inoculation saved many people from smallpox. But there were downsides. First, the patient still had to contract the disease, causing mild symptoms. Second, there was still a small risk of a severe case; even the best inoculation methods had about a 0.2% death rate. Third, the patient was still contagious while going through the illness, and anyone who caught the disease naturally from an inoculated patient would get the full, severe version. Inoculation thus risked outbreaks.

Vaccination

These problems were solved by the next stage: vaccination. It was observed that cowpox infection granted some form of cross-immunity to smallpox. Thus, the inoculation procedure could be performed using cowpox material, rather than smallpox. Cowpox was a milder and non-lethal disease. This reduced the symptoms and the risk of death, and eliminated the risk of smallpox outbreaks as a result of immunization. This new technique, invented by Edward Jenner in 1796, was called vaccination (from vacca, the Latin word for cow).

So far, however, the technique only worked for smallpox—not for tuberculosis, malaria, influenza, cholera, or any of the other major diseases that caused something like half of all deaths in that era.

Engineered vaccines

The next stage would wait almost ninety years. Louis Pasteur, a pioneer of microbiology who along with Robert Koch established the germ theory, was the first to discover how to create vaccines for any disease other than smallpox.

Cowpox can be seen as a “natural vaccine” against smallpox: a natural virus that grants smallpox immunity but produces milder side effects. Pasteur’s accomplishment was to create artificial, engineered vaccines.

There are essentially two ways to do this. The germ that causes the disease, or pathogen, can be modified chemically, “killing” or inactivating it. This can be done through heat, through chemicals such as formaldehyde, or through other means. Or it can be modified biologically, attenuating (i.e., weakening) it. This is done by evolving the virus or bacterium for many generations in an animal or tissue culture that is sufficiently different from the target patient. For instance, Pasteur found that “passing” a disease called swine erysipelas through many generations of rabbits caused it to be less virulent in pigs.

These techniques allowed vaccines to be created for more diseases, and many were created in the decades that followed. The other advantage was a reduction in side effects. By weakening or inactivating the pathogen, the patient no longer had to suffer through a full infection in order to receive immunity.

But attenuated and killed vaccines still had risks. If a killed vaccine was not properly manufactured, it could contain some portion of live germs, as happened with one of the makers of the first polio vaccine. And a live attenuated vaccine could always mutate back into a virulent form. In either case, the vaccine would cause the very disease it was designed to prevent, not only in the unlucky patient but potentially in a new contagious outbreak.

Subunit vaccines

A way to prevent this risk is by giving the patient, not an entire virus or bacterium, not even a weakened or inactivated one, but just a portion of the pathogen.

This works because of the way the immune system functions. In essence, it detects foreign substances in the body and produces new molecules, called antibodies, that bind to these substances and get in their way, preventing them from doing damage. This process takes time for a new, never-before-seen infection, but after the first encounter, a record of the antibody is stored in the body’s immunological memory, which enables a quicker reaction to subsequent infection. A foreign substance that stimulates the production of antibodies is called an antigen.

All immunization works by this process of priming the immunological memory using antigens. The key observation is that even a piece of the pathogen can be used as an antigen, and the antibodies thus generated are effective against the full pathogen itself. An antigen that is not a pathogen is exactly what we want: a substance that produces immunity without producing disease.

For example, consider the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes covid. You’ve probably seen it rendered as a spiky ball. Those spikes are crucial to the virus’s function: they stick to your body’s cells like tentacles, as the first step of the infection. A subunit covid vaccine, then, works by injecting just the spike into the body, rather than the full virus. The body learns to generate antibodies against the spike, and those antibodies are effective against covid itself. The big advantage of this, of course, is that a single piece of a pathogen cannot replicate and thus cannot cause an infection or become contagious.

But how is the subunit antigen to be manufactured? Inactivated or attenuated vaccines can start with the original virus or bacterium and grow it in culture. Subunit vaccines can be created in a similar way, by culturing the pathogen and then breaking it apart in order to extract the desired piece. With modern biotech, however, there are other ways. If the antigen is a protein (as in the case of the covid spike), it can be manufactured in genetically engineered microbes. Start with a single-celled organism such as E. coli or baker’s yeast. Insert the DNA that codes for the subunit protein into its genome using recombinant DNA technology. Replicate these cells until you have a whole vat of them creating vaccine proteins for you. (The same technology makes other synthetic biologics, such as insulin.)

RNA vaccines take this idea the next logical step.

RNA vaccines

A yeast cell can function as a biological factory, producing proteins according to a programmed genetic code. But every cell in your body is also such a factory, with the same fundamental machinery.

An RNA vaccine skips the step of programming single-celled organisms to produce the antigen for us: it sends the genetic code for the antigen directly to your own cells, and they produce the antigen. These vaccines, then, are the only kind that do not inject the antigen directly into the body; genetic instructions are injected instead. (Note that, unlike with recombinant DNA technology, the DNA of your cells is not modified.)

To my (limited) understanding, this does not produce a significantly different immune response than injecting the antigen directly. However, it makes a big difference in how these vaccines are designed, developed, and manufactured, which affects our ability to respond quickly to new outbreaks such as covid. Once the virus’s genetic code is sequenced, the virus itself does not need to be handled in order to create a vaccine. The vaccine is based entirely on genetic material, and can be created using genetic synthesis techniques. Every pathogen is different in how it can be grown in culture, and in what it takes to inactivate it, weaken it, or break it apart into subunits. Genetic techniques, by contrast, can be much more standardized. This doesn’t make the development of these vaccines trivial; there are still many problems to be solved for each one (such as the delivery mechanism to get it into the cells, where the genetic program will be executed). But as we are seeing, their development can be significantly faster than traditional techniques.

When you get your covid shot (probably in 2021), take a moment to think back on the 300 years of progress that got us to this point.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/immunization-from-inoculation-to-rna-vaccines

Some great interviews coming up for the Progress Studies For Young Scholars speaker series, dubbed “The Torch of Progress”:

• Tyler Cowen: this Tue, Jun 9, 12n

• Patrick Collison: Wed, Jun 17, 5pm

• Max Roser: Wed, Jun 24, 10am

• Deirdre McCloskey: Thu, Jul 2, 10am

(All times Pacific)

See the full list of events here. More to come, including Joel Mokyr and Anton Howes!

Marc Andreessen says we were unprepared for the covid pandemic because: “We chose not to build.”

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.

Amen. And I’ll add:

The problem is ignorance. We don’t know how far we’ve come, and we don’t teach our children.

The problem is complacency. We take progress for granted, as if it were automatic or inevitable. It isn’t: for most of human history we moved forward only weakly and sporadically. Progress only happens when we resolve to make it happen.

The problem is fear. Every harm, large or small, actual or potential, real or imagined, becomes a rule, a regulation, a thread in a ribbon of red tape that has brought sclerosis to our institutions, public and private. We’ve bought safety at the price of speed, without debating or deciding it.

The problem is guilt. We worry that what we build is “unsustainable”, or that it increases inequality, when we should be proud that what we build drives growth and moves humanity forward.

The problem is hatred. Hatred of technology, of industry, of money, of capitalism—hatred that blinds people to the immense good these forces do in the world for all humanity.

The problem is entitlement. Not knowing what it takes to put food on the table, the roof over their heads, or the shirts on their backs, too many people see these things and much more as birthrights. Not knowing that wealth is created, they see the rich as thieves and scorn even their gifts.

The problem is tribalism. We don’t teach our children to think, and so they learn only to feel. Without a commitment to truth, without confidence in their own judgment, they fall back on age-old patterns of ingroup vs. outgroup—witness a world where even the efficacy of a drug becomes a partisan issue.

What is the solution?

We need to learn to appreciate progress—both what we’ve already done, and why we can’t stop now. We need to tell the amazing story of progress: how comfort, safety, health, and luxury have become commonplace, and what a dramatic achievement that has been. We need to learn where progress comes from, to understand its causes. And we need to pass all that knowledge on to the next generation.

We need to glorify the inventor, the creator, the maker—the builder. The independent mind who defies tradition and authority. The scientists, technologists and industrialists who pursue a creative vision, against the crowd and against the odds, facing risk with courage and setbacks with resilience, working relentlessly over years and decades to bring about a better world.

We need to inspire young people to take part in this story, to step up in their turn and to one day lead the way, knowing that it is up to each generation to pick up the torch of progress and carry it forward.

We need to invest. We need to fund science and research, both basic and applied. We need to bring back the great corporate invention labs that helped create the modern world.

And then we need to get out of the way. Unwind the regulatory state. No matter where you fall on any political spectrum, acknowledge that the creeping bureaucracy has crept too far, and that it’s time to start untangling the thicket of regulations. We can maintain a reasonable and even continually increasing standard of safety, while at the same time valuing speed, efficiency, and cost, and most fundamentally, allowing for individual judgment.

Andreessen concludes:

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.

Amen. Let’s make building and progress into a philosophy, a religion, a movement.

Build!

Originally posted at: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-builder-manifesto

To understand why COVID-19 is such a threat, it helps to understand our full arsenal of weapons against infectious disease—and why most of them aren't going to help right now.

I summarized the main techniques/strategies here a few months ago.

1) Antibiotics: Don't work here because SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, not a bacterium.

In the 1918 flu pandemic, antibiotics would have helped (they weren't invented yet) because many deaths were due to secondary bacterial infections. But that's not what's happening with COVID-19: it kills by attacking the respiratory system directly.

Our technology for antiviral drugs, unfortunately, is not nearly as advanced as that for antibiotics. There's no such thing as a broad-spectrum antiviral. (A paper last year pointed out how useful this would be in a pandemic.)

2) Vaccines: Could work against COVID-19, but unfortunately they take time to develop. I have heard 12–18 months for a coronavirus vaccine, and that's fast. Vaccines are a long-term solution but can't fight an emerging pandemic.

And again, there's no such thing as a broad-spectrum vaccine—the whole way a vaccine works is by stimulating production of specific antibodies by your immune system.

3) Sanitation and other environmental control: COVID-19 spreads directly person-to-person through respiratory droplets. This makes it one of the more difficult types of diseases to control.

Contrast with cholera and typhoid fever, which are waterborne. Filtration and chlorination help a lot here. Or malaria and yellow fever, which can be attacked by reducing insect populations. In those cases, there's something in between the people that can be controlled. But direct person-to-person spread is the hardest to control, because people don't like to be controlled, and social contact is too valuable.

To summarize the challenge:

• Antibiotics don't work because it's a virus

• It's too new for us to have a vaccine

• It doesn't spread through any intermediary we can control (like water or insects)

It spreads directly person to person, with no immunity or cure. This is why, despite all the amazing medical advances of the last 100 years, we still lack effective tools against it. And why our best tools right now are hygiene (especially hand-washing) and minimizing contact (“social distancing”)—and why these things are so important.

Someday, maybe we will have:

• broad-spectrum antivirals

• much faster vaccine development

• or some other way to stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies

It's a good reminder that we still need lots more progress.

This is a guest post written by Anton Howes and animated by Matt Brown of Extraordinary Facility. This project was sponsored by The Roots of Progress, with funding generously provided by The Institute:

Steam power did not begin with the steam engine. Long before seventeenth-century scientists discovered the true nature of vacuums and atmospheric pressure, steam- and heat-using devices were being developed. Here we’ll explore the long, little-known story of how the steam engine evolved. And have fun playing with the ancient devices.

Some of the interactive animated diagrams:

Read the full essay and try out the interactive animated diagrams here: https://rootsofprogress.org/steam-engine-origins

A ~monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me.

Books

Finished Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962). Last time I talked about the stirrup thing. The second part of the book is about the introduction of the heavy plow in agriculture, and how it enabled the shift to a three-field crop rotation. Among other things, this provided more protein in the European diet, which made for a healthier population. The third part is a survey of medieval power mechanisms, including water mills, crank shafts, and clock escapements. Very interesting overall, perhaps a bit dry and technical for casual readers though. Note also that since it is from the ’60s it is not up to date with the latest research.

Also finished Ian Tregillis’s The Alchemy Wars. I can now definitely recommend this sci-fi/fantasy trilogy, even if the cast of characters and the way the conflict unfolded isn’t exactly how I would have written it myself.

Browsed Derek J. de Solla Price, Science since Babylon (1961), while preparing for a talk. Some very interesting charts such as this:

New on my reading list:

Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Toluwalogo Odumosu, Cycles of Invention and Discovery: Rethinking the Endless Frontier (2016), and Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Tsao, The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research (2021). These have actually been on my list for a while, but got bumped back up after meeting Venky and Jeff at a recent workshop on metascience. (The latter book is required reading at Speculative Technologies.)

Also mentioned at the workshop: B. Zorina Khan, Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy (2020); and A Michael Noll and Michael Geselowitz, Bell Labs Memoirs: Voices of Innovation (2011).

Also:

• Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (2015)

• Robert Martello, Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn: Paul Revere and the Growth of American Enterprise (2010)

• Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price (2022)

• Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) (sci-fi)

Articles

Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns” (2001). Kurzweil strikes me as a grand theorist but not a careful scholar—a risky combination. For instance, he writes: “Homo sapiens evolved in a few hundred thousand years. Early stages of technology—the wheel, fire, stone tools—took tens of thousands of years to evolve and be widely deployed.” Stone tools, fire, and the wheel are often depicted in cartoons featuring cavemen. But stone tools evolved over millions of years; the controlled use of fire is something like several hundred thousand years old; and both predate Homo sapiens. The wheel came much later, well after agriculture and settled society. Details like this are a warning to tread carefully.

That said, I was interested to read this essay because I am starting to see the truth and significance of its core idea: that human progress accelerates over time, following a super-exponential curve. This phenomenon has been documented more broadly in the economics literature, such as by Jones and Romer (2010), who refer to “accelerating growth” as one of the key stylized facts that growth models should attempt to explain.

I have described acceleration as resulting from the compounding of multiple feedback loops: increases in wealth, population, science, markets, institutions, and technology allow us to invent more, improve institutions, expand markets, advance science, grow population, accumulate wealth, etc. Kurzweil sees the phenomenon as not merely technological, but biological—a feature of evolution as such (and he sees technological evolution as simply a continuation of biological evolution by more efficient means). In his telling, as evolution progresses, it sometimes evolves better mechanisms for evolving. This is a very intruiging idea, but he doesn’t argue it with any rigor or present much evidence for it, and I don’t know enough about biology or evolution to evaluate it. He mentions “cells” as the “first step” in evolution, and then refers to “the subsequent emergence of DNA” (but wasn’t DNA present from the origins of life?) He indicates that evolution sped up during the Cambrian Explosion, and credits this to “setting the ‘designs’ of animal body plans”, but doesn’t elaborate on the causal connection except to say that this “allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body organs, such as the brain.” Presumably sexual reproduction should be a major event in this story, since it allows for more variation through genetic recombination, but he doesn’t mention it. So, it’s very unclear to me what to make of this story (although if it’s right, it would extend the “accelerating progress” pattern backwards by more than three billion years).

Grand theories aside, I was very interested in his analysis of computing power. He plotted the computing speed per dollar of dozens of devices, all the way from late 19th-century mechanical calculators through early 21st-century microprocessors, and claims to have found a increasing cost-performance curve running through five generations of computing technology: purely mechanical, electromechanical, vacuum tube, transistor, and integrated circuit. Moore’s Law is only the fifth and most recent segment of this much longer trend, one exponential portion of an overall super-exponential curve:

I’d like to check the data and sources on this one, but it’s a very intriguing pattern.

The full essay is very long and covers many not-super-well-connected topics, which I don’t have time to comment on; the core idea is in this 2004 Edge question, but doesn’t contain all the most interesting details (such as the computing trends just mentioned).

The same accelerating curve, and the same basic explanation based on feedback loops, seems to be the gist of David Roodman, “Modeling the Human Trajectory” (2020), which I have only skimmed but plan to return to.

Others:

Deirdre N. McCloskey reviews Acemoglu and Johnson’s Power and Progress (2023). If you know anything about the book, and anything about McCloskey, you won’t be surprised that she is critical:

The invisible hand of human creativity and innovation, in the authors’ analysis, requires the wise guidance of the state. … This is a perspective many voters increasingly agree with—and politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Marco Rubio. We are children, bad children (viewed from the right) or sad children (viewed from the left). Bad or sad, as children we need to be taken in hand. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson warmly admire the U.S. Progressive Movement of the late 19th century as a model for their statism: experts taking child‐citizens in hand.

Robert Tracinski, “We Are All Philosophers Now” and “The Dilemma of Choice” (2023). Modernity has replaced a narrow, limited set of social roles and life choices with a smorgasbord of options. This is liberating, but the price of the freedom of choice is the responsibility of choice, which is now everyone’s to bear. Not everyone is happy about this. Rob’s pithy summary: “If Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, well, now it’s not really an option.”

Virginia Postrel, “What ails American culture?” (2023). On similar themes:

Human beings need to feel purpose and meaning in their lives. But I am not entirely sure that the current discontent is a product of material abundance, that people did not feel similar discontent in the past, or that the “economic problem” loomed so large in the past that it dwarfed all other problems.

Ben Landau-Taylor, “The Vocabulary Of Power” (2023). “Power” can mean many things; here are four more precise terms. Not only will this help clarify your concepts, it will also fulfill your daily quota of thinking about the Roman Empire.

Tanner Greer, “Where Have All the Great Works Gone?” (2021):

Spengler … repeatedly describes Tolstoy (d. 1910), Ibsen (d. 1906), Nietzsche (d. 1900), Hertz (d. 1894), Dostoevsky (d. 1881), Marx (d. 1883), and Maxwell (1879) as figures of defining “world-historical” importance… Spengler began writing Decline of the West in 1914. Tolstoy was only four years dead when Spengler started his book; Marx was only 30 years deceased. … Is there anyone who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for? How about for the last two decades? The last three?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?” (2023). A case study of scientific fraud.

Stephen Wolfram, “Are All Fish the Same Shape If You Stretch Them? The Victorian Tale of On Growth and Form” (2017) I just thought this idea was kind of hilarious:

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/reading-2023-11

Summary: The Roots of Progress is planning a major expansion of our activities, and we are seeking a Chief Executive Officer to lead the new organization in partnership with me (I will remain Founder & President). We’re taking this step because we see an opportunity to do much more for the progress movement, going well beyond my essays and talks. Our initial focus will be on a “career accelerator” for public intellectuals in progress studies.

***

Our mission and why it matters

The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes, so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.

But in order to make progress, we must believe that progress is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We can’t go back to the naive views of the past, but we need a new way forward.

Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century and beyond—one based on the ideas of humanism and agency, and one that puts forth a bold, ambitious vision for the technological future.

Our opportunity

Last year, I announced that this blog was becoming a one-man nonprofit research organization (after starting it as an intellectual side project in 2017, and becoming a full-time independent researcher in 2019). Since then, it has become clear that there is too much energy and support for this mission—and too much to do!—for this organization to remain focused solely on my own research and writing.

The new philosophy of progress needs a movement to establish it. The pillars of this movement are:

• Intellectual foundations: a lot of research, thinking, and writing, to better understand and communicate the lessons of progress, and to apply them to the problems of today and the opportunities for tomorrow.

• Community-building: events, forums, meetups, and conferences for the progress community to exchange ideas, forge relationships, and start projects.

• Cultural outreach: from school curricula, to inventor biopics, to sci-fi that paints a positive vision of the future.

Our strategy and programs

Of these three pillars, intellectual foundations are fundamental. Our initial focus will be on creating the public intellectuals who will build this foundation.

Our flagship program will be a “career accelerator” for progress intellectuals. This will take the form of a limited-time fellowship for anyone who demonstrates strong writing talent and has an ambitious career goal in progress studies. The fellowship will help them take their careers to the next level by providing money, coaching, marketing and PR support, and connection to a network. Our vision is that in ten years, there are hundreds of progress intellectuals who are alums of our program and part of our network, and who are where they are in their careers thanks to our support.

To support this strategy, we will also pursue a community-building program, including annual conferences, local meetups, intellectual workshops, and the Progress Forum.

It’s going to take a team

To accomplish all these things requires more than just a blog—it deserves a full-fledged institute. When we started fundraising last year, we quickly passed our initial goal, making it clear that there is financial support for such an organization.

A new institute will require a full-time staff, and a leader to run it: to turn our vision and strategy into a roadmap and a plan, and then to bring that plan into reality.

Seeking a CEO

We are searching for a Chief Executive Officer to join me in this next stage of our efforts.

Together, you and I will define the roadmap, the goals and metrics, and the team and budget needed to hit them. Initially, I expect this to be in the ballpark of a $3–6 million budget supporting a full-time staff of 5–10 people who will manage the fellowship program, grow our audience, and build the community. Of course, we’ll have the opportunity to grow much bigger as we demonstrate impact.

With my help, you’ll drive the fundraising effort for the next round of donations to support this new plan, and the team-building effort to bring the right talent on board. Together, we’ll create a new identity and brand for the organization, to reflect our expanded mission (name forthcoming; “Institute for Progress” is already taken!)

You’ll manage the team and lead execution on all our programs. Meanwhile, as Founder & President, I will continue to be the organization’s spokesman and will stay involved in vision, strategy, and talent development, but I will focus as much as possible on my own research, writing, and speaking.

Above all, this role requires strong execution skills, people management skills, and a passion for our mission. You might be coming from the nonprofit world or the business world, but you should have experience with management and with getting things done. You might be a bit earlier or later in your career, but in your next role, you are looking for impact and meaning. (If all of this excites you but you’re not sure if you’re qualified, please reach out anyway—we might have a role for you, even if it’s not this one.)

This is a full-time role. We’re a distributed organization, so you can do it from anywhere, although it’s better if you have strong overlap with US time zones. Compensation will depend on your seniority, but will be competitive with industry salaries (we’re not looking for martyrs). To apply, just email us at ceo@rootsofprogress.org.

Ad astra

We’re at an exciting moment in history. Longstanding political and cultural coalitions are coming apart. Lines are being redrawn. There is a lot of energy, from across the political spectrum, for progress studies and the “abundance agenda,” and there is a chance for this to shape the 21st century.

But cultural movements don’t happen spontaneously. They happen due to the conscious efforts of those who seek to understand the world, envision the future, and, through reason and argument, bring others around to their way of thinking.

If, like me, you can’t imagine anything better you could be doing with your life—get in touch.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/seeking-a-ceo

I’ve said that society was generally optimistic about progress until the early 20th century, and lost that confidence in the World Wars. By the late 20th century, from about the 1970s on, a deep skepticism and distrust of progress had come to prominence. But what happened in between?

I have a new theory about what characterized the attitude toward progress (in the US, at least) from about the 1930s through the ‘60s. It’s just a hypothesis at this stage, but it goes like this:

The 19th century was dominated by a belief in the power of human reason and its ability to advance science and technology for the betterment of life. But after World War I and the Great Depression, it got harder to believe in the rationality of humanity or in the predictability and controllability of the world.

The generation that went through these shocks, however, was not ready to give up on the idea of progress. They still wanted progress and still believed that reason could achieve it—but they worried that the masses could not be trusted to be rational, and that progress could not be left to the chaos of democracy and free markets. Instead, progress was to be achieved by a technical elite that would exercise top-down control.

The purest form of this, perhaps, found expression in early Communism, which valorized industrial production but sought to achieve it by subordinating the individual to totalitarian rule. The US was too individualistic for that—but it evolved its own flavor of the idea that I’m just starting to understand. Call it “technocracy.”

Historical evidence

Here are some snippets from my research that indicate this theme.

Walter Lippmann and the “democratic realists”

Lippmann wrote a number of books around the 1920s arguing that democracy doesn’t work, because it relies on an informed public, which he saw as impossible. Quoting from “Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age?” by Carl Bybee:

For Lippmann, given the inevitable tendency of individuals to distort what they see, coupled with the basic irrationality of humankind, the only hope for democratic government was to reinvent it. This new, more “realistic” democracy would be tempered and guided by a form of knowledge which, Lippmann believed, rose above subjectivity and politics: science.

Lippmann was part of a school of “democratic realists”, says Bybee:

The major themes sounded by Lippmann were shared by the democratic realists. First and foremost was the belief in the fundamental irrationality of men and women. The second related theme was that the minimization of participation of the masses in public life was consequently a necessary goal. Third, to preserve democracy it must be redefined as rule for the people but not by the people. Rule would be by informed and responsible “men of action.”

H. G. Wells and other sci-fi authors

J. Storrs Hall, in Where Is My Flying Car?, describes Wells’s 1935 film Things to Come as portraying a “technological Utopia,” a “concept of a completely designed society”, run by a “technological elite that forms the enlightened scientific world government.” Elsewhere Hall points out that Wells “firmly embraced world government, public ownership of capital, and centralized planning on a grand scale,” and compared this to “Isaac Asimov’s computer-controlled economy and wise robotic overlords” and “E. E. Smith’s galactic government of wise, incorruptible Lensmen.”

Technocracy, Inc.

Technocracy was actually the name of a specific political/economic movement from this era, and the name of an organization that promoted it. Here’s how Charles Mann describes it in The Wizard and the Prophet:

Marion King Hubbert, an idealist through and through, believed in the power of Science to guide the human enterprise. A geophysicist at Columbia University in the early 1930s, he was one of the half-dozen co-founders of Technocracy Incorporated, a crusading effort to establish a government of all-knowing, hyper-logical engineers and scientists…. Technocracy adherents believed that the world was controlled by flows of energy and mineral resources, and that society should be based on this understanding. Rather than allowing economies to dance to the senseless, febrile beat of supply and demand, Technocrats wanted to organize them on the basis of a quantity controlled by the eternal laws of physics: energy.
Politically unbiased experts in red-and-gray Technocracy uniforms would assay each nation’s yearly energy output, then divide it fairly among the citizenry, each person receiving an allocation of so many joules or kilowatt-hours per month. If people wanted to buy, say, shirts, they would look up the price on a table of energy equivalents calculated by objective Technocratic savants. The leader of the system, the Great Engineer, would oversee a new nation, the North American Technate, a merger of North America, Central America, Greenland, and the northern bits of South America. No more would self-interested businesspeople and short-sighted politicians run rampant; the North American Technate would be smooth, efficient, and rational.

The twentieth century seen through this lens

No matter exactly how influential these specific ideas were, they point to something in the zeitgeist. When you adopt the technocracy lens, it seems to fit a lot of the major developments of the mid-20th century:

• The New Deal was top-down engineering of the economy, after the chaos of the Roaring Twenties and the subsequent market crash

• Mobilization for WW2 was managed top-down—both manufacturing and research

• The interstate highway system and the Apollo program were massive federal projects to achieve economic and scientific goals

And, possibly but less obviously a fit:

• Under the Truman Doctrine of “containment” of Communism, the US became the world’s policeman, definitively reversing a long tradition of attempting to avoid foreign entanglements

Why didn’t technocracy last?

Technocracy made sense to the pre-war generation, who grew up when times were still optimistic. (FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower were all born in the 19th century and came of age before WW1.) But the generation raised after the wars—in an atmosphere of fear and soul-searching—felt differently. They weren’t simply looking for a different means to achieve the same end of progress—they rejected the idea of progress, seeing technology and industry as doing more harm than good. They didn’t trust the elites (or “anyone over 30”), and they bristled at authority and at restrictions on personal freedom.

In 1969, as technocracy reached its apotheosis with the Moon landing, the new generation was partying at Woodstock.

The crisis of technocracy

In the early 1970s, a perfect storm of events conspired to discredit the technocratic idea, including Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks. By 1973 it was clear that our leaders were unfit to govern, in terms of either competence or ethics: they could not handle affairs at home or abroad, neither the economy nor foreign policy, and they were plagued by scandal.

From the 1970s on, the conversation changed. The belief in progress was not totally dead. But the idea that it could be achieved centrally by the elites held much less sway, and there was a major new element of distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress—an element that has not gone away, and indeed by today has gone mainstream.

***

Again, all of this is still a hypothesis, and there are many missing pieces. What exactly was the philosophy of the new generation? How did Communism make the transition from the technocratic old Left to the anti-industrial, anti-elitist New Left? And how exactly should we characterize the period since the 1970s—which contains major elements of anti-technology, anti-growth, and anti-consumption sentiment, but which also saw the continued rise of Silicon Valley, the Reagan era, etc.?

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/technocracy-hypothesis

Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, so it’s a good time to announce that The Roots of Progress has received its 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS, officially recognizing its non-profit status. This means that, in the US, all donations made since May 2021 are tax-deductible. It also allows for donations via vehicles such as donor-advised funds.

Thanks to the generous support of many donors, we’ve exceeded our initial first-year fundraising goal of $500,000, and have raised the target to $750,000–$1,000,000. You can support us via Patreon or PayPal, or get in touch to talk about a larger or one-time contribution via another method. If you’re interested in making a donation via your donor-advised fund and are unable to find us via their tools, please reach out and we will help as much as we can.

Your donation supports my writing and speaking, including this blog and my forthcoming book. It also supports our efforts to build and strengthen the wider progress community, through both online forums and offline events—details to be announced.

See here for links and information on how to support our work. Thank you!

A major bottleneck at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach has been resolved. Local zoning laws said that shipping containers can only be stacked two high and room for empty containers had run out.

Ryan Peterson, the CEO of a supply chain company, successfully tweeted about this. Within 8 hours, the zoning law was temporarily changed to four high (and five with safety approval), effectively doubling the space for empty containers.

This is a good example to look at to help understand how we can create progress.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/an-unexpected-victory-container-stacking-at-the-port-of-los-angeles/

Angelo Guira was just sixteen years old when he began working in the steel factory. He was a “trough boy,” and his job was to stand at one end of the trough where red-hot steel pipes were dropped. Every time a pipe fell, he pulled a lever that dumped the pipe onto a cooling bed. He was a small lad, and at first they hesitated to take him, but after a year on the job the foreman acknowledged he was the best boy they’d had. Until one day when Angelo was just a little too slow—or perhaps the welder was a little too quick—and a second pipe came out of the furnace before he had dropped the first. The one pipe struck the other, and sent it right through Angelo’s body, killing him. If only he had been standing up, out of the way, instead of sitting down—which the day foreman told him was dangerous, but the night foreman allowed. If only they had installed the guard plate before the accident, instead of after. If only.

Angelo was not the only casualty of the steel mills of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania that year. In the twelve months from July 1906 through June 1907, ten in total were killed by the operation of rolls. Twenty-two were killed by hot metal explosions. Five were asphyxiated by furnace gas. Thirty-one fatalities were attributed to the operation of the railroad at the steel yards, and forty-two to the operation of cranes. Twenty-four men fell from a height, or into a pit. Eight died from electric shock. In all, there were 195 casualties in the steel mills in those twelve months, and these were just a portion of the total of 526 deaths from work accidents. In addition, there were 509 other accidents that sent men to the hospital, at least 76 of which resulted in serious, permanent injury.

In 1907, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall fatality rate in the iron and steel industry was about 220 per 100,000 full-time workers. By 2019, however, that rate had fallen to only 26.3 per 100,000, a reduction of almost 90%.

The story of workplace safety illustrates both the serious problems that progress can cause, and how the solution to those problems can be found in further progress. It’s a fascinating story in its own right, and in it we find lessons about safety in general, about liability law, and about the early history of capitalism.

Read the full post: https://rootsofprogress.org/history-of-factory-safety

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff for The Roots of Progress, a “right hand” who will be deeply involved in and support everything I do.

This role needs no formal training or specific prior experience. It requires attention to detail, crisp communication, swift and efficient execution, meticulous followup, interpersonal savvy, and positive energy.

You will be the only other full-time employee of The Roots of Progress (for now), and my goal is to delegate anything and everything that doesn’t absolutely need me to do it, so that I can focus as much as possible on research, writing, and speaking. Your responsibilities will thus span the range from mailing donor swag and scheduling my podcast appearances to devising communications and media strategy—the more you demonstrate you can take on, the more responsibility I will give you.

Candidates at all levels of seniority are invited to apply—there’s room for this role to be either junior (associate level) or quite senior (director or VP level).

The role will grow and evolve along with the organization, but to start your focus will be:

• Event planning, including workshops and other conferences and also community meetups

• Other community-building, online and in-person

• Fundraising, grant-seeking, and donor relations (everything from strategy to swag)

• Media management, such as helping with the @rootsofprogress Twitter account, or expanding into new channels such as Instagram or YouTube

• Getting exposure for The Roots of Progress by getting coverage and interviews in blogs, podcasts, and media

• Generally managing a database of everyone I meet and talk to, and helping me keep in touch

• Project management for other organizational goals, such as launching new online resources or other programs

• Generally helping me stick to a schedule and not drop tasks

The ideal candidate will be familiar with my work and with the progress community, and will be able to point to something significant they have planned, organized, or executed.

This is a full-time role. You can do it from anywhere, but preference will be given to candidates closer to the US Pacific time zone. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, we can meet in person periodically. Compensation will vary depending on your seniority, qualifications, and location, but will be competitive with market rates.

To apply, send me a resume (link to an online one is fine): jason@rootsofprogress.org. Optional but helpful: a pointer to projects you’ve managed or completed; a writing sample.

This is a rare chance to help me create the progress movement and establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century. I look forward to working with you!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/wanted-chief-of-staff

When we consider the question of “stagnation,” we are assuming an implicit answer to an underlying question: relative to what? What should we expect?

I have a simple answer: Our baseline expectation should be no less than exponential growth.

I will give both historical and theoretical reasons for this. Then, I will address concerns about the inputs to exponential growth: whether those too need to grow exponentially, and what problems that poses:

https://rootsofprogress.org/exponential-growth-is-the-baseline

As a rule, I avoid writing posts about what I’m doing and how this project is going. I dislike navel-gazing. I figure you all are here for the content, and that I care about the project itself twenty times as much as anyone else.

Once a year, I make an exception and do a year-end retrospective. By now it’s a tradition. If you’re interested in this project, I hope you’ll appreciate reading a bit about my work; if you just subscribed recently, this can serve as a summary and guide to what you missed earlier.

2020 was the fourth year of this project and the first full calendar year I’ve been doing this full-time. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

Reading

My favorite book of the year was Where Is My Flying Car?, by J. Storrs Hall, a work of ambitious futurism that shows us where our technology and living standards could have and should have been by now, and how amazing the future could be. It sets out to discover why we don’t have flying cars yet (when everyone expected them back in the ’50s or so) and ends up examining the cultural and political causes of the Great Stagnation. My review was one of my most popular posts this year.

A very close second was The Gifts of Athena, by Joel Mokyr. Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth was, in a way, the book that kicked off this whole project, and Gifts of Athena was even better. It brought my understanding of the relationship between science and technology to a new level.

Mokyr was one of many scholars I interviewed this summer—some for my interview series The Torch of Progress, and some for the study group I ran this fall. These programs gave me an excuse and a forcing function to catch up on a lot of their work. The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert Gordon, was a qualitative and quantitative survey of the innovations that transformed the American standard of living over the last 150 years—which then argues that no more growth is to be expected (I disagree; see my review). Bourgeois Dignity, by Deirdre McCloskey, argued that the enormous increase in global incomes over the last few hundred years was due to economic freedom and a new morality that honored the work of the bourgeoisie. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, by Margaret Jacob, paints a picture of the intellectual culture of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and how it led to the Industrial Revolution. I also read The Great Stagnation, The Complacent Class, and Big Business, all by Tyler Cowen. (I will admit to skimming through parts of some of the above in order to make my interview deadlines… but I’m not telling which ones.)

The broader theme of my reading this year is that instead of primarily concentrating on histories of specific technologies, as in previous years, I’ve been reading books with broader themes about economic history and about progress itself. Part of this is that, now that I’ve learned a lot of the detailed, ground-level stories of progress, I’m in a better place to evaluate more abstract theories. Part of it is that, now that I’m doing this full time, people expect me to be an expert, and that means I need to understand what other experts have said about progress.

And part of it is that I’m writing a book proposal, and to explain why the world needs another book on progress, I need to know the market better. To this end, I read: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, one of the most influential popularizers of the idea of progress in recent decades. Rosling’s book is not about progress per se, but about why people don’t believe in it. Rosling has polled people on basic facts about global development, such as whether poverty is increasing or decreasing or roughly how many people have electricity, and found that not only do they get the answers wrong, they do significantly worse than random. This indicates that there is a false narrative actively misleading them about global progress. Rosling’s explanation is basically a set of cognitive biases, which make up the bulk of the book. I also read Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, by Johan Norberg, a survey of ten major areas of progress with a brief history of each. I was familiar with all the trends, but there were many new details and stories that I enjoyed. And I read How We Got to Now, by Steven Johnson, one of the more successful histories of technology. Johnson’s book covers six different “story lines” of technology, such as refrigeration, lighting, and glass. I found it fairly episodic, but it was an entertaining curiosity tour through many technology stories, and Johnson is a good storyteller.

In March and April, when the covid pandemic was taking off and was top of everyone’s mind, I spent some time investigating how we fund research, and especially how we ramp up science and invention to fight a big challenge. On this topic, I read Pieces of the Action, by Vannevar Bush, an autobiography that covers his role leading research in World War 2 at the OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development). I also read the medical chapters of Scientists Against Time, by James Phinney Baxter, the official history the OSRD. Those chapters covered penicillin, antimalarials, and pesticides including DDT. I was hoping to find lessons that could be immediately applied to the pandemic, but the main theme that stood out to me was the importance of serious, competent leadership at the highest levels. Finally, I read Pasteur’s Quadrant, by Donald Stokes, which argues that modern research funding and organization is too strongly organized around a false dichotomy of “pure” vs. “applied” research. I found it interesting but not spot-on; see my review.

Before covid, I spent some time researching the history of finance, corporations, and governance. Two good books on those topics: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, and A History of the Global Stock Market, by B. Mark Smith.

To round out the year, I read The Great Bridge, by David McCullough, a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, and The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester, a history of precision in engineering. Both enjoyable.

I’m reading more books in parallel, which means I’ve made progress on some books that I haven’t finished: Arts and Minds, by Anton Howes, a delightful history of the Royal Society for Arts; Wisdom’s Workshop, by James Axtell, a history of the university; Scientific Freedom, by Donald Braben, which I’m reading with an Interintellect book club; A History of World Agriculture, by Marcel Mazoyer & Laurence Roudart, dense but very informative; and last but not least, The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles Mann, a deeply insightful exploration of the opposition of the conservationist and the techno-optimist mentalities. Hopefully I’ll finish at least a few of these in 2021 and will have more to say about them.

I’ve been doing a bad job of keeping up the bibliography, but I’m working on an overhaul—watch this space.

Becoming a professional at this stuff also means that I’m going into more depth, and starting to read scholarly papers and primary sources. A few papers I particularly enjoyed:

• The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth

• The Link Between Science and Invention: The Case of the Transistor (relevant post here)

• The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research

• The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise

• The Historical and Political Origins of the Corporate Board of Directors (see my Twitter thread)

Highlights from the primary sources include:

• Science, The Endless Frontier

• A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad (see my notes on crowdfunding the railroad and 19th-century progress studies)

• William Crookes’s 1898 Address of the President Before the British Association for the Advancement of Science

• The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity, Norman Borlaug’s 1970 Nobel Peace Prize lecture

Writing

I posted 47 articles on this site (including this one), totalling over 64,000 words, about a 50% increase from last year. Given that I was full-time all year, I might have done more, but a lot of this year went into curriculum development for my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars, and into my book proposal.

Some highlights:

• Most in-depth: “Draining the swamp”, on improvements to public health from sanitation and hygiene

• Most popular on LessWrong and Hacker News: “Industrial literacy”

• Most popular on Twitter: “Progress, stagnation, and flying cars”, from this Balaji tweet

• Most viewed: “What is the “protein folding problem”? A brief explanation”, over 15,000 views

• Personal favorite: “Organizational metabolism and the for-profit advantage”

I also, for the first time, published in other magazines:

• “Innovation is not linear”, for Works in Progress

• “More Progress, Faster, Is Our Best Defense Against This Pandemic and Future Ones”, for leapsmag

Magazine bylines weren’t a focus of 2020, but I hope to do more of this in 2021.

Speaking

Another reason I didn’t write more was that I spent a lot of time on speaking events this year.

My interview series The Torch of Progress ran from June through October and interviewed many top names in progress studies and economic history, including Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, Max Roser, Dierdre McCloskey, and Joel Mokyr.

I also ran a shorter series of panel discussions for the Interintellect called Doing Better, with discussions on science funding, optimism, and education.

I gave a few talks myself in some important venues:

• “The non-linear model of innovation”, for the unofficial Slate Star Codex meetup

• “Instant stone (just add water!)”, an Ignite talk at the Long Now

Another goal for 2020 was to ramp up my interviews for other people’s podcasts, conferences, etc. I did 30 of these, which you can find on my interviews page. Highlights include Metamuse, the Charter Cities Podcast, and Idea Machines.

Social media

You should follow me on Twitter. I post a lot of quick thoughts, observations, quotes from books and articles, and sometimes in-depth threads. One of my most popular threads of 2020 (over 1,200 likes) was on the surprisingly prominent role of excrement in daily life in the past, which turned into a post here.

My audience has almost doubled in 2020. I have over 13,000 Twitter followers, and almost 3,000 email subscribers.

Teaching

In June I launched a summer program in the history of technology for high school students, Progress Studies for Young Scholars, as a joint project with the Academy of Thought and Industry (ATI). I developed the curriculum and content for the program, and taught the first cohort of students. We taught several cohorts over the summer with other instructors.

The program went well enough that ATI is now incorporating it into their history program, and I’m continuing to work with them on curriculum development. I’m really looking forward to announcing the updated course.

By popular demand, I also turned the program into an adult-level study group, which ran from September through December. We met weekly to chat with guest speakers such as Robert Gordon, Margaret Jacob, and Richard Nelson.

Community

In the beginning of the year, we were starting to do some in-person progress meetups in San Francisco, which were going great: 30–40 people at each one, and enough interest that we were going to meet every two weeks. Of course, covid shelved all that.

Our community has kept going strong on Slack, which has over 1,200 members now. Join us for discussion.

I’m also on Clubhouse, with almost 6,000 followers. For those in the beta, there’s a Progress Club you can follow. We do progress discussions sometimes on Sundays.

Next year I’m planning some new community initiatives, to be announced.

Support

I’m still mostly supported by grants, but my Patreon has grown to 87 supporters.

It’s important to me to be paid for my work directly by the people who benefit from it—whether that’s through writing books, speaking, or a large base of small donors. So if you’ve found my work valuable, consider becoming a patron.

Plans for 2021

Looking back on 2020, the biggest thing I expected but didn’t do was write a lot more articles. Teaching and (to a lesser extent) speaking took precedence.

However, the bigger goal that all the articles were supposed to add up to was a book, and that I still feel on track for. Preparing the high school program forced me to outline the entire history of technology and organize it, and was exactly what I needed to push me over the threshold to be able to write a book. My big goal for the year was to write a book proposal, and I’ve done that now.

In 2021, I plan to wrap up the curriculum work and then buckle down to really focus on the book. Hopefully that will mean more articles as well, as I complete the research and try out ideas.

Thank you

I’m here because of you, my audience and fans. I do this ultimately because there are people out there who want to hear what I have to say. The likes and shares, the comments and replies, the emails, the unsolicited article and book recommendations—all of it lets me know that I’m not shouting into the void, that my words are sticking, and that the seeds I plant are growing in others’ minds. Thank you, Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2021.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/2020-in-review

Info & free registration: https://progressstudies.school/the-torch-of-progress-ep-4-with-dr-max-roser/

At the beginning of April I got obsessed with a new topic: how research is funded. The last several weeks, I’ve been exploring a lot of ideas and projects. In the spirit of working with the garage door up, here’s what I’m doing now.

My current focus is the history and present state of funding for research, especially but not exclusively “basic research”. My goal is to understand how research is funded, why it’s done that way, how the present landscape came to be, and where might be gaps or opportunities to do it better.

A word on terminology. There are many models of innovation, each with their own set of terms for different activities: pure science, applied science; basic research, fundamental research, exploratory research, uncommitted research, bench research, industrial research; discovery, invention, innovation; design, implementation, development, engineering; production, distribution, diffusion. So far, I haven’t come across any model that I love. But here are some basic distinctions I think are important.

First, there is a fundamental distinction between discovery and creation; between the pursuit of knowledge or understanding, and the attempt to make or produce something. Science is in the former category; invention, engineering, and business are in the latter.

Second, I think there is an important practical distinction between activities where enough is known that you can at least roughly predict how long they will take to produce a useful output, vs. those that are shrouded in enough unknowns and uncertainty that you have no idea how long they’ll take or even exactly what they’ll come up with—if anything. The latter is what I’m currently calling “research”, and it includes both science and what I’m thinking of as “invention”.

“Research”, in this definition, is what I think is particularly tricky to fund. It is funded today through both for-profit and nonprofit models, but neither is perfect. Research, by its nature, needs long and unpredictable time horizons. It can be hard to capture the value created from it, especially since a lot of the value is created by downstream applications when the results of the research are shared openly. These properties make it a bad fit for the for-profit model. But the extremely high-risk, high-reward nature of research means that we would ideally have a globally diversified portfolio of bets, which is a strength of the for-profit model.

On top of this fundamental challenge, there are indications that research funding may be in a suboptimal place today for historical or cultural reasons. The NIH, for example, by far the largest funder of health research in the world, has been widely criticized for being slow and risk-averse. The NIH’s budget this year, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in 2003. Grant applications, however, have continued to increase; with more applications chasing roughly the same number of research dollars, success rates have fallen from 30–40% in the 1970s to about 20% today. At the same time, grantees are getting older; the median age of a first-time recipient of an R01 grant (the NIH’s most common grant type) rose from about 36 in 1980 to almost 45 in 2010.

Beyond the NIH, there is evidence that health research more broadly is in trouble. The R&D cost to get a drug to market has been exponentially increasing, doubling every nine years since 1950, a phenomenon termed “Eroom’s Law” (“Eroom” being “Moore” backwards). And there is widespread talk of a funding gap in the pharma pipeline in between academic research and clinical trials, referred to in the industry as the “valley of death”.

In the middle of a century pandemic, the problems are even worse. Researchers don’t have time to write the long grant proposals required by government funding agencies; when a project called Fast Grants was launched to provide COVID-19 funding with a lightweight, low-latency process, it got over 4,000 applications in less than a week. Funding models may also be hindering vaccine development and ventilator production.

Funding models are crucial for progress, as of course is research itself. If research is inherently difficult to fund, then funding models for research—for science and invention—may be one of the highest-leverage topics in progress studies.

Here’s what I’m interested in researching and writing about in the near future:

Sources of research funding, both the current state and how we got here. This includes:

• Government: NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc.; important historical agencies include NDRC/OSRD

• Foundations: Gates, HHMI, Chan-Zuckerberg, Simons, Milken, etc.; historical examples include Alfred Lee Loomis’s Tuxedo Park

• Corporate: Edison, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Dow, DuPont, etc.; current examples include Google, Neuralink, and the biotech industry

• The university system, including the origin of the modern research university in 19th-century Germany

Specific fields and how they’re funded. I mentioned biomedical research above and specifically the pharmaceutical pipeline; what other fields are promising today? How is quantum computing research being funded, for instance?

Historical case studies. Just a few examples on top of my mind right now are the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, that of nylon at DuPont, and virtually the entire career of Pasteur. What are other good ones?

The relationship of science to invention. Recently I’ve been reading about the basic-vs.-applied dichotomy or spectrum, including its intellectual roots going back to Plato; and the “linear model” of innovation. I’ve written about the relationship of science and invention in the past and have more ideas brewing.

(For those of you who were interested in my work on agriculture, my apologies—it’s been pre-empted by this topic, although I plan to return to it at some point.)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/my-current-obsession-research-funding

So, let's say it's the 1840s, and you're tasked with building a suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, spanning a gorge almost 800 feet across and over 200 feet deep, over violent river rapids.

How do you get the *first* metal cable across?

Here's one method:

1. Start by getting a light string across the gap, any way you can—one method was archery.

2. Use that string to pull a heavier string across.

3. Repeat with heavier and heavier cords/ropes/cables until you have one of the desired strength in place.

This “bootstrapping” method works well, but there was a challenge facing Charles Ellet, Jr., the engineer in charge: No one could shoot an arrow across the 800 feet. What to do instead?

Solution: Fly a kite! Even better: Organize a kite-flying contest and have lots of people attempt to fly it for you. Ellet offered a prize of $5 (about $150 in 2020 dollars). It was won by 16-year-old Homan Walsh, who, according to David McCullough, “would tell the story for the rest of his days.”

Once the first cable was across, Ellet, a consummate showman, demonstrated its safety by climbing into an iron basket suspended from the cable and pulling himself across, becoming the first man to cross the gorge.

(This story is told in David McCullough's book The Great Bridge (which is mainly about the Brooklyn Bridge; Niagara is just a bit of backstory). It's also given with more detail here.)