- A new book on Progress Studies has recently been released, “Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know” by Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy. I wrote a short review/summary here.
- Another new Progress Studies related book was recently published, “Open: The Story of Human Progress” by Johan Norberg. Quick caveat, the book has been released in the UK and other European countries. However, it’s only coming out in the US on the 15th November.
- Matt Ridley appears on the EconTalk podcast. He discusses his book, “How Innovation Works”.
- Do we need more ‘yellow-beret’s? To escape being drafted for the Vietnam War, “Between 1955 and 1973, almost 3,000 medical school graduates enrolled in the program”. From this pool of people, “Nine physicians who trained at the NIH during this period went on to win Nobel Prizes.”
- “What unknown technological invention will have a huge impact on the future?”
- Tim Harford, “We fall in love with the new, but not everything is obsolete.”
- “Does economic history point towards a singularity? “Over the next several centuries, is the economic growth rate likely to remain steady, radically increase, or decline back toward zero? This question has some bearing on almost every long-run challenge facing the world … Ultimately, I found very little empirical support for the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis.”
- A Progress Studies magazine has launched, “Works in Progress”.
- John Myers on the hard question in Progress Studies. Myers concludes “how do we in practice actually engineer that a government fixes these policies and laws? There is astonishingly little focus on that hard question in developed countries, when it may give a higher return on effort than almost any other human endeavor. I believe it should be a core focus of Progress Studies and would like to work with others to summarize the state of the art and identify areas for future research.”
- Conversations with Tyler podcast episode 103: Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth.
- The Torch of Progress podcast episode 11: Jerry Neuman. “Key discussion points: the funding, organisation, and management of research; linear and non-linear models of innovation; uncertainty vs. risk in progress”
- The WHO confirmed that Africa defeated wild polio.
- Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp launched a blog/newsletter called “Agglomerations”. They will be writing about a “broad set of technology and innovation policy issues, with a particular eye on the impacts and importance of agglomeration effects.” Their first post examines the differences between, “technology policy, innovation policy, and industrial policy”.
I’m on Twitter @krisgulati, where I tweet about the causes and consequences of progress, economic growth, technological change, and innovation. I have made a Progress Studies subreddit to foster discussion. You can follow my work on the Progress Studies LinkedIn page or the Progress Studies Facebook page.
If you like this blog and want to see more posts on Progress Studies you can support me (regularly) on Patreon or for one-off donations visit Buy me a Coffee.
You can subscribe here
Progress Studies 