New Things Under the Sun
Episodes
66 episodes
Government Funding for R&D and Productivity Growth
What’s the return on government funding for research?There are a few places in the academic literature you can look to for insight. Jones and Summers (2021) uses a hypothetical thought exp...
Do prediction technologies help novices or experts more?
Which kind of inventor (or scientist) is going to benefit more from artificial intelligence: novices or experts? In theory, it can go either way.This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article
Prediction Technologies and Innovation
Some inventions and discoveries make the inventive process itself more efficient. One such class of invention is the prediction technology. These can take a lot of forms. AI is one example of a technology that can help scientists and inventors ...
Training Scientists in Low and Middle Income Countries
New Things Under the Sun is once again putting together a list of dissertation papers related to innovation. If you want your paper to be included, email the tit...
The Decline in Writing About Progress
The frequency of words associated with "progress" in English, German, and French books rose during the era of industrialization, but is down since the 1950s, at least according to google. Is this a signal of declining cultural interest in progr...
Incentives to Invent at Universities
Prior to the 2000s, many European countries practiced something called “the professor’s privilege” wherein university professors retained patent rights to inventions they made while employed at the university. This was a “privilege” because the...
Twitter and the Spread of Academic Knowledge
A classic topic in the study of innovation is the link between physical proximity and the exchange of ideas. But I’ve long been interested in a relatively...
When the Robots Take Your Job
Note:Economists typically think that labor and capital are complementary - more of the one makes the other more productive. But there’s a flourishing literature that looks at the consequences of capital that replaces, rather than...
Can We Learn About Innovation From Patent Data?
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on
Do studies based on patents get different results?
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on
Patents (weakly) predict innovation
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on
How many inventions are patented?
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on
Training enhances the value of new technology
Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few centuries, but much of that progress is still limited to the richest countries. Why don't new technologies spread quickly throughout the world, benefiting billions of people? In this p...
Teaching Innovative Entrepreneurship
Correction: In this podcast, I misspoke towards the end and referred to Eesley and Lee (2020) as Eesley and Wang (a 2017 paper I wrote about earlier here). Apologies to t...
Teacher Influence and Innovation
Here’s a striking fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine also had a Nobel prize winner as their academic advisor.undefinedWhat accounts for this extraordinary transmission rate of scientifi...
When Research Over There Isn't Helpful Here
Much of the world’s population lives in countries in which little research happens. Is this a problem? According to classical economic models of the “ideas production function,” ideas are universal; ideas developed in one place are applicable e...
Big Firms Have Different Incentives
This week, Arnaud Dyèvre (@ArnaudDyevre) and I follow up on a previous podcast, where we documented a puzzle: larger firms conduct R&D ...
Geography and What Gets Researched
How do academic researchers decide what to work on? Part of it comes down to what you judge to be important and valuable; and that can come from exposure to problems in your local community. This podcast is an audio read through o...
How to Impede Technological Progress
Most of the time, we think of innovation policy as a problem of how to accelerate desirable forms of technological progress. But there are other times when we may wish to actively slow technological progress. The
The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth with Tamay Besiroglu
This is not the usual podcast on New Things Under the Sun. For the third issue of Asterisk Magazine, Tamay Besiroglu and I were asked to write an
The Size of Firms and the Nature of Innovation
We’ve got something new this week! This is post, which is on how the size of firms is related to the kind of innovation they do, is the first ever collaboration published on New Things Under the Sun. My coauthor is Arnaud Dyèvre (
When Technology Goes Bad
Innovation has, historically, been pretty good for humanity. But technology is just a tool, and tools can be used for good or evil purposes. So far, technology has skewed towards “good” rather than evil but there are some reasons to worry thing...
Can taste beat peer review?
Scientific peer review is widely used as a way to distribute scarce resources in academic science, whether those are scarce research dollars or scarce journal pages. At the same time, peer review has several potential short-comings. One alterna...
What does peer review know?
People rag on peer review a lot (including, occasionally, New Things Under the Sun). Yet it remains one of the most common ways to allocate scientific resources, whether those be R...
Biases Against Risky Research
A frequent worry is that our scientific institutions are risk-averse and shy away from funding transformative research projects that are high risk, in favor of relatively safe and incremental science. Why might that be?Let’s start with t...