Claims

The rise and fall of our interest in progress?

More complicated than it seems at first

Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.

Some Intuitions From Recent Models of Automation

Transmission of innovative taste?

For the sample on New Things Under the Sun, not really

Correlations between patents and other innovation proxies

Less than half, more than zero

One reason technology doesn't diffuse more quickly - you need to know how to use it well

Boosting innovation by teaching people to be tech entrepreneurs?

Disentangling selection and training

Limits to the universality of new discoveries

Let's get meta

A reason large firms conduct R&D at the same rate as small ones, despite (apparently) lower R&D productivity

The salience of local problems

Raise the cost of research, or reduce the rewards of it

Big firms do things differently

Models of economic growth where sometimes technology gets you killed

Suggestive evidence says yes, but we need to know more

It knows a bit!

What if risk aversion is a lot of little biases that add up?

Evidence that local interaction leads to deeper engagement with new ideas

Big impacts for people who move to countries where science is happening

New ideas vs deep expertise; conceptual vs experimental innovation

Average impact falls but the hits keep coming

Remote teams have traditionally been bad at breakthrough innovation, but things may have changed

Growth theory in the shadow of artificial general intelligence

Very close physical proximity helps people discover each other, if they wouldn't otherwise

Science can follow more than one path

Yes, but with some serious caveats

Relatively common for ideas we know will be big, but not so much for the rest

Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average

Evidence from Three Global Crises

Public honors as coordination devices

Do the same mechanisms that create complex life also create complex technology?

Evidence that emissions standards and high fuel prices boost clean innovation in cars

Why does patenting yesterday predict patenting today?

Solving "More Research Needed"

Evidence on how life experiences influence research choices

Into the weeds

Some of the forces blocking really new ideas in research

Science is particularly useful for inventions in unfamiliar or difficult knowledge domains

Some theory on how academia changes itself, with an illustration from economics

20 years is a good rule of thumb

Evidence that this idea spreads best from people in a similar social position, and that you can only get the idea once

Incentives to publish fast are in tension with careful science

More researchers per innovation, because you need more knowledge to solve frontier problems

The knowledge immigrants bring with them takes root in receiving countries

Exposure to entrepreneurs (mostly) encourages entrepreneurship

In medicine, applied research and development responds strongly to profit signals, more basic research not so much

Buterin, Hitzig, and Weyl's proposal to fund public goods

Evidence that academic conferences facilitate subsequent collaborations between attendees

Why remote collaboration is becoming so common in academia, and what we can learn from it

The challenge of building outlets to host research that can't be published in top journals

Some evidence the scientific incentive system works

Filmmaking is a technology too, and like other technologies it gets better

If ideas comes from brains, maybe more brains means more innovation

How easier long-distance communication erodes local knowledge spillovers

Taking a stab at some psychohistory

Micro and macro evidence on the productivity of R&D over time

When you give multiple teams of researchers the same question and data, it's not uncommon to get different results

Evidence from patents and papers

Cheaper travel is one reason local knowledge spillovers are declining

Physical sciences seem to have less issues - is that due to empirical tools, theory, or both?

Evidence from patents

Some evidence that science does self-correct

Several strands of evidence on the size of publication bias

They are usually more than half the point of R&D

Quasi-experimental evidence on the effectiveness of giving R&D grants to small businesses

Usually. But there are some exceptions.

A Thought Experiment by Jones and Summers

Patents make citations to other patents, but that doesn't always mean engagement with the cited patent's ideas

Cities as a platform to remix knowledge

Technologies directly dependent on science are atypical, but they may have indirect impacts on most technologies

If patents in one tech class cite another, a surge in patenting in the cited class forecasts patenting in the citing one

Natural experiments in the extent of science show predictable effects on technology that relies on science

Better than standard evidence for the existence of learning curves, as well as why they are less useful than hoped

Why a tight correlation between cumulative experience and declining costs doesn't really prove anything.

Access to libraries boosts local patent rates; access to wikipedia shapes science

Physical proximity is more important for meeting new people (with new knowledge) than for collaboration

Knowledge that is different - but not too different - tends to be most useful for innovation.