New Things Under the Sun

2 months ago | newthingsunderthesun.com | Matt Clancy

To make this document more skimmable, after each question I’ve written a very short high level response in a quote block (aiming for the length of a tweet). A more detailed response is given below each quote block. If you have additional questions you would like to see answered, please The US government spent ~$160bn on R&D in 2022, about 2.6% of government spending. As a share of GDP or federal spending, federal support for R&D has declined for decades.

2 months ago | newthingsunderthesun.com | Matt Clancy

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 experiment to make the case that, on average, every dollar of R&D spent probably generates several dollars in benefits via its long-run impact on economic growth (see What are the returns to R&D? for more discussion). But that result applies only to R&D in general, government and non-government, bundled together.

Nov 22, 2024 | newthingsunderthesun.com | Matt Clancy

Suppose you wanted to build up the scientific capacity of a country that is far from the scientific frontier. There are good reasons you might want to do that, rather than rely on the scientific efforts of countries on the frontier: where researchers are based affects what they choose to work on, and not all research is relevant everywhere. One part of building capacity is training scientists.

Jun 19, 2024 | newthingsunderthesun.com | Matt Clancy

A classic topic in the study of innovation is the link between physical proximity and the exchange of ideas. I’ve covered this pretty extensively on New Things Under the Sun, and one theme has been that scientists/inventors have various ways of keeping up with relevant new discoveries: they read journals, attend conferences, talk with people in their professional circle, etc.

Jun 3, 2024 | newthingsunderthesun.com | Matt Clancy

In What if we could automate innovation? I looked at a model of economic growth where part (or all) of the innovation process could be automated. A key takeaway from that post was that the rate of economic growth was related to the rate at which innovation tasks got handed off to machines, rather than the share of the innovation process that had been automated - unless that share is 100%, in which case things get weird fast.