We need a new "Science of Progress"

Subtitle: Humans need to know better how to be better.

That 's what Patrick Collison , co-founders of software infrastructure company Stripe, and Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, say in The Atlantic. published an article on

In 1861, American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new type of research institution. Recognizing that "every day there is more and more evidence of the positive influence of scientific culture on industry and national civilization," and the growing importance of what he called "Industrial Arts," he proposed the creation of a new An institution specializing in the study of practical knowledge. He named it the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rogers was one of many reformers in the late 19th century who saw that America's ability to make progress could be greatly improved. Drawing on the successful model of German universities abroad, these innovators realized that a combination of intensively taught research and teaching could be a powerful driver of research progress. Over the decades, Rogers, Charles Eliot, Henry Tappan, George Hale, John D. Rockefeller, and others Founded and reorganized many of the best universities in the United States today, including Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, Caltech, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, etc. By acting on their understanding, they engage in a conscious "progress engineering" .

"Progress" itself is understudied. By "progress" we mean the combined economic, technological, scientific, cultural and organizational advances that have transformed and improved our lives over the past few centuries. For a number of reasons, there has not yet been a broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or on the deeper goal of accelerating progress. We believe that it should have a dedicated area of study. We propose the creation of a discipline called Progress Studies .

Before delving into what "progressive research" entails, it's worth noting that we still need to make a lot of progress. We don't have a cure for all diseases; we don't yet know how to fix climate change; we still have a long way to go before most people in the world can live as comfortably as the richest people do today; we haven't Knowing how to best predict or mitigate various natural disasters; we can't travel as cheaply and quickly as we would like; we can do better in educating young people. There are still plenty of opportunities for improvement.

These are major challenges. Many advancements can also come from smaller advancements: thousands of tiny advancements combined with each other can represent huge advancements in society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions increase living standards by 1% per year, children will grow up to be 35% better off than their parents. If their standard of living improved by 3% per year, these children would grow up to be 2.5 times better than their parents.

Progress is very important in terms of both large and small improvements.

Looking back, it is surprising how unevenly distributed the progress has been. In ancient times, the ancient Greeks were the discoverers of everything from arch bridges to spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge may have been largely concentrated in China and parts of the Middle East. Culturally, Renaissance Florence artists enriched the heritage of all humanity, and in the process, their masterpieces remain the lifeblood of the local economy. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the start of the Industrial Revolution, the north of England made rapid progress. In each case, these discoveries, which improved everyone's standard of living, were made in innovative efforts on a relatively small geographic scale. Examples today include Silicon Valley in the software sector and the Swiss Basel region in the life sciences sector.

Such examples suggest that some ecosystems may be better than others at generating progress, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? How productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why does Silicon Valley happen in California instead of Japan or Boston? Why was science so powerful in Germany and Central Europe in the early 20th century? Can we intentionally create the conditions most conducive to this progress, or effectively adjust to the environment we find ourselves in today?

This is exactly what "progressive research" is about. It will consider this issue as broadly as possible. It will examine the successful people, organisations, institutions, policies and cultures that have emerged to date and attempt to develop policies and prescriptions that will help improve our ability to produce beneficial progress in the future.

Along these lines, the world would benefit from organized efforts to understand how we should identify and train talented young people, how to most effectively communicate and share ideas, and how various players in the innovation ecosystem (including scientists, businesses What incentives should be in place for scientists, managers, and engineers), how different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists are selected and funded, and many other related issues.

Much of the existing scholarly work addresses these topics, but in a highly fragmented manner, without directly confronting some of the most important practical issues.

Imagine you want to know how to most effectively select and develop the best students. While this is an important challenge for educators, policymakers, and philanthropists, knowledge about how best to do it is scattered across many different fields. The Psychometrics literature examines which tests predict success. Sociologists consider how to use the Internet to find talent. Anthropologists study how talent depends on context, and historiometric literature studies clusters of artistic creativity. There is a lively debate about when and if "10,000 hours of practice" is required to achieve truly great results. The pedagogical literature studies talent selection programs such as the Center for Talented Youth. Personality psychologists have studied the degree to which openness or self-consciousness affects income. More recently, there has also been research in kinesiometrics, looking at which numerical variables can predict athlete success. In economics, Raj Chetty and his co-authors examine the contexts and communities that best encourage innovators. Thinkers in these disciplines do not necessarily attend the same conferences, publish in the same journals, or work on common problems together.

When we considered other major determinants of progress, we found insufficient engagement with core issues. For example, there is growing evidence that management practices largely determine performance differences between organizations. A recent study found that in Italy, a specific intervention — teaching businesses better management practices — increased productivity by 49 percent over 15 years compared with peers that had not received training. How applicable is this situation and can it be repeated? Economists have learned that the productivity of firms often varies by a factor of two or three within a given industry, meaning that a priority for management science and organizational psychology is to understand the drivers of these differences. Related to this, we are increasingly recognizing that organizations with higher levels of trust can empower more effectively, thereby improving their responsiveness and ability to deal with problems. Organizations like Y Combinator, MIT's Radiation Lab, and ARPA have an amazing track record of advancing progress far beyond their reach. While research in these areas exists, we are still fairly underinvested in this area. Together, these examples suggest that one of our top priorities should be to identify interventions that increase the efficiency, productivity and innovation of human organizations.

Likewise, while science has created much of our prosperity, scientists and researchers themselves do not have enough energy to think about how to organize science. In a recent paper, Pierre Azoulay and co-authors conclude that long-term Howard Hughes Medical Institute grants to promising scientists enable these Scientists are 96% more likely to achieve breakthrough results. If this finding is confirmed, it suggests that current funding mechanisms may be far from optimal, in part because they do not place enough emphasis on research autonomy and risk-taking.

More broadly, demographics and institutional dynamics have made dramatic but invisible changes in the way we support science. For example, the National Institutes of Health (the largest research funding agency in the United States) reported that in 1980 it gave early-career scientists (under the age of 40) 12 as much funding as it gave to later-career scientists (over 50) times. Today, that has reversed: Scientists over 50 receive a 5-fold increase in funding. Is this tendency to fund older scientists an improvement? If not, how should research funding be allocated? Should other countries organize their scientific institutions along the lines of the United States, or change them deliberately? Despite the importance of these issues, it is perhaps not surprising that critical assessments of scientific practice and funding are lacking. Doing so will be an important part of "progressive research".

"Progressive research" has precedents in fields and institutions. The economics of innovation is an important topic that should occupy a larger place in economics. Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination seeks to encourage optimistic thinking about the future through fiction and narrative: it observes that, almost certainly, imagination and ambition play a role in themselves. big effect. Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson call for an "applied history" movement to better capture historical lessons and apply them to real-world problems, Including advising political leaders. Ideas and institutions like these are likely to be more effective if they are part of a clear, broader movement.

In a world of "progressive research," academic departments and degree programs don't necessarily have to be reorganized. That would likely cost a lot of money and time. Instead, the new focus on progress will be more akin to a school of thought that will prompt academia, philanthropists and funding agencies to spread out priorities. Over time, we hope to see communities, journals, and conferences devoted to these issues.

This transition has happened before. Before we realized that "climate science" was a separate discipline, there had been a lot of excellent work done in environmental science, physics, chemistry, oceanography, mathematics and modeling, computer science, biology, ecology, and others. Climate science research. Likewise, the name "Keynesian economics" has helped economists focus on fiscal policy as a tool to fight recessions, just as the name "monetarist" has created a strong focus on issues surrounding the money supply. interest of.

An important difference between our proposed "progressive research" and much existing academic research is that mere understanding is not the goal . When anthropologists look at scientists, they try to understand the species. But from the perspective of progressive research, the implicit question is how scientists (or their funders or evaluators) should act. The success of Progress Research will come from its ability to identify effective progress interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policymakers and others. In this sense, "progressive research" is closer to medicine than biology: its goal is treatment, not just understanding.

We know that the term "progress" may sound too prescriptive to some readers. Yet it was the clear cornerstone of Vannevar Bush's rationale for postwar science funding that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation. In an age where funding for good projects is hard to come by, or even on the verge of bankruptcy, we must definitely make the case for research on how to improve human well-being. This possibility is at the root of, and rightfully so, why the American public is keen to support the pursuit of knowledge.

If we look back at history, the organization of knowledge areas, as recognized areas of effort and funding, is very important. The field of study has expanded considerably since the early European universities were formed to advance theological thought. Organised philosophical and natural science research later gave rise to more in-depth studies - to name a few - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and economics. Each discipline and its subfields have produced many later transformative discoveries. Simply put, our view is that this process has not yet reached a natural end point and that the next steps should be more focused and definitive studies of progress itself.

Compiled from: We Need a New Science of Progress