World War II supposed a substantial increase in US federal R&D spending, and it may be regarded as an imperfect[1] natural experiment of what happens when you transition a country from a relatively "laissez faire" (with many caveats) model of scientific support to one where there is heavy government involvement. In addition to that, WWII may have implied a societywide forced learn by doing program. It has been argued that WWII caused GDP growth to be higher than it would otherwise have been. H…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
The history of Venture Research, the original Emergent Ventures (ht/ Patrick Collison for the pointer)
Restoring the conditions of the pre-1970s environment would, he said, require getting rid of boundaries, deadlines, milestones, peer review, priorities and any objectives beyond exploration and understanding.13 According to Braben, starting in the 1970s, increases in public funding for science brought …
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Nuclear fusion is coming. Back in 2014, I was showing optimism about fusion, and the deadlines given by some of those companies aiming to get at commercial power plants were somewhat too optimistic. The revised dates, four years later don't look that awful though: fusion is not always 20 years into the future anymore:
General Fusion wanted to have their reactor in 2020 (2014), now they claim commercial…
How much truth is there to these statements? (The ones before the revision!)
My prior belief is that religion will have nonexistent or weak effects on the variables of interest. Religion is often intertwined with social class, and/or ethnicity, and so one has to look at diverse breakdowns of the data and compare if possible across time and countries.
(Edit: This post looks at both individual level and aggregate levels. At the individual level it is easier to discern causality, while the aggregate level help…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Before the usual links post, the yearly statistics, as usual. One more year, Nintil has received more views than the previous year:
Only one post I've written this year is among the most read: On the constancy of the rate of GDP growth, the rest are basically the Soviet Series and some very old posts in spanish. Visits this year (not counting visits that came from search engines) came mostly from twitter…
I had the chance to meet Glen Weyl a few weeks ago, and I promised him that at some point, if no one had penned a critique of Radical Markets that I deem good enough, I would write one.
But this post is not about that. Here I will just compile the discussion so far. I'll skip the praise and cut straight to critical reviews, in no particular order. The book was published in April this year, so there should have been enough time for people to engage with the book. In my opinion, the weakest part of the book i…