This fall I will be hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress.
The primary attraction of the program is a weekly Q&A, each week featuring a different special guest—usually a historian or economist who has written on science, technology, industry and progress. Reading from that author will be given ahead of time. Confirmed speakers so far include:
Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern), author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth
Margaret Jacob (UCLA), author of Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West
Richard Nelson (Columbia), author of the classic paper “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research”
Ashish Arora (Duke), co-author of “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”
Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan), co-author of papers such as “Funding Breakthrough Research”
Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), co-author of “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives”
Patrick Collison (Stripe), co-author of “We Need a New Science of Progress”, the article that coined the term “progress studies”
Anton Howes, author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation
Alicia Jackson, former DARPA program manager and director
The program will also include all of the reading from my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars: a summary of the history of technology, including advances in materials and manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and disease. This provides the indispensable historical framework for a proper empirical grounding of the study of progress.
Announcing the Study Group for Progress
Link post
This fall I will be hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress.
The primary attraction of the program is a weekly Q&A, each week featuring a different special guest—usually a historian or economist who has written on science, technology, industry and progress. Reading from that author will be given ahead of time. Confirmed speakers so far include:
Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern), author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth
Margaret Jacob (UCLA), author of Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West
Richard Nelson (Columbia), author of the classic paper “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research”
Ashish Arora (Duke), co-author of “The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth”
Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan), co-author of papers such as “Funding Breakthrough Research”
Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), co-author of “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives”
Patrick Collison (Stripe), co-author of “We Need a New Science of Progress”, the article that coined the term “progress studies”
Anton Howes, author of Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation
Alicia Jackson, former DARPA program manager and director
The program will also include all of the reading from my high school course, Progress Studies for Young Scholars: a summary of the history of technology, including advances in materials and manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and disease. This provides the indispensable historical framework for a proper empirical grounding of the study of progress.
More details and enrollment forms: https://rootsofprogress.org/announcing-the-study-group-for-progress