51 blurbs
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is considering implementing a $100,000 fee on international students who want to work in the United States after graduation via the optional pract…
If you’ve been following the conversation around the design of scientific institutions and funding strategies, you may have come across a table breaking down how different characteristics map onto different mechanisms. F…
Last week, I mentioned a big Congressional Budget Office report estimating the economic impact of federal spending on non-defense research and development efforts (think basic and applied science at the National Science …
Here at AGF, we tend to think investment in research and development, whether by governments through agencies like the National Institutes of Health or in private businesses and universities, is worth an awful lot. When …
This week I’m at the NBER Summer Institute , taking in lots of new work on the economics of science and innovation. Two of the papers being presented have already made appearances on this blog (one on idea diffusion , an…
This Monday was the deadline for public comments on OMB’s proposed rewrite of the rules governing federal grantmaking. The response was immense, with more than 200k comments submitted over the past few weeks. As expected…
For America’s 250th anniversary, Brad Wible invited a trio of pieces for Science’s Policy Forum tracing the institutional shifts that built the modern US scientific enterprise. Ronald Daniels writes about the founding of…
The most interesting thing I read recently was the winning entrants in the Astera metascience essay contest , for which I was one of the judges. While not every winning essay was related to AI (see these two , for exampl…
Our regular roundup from earlier this week is posted here . It’s been six years now since the publication of Ideas are getting harder to find , a famous paper in the economics of innovation which documented that vast inc…
As part of the month-long debate about the extent of the European/American gap in living standards, Luis and Pieter Garicano suggested a “ driving around test ”: “Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a…
It’s 2017 again: the Gorillaz are topping charts, Star Wars is in theaters, and the NIH is discussing a potential cap on the number of grants a single PI can hold at once. Last week the agency published an RFI floating p…
Last week the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a proposed revision to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance . It runs 412 pages, and carries significant implications for federally funded science in…
Earlier this month NSF announced its new X-Labs program , a $1.5 billion, decade-long initiative to fund independent, milestone-driven research teams working outside of traditional university and corporate structures. Th…
In other news, arXiv’s CS section chair Thomas Dietterich announced that authors who submit papers with “incontrovertible evidence” of unchecked AI content (e.g. hallucinated references or leftover chat content like “her…
Our scientific ecosystem often prizes outputs that, themselves, don’t necessarily drive scientific progress, but instead are useful proxies for the more intangible processes that do. Three reads this week have me thinkin…
The US is richer than Europe. This is not especially controversial: residents of just about every European country, save for tax havens like Luxembourg and the petro-state of Norway, lag the US in median income . But is …
Matt Yglesias dropped an avowedly contentious take on energy abundance, arguing that “conventional environmentalism” is overly focused on efficiency and missing the upside of truly abundant energy generation. Yglesias ar…
Drug development fails 95% of the time, making biotech a brutal investment environment. So how does the industry keep the money flowing? Abhishaike Mahajan, also known as Owl Posting, has a great post on the financial en…
Many leading science funders have a stated goal of supporting ambitious, “high-risk, high-reward” research, or at least specific programs dedicated to that cause — to give a few examples: “ ARIA was built to… go after id…
Matt Clancy : The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in the UK and not somewhere else in Europe? Allen argues it’s down to economics. It’s only worth doing all …
Jordan Dworkin: As Science Evolves, How Can Science Policy? Coming up in science, my peers and I enjoyed critiquing the institutions in which we worked, and occasionally used our computational skills to probe and quantif…
As AI drives down the time & effort cost required to produce scientific grant proposals, funders are likely to be flooded with eligible, reasonable-seeming submissions that strain an already overburdened review system. I…
In the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush famously posited that “ scientific progress… results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in a manner dictated by their curiosity. ” In a …
One thing I’m not reading this week: your writing about metascience policy. If you’d like to fix that, Emergent Ventures just announced a new tranche of grants for (1) metascience policy entrepreneurs and (2) science & m…
The National Science Foundation’s 2027 budget request makes for some high variance reading. Two things that have me excited are the proposal for an NSF metascience unit to “champion agency-wide efforts to explore non-tra…
The legal fight over the NIH’s proposed 15% indirect cost cap is over (for now). STAT reports that the administration let the Supreme Court petition deadline pass without filing, ending 14 months of litigation. The court…
Niko McCarty, founder of Asimov Press and now a fellow at Astera Institute, recently ran a bounty to surface new ideas to reduce the cost of lab experiments in biology. I found his reflections really interesting. He rece…
This week, there were two very different pieces on reforming how we fund science. In City Journal, Michael Gibson (former VP of Grants at the Thiel Foundation) argues that Jim O’Neill’s nomination as NSF director is a ch…
However you want to reform science funding, structural shake-ups require that there are functioning agencies to reform; to keep tabs on how things are going on that front, Grant Witness is now tracking NIH and NSF fundin…
How about one more from Asimov before they go: this week Alvin Djajadikerta published “ Designing AI for Disruptive Science .” In it, he explores the possibility that (current approaches to) AI-for-science might enhance …
Ryan Hill and Carolyn Stein have a new working paper on how AlphaFold has affected protein structure research in the five years since its release. They ask three primary questions: Did experimental (i.e., non-computation…
While you’re thinking about that, let’s stay with science. Does MAGA Actually Want American Science to Win? is the latest from Ari Shulman, writing in The New Atlantis. Shulman argues that MAGA’s critique of the failings…
Got your guesses about Alphafold ready? Here’s what Hill and Stein found. Did experimental (i.e., non-computational) structure determination decline? The rate of experimental structure determination is unchanged, and the…
Back in 2023, we asked Michael Wiebe to take a look at a 2021 article by Enrico Moretti titled “ The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors. ” We were interested because one of the inputs to ou…
In a previous post , we noted that Congress largely preserved science budgets for FY26, rejecting large proposed cuts. Unfortunately appropriations are only step one. A few weeks ago Nature reported that OMB has been wit…
On a happier note: This week the Astera Institute announced Radial , a new division committing up to $500M over the next decade to experimenting with how life sciences research is organized, funded, and shared. Early pro…
If policymakers in the US can agree on anything, it’s that they want more semiconductor plants (“fabs”) built in the US. The bipartisan CHIPS & Science Act promised hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to…
Another interesting thing about the paper discussed in item #4, about Dutch nitrogen regulation and residential building, is that it was written completely by AI! It’s part of the Autonomous Policy Evaluation Project (Pr…
There was a good back-and-forth on NIH funding in the Good Science Project last week. Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck first made the case that science funders would benefit from adopting some VC-style practices, then …
STAT reports on a growing number of state-level science funding proposals. Massachusetts’ governor has proposed a $400 million DRIVE initiative, a coalition of medical schools and researchers is pushing New York to creat…
This week I’m reading a father-son team with competing explanations of why Europe lags behind the US in generating innovative companies. Luis Garicano (and coauthor Per Strömberg) look specifically at Sweden, which has b…
A new NBER working paper introduces GABRIEL , an open-source library that wraps GPT for extracting, rating, ranking, and categorizing qualitative information from text data. Of note for innovation policy: they apply the …
This week I’m working my way through Asterisk Magazine’s newest issue on science, which has many excellent pieces relevant to folks working on innovation policy. Click for Jolie Gan’s exploration of the increased importa…
Here at AGF we care a lot about ensuring basic scientific research gets funded and conducted well, and this piece in Works in Progress by Aria Schrecker is a nice illustration of why that kind of work can matter in achie…
It’s admin burden week in the AGF Innovation Policy vertical. Let’s start with the good: last week the NIH announced that they will no longer consider “Basic Experimental Studies Involving Humans (BESH)” to be clinical t…
Now for the ugly: a few days ago the Council on Government Relations released a new report on research regulations ; they find that 66% of new or revised requirements since 1991 have been issued in the last 10 years, wit…
AI makes it easier to do good science, but it also makes it easy to churn out junk papers. Late last month, arXiv, under strain from a rapid increase in submissions, changed its policy to block new university-affiliated …
Last week’s science appropriations news was encouraging, but a Nature feature this week documents the damage done over the last year: almost 8,000 grants were terminated or frozen (2,600 of which have not been reinstated…
Congress is pushing back on the administration’s proposed science cuts, as the NYT and Science report. The Senate’s bipartisan CJS package largely preserves funding across the board — science budgets at NASA and DOE are …
Market shaping. So hot right now. But for funders used to the simplicity of push funding, it can be difficult to figure out how to appropriately size a pull mechanism such that it sufficiently incentivizes innovation wit…
In case you missed it over the holidays, the Institute for Progress responded to OSTP’s RFI on accelerating science with a wide-ranging set of recommendations. In addition to some metascientific mainstays — like fast gra…