My science remarks at the AEI metascience forum

Jim Pethokoukis has transcribed some of them, here is one bit:

There’s a commonly noted productivity slowdown in the Western world starting in 1973 that I and some other people here have written about. I think one neglected factor behind this slowdown is just the destruction of the German-language speaking and central European scientific world, which starts in the 1930s and culminates in World War II. On top of that, you have the Holocaust. The fruits of science take a long time. So if you’re entranced with AI, that is ultimately the result of someone earlier having come up with electricity — Tesla, Edison, others. So before the 1930s, central Europe and Germany is by far the world’s most productive scientific area. And which factors organizationally were behind those successes? To me, that feels dramatically understudied. But you have a 10-, 15-year period where essentially all of that goes poof. Some of it comes over here to the US, a bit to Great Britain, but that’s really a central event in the 20th century. You can’t understand 20th century science without thinking very hard and long about that event.

But in terms of more approximately and more recently, here’s how I would put the importance of metascience or how science is done. It’s how science is done better that will get us out of the Great Stagnation. I don’t think that doing it worse is what got us into the Great Stagnation. So when it comes to what got us into the Great Stagnation, I think the number one culprit is simply we exhausted a lot of low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines. At some point, enough people have cars and you get the side airbag. Your CD player has better sound, now you hook in your smartphone or whatever. Those are nice advances, but they’re not really fundamental to the act of driving. So there’s just an exhaustion that happens.

There are other factors, there’s an increase in the level of regulation in a number of ways, some good, some bad, but it’s still going to slow down some amount of progress. And then the energy price shock in 1973 combined with our unwillingness to really go large with nuclear power, right? So all that happening more or less at the same time. And then a few decades earlier, the world took this huge, you know, wrenching gut blow. Now this all means actually, you should be quite optimistic about the future. Here’s the trick to the whole hypothesis, the counterintuitive part. So let’s say the Great Stagnation is not caused by science being done worse. As we’re probably now coming out of the Great Stagnation, we have mRNA vaccines, right? We have ChatGPT, a lot of advances in green energy. Maybe they’re not all sure things yet. Other areas like quantum computing, not a sure thing yet, but you can see that a lot might be coming all based in this new fundamental technology. You could call it computing.

So the hurdle that science has to clear to get us out of those accumulated institutional and low-hanging fruit barriers, that’s a higher hurdle than it used to be. So if the current scientific advances are clearing that higher hurdle, you should actually be quite optimistic about them because they’ve passed through these filters. So you have these other developments. Oh, ‘90s internet becomes more of a thing. Well, that was nice for a few years, you know, Walmart managed its inventory better. 1995 to 1998 productivity goes up, wonderful. That dwindles away. It’s then all worse again. If we really are now clearing all the hurdles, you should be especially optimistic. But it also means science policy, how science is done, how it’s organized, how it’s funded is way more important than during all those years. Those years when we were stuck, you were reshuffling the deck chairs. Not on the Titanic, but what’s like a mediocre company that just keeps on going. I don’t want any name names, but there’s a bunch of them. You were reshuffling the deck chairs there, and now we’re reshuffling the hall enterprise. It’s a very exciting time, but science matters more than ever.

There is more at the link, good throughout.