Ideas Behind Their Time: Part Two
In 2010 I wrote about Ideas Behind Their Time:
We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and color photography. What is less commented on is the third possibility, ideas that could have been discovered much earlier but which were not, ideas behind their time.
I gave experimental economics, random clinical trials and view morphing (“bullet time”) as examples. Jason Crawford has a list discussing the wheel, the steam engine and bicycles among other possibilities. In some cases, further exploration indicates that an idea required precursors and so was not as behind its times as first suspected, in rare cases, however, good ideas really could have been invented much earlier.
Using Claude, Brian Potter has significantly expanded the list by looking systematically across a wide range of inventions and asking could they have been invented earlier? Most could not. Put the other way, most useful technologies tend to be invented quite quickly once they are possible–this is reassuring. The airplane, for example, could not have been invented before a high power-to-weight engine, which happened circa 1880 making the late 1880s the earliest feasible date for powered flight. Thus, the Wright Brothers (1903) were only just behind the earliest feasible date–and that is true for many inventions.
The ideas very far behind their time include the stethoscope, general anesthesia and reinforced concrete and quite far behind are the Jacquard loom and canning. Is there a pattern here?
Addendum: Brian’s Github with the full prompt and output for each invention is here.
Early evidence on school smartphone bans and mental health
The word “early” is appropriate here and is to be stressed, nonetheless I am not surprised by these results, given the relative impotence of treatment effects in so many settings:
To provide causal evidence of the effects of these bans, I rely on synthetic difference-in-difference models and the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) from 2016 to 2024. Currently, there are data for only one state with two post-ban periods and two states with one post-ban period, which makes the results preliminary evidence only. The outcome variables are screentime and measures of psychological wellbeing. Overall, these early results provide no clear evidence that the school ban policy reduced screentime or improved psychological wellbeing.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by Henry Saffer.
Using agents to build economic datasets
Constructing datasets from primary sources is one of the costliest tasks in empirical economics. We propose Deep Research on a Loop (DRIL), a methodology that uses AI agents to assemble datasets from publicly available sources. DRIL applies a fixed research instrument across a mapped unit space (e.g., countries by years), with a two-stage architecture separating design from implementation. The instrument specifies variables and coding rules, an evidence policy governs sources and citations, and data quality mechanisms track gaps and uncertainty explicitly. We exercise DRIL on a 2025 update of the Global Tax Expenditures Database for eight Latin American and Caribbean countries. The run produces 129 sources and 136 evidence records, covering 22 qualitative fields fully and 6 quantitative estimate types with documented gaps, at the cost of a standard LLM subscription comparable to a few hours of research-assistant work. We argue that even partial automation of dataset construction can shift the production function of empirical economics.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Why are stock prices still so high?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt, with the general theme that plenty is going well in the global economy:
A second important fact is that American presidents, whether Democrat or Republican, usually have very little influence on the economy. That is a hard truth for people to hear, since partisan sentiments often run strong, especially when it comes to President Trump. Yet the research literature is clear that most business cycles are not caused by presidents.
As for the current cycle, the core reality is that our economy continues to hum along. Yes, gas prices above $4 a gallon cause dismayed news stories and consumer worry. But energy prices have less influence on the overall economic picture than they once did. The chances of a recession have been falling, and a recent jobs report showed strong progress in hiring.
Of course the Trump administration will take credit for such developments, but mostly they are due to underlying structural factors.
And this:
During the current war, many parts of the global economy have shown more resilience and fortitude than might have been expected. Stocks in South Korea at first plummeted 20 percent, due largely to its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Today, the Korean stock market, pushed along by the chip-making achievement of Samsung and memory maker SK Hynix, is reaching new highs.
…In previous times, sharp oil price hikes often brought catastrophe to the economies of Latin America. These days Latin American government bonds have held up well and are even considered a safe haven.
Recommended.
Monday assorted links
1. Why Dunkin’ Donuts failed in India.
2. Rents in the Middle East, and is the region less dependent on oil than before? And why is Jordan still relatively stable in economic terms?
3. Kakistocracy, the pending Richard Hanania book.
4. Brad Mehldau defends Billy Joel. Slowly, but even I am being brought around to this position.
5. Kurtis Hingl on the future of research papers: “But this will evolve to a demand-side system where “papers” are accompanied by a platform of all the tools used in the process, and the reader will ask their AI their “what if we did X instead of Y, does that change the estimate?” Like if I were reading an experimental chemistry paper, and it came with a pre-set lab with all the ingredients, a lab director and assistants, and I could ask them as I read the paper, “what if we tweaked the proportions by X?” and they did it right there in front of me and together we saw the outcome.”
6. Yes China understands their security risks from ChatGPT and other LLMs.
Another use of AI in research (from my email)
“Another thing we (John [Horton] and I) have thought about is having a swarm of AIs “fight” over a literature. They could take the cumulative datasets available and continuously argue until they understand the question. One line of thinking says they reach a stalemate (as scientists currently do). But we think not. More likely, they push evidentiary understanding to the limit and coalesce around what’s most probable — if not definitive!”
That is from Benjamin Manning.
The interstate trade effects of autonomous trucks
Recent advances in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technologies promise substantial cost savings for goods shipped by truck. In this study, we quantify the impacts of these transport cost reductions on the US interstate trade using a structural gravity model of domestic trade. Based on projected cost savings from the widespread adoption of self-driving technologies, we estimate significant increases in total interstate trade value. State-level impacts vary from 40.3% of GDP in Mississippi to 5.9% in Florida, while the largest impacts in dollar value are observed in Texas and New York. The sectoral analysis highlights motorized vehicles, mixed freight, and electronics as the industries experiencing the largest trade value growth. Additionally, goods with low value-to-weight ratios—where shipping costs represent a large share of the delivered value—are expected to benefit most in relative terms. These findings underscore the transformative potential of autonomous vehicle technologies in reshaping US trade patterns and sectoral dynamics.
That is from a recent paper by Taejun Mo, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
USA sectoral shift fact of the day
Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.
Here is the source (Charlie Bilello) and a graph. In relative terms, is this good or bad for men?
Sunday assorted links
1. What should be our Bayesian priors on von Neumann probes?
2. AI book mirrors.
3. Why power in Spain is so cheap.
4. The comments on Mick West here are pretty tough. We still do not know what it is, and yes the national security people have pondered these questions in advance. Most broadly, trust people who are in “explorer mode,” not debunker mode. Debunker mode is tempting, because you often end up right, and feeling good about yourself, but it also means you miss big discoveries when they come along.
5. More on the cell phone ban study.
6. Technological breakthroughs and the progress of science. The early papers based on digital computing techniques did very, very well, at least on average.
Will AI kill the research paper?
Imagine taking a macroeconomics paper and adding a little button at the end “Press this button to update this paper with the latest macro data.”
All of a sudden you have multiple papers rather than one, and no single canonical version. It is the latter versions, not created directly by the authors, that people will look at.
Imagine adding another button, to either micro or macro papers “Please rerun these results using what the AI thinks might be five other different yet still plausible specifications.”
Then you have more papers yet.
Ultimately, why not just build a “meta-paper,” using AI, to answer any possible question about the subject area under consideration. This meta-paper would allow the reader, using AI, to make many sorts of modifications and additions to the basic work. The meta-paper also would allow the reader to add new data, to run additional robustness checks, and to do whatever else you might think of. Once again, the canonical version of the paper evolves away.
A researcher might spend a significant part of his or her career building such a meta-paper. Imagine a meta-paper, or sometimes I call it a “box,” devoted to answering questions about say fiscal policy, minimum wage hikes, or maybe the Industrial Revolution. Fed researchers would spend their entire careers, not writing papers, but improving the Fed’s “box” that answers questions about monetary policy and also prudential supervision.
Who will be good at doing such things? Is it the people today who become the top economists, or not? Will it be a highly decentralized endeavor, or, given the compute and team work requirements, a highly centralized one?
Economics is going to change a lot, as will many of the other sciences.
It is funny, and tragic, how much some of you are still obsessed with writing and publishing “papers.”
Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don’t properly understand?
Off the top of my head:
• Lightning (how does it happen?)
• Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?)
• Glass (thermodynamics of formation)
• Turbulence (when does it start?)
• Morphogenesis (how does a creature know what should go where?)
• Rain (it seems to start faster than models would predict)
• Ice (dynamics of slipperiness)
• Static electricity (which material will donate electrons?)
• General anaesthetic. (And the mechanism of a lot of drugs, e.g. paracetamol.)
That is from Patrick Collison. It is a further interesting question how many of those questions will be answered by what is sometimes called AGI. Perhaps none of them? In at least some of those cases, what is scarce is experimental data, not reasoning per se.
Saturday assorted links
1. Do chatbots ever follow the interests of advertisers?
2. Approaching the Star Trek universal translator.
3. Jon Haidt response to the new cell phone study.
4. U.S. electricity prices have been flat since June.
5. Friend Alla Keselman now has a Substack.
6. I am enjoying the new Elizabeth Strout novel The Things We Never Say. It is arguably “too American” for me, and also “too New England,” still it is quite good.
The UAP report so far
I will stick with my earlier Free Press predictions:
The fact remains that, if you talk with insiders, they will confirm that the federal government faces some big mysteries. It seems that we have data on what appear to be craft that move very fast, have no visible means of propulsion, and can accelerate in a surprising manner. Radar, infrared, and other forms of data are cited to varying degrees, plus there are eyewitness pilot reports, broadly consistent with what our instruments are telling us.
And this:
Assuming a reasonable chunk of the data are declassified, I think we will simply see more of the same kind of material we’ve seen in the past: more data on entities that appear to move very quickly and in mysterious ways, but with no real explanations. We will see, as I’ve argued before, that the government itself does not know what is going on, and has been afraid to admit that. That may be the real “conspiracy” and why the veil of secrecy has been relatively difficult to pierce.
As of yesterday, there are plenty of additional videos of what seem to be glowing orbs moving fast and in unpredictable ways. Or try this one. Here is another weird one. Or try this. And another one, near military craft. And what is this?
One thing we can conclude is that the debunkers, who have been suggesting this is all camera tricks, parallax issues, or people not understanding how videos work, are proven wrong in general, even though they are right about some particular cases. On that point we can move on, as I have been arguing for some while. Mick West is not your proper guide here.
Nonetheless we still do not know what it all means, and I do not see proof of anything in particular.
I also will stress my earlier point that we are not going to see alien bodies or alien technologies, or anything meaningful connected to Roswell. That is sheer fantasy, or sometimes locos.
340 million hits in the first twelve hours? More people will be believing in aliens in any case, I suspect. Or will it be demons?
It is fashionable in the comments sections of blogs to call this topic a waste of time, but the serious people in the military and national security — most of whom do not cite alien presence — do not see it that way.
And they will be releasing more materials. These materials are being released because some subsection of “the Deep State” wants to know what is going on. As do I.
Public Choice Outreach!
Just a few spots left! Lots of great speakers including Tyler, myself, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Jon Klick, Shruti Rajagopalan and more.
Please apply and encourage your students to apply.
Self-fulfilling misalignment?
We started by investigating why Claude chose to blackmail. We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.
And here is Alex Turner on the topic of self-fulfilling misalignment. I raised this possibility some while ago in a Free Press column, and mainly was met with hostility.
The social return to a positive world view, and avoiding negative emotional contagion, never has been higher.