New Things Under the Sun
Matt Clancy
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About This Podcast
Explore Statistics
Recent Episodes
Government Funding for R&D and Productivity Growth
What’s the return on government funding for research?There are a few places in the academic literature you can look to for insight. Jones and Summers (2021) uses a hypothetical thought experiment to…
S1E64 Do prediction technologies help novices or experts more?
Which kind of inventor (or scientist) is going to benefit more from artificial intelligence: novices or experts? In theory, it can go either way.This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial…
S1E63 Prediction Technologies and Innovation
Some inventions and discoveries make the inventive process itself more efficient. One such class of invention is the prediction technology. These can take a lot of forms. AI is one example of a…
S1E62 Training Scientists in Low and Middle Income Countries
New Things Under the Sun is once again putting together a list of dissertation papers related to innovation. If you want your paper to be included, email the title, an abstract, and a link to the…
S1E61 The Decline in Writing About Progress
The frequency of words associated with "progress" in English, German, and French books rose during the era of industrialization, but is down since the 1950s, at least according to google. Is this a…
S1E60 Incentives to Invent at Universities
Prior to the 2000s, many European countries practiced something called “the professor’s privilege” wherein university professors retained patent rights to inventions they made while employed at the…
S1E59 Twitter and the Spread of Academic Knowledge
A classic topic in the study of innovation is the link between physical proximity and the exchange of ideas. But I’ve long been interested in a relatively new kind of serendipity engine, which isn’t…
S1E58 When the Robots Take Your Job
Note:Economists typically think that labor and capital are complementary - more of the one makes the other more productive. But there’s a flourishing literature that looks at the consequences of…
S1E57 Can We Learn About Innovation From Patent Data?
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited…
S1E56 Do studies based on patents get different results?
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited…
S1E55 Patents (weakly) predict innovation
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited…
S1E54 How many inventions are patented?
Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited…
S1E53 Training enhances the value of new technology
Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few centuries, but much of that progress is still limited to the richest countries. Why don't new technologies spread quickly throughout the…
S1E52 Teaching Innovative Entrepreneurship
Correction: In this podcast, I misspoke towards the end and referred to Eesley and Lee (2020) as Eesley and Wang (a 2017 paper I wrote about earlier here). Apologies to the authors.A lot of…
S1E51 Teacher Influence and Innovation
Here’s a striking fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine also had a Nobel prize winner as their academic advisor.undefinedWhat accounts for this…
S1E50 When Research Over There Isn't Helpful Here
Much of the world’s population lives in countries in which little research happens. Is this a problem? According to classical economic models of the “ideas production function,” ideas are universal;…
S1E49 Big Firms Have Different Incentives
This week, Arnaud Dyèvre (@ArnaudDyevre) and I follow up on a previous podcast, where we documented a puzzle: larger firms conduct R&D at the same rate as smaller firms, despite getting fewer…
S1E48 Geography and What Gets Researched
How do academic researchers decide what to work on? Part of it comes down to what you judge to be important and valuable; and that can come from exposure to problems in your local community. This…
S1E47 How to Impede Technological Progress
Most of the time, we think of innovation policy as a problem of how to accelerate desirable forms of technological progress. But there are other times when we may wish to actively slow technological…
S1E47 The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth with Tamay Besiroglu
This is not the usual podcast on New Things Under the Sun. For the third issue of Asterisk Magazine, Tamay Besiroglu and I were asked to write an article on how likely it is that artificial…
Frequently Asked Questions
New Things Under the Sun has published 66 episodes since December 2021, covering topics in Science, Social Sciences.
New Things Under the Sun is currently dormant with new episodes monthly. Average episode length is 21m.
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