This fall I will be hosting a study/discussion group on the history, economics and philosophy of progress. Members of the EA Forum can get 50% off using this link.
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.
The group will meet weekly on Sundays at 4:00–6:30pm Pacific, from September 13 through December 13. The guest Q&A will run 60–90 minutes, and the rest will be group discussion. (Recordings will be available privately afterwards if you miss a session.)
You can register for a 50% discount of $1,200 using this link.
Thanks to Peter Hartree for supporting my work and encouraging me to announce this here.