innovation culture

Their methods are a bit unorthodox, but Dyevre (2024) uses more standard methods and obtains broadly similar results:

Using a novel firm-level dataset...covering 70 years (1950-2020), I estimate the impact of the decline in public R&D in the US on long-run productivity growth. I use two instrumental variable strategies...to estimate the impact of

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Startups, he argues, can be engineered in the same way. “Startups excel when they put all their energy into one main thing ,” he says. “If you want to hit escape velocity, your startup should be designed to focus on that. In other words, it better taste good. But if your startup is designed to have several teams all equal in size, where’s your... See more

Caro’s question is: How does political power really work in America?

Once he asks it, it takes the wheel. Caro is willing to go broke to answer it.

For example: one day in the 1960s, his wife Ina sold their home so that he wouldn’t have to, because it was obvious to both of them that they needed to. And despite being warned by those around Robert... See more

The default outcome?

Let's grant the assumptions at the start of this post and the above analysis. Then, the post-labour-replacing-AI world involves:

• Money will be able to buy results in the real world better than ever.


• People's labour gives them less leverage than ever before.


• Achieving outlier success through your labour in most or all areas is now

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When you expand a technology, you expand it towards both ends. The divine and the profane. With AI we receive breakthrough medical research AND waifu porn bots. With crypto we receive community owned infrastructure and endless memecoin rugs.

Ideas have this amazing property. Thomas Jefferson said "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."

Note that the key phenomena are not movements. They are not collective efforts to build social capital around any particular idea or aesthetic or value. Nor are they forms of propaganda or prestige. The real core activities of culture are disciplines of craft aimed at actually achieving something great, regardless of what everyone else thinks. They... See more

The historian and biographer extends this backwards in time. Now youth find models of honor not only among the living but among dead. To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider... See more