Johanna

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to... See more

In order to improve allocation, we should pay attention to funding models. We may want to improve the models we have, or reallocate our portfolio of them, or bring back old ones that we have left behind, or invent new ones.

The picture this survey paints is bleak: Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.

One way to create a shared context is through shared struggle. This is why many organizations implement ritualized hazing3 to initiate new members, but the important thing is not the hazing, it’s the sense that you are working together with your fellow humans to achieve a super-human goal. Whether that’s to develop vaccines, to drywall a shelter,... See more

I think another important factor in determining happiness is how hard of a line you want between work and home life. One benefit of traditional office environments is that when you physically leave the office, it’s not too hard to flip the switch and go into “home mode”. Sure you may have to deal with the odd email every now and then, but it’s... See more

Faced with these facts, we should question UBI’s rationality; as Luke Martinelli put it: “an affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable.”

Transportation equity is not a discrete problem. It poses a barrier to accessing everything that constitutes a good quality of life; healthcare, fresh food, public Wi-Fi, friends, education, jobs, and voting. If everything is brought within a 15 minute radius, not only does car ownership become widely unnecessary, prompting the provision of a... See more

After two years of working from home, I don’t have one unified period of getting things done. I have several mini periods. Work isn’t a contiguous landmass of focus; it’s more like an archipelago of productivity amid a sea of chores, meals, mental breaks, and other responsibilities.

For hunter-gatherers, chiefs and shamans could, and did, moonlight as foragers and hunters. Overlapping duties preserved a strong sense of community, reinforced by customs and religions that obscured individual differences in strength, skill, and ambition. Shared labor meant shared values.But in industrial economies, lawyers don’t tag in for brain... See more