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Energy Usage There are no low energy, rich countries. It is one of the clearest predictors of growth and future prosperity. Energy is important for most advancements, productivity growth, and impact on the climate. Yet, the research expenditure is quite negligible. Across the top 25 usage sectors, there is a lot of research left to be done for techniques, processes, and fundamental breakthroughs.…
Things we don’t understand Apart from the philosophical and consciousness-related gaps, there are few general-purpose or almost-at-that-level things that we really don’t understand how or why they work. Why do planes fly? What happens inside fire? How does general anesthesia work? Why does magnetism occur? What is gravity? Why do we need to sleep? What is the nature of dark matter and dark…
Randomized Funding We are seeing a great renaissance in new funding models1, grant programs2, and moving back (hopefully!) to “fund people, not projects”3. A lot of these initiatives bring an easy, non-bureaucratic application process to get funding. How applicants are selected is still largely the same. Though there isn’t a full RCT selecting applicants to fund at random, there have…
Prolific It appears we don’t understand outliers to our baseline model of output. Some people are just outlandishly prolific: Sebastian Bach: on average composed 20 pages of finished music per day. Thomas Edison: averaged a patent every 10-12 days of his adult life. Albert Einstein: “Scientists call 1905 Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis — his year of miracles. Within a few months, Einstein…
Age Age of achievement, discovery, agency, and impact is increasing across industries and fields. Watson was 25 and Crick was 36 when they discovered the structure of DNA. More than a dozen of the signers of the American declaration of independence were 35 or younger and the average age was 44. The majority of the people at Xerox PARC at its zenith were under 30. The Macintosh team’s average…
US Immigration Free movement of capital is considered paramount in policy and discourse but arguably free movement of labor is even more important. Allowing free movement of labor would approximately double global output. This is further noticeable with migration to the United States: “Migrants to the U.S. are up to six times more productive than migrants to other countries—even after accounting…
Agglomeration “One of the biggest meta-ideas of modern life is to let people live together in dense urban agglomerations. A second is to allow market forces to guide most of the detailed decisions these people make about who they interact with each other. Together, the city and the market let large groups of people cooperate by discovering new ideas, sharing them, and learning from each other. The…
I’m Anil Varanasi, I live in San Francisco and I work at Meter. Before this, I studied economics and computer networking at George Mason. Email: anil@anilv.com Twitter: @acv