Progress studies
[6] Elsewhere, the online magazine Works in Progress was established by Sam Bowman, Saloni Dattani, Ben Southwood and Nick Whitaker in 2020, "dedicated to sharing new and underrated ideas to improve the world".
In response to Cowen and Collison's article, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote: "The questions animating progress studies aren't mere academic exercises; they are central to understanding how we can bring about a better future for all.
[17] Cowen acknowledges that GDP is imperfect and proposes the idea of Wealth Plus, which takes into account leisure, household production, and environmental amenities.
[22] Stagnationists like economist Tyler Cowen have warned that rapid recent advances in software, the 'world of bits', have obscured a slowdown in scientific discovery and technological innovation outside of digital life, the 'world of atoms'.
[25] Tyler Cowen has said: "When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen.
[27] Progress study proponents do think about aspects of government such as housing policy that affect the ability of people to move to find better opportunities and upwards mobility.
[29] Recent advances in this area include a malaria vaccine, shown in a pilot run in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi to have the potential to reduce 13% of childhood deaths.
"[36] The ecomodernist manifesto states that: Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion.
The manifesto states, "cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts."
[47] Science writer and researcher (and Works in Progress cofounder) Saloni Dattani advocates for governments and international organizations to foster more widespread collection of public health data across different countries,[48] the testing of more interventions in parallel during randomized controlled trials,[48] recruiting industry experts to contribute to scientific endeavors,[48] reforming the peer review process,[49] and greater data transparency from scientists[46] Economists Heidi Williams and Paul Niehaus have argued that scientific practise could be improved with institutional support to amplify top-performers' work, and with incubation grants allowing institutions to "partner with academic researchers in trying to integrate research into operationalizing and scaling effective interventions.
"[52] Economist Ryan Avent explains: "The difference between the sci-fi futures people imagined a half-century ago and the present as we live it — similar to the past, but we all have pocket computers — is an energy gap.
"[57] Proponents of progress studies tend to be aligned with YIMBY policies, believing that a shortage of housing in major cities limits economic growth.
[58] In Britain, former hedge fund manager and British YIMBY leader John Myers, along with policy analysts Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman, have suggested a "Housing Theory of Everything", which states that a wide range of problems – "slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility" – could be improved by fixing the housing shortage.
