Aeon in Motion
As summer nears its end here in North America, we hope this newsletter finds you making the most of it. We are, so this will be brief.
We are excited about some activity coming up in September: we will be in New York the week of September 7th, and Philadelphia the week of September 21st (during which we plan on hosting another one of our discussion dinners).
If you will be in New York or Philadelphia at the same time we’re there, or if there is someone in either of those cities you think we should meet, please reach out or simply respond to this email. We would love to see you, and we would appreciate any new friends you can introduce.
The Idea Garden
We Have Learned Nothing - Colossus
Jerry Neumann looks at twenty-five years of startup methodology and asks the uncomfortable question: did any of it work? Survival rates have barely moved since 1995, and once a framework becomes universal, whatever edge it conferred quietly disappears. His deeper charge is that the field calls itself a science while producing claims that cannot be falsified. We include it because the same audit is overdue in science itself. Metascience is accumulating frameworks quickly, and we should hold our own work to the standard Neumann applies here.
The secret cause of the industrial revolution
This piece traces the industrial revolution to a change most accounts skip: after 1688, Parliament spent a century dismantling the property arrangements that had frozen English land in place. Thousands of enclosure acts, estate acts, and turnpike trusts loosened rules rather than tightened them, and transport costs fell by roughly three quarters. Such an episode may offer lessons for anyone whose instinct is to govern more strictly and with more top-down oversight. Growth arrived when veto rights were made less powerful, not more powerful.
Why can’t technologists and economists agree on AI?
Matt Clancy examines why technologists and economists cannot agree on what AI will do to growth, and finds the disagreement has almost nothing to do with AI. Forecasters who spent dozens of hours engaging each other's best arguments diverged rather than converged. Their conclusions were largely set before the evidence arrived, formed by a lifetime of professional experience mostly unrelated to the question at hand. That is a warning for anyone evaluating something genuinely new. Priors carry enormous path dependency, and the newer the phenomenon, the more of the judgment they determine.
Science: A New Golden Age – The White House
The administration's science report presents itself as a successor to Vannevar Bush's Endless Frontier, and it carries the promotional register you would expect. Read past the packaging and the diagnosis is familiar: American science is described as constrained by institutional design rather than by talent or ideas. The proposed remedies lean toward funding people, diversifying mechanisms beyond consensus peer review, and building new institutional models. Disconcertingly, and somewhat paradoxically, it also advocates for more government oversight and more top-down direction and accountability.
Pierre Azoulay on Open Science as an Economic Institution
Pierre Azoulay's lecture, the fourth in IFP's economics of science course, treats openness as machinery rather than virtue. Scientists accept roughly a quarter less pay for the right to publish, quietly subsidizing the commons. Cutting access frictions on patented research materials raised follow-on work by twenty to thirty percent. Funding people on ten-year horizons, with room to fail, yields fewer papers and more consequential ones. Each is a design lever, and his closing note is one we share: institutions that worked in 1950 likely need reimagining.