Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So let’s go deep on medical research here for a second, because this is an area that you wrote this paper about before about how the progress in the field might be slowing. And like you mentioned, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy that I run with my wife, a big focus of it is on medical research and trying to — we have this aspirational goal that we wanna help build tools that can help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century. And basically, the math of how you get there is, starting about 100 years ago there was really this uptick in medical research where we started doing randomized control experiments, treating it more like an experimental science. Since around that time, the average life expectancy has increased by a quarter of a year every year, relatively linearly. There’s no guarantee, of course, that that continues, but if we’re able to have that continue, then that would imply that by the end of the century we will generally have had to have either cured, prevented, or been able to manage most if not all of the diseases that we’re aware of now. So there’s some trend that suggests that this should be reasonable, and the approach that we’re taking in the work at CZI is largely about building tools to help compound the rate of science. And what we see is that, like you mentioned, the government is the largest and most important funder of science and it basically funds the whole establishment of scientists across the country. But the grants tend to be very spread out across a lot of people. They’re not typically put into big infrastructure projects. And that’s the niche that we felt through CZI that we can help to fill: instead of investing a million dollars in a lab, put $100 million or a couple hundred million dollars over time into building up really important scientific assets for the community. Like helping to fund scientists to go put together this Human Cell Atlas. Think about it as like the periodic table of elements but for biology — all the different kinds of cells in the human body. And the goal is just, if you look throughout the history of science, at least, most major scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools that help people look at things in different ways. And so the theory is similar to what you’re going at of how you increase the compounding rate of progress. There are a couple of different directions that I think we could go in here. One is that I’m curious what you’ve seen in your studies in the space that suggest to you that the rate of progress is actually slowing. And I’m also curious about the examples you’ve seen overall of how the science around studying progress would potentially lead to a different approach or a different portfolio of how this kind of work gets done. So I don’t know where you want to start with that, but there’s a lot here to do. Here’s what worries me, and it should worry you too. So as you mentioned, U.S. life expectancy is basically going up in linear fashion. But if you look at expenditures, we used to spend a few percentage points of GDP on healthcare, and now it’s about 18%. So we’ve gone up to 18%, and we’re not even boosting the rate. I’m not saying it’s the fault of any one group of people, but something has gone wrong. There’s some kind of last-mile problem. You can turn to the newspapers and read all kinds of fantastic stories — new research, new ideas, new tools — but when the rubber hits the road, people living longer, we’re spending more and more and more for exactly the same returns. So if that trend continues — and you see a similar trend in many areas: crop yields, feeding the world, other areas — the question becomes, where does all the progress go? So the idea that you need to look at each structure and encourage more risk-taking, better decisions with the money, less bureaucratization — maybe in some cases more centralization, whatever it takes — but that there is this invisible crisis, and people are distracted by the headlines about CRISPR or whatever. But actually what you get for the money — performance is so-so, I think. Yeah, and so what we wrote in this article a year ago about what’s going on in science — if you look at it by the most kind of microscopic measures, like the number of PhDs in the U.S, —actually if you take all the microscopic measures, they all have grown by about a factor between 50 and 100. Number of PhDs, number of papers published every year, actual dollars into the science funding, and so on. So in a very stylized way, if you look at the first half of the twentieth century as compared to the second half, there’s way more input in the second half of the century. And again, not by 50%, but by orders of magnitude. And so then I think the question for all of us would be, well, in which half of the century did we get more out in terms of useful scientific knowledge? And then whichever we think did better, to what degree? And again, this is a very difficult question to answer of how do you weigh scientific knowledge? And so you have to look at it, I think, into various applied contexts. Like life expectancy or semiconductors or, as Tyler mentioned, crop yields or whatever. And I think what’s interesting and, anyway should be concerning, is that for almost every conceivable applied measure we seem to be getting at best constant returns. But that’s really bad because we see exponentially increasing inputs and constant return outputs. That is almost by definition not a process that we can sustain. Now, there’s two broad possibilities there. One is it’s just getting intrinsically harder to generate progress and to discover these things. And who knows, maybe some significant part of that is true. But the other possibility is it’s somehow more institutional, right? It’s more contingent, it’s more sociological. And again, we do have suggestive evidence that our institutions are — well, they’re certainly older than they used to be, and as in the NIH funding example, there are changes happening beneath the surface and so on that may or may not be good. So I don’t think we should write off the possibility that it’s not inevitable, and that there do exist alternate forms of organization where things would work better. And again, if we dig a little bit into the evidence there, you see things like — there’s a science funding program that, obviously, you’re familiar with called HHMI at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They give grants along the lines of how CCI does where they’re longer term, they’re more open-ended and so on. Pierre Azoulay at MIT wrote a paper a couple years ago in trying to look at, well, if you take ostensibly identical scientists, some of whom receive HHMI grants, and some of whom don’t, how much more successful are the HHMI recipients? And he concluded they’re about twice as likely to produce a top 1% paper by citation count. Again, that’s really suggestive.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.