New Things Under the Sun Matt Clancy

Note:Economists typically think that labor and capital are complementary - more of the one makes the other more productive. But there’s a flourishing literature that looks at the consequences of capital that replaces, rather than augments, human workers. In this post, I want to talk about a very simple equation that is inspired by the ideas in these papers, and which I think is a useful thinking tool.This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article When the Robots...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on New...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on New...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on New...

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zeroPatents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovationDo studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on New...

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few centuries, but much of that progress is still limited to the richest countries. Why don't new technologies spread quickly throughout the world, benefiting billions of people? In this podcast, we’ll focus on one particular answer: new technologies improve productivity, but they improve productivity more when paired with knowledge on how to use them. If this is true, new technologies will be less beneficial to recipients who don’t have...