Podcast on science policy

 [[{“value”:”It is titled ARPAS, FROs, and Fast Grants, Oh My!  The host is the excellent Tammy Winter, and the other guests are Patrick Hsu and Adam Marblestone, plus yours truly. Here is the link, with transcript.  Excerpt: Tyler Cowen: In virtually all institutions, we should be taking more chances on quite young people, giving them
The post Podcast on science policy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

It is titled ARPAS, FROs, and Fast Grants, Oh My!  The host is the excellent Tammy Winter, and the other guests are Patrick Hsu and Adam Marblestone, plus yours truly.

Here is the link, with transcript.  Excerpt:

Tyler Cowen: In virtually all institutions, we should be taking more chances on quite young people, giving them more authority, in general. My background is quite different from the rest of you at this meeting. I spent a big chunk of my career studying the financing of the creative arts, economics of the arts. That’s always my mental touchstone. When I hear about Focused Research Organizations that expire when the project is over, I think of Hollywood movies. We’ve been doing that for a long time.

You can almost always find parallels in the arts, which makes you much more optimistic about what you can do. Rapid patronage was a big thing during the Renaissance, and it worked really well. I knew when we started Fast Grants, “Oh, we can do this” because of historical examples.

And when you think of young people running things — well, who ran the Beatles? There was George Martin and Brian Epstein, but the Beatles ran the Beatles. Paul McCartney had to figure out the recording studio. We don’t call that science, but that was an extremely difficult scientific project that had never been done before. And this guy, who hadn’t gone to college, at age 23 starts figuring it out and becomes a master. When you see those things happen in the arts — frequently, they happen — you become way more optimistic. “How many people can do this? How can we scale it? Can super young people contribute? Can this all work?”

You are not saying it’s easy — most projects in the arts fail, too — but you think, “Yes, yes, yes, we can do this.” And you do it, or you try to do it.

Recommended, interesting throughout.  We had great fun taping this at Stripe headquarters.

The post Podcast on science policy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

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