While at a smaller scale, science grants have similar characteristics to infrastructure projects: they take a long time, can be capital intensive, and if you cancel them midstream it can destabilize the sector. Should we protect science grants against political cancellations?

Emergent Ventures India, 12th cohort: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

And work on Clinical Trial Abundance is not just a hypothetical. Based on the Clinical Trial Abundance initiative last year w/ IFP & Renaissance Philanthropy, I've been working on ways to make clinical trials more efficient (stay tuned & if you wanna help, DM).

In recent decades, only a handful of government interventions have been widely regarded as successes. Operation Warp Speed is one of them. So is the CHIPS Act, the $39 billion program that catalyzed a massive investment boom in manufacturing semiconductors on American soil.

🚨 Hiring scientists to help give away money 🚨 At Open Philanthropy, we have given away $600M in biomedical research since 2016. Now, we're expanding the team to do more. Hiring: * Up to 3 Senior Program Associates * Program Officer in strep A Remote OK, salaries in links! (thread)

58% is “the walls are closing in on our tinpot dictator” levels of youth unemployment. If you believe this fake clickbait “survey” from Kickresume, you’ll believe anything negative that’s said about the economy. We actually have high-quality data available, folks.

To put a specific data point on this - right before Tunisia kicked off the Arab Spring, the youth unemployment rate was around 31%

A pretty wild stat on US foreign policy & Africa. W. Bush and JFK spent *much* more time with African leaders (JFK: USAID + Peace Corps, W: PEPFAR, etc.) than Obama/Biden/Trump. Wild given Africa will very soon be the only countries growing excl. immigration. Clearly important!

Lab directed R&D at the national labs allows each lab to pick exciting internal research to fund, leading to breakthroughs (and a Nobel prize!). Charles Yang and I explain why this type of funding mechanism should be expanded: ifp.org/lab-directed-r…

Cutting off our supply of global talent is asking for American stagnation and decline. I, for one, don’t want that.

This is gonna rock

Didn’t see this one coming! US investment in Africa outpaced Chinese investment in 2023 bbc.com/news/articles/…

I love this framing from Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 (in DC 11th-17th 🇺🇸)