Most Popular Articles of Last Year

Happy Birthday to New Things Under the Year

This newsletter turned two years old on December 1, 2021! So let’s do a little year-in-review.

Since December 6, 2021, I wrote 27 articles for the site, which is slightly above my goal of one every two weeks. In reverse order, the five most popular of these were:

#5:

Combinatorial innovation and technological progress in the very long run

#4:

An example of successful innovation by distributed teams: academia

#3:

What are the returns to R&D?

#2:

Innovation gets (mostly) harder

#1:

Is Technological Progress Slowing?

Each of 1-4 received more than 10,000 views (and #5 is close). These five pieces were more popular than anything I wrote in the previous year, with one exception. My all-time most popular post is a piece I wrote in June 2019: “Are ideas getting harder to find because of the burden of knowledge?” (Link to most recent updated version). That one has nearly 17,000 views.

Thanks to everyone who shared read and shared these!

Other developments

There were a few big developments this year for the project. Most importantly, I received a grant from Emergent Ventures in November 2020 which allowed me to reduce my teaching duties for the year in order to spend more time working on this newsletter. I wrote about 21 posts in the year before I had grant support, and 27 in the year after. But the posts also grew longer, more polished, and more ambitious during that year. Subscribers grew from 875 on December 6 2020 to 4,021 on December 6, 2021.

The other big development was the launch of newthingsunderthesun.com, which provides:

• a permanent home for posts I write

• a way to update posts and keep them current

• a way to map out wider context and the bigger pircutre

You can read more about this “living literature review” here.

What’s in store for 2022?

One project for the upcoming year is to set up a proper podcast channel for the material I’ve recorded so far. The podcast is just me reading the newsletter, but it seems to be a big channel for people to access what I write. Over the last year, there was 2 listeners for every 3 readers (for the articles where I did record a podcast, which was not all of them). At present the podcasts are really only available via the substack newsletter posts and I think that probably makes accessing them a bit harder than it needs to be.

More broadly, for the next year I am continuing to target an original article every two weeks (on average), and I hope I can add to this some more frequent updates of existing articles. I hesitate to announce in advance what I’m planning to write about, because I find I frequently pivot after doing the reading. But one of the larger themes I’m hoping to tackle in a series of articles next year relate to how scientific priorities are set and modified. But I enjoy bouncing all over this space, so I imagine there’ll be tons of other stuff.

What do you think? If you’ve got any feedback about this project, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading everyone!

-Matt