Relaunching Macroscience

A better science is possible

At long last, Macroscience is back.

If you’re receiving this email, you subscribed to Macroscience in its original iteration as a project of our Senior Fellow Tim Hwang. In 2023 and 2024, Tim published a series of articles discussing the principles grounding government’s role in shaping science. Tim’s idea was simple: We have macroeconomics, which helps us manage the money supply. But we don’t have anything like macroscience to help us organize science on a large scale. In addition to Tim’s newsletter, we hosted interviews with top metascience thinkers and the Metascience 101 podcast.

American science needs metascience more than ever. Our scientific institutions, while still productive, are increasingly cautious and bureaucratic. They feel rickety. At the same time, political and technological change is happening rapidly. Science budgets are being cut, AI is taking off. Can our scientific institutions, built at the end of World War II, keep up with this change? Should they be redesigned? Rebuilt from the ground up?

Fortunately, our understanding of the structure of science has massively expanded. Building from a basis of metascience evidence, scientists and policy entrepreneurs are experimenting with new models for funding and doing science. In the political and technological tumult, there are new scientific and policy ideas waiting to be tested and opportunities ready to be seized.

We are bringing that experimental ethos to Macroscience. We are relaunching Macroscience with a broader focus and community of writers, including the scientists and policy entrepreneurs shaping the future of American science. Macroscience will explore ideas for how to improve science and policy, and it’ll feature writers who challenge assumptions and start friendly arguments. And it’ll provide, I hope, an optimistic but plausible vision for the future of scientific progress.

While Tim will still write on a regular basis, my aim is to create a larger community of science and technology writers that’ll contribute regularly to Macroscience. I’m Andrew Gerard, and I care about doing science better because of its incredible potential to improve people’s lives. I’m a social scientist, and spent most of my career working in international science policy. Before coming to IFP, I was Deputy Director of the Research Division at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and I’ve also worked in higher education and non-profits.

Here are some of the questions that we want to explore in the coming months:

• What will science look like as the government radically reforms its relationship to the American research university?

• The sociology of metascience: who are in the different camps shaping the metascience discussion?

• Can we simplify federal science policy to speed up science?

• Should the US government take an equity stake in scientific innovations?

• Can there be negative marginal returns to science funding?

• What’s stopping us from getting better drugs, faster?

• Should Americans care about international science?

It’s going to be great — look for more to come soon. Don’t hesitate to email me with questions, feedback, pitches, or ideas.