Caleb Watney: Think Tank Founder Accelerates Progress Through Policy
Summary:
In this episode, we speak with Caleb Watney. He is a co-founder of the Institute for Progress (IFP) which aims to accelerate technological, scientific, and industrial progress. On top of that, Caleb holds a Master’s in Economics from George Mason University and has spent the last seven years working in policy in Washington, DC.
Some things we touch on in this episode:
What it's like to be a Christian working in policy.
Why is policy something Christians who want to be impactful, should be concerned about.
Why we should care about improving science research.
Less controversial ways to make an impact including how to enhance skilled immigration.
Caleb’s career advice for Christians looking to work in policy, particularly neglected areas within policy.
Articles, organizations, and other media discussed in this episode
Caleb co-founded the Institute for Progress (IFP) which aims to accelerate technological, scientific, and industrial progress.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States that supports fundamental research and education in all medical fields of science and engineering.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) which is NSF’s medical counterpart supports medical research and scientific studies that turn discovery into health.
The PETA Science Consortium International promotes robust non-animal testing methods that protect human health and the environment.
The Chips and Science Act provides funds to support the domestic production of semiconductors
and authorizes various programs and activities of federal science agencies.
The Inflation Reduction Act aims to curb inflation by reducing the deficit, lowering prescription drug prices, and investing in domestic energy production while promoting clean energy.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) serves as a public policy think tank in the United States.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is a global policy think tank with the stated intent of using science and scientific analysis to attempt to make the world more secure.
The Lincoln Network works to advance a more perfect union between technology and the American republic.
The Endless Frontier Fellowship offers exceptionally talented early-career individuals an opportunity to help design the future.
Episode Highlights:
If we could find small ways of impacting the way in which technology grows...those small ways of tweaking it can have really long run consequences
[00:01:18]“And so through technology policy, if we could find small ways of impacting the way in which technology grows, the way that it is developed or regulated, or what kinds of technology come to market first there's a lot of path dependency. And so kind of those small ways of tweaking it can have really long-run consequences if you really take technological growth seriously.”
Policy is one of the most impactful places that you can be working...Really small changes to the way in which they govern a particular sector can have really large consequences for millions and billions of people
[00:08:12]“Policy is just at a very high level, one of the most impactful places that you can be working. If we think about what are the things that affect the most number of people which is one way of thinking about impact, then certainly public policy, and especially public policy in the United States can have a really large impact...Really small changes to the way in which they govern a particular sector can have really large consequences for millions and billions of people.”
We're supposed to one part of caring for the poor is curing new diseases and all the people who would suffer from a disease
[00:37:12]“We're supposed to one part of caring for the poor is curing new diseases and all the people who would suffer from a disease. And there are a lot of people who die prematurely before they have a chance to sort of engage with the church or engage with the gospel. And so providing better tools to just kind of generically improve the status or the condition of the world I think is a very high level, broad, maybe vague, you could even call it a tool for sort of directly advancing the gospel.”
We have a long tradition of seeing that direct material advances in human conditions when done by the church, actually enable the church to then have a greater spiritual focus or spiritual impact.
[00:38:20]“We have a long tradition of seeing that direct sort of material advances in human conditions when done by the church, actually enable the church to then have a greater spiritual focus or spiritual impact. That connection between spiritual and physical blessing is something I think the church has maybe neglected at times.”
We're certainly called to be in the world, but not of it.
[00:30:56]“So we're certainly called to be in the world, but not of it. But I think there's a very long Christian tradition of sort of being very proactive in the way that we're engaging the world and that involves governance of the world. I mean, there's been a lot of very famous Christian leaders that have been working in sort of politics very effectively. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. Is just one example who really rallied sort of democratic forces to make changes that I think we'd all agree were really essential for the betterment of society and for bringing the kingdom of God on earth.”
Christians are called to really think about carefully the real-world impact of their actions
[00:31:00]“Insofar as Christians are called to really think about carefully the real-world impact of their actions, I think that means thinking about where can we have the most impact, and kind of as we covered earlier, politics is an enormously impactful way now. You want to be careful and make sure that you're not compromising kind of on your values.”
Christians ought to have intellectual humility
[00:33:35]“That's a really interesting idea, this intellectual humility that a Christian ought to have. That is because we are falling, as you mentioned, we are prone to sin and also to make mistakes, cocktail mistakes about what's right, and what's true. That also seems to be a bit different from a lot of Christian messaging sometimes hear, which can put forward this idea that there's only one way or there's let's just say in a political context, right, it's black and white.”.”
I highly recommend starting earlier than later
[01:03:57] “I think especially if you want to have some sort of a writing output eventually like you want to be a researcher or public intellectual or something like that. Getting started on that earlier rather than later is, I think, highly recommended.”
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[00:00:02.890] - JD
I'm JD and this is the Christians for Impact podcast. We talk to Christians about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to impact them during and after university. Today I speak with Caleb Watney on policy impact, improving science and skilled immigration. Caleb holds a Master in Economics from George Mason University and has spent the last seven years working in policy in Washington DC. He started at the Mercado Center, worked then with our Street Institute and also at the Progressive Policy Institute before co founding his own think tank called Institute for Progress. IFP aims to accelerate technological and scientific and industrial progress. It's only a year old, but it's gaining a lot of traction. We speak about what it's like to be a Christian working in policy, why we should care about improving science research and less controversial ways to make an impact including how to improve skilled immigration.
[00:01:08.950] - JD
Caleb, thanks so much for coming on.
[00:01:10.760] - Caleb
Yeah, thanks for having me. It should be fun.
[00:01:12.790] - JD
Caleb, could you just share a moment about your background, your education and what.
[00:01:17.210] - JD
It is you do now?
[00:01:18.190] - Caleb
Sure. So my name is Caleb Watney. I run a think tank in DC called the Institute for Progress. My background I was born in California but grew up mostly in Kansas. Actually moved there for junior high and kind of in undergrad. I was really interested in this intersection between economics and technology and I wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to do one or the other. And then after some internships in DC, I realized that actually you could sort of find the combination of them, the intersection of them in technology policy. And that really EAS interesting to me both as sort of a combination of my interests and then also from the perspective that a lot of economists think that what really drives long term progress, what drives long run rates of human civilizational sort of wealth creation and autonomy for individuals is technological and scientific change. That's like the single biggest thing for the long run. And so through technology policy, if we could find small ways of impacting the way in which technology grows, the way that it is developed or regulated or what kinds of technology come to market first there's a lot of path dependency.
[00:02:30.410] - Caleb
And so kind of those small ways of tweaking it can have really long run consequences if you really take technological growth seriously. And so yeah, that was pretty interesting to me. I did my Master's at George Mason University, got a Master's in Economics there and then from there kind of went around worked at a number of different think tanks working on different sort of tech policy issues. I worked on driverless car policy, some cybersecurity stuff, artificial intelligence, high skilled immigration and especially how that affects sort of technological progress. And then I sort of found myself working my way up the layer of abstraction. It feels like it was really specific my first paper I really dove into was Cybersecurity for Autonomous Vehicles. And then I went from there and I was like, well, really like autonomous vehicles more generally interesting. And I went from there and I thought, well, really, AI is what makes autonomous vehicles interesting. And AI could affect lots of different things. Let me work on that. And then while I was working on AI, I was like, well, really, AI is one of many technologies, kind of what affects what kinds of technologies get developed in the first place.
[00:03:32.230] - Caleb
Would have went up to innovation policy. And even from there I'm kind of now working on, well, what are the inputs for innovation policy? And so I found a lot of my work has ended up going in the direction of sort of science funding and what are the ways in which we can fund structure, incentivize scientists to work on different kinds of problems or work in better conditions? High skilled immigration and sort of domestic talent development is sort of the human capital element. And then tech clusters kind of where does the work happen, what's the physical manifestation of that work? And how does the physical environment affect the way that they work? So I don't know. That's sort of one way I could retrofit my career development over the years.
[00:04:10.110] - JD
Yeah, thanks. So tell us a bit more about the project you're working on now and what does a typical day look like for you?
[00:04:15.810] - Caleb
For sure. So a think tank is sort of a fun job and it's called the Institute for Progress, IFP our website is Progress Institute if you want to learn more. What I like about working at a think tank is that it is quite varied. It feels like if I was just sitting in an office all day and, you know, writing 40 page white papers and that was the only thing I was doing, I would probably get a little bit bored.
[00:04:40.190] - JD
This is what you were doing before?
[00:04:42.250] - Caleb
Partially, yeah. So some of the previous roles I was doing were a bit more research heavy, but what I've always found really interesting is kind of the full stack of ways to influence policy. And actually this was somewhat of a deliberate focus for us as we were starting, IFP we thought that a lot of think tanks are quite siloed. You have people that are focused just on research or just on sort of communicating your findings to the public or even on sort of outreach to the Hill and sort of pounding the pavement for Congress every day. And we found that the people that were most effective were the ones that could be sort of vertically integrated across those three axes. So if you, Ara, the one who really went in depth and wrote the 40 page paper, but then can explain that in sort of a very clear and concise way to the Hill staffer, you're then going to be able to dive into the details of that much more organically and that's going to build a better relationship with the Hill staffer.
[00:05:33.330] - JD
Okay, yeah, that's very interesting. It's a bit unintuitive to me. I would think that with so many think tanks here in DC and so many causes, it might make sense if you had each think tank specializing in one aspect of the movement that they're a part of, but you're saying that having this well roundedness is much more effective.
[00:05:51.220] - Caleb
Yeah, I think a lot of the way in which policy actually happens in DC, it's very relationally driven. And so as soon as you have some sort of third party intermediary who is sort of trying to hand off a relationship to some other person, that ends up leading to this relationship context collapse, that actually loses a lot of the value. Like, if you're the deep expert and you sort of know what you're trying to suggest or what ways in which Congress needs to move, the reason and why Hill staffers might actually do something is because of your relationship. That's the thing that actually motivates them to spend political capital kind of on your objectives, or at least for them to know to have a high trust in that the information you're giving them is correct and valid. And I think the same thing applies on the communication side that as you're trying to persuade journalists or the broader public about sort of the importance of any particular policy intervention, it's very helpful for you to actually have the deep technical expertise to be able to persuade them. And then likewise, if you as a technical researcher have this deep understanding of how the public and how the media sort of responds to different kinds of proposals that can then inform your writing as you're doing it.
[00:07:01.430] - Caleb
And so we've just found, kind of, I think both in theory and in practice, that having people that have this sort of vertical integration across the entire policy engagement process tend to be more effective. Now, the flip side is that it means it somewhat limits how wide you can go in terms of topic area coverage. So in some sense, we're proposing a model where policy experts are a bit narrower in terms of how much they cover, but then much deeper in terms of how much of that policy engagement process they're covering. And so, yeah, that's kind of what we do. Maybe I'm just diluting myself, but that also tends to be what I enjoy. I think it's both more effective and I think it's a bit more fun for someone like me.
[00:07:45.350] - JD
Yeah, thanks for sharing. So let's take a step back or maybe a step up, looking at this from a bigger picture perspective. Why is policy in general something that Christians who want to impact the world should be concerned about? Why is this not just something that is maybe your particular interest, as you mentioned, but something that maybe christians who want to be good stewards of their opportunities, their time, especially early career, having a big impact. Why is this something they should be interested in?
[00:08:12.290] - Caleb
For sure. Great question. I think policy is just at a very high level, one of the most impactful places that you can be working. If we think about what are the things that affect the most number of people which is one way of thinking about impact, then certainly public policy, and especially public policy in the United States can have a really large impact. The United States federal government both directly spends trillions of dollars every year but also sort of regulates or influences and shapes and funds basically every single sector of our economy. Really small changes to the way in which they govern a particular sector can have really large consequences for millions and billions of people. And especially because the United States sort of has this privileged role as being on the frontier of a lot of new scientific and technological developments. It means that the decisions made here resonate not only just over the, you know, 350,000,000 people in the United States, but over the, you know, 7 billion people all over the world. And so public policy, especially in the United States is just this massive kind of wedge or lever over which you can affect the lives of trillions of billions of people.
[00:09:25.430] - Caleb
And so obviously you want to be quite careful and thoughtful and sort of have a high rigorous bar for what kinds of policy you should be engaging in. But I think that's the basic case.
[00:09:35.980] - JD
I think the popular conception of policy is that it's political. That when we're working on shaping government programs that inevitably there is this red versus blue. In the case of the US. Is this something that you deal with on a daily basis or is it possible to work in policy without being overly political?
[00:09:58.330] - Caleb
Right. I think this is actually like a conception that turns a lot of people off and it's a very understandable conception because ultimately the people that are the decision makers do have to get elected. And so this kind of political side of policy does hang over kind of the whole enterprise. But I think what we found engaging in DC is that while politics is absolutely part of the process and something that's never going to go away, it's an inevitable part of the process and it's actually good. I mean, to be living in a democracy, we don't want to be living in some other kind of system. But I think a lot of the parts of politics that turn people off aren't inevitable for the entire policy process. We found that a lot of the most important decisions or maybe a lot of the most productive areas are actually things that don't get a lot of coverage. A lot of the areas that you'll see when you kind of turn on the news are very high salience political issues, kind of what's the overall rate of taxation? What kinds of welfare policies are being passed? A lot of them are these days are culture war issues which actually may not even have very obvious policy making applications.
[00:11:07.690] - Caleb
But a lot of the ways in which the government spends money or actively shapes markets are not particularly partisan. So if you think about some of the areas that we work in say science funding, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health together spend, you know, around 60 $70 billion a year sort of actively funding research. And that's not an area that you'll hear talked about on Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson every day. But the ways in which they spend those dollars really matter. As just one example, that's very topical. We just were saved from this pandemic through the creation of mRNA vaccines. But to us it's totally plausible that we could have had mRNA vaccines a decade earlier than we actually ended up getting them. Caitlin Carico, the Hungarian born scientist who sort of moved to the United States an immigration story there, who was sort of pioneering in the development of mRNA vaccines was trying to actively get NIH grants for her work in the early ninety s and was having a really difficult time for it. She ended up sort of finding some very basic grant support just through general career development grants or through some other NIH scientists who were kind of able to share some of their work.
[00:12:16.440] - Caleb
But her early pioneering work on MNR, if it had been funded at an earlier stage we could have had mRNA vaccines, I think at least a decade earlier. And now that we've sort of unlocked them for the use in code vaccines we're seeing a whole new spurt of them in maybe an anti malarial vaccine. There's talk of a vaccine to cure multiple sclerosis, even some kinds of cancer. And so it seems to be a whole platform technology that we've really unlocked.
[00:12:43.690] - JD
So what I'm hearing is that policy really affects every day. That it's not just about these culture war issues that are oftentimes very aggressively fought out on television or in the public sphere, but it's very much policies that affect dollar amounts that are hundreds or thousands of dollars per. American that affect things as important as how we're investing in science. Affect things like our medicine. What kind of medicine we're developing to keep people safe and healthy. And is this something that's particularly neglected? It seems like there have always been people who have been interested in politics and policy as well. Is this something really that Christians in particular should be interested?
[00:13:29.510] - Caleb
Yeah, I think it is actually weirdly neglected. We try to focus on issues actually as a think tank that we think are some combination of the classic framework around neglectedness tractability and importance. And so that's sort of a motivating framework we use to decide what kinds of policy issues to work on and just to kind of continue with this example. And this is by no means the only example, but I think it's just worthwhile to stick with it. Within the sort of science funding community, there's a large group of voices that are very focused on, say, increasing the total size of funding. So universities obviously are very dependent on research grants and so they spend a fair amount of time and money sort of lobbying Congress, increased research pools. Companies in some sense, who benefit from downstream research applications spend a lot of money lobbying for more science funding. And R and D generally, there's a very large and vocal community focused on how much should we be spending, but there's not really that same community for impacting or shaping how the money is being spent.
[00:14:32.150] - JD
Is there a particular reason that money is being spent poorly right now? Or that there are ways we could spend it that would be much more impactful?
[00:14:38.640] - Caleb
Yeah. So this is what we call sort of this emerging area of PETA science, which we describe as sort of applying the frameworks and the lessons of the scientific method to the way that we fund and structure science. And there's actually been quite a lot of sort of homogeneity in the science funding ecosystem. A lot of the current systems we have set up were sort of emergent from the 1960s, this kind of post World War II scientific order that was created. But we haven't fundamentally changed the system since then, really, even though the way in which science operates today is very, very different.
[00:15:13.040] - JD
Can you trace that out a bit? What does that mean in this post World War II world, how science is funded? It's all a bit vague to me.
[00:15:19.610] - Caleb
Right, so the major system is really focused around sort of peer review and the idea that scientists can kind of independently decide which areas of science are important. They can then submit grant reports, and then we can have a system of peer review decide amongst these competing offers and sort of see which ones should be prioritized.
[00:15:44.000] - JD
Sounds like a good thing, right?
[00:15:45.920] - Caleb
Peer review, for sure. And actually the peer review system kind of developed in the 1970s. Actually it was sort of some concerns about the the partiality of science and whether people at the NSF or the NIH were sort of selecting the best scientists or were they just selecting their friends. And so this sort of system of peer review came along as kind of a mechanism for political legitimacy, saying like, hey, look, we have a system, we're sort of trusting the experts. And I think it's certainly not a bad system, sort of on the surface of it, but this system interacts though, with a lot of other systems. And so if you're an academic and you're trying to get tenure, that's sort of the big career incentive. A lot of scientists want you very much have an incentive to kind of suggest incremental scientific projects. You're oftentimes awarded through both the grant making process and through sort of this tenure clock system to sort of get very safe bets if there's some new data set that has sort of a clear causal identification strategy but it's not particularly groundbreaking. Like just very careful empirical papers sort of adding to an existing literature are like pretty high likelihood of succeeding because you're not really challenging an existing paradigm.
[00:16:56.920] - Caleb
But it also means that the corresponding sort of scientific gain we get from that finding is less. And so if you think about sort of to use a baseball analogy, if you were trying to hit a home run versus you could hit like a single or AAA, lot of the incentives in our scientific system are pushing for scientists to arbitrarily sort of take singles and doubles as opposed to aiming for the home run.
[00:17:16.600] - JD
What would it mean to change the way that science is incentivized in order to have more balls out of the.
[00:17:23.580] - Caleb
Park, right, to take more, like high risk, high reward bets. One interesting system, and again, this is sort of based on the way in which the current scientific system may be pushing for incremental.
[00:17:34.470] - JD
And I'm guessing an example of this is, for instance, developing mRNA vaccines, right? This is something we could have with better incentives developed many years ago, would have saved hundreds of thousands, millions of lives. But because of the way science is incentivized, we didn't develop it sooner.
[00:17:49.490] - Caleb
Right? So Caitlin Carico, as she was applying, she was saying, hey, I think mRNA vaccines could be quite groundbreaking. But the scientists who were reviewing her application said, we think this is like too unlikely and this is like too long a bet. Basically we're not going to put funding dollars towards it. One way in which you could potentially get around that is to change basically how much consensus is needed for a grant to get funded. So under the current system, you're effectively sort of being judged by a panel of your peers, peer review, and then you're averaging those scores and then ranking based off of the average. But a characteristic of high risk, high reward, novel ideas might be that some people really get them and see the appeal and others don't. And so then if you're just averaging, then that will sort of like bring down the score. But there's lots of people who told many groundbreaking entrepreneurs at Amazon or Airbnb or Uber, none of these things will ever work. But obviously they did. And so if you were to use an analogy to the venture capital context, when you're trying to fundraise for an idea, you don't need every single venture capitalist or a whole panel of them to sort of get on board with your ideas.
[00:18:55.730] - Caleb
You just need one or two of them to have deep conviction that your ideas is good and worth funding and then they can sort of unilaterally fund it.
[00:19:02.910] - JD
What are some other examples of this? Are there any examples that all the listeners would know about that didn't get a lot of funding from most sources but it only took one or two and then launched them into success?
[00:19:13.540] - Caleb
Yeah, I think most of the Silicon Valley companies that you would sort of think about, I think yeah, Google, Amazon, Apple, basically all of them at a period sort of had lots of people who would have disagreed with the way in which they wanted to sort of try out some new novel technology strategy. But because they were able to get just one or two very key investors that enabled them to sort of take the risks they needed.
[00:19:35.700] - JD
It's a personally very reassuring and encouraging concept, this concept that most are going to disagree with you or not, at least not see the value in what you're doing. But it only takes a couple, or really even one, to spot something that will be tremendously valuable. The next apple or the next mRNA vaccine that saves millions of lives.
[00:19:53.790] - Caleb
Yeah. And you can think about this kind of at a more general level, that our current system is eliciting, almost like ranking of preferences, but it's not eliciting intensity of preferences that I might be able to say. Oh, I think A is more likely to succeed than B or that B would have a higher pay off than C. But if I can't say how much I think that that is worth, that actually missing something. And so with venture capitalist the great thing is that one person can really choose to invest either $10,000 or $10 million based on sort of how intensely they feel those preferences.
[00:20:24.770] - JD
So what would that look like in science? How would a scientist stake a bet on some promising new research project?
[00:20:31.470] - Caleb
Right, so one mechanism that we think has a lot of promise and which actually might sort of have a pilot program soon that we're potentially excited about is this idea of a golden ticket. So basically the way this would work is during a normal funding round you would give each scientist on the study section one golden ticket which they could basically use to say I feel so strongly that this is a good idea. I don't care what the average score is, I want to guarantee that this gets funded and I'm going to use my limited golden ticket to sort of say that I want this particular project to get funded.
[00:21:03.100] - JD
Isn't there something like this on a lot of those shark tank TV shows?
[00:21:06.480] - Caleb
Yeah or like The Voice or yeah, it's actually a kind of common mechanism.
[00:21:09.890] - JD
They hit the buzzer and they definitely get through.
[00:21:11.700] - Caleb
Exactly. But we don't have a mechanism like that broadly within science, especially on the peer review level. And so adding in a golden ticket mechanism, there's something that lets sort of peer reviews, peer reviewers say, I really strongly, deeply believe that this is a good idea. And I think it really merits funding as a way of eliciting new information from reviewers and also at a portfolio level, shifting a bit more towards high risk, high reward ideas getting funded.
[00:21:38.370] - JD
So this is a large part of what your organization is working on doing is trying to influence policymakers or influence the government as well to change incentives for public university funding so that this is happening or how does that fit in with your work?
[00:21:58.020] - Caleb
Totally. So we kind of decided at a high level that PETA science was one of our priority areas based on this kind of significant, strict ability and neglectedness framework. And then within that there's, I think, a lot of different layers. So first you have to kind of understand the ecosystem as it currently stands because for almost like Chesterton Fence reasons, you don't want to start changing things unless you understand how the system currently operates. It means you're more likely to make a mistake. And so we spent a lot of time talking with scientists, talking with the folks who are within the NSF and the NIH to sort of understand what are their constraints. Because I think another common mistake that sometimes people can make from the outside is just looking and saying, well, everything that the agencies are doing wrong, or if I want some system to be different, they're not doing it. The agency must be making a mistake. But oftentimes the agencies have sort of specific requirements from Congress that they have to do something in way X, Y or Z. And so by working with them to understand what are their constraints, what are the things that they're doing out of sort of long held precedent or tradition, versus what are the things that they're doing based on sort of specific statutes requiring them to do something versus what are things that they would like to try but they don't have the funding for understanding.
[00:23:08.020] - Caleb
Kind of all of those different obstacles for an agency is actually really key and critical for being able to make good recommendations.
[00:23:14.490] - JD
But very concretely, what are a couple of things you would love to see Congress do or those agencies do that would improve the way science is funded and have tremendous positive impact?
[00:23:23.670] - Caleb
I think one interesting thing would be to create a specific center for experimentation. I think oftentimes when experimentation is a secondary goal for an organization or for.
[00:23:35.440] - JD
An engineer, generic scientific experimentation organization, sorry.
[00:23:39.320] - Caleb
Experimentation in new kinds of funding mechanisms. So something like trying out a golden ticket mechanism. We're going to actually rigorously see, we're going to have sort of a control group and we're going to have a counterfactual and know kind of, oh, these are the new people that would have been funded under a golden ticket and these are the people that would have been funded under the old system. And now we can compare these cohorts across time and sort of see how our younger scholars being funded more under one particular system, are we getting more high risk bets under another system? So we want to actually be able to measure those sorts of things.
[00:24:08.430] - JD
Yeah. What are some other examples of concrete changes you'd like to see?
[00:24:11.660] - Caleb
So another, at least experiment I would like us to run or try would be a lottery system. So one concern within the system is that there's a lot of time spent in sort of the grant application process. One metric has it that principal investigators, sort of the main people applying for grants, are spending around 44% of their time doing grant applications, and then they're related sort of paperwork and maintenance after they've gotten the grant, as opposed to doing active research, which is a lot of their time. Yeah.
[00:24:42.110] - JD
These are key researchers right, who are.
[00:24:43.760] - Caleb
Spending time their time is filling out the paperwork. Yeah. And obviously not all of that time is wasted. I mean, in some sense they are coming up with the scientific ideas in the first place, that they actually want to test it out in the world. But I think probably 44% seems like quite high. And I could imagine if we could cut that in half, that would actually be a quite big boost to scientific productivity without actually spending any more money. And so one way of sort of getting at how much of this process is valuable would be having some scientists actually win through a grant lottery. And so actually, New Zealand tried this for a little bit, where they had some share of their applications not being decided through this sort of lengthy grant application and peer review process. But just through chance. I think you have to meet some basic standard of kind of like competence or whatever that you were an existing researcher that had done real science before, but then beyond that, it was sort of decided by lottery.
[00:25:35.330] - JD
This is the thinking here also, that once you're talking about these very hypothetical experiments or projects, it's not really clear whose opinion is better than who else's opinion. You just want to find something or as much as you can and do that as efficiently as possible with as low transaction costs as possible.
[00:25:54.640] - Caleb
Yeah, exactly that. We are very precisely ranking all these different applicants, but maybe all of these, like maybe this is all false precision. Maybe we don't actually know beforehand what kinds of scientific ideas are really likely to pay off and which ones are not. And if that's true, then this very long, lengthy, costly process is not actually adding that much value. And maybe by switching at least some portion of our grant funding towards a lottery, we could get sort of more efficiency and actually be able to take a risk on some novel bets that wouldn't have been made if they had to go through. The current process. And so it seems at least worth trying. One thing I want to specify is that by experiment, I don't just mean like, try something new, but actually experiment in the scientific sense that we have a clear hypothesis that we're trying to test. We're being quite careful about data collection and evaluation and then scaling the ones that work. So, as I mentioned, New Zealand has done a scientific lottery. But quite disappointing to me, they haven't actually sort of done much to figure out what's the counterfactual population that would have gotten funded under the old system.
[00:26:58.700] - Caleb
Instead, the extent of their evaluation was to send effectively a survey out to all the scientists and ask, did you like using the lottery, yes or no? And unsurprisingly, the scientists who won the lottery liked using the lottery more than the scientists that didn't win the lottery. So again, that's not actually telling us that much about sort of how these mechanisms compare and contrast. So I want to be quite specific, but we have a lot of the tools within science to actually know how to run sort of careful, thoughtful evaluations to know how these mechanisms compare.
[00:27:28.890] - JD
So PETA science is one of the three Foci of your organization. You also focus on high skilled immigration and what was the other general economic growth or biosecurity? Biosecurity, right.
[00:27:42.610] - Caleb
And we're actually sort of expanding potentially. So we have sort of a new fourth emerging area that we're doing some work on sort of infrastructure. How do we actually build things in the physical environment?
[00:27:51.760] - JD
So is it mostly about producing reports? You mentioned vertical integration and you described that very well, how it's important to have that technical expertise but then also have that communication ability so that you can effectively make relationships here in Congress that could actually influence policy that's enacted in Congress and also the agencies as well. Are you taking a similar approach towards improving risks from biosecurity and towards high skilled immigration? Or how does your work there differ from that of PETA science?
[00:28:25.340] - Caleb
Yeah, I think our approach tends to be quite specific. Before sort of entering an area, we try to lay out somewhat of a rough road map of kind of who are the major players, what are the big roadblocks? To what extent are the roadblocks things that you directly need Congress to change versus things that you could do just through the agencies, versus things where you might need more academic research before being able to make sort of clear, specific recommendations? And so then our approach within each area is very dependent on kind of that rough road map. And usually we try to have things or improvements that we can suggest that could operate both on the congressional level and on the agency level, partially because sort of congress is very, I guess, lumpy in terms of when they'll actually make changes. As we're sort of sitting here in November of 2022 we're coming out of an unusually productive two year period for Congress in terms of the number of bills and especially major pieces of legislation that they've been passing. You had the Chips and Science Act, which was kind of a historic investment in new science funding and chip manufacturing for semiconductors.
[00:29:28.770] - Caleb
You had the Inflation Reduction Act, which had a huge amount of money for infrastructure. You had a couple of other major bills that passed a lot of money. And so within all of those bills were lots of other sort of smaller pieces of technical changes across these different areas. And that was sort of like a uniquely productive period to actually be engaging with Congress because they were making so many active changes. But there are other sort of Congresses which are usually defined as like two year terms or sorry, one year terms. But in other Congresses it may be much less productive. And so it's actually very helpful to have a number of policy approaches across both agency and congressional engagement to make sure that we can always be productively moving the ball forward. So I'm happy to go maybe specifically in immigration or biosecurity, as you prefer.
[00:30:13.560] - JD
So let's look at working in policy in general as a Christian, looking at it from a couple of different perspectives. One, I'd like to hear your response to maybe a more critical take, which is that Christians shouldn't be involved in policy. I know many mennonites, or Anabaptists for instance, and they have this view that Christians should be should not be stained by the world and give to Caesar what is Caesar, to God what is Gods. And that being part of the Kingdom of God means being separate from the political sphere and all of its conniving and all of its vain pursuits. Do you see your work and policy as part of your Christian faith or do you sense attention there?
[00:30:56.370] - Caleb
I don't sense attention really. So we're certainly called to be in the world, but not of it. But I think there's a very long Christian tradition of sort of being very proactive in the way that we're engaging the world and that involves governance of the world. I mean, there's been a lot of very famous Christian leaders that have been working in sort of politics very effectively. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. Is just one example who really rallied sort of democratic forces to make changes that I think we'd all agree were really essential for the betterment of society and for bringing the kingdom of God on earth. And so insofar as the mission of the Church is to sort of bring the kingdom of God on earth, I think that's going to involve some engagement with sort of the political process and of the political principalities of this world. Insofar as Christians are called to really think about carefully the real world impact of their actions, I think that means thinking about where can we have the most impact and kind of as we covered earlier, politics is an enormously impactful way now. You want to be careful and make sure that you're not compromising kind of on your values.
[00:32:00.720] - Caleb
And there can definitely be times where sort of abstention from the political process can be justified. But I think at current margins, engagement with policy is like a totally legitimate and in fact yeah.
[00:32:11.620] - JD
What's an example of a political play that you wouldn't make because of your Christian faith?
[00:32:16.250] - Caleb
I think yeah, there ara certain principles like you should maybe I would almost call it like tactics. Yeah. I think trying using lies or deception or sort of other untoward tactics as a way of trying to advance political goals seems ungodly and not worth doing. I think obviously you should try to think about the actual political impacts of your work. And so if you were advancing policies that would have negative impacts on the world, you should probably not do that. And maybe this might also be a call for humility and saying that thinking about worlds in which you're wrong. I think I've seen a lot of people who sort of will feel quite confident that a particular policy is correct, but we're sort of taking this like moral uncertainty quite seriously actually. I think is important. Christians more than anyone should know about the limitations of sort of human cognition and the fact that we can be weak, we can fall prey to sin, we can be overconfident. And so trying to think very carefully about sort of what happens if we're wrong about any given policy is actually really important. So I oftentimes try to think about what are policies that seem broadly positive in a wide range of futures and then actually put like more sort of focus on those because I think there's a good chance that I could be wrong on any particular thing.
[00:33:35.320] - JD
That's a really interesting idea, this intellectual humility that a Christian ought to have. That because we are falling, as you mentioned, that we are prone to sin and also to make mistakes, cocktail mistakes about what's right, what's true. That also seems to be a bit different from a lot of Christian messaging I sometimes hear, which can put forward this idea that there's only one way or there's let's just say in a political context, right, it's black and white. Who's on God's side, or God would obviously prefer this policy over that policy. It sounds like you'd say that's a mistaken approach. Any additional thoughts about that? Because I tend to associate Christians with those who are much more black and white than those who are willing to admit an intellectual mistake.
[00:34:25.670] - Caleb
Yeah, I think part of this Christians have, I think, quite strong beliefs, I think justifiedly about wisdom that they feel like it's received directly from the Bible or from the word of God it's revealed to the teachings of Jesus. And I think have like a higher bar of kind of confidence in those things. But I think oftentimes there's not actually that much direct political or maybe biblical wisdom we can take that we can apply just sort of copy and paste towards political activities of the day. A lot of the Bible is written for a specific context and guides us in sort of moral teaching and gives us maybe the values that we should be seeking to pursue. But it doesn't actually tell you like, what specific subgenre of tax policy is going to be the most biblical, the most Godly. You actually have to have an understanding of sort of the technical effects that these policies can have in the real world. And the Bible is not an economics textbook and I think isn't trying to be. And so I think a lot of the maybe humility on the political level comes not from sort of what are the moral values that we should be seeking to promote in the world, but instead kind of what are the real world impacts?
[00:35:31.540] - Caleb
And what do we actually know about how the world operates and the sort of maybe the complicated interaction effects of policy with these complex global trade and economic systems?
[00:35:43.000] - JD
There's a long tradition of Christians who.
[00:35:44.910] - JD
Are trying to shape public policy as part of advancing the kingdom of God. Other Christians cringe a bit at this language. They see them as separate things. I'm thinking of, of course, the social gospel movement of the early 20th century in the US. But also I think of Martin Luther King in the 1960s pushing for civil rights and equality in a way that all Christians today can get behind. In what sense do you see the work that you're doing as part of advancing the kingdom of God? And if you wouldn't, how would you frame it, in other words, if you had other more theological framings for it?
[00:36:27.770] - Caleb
Yeah, I think it's a good question and one that I don't know, I have totally, you know, well thought out responses to.
[00:36:36.830] - JD
So there's a long tradition of Christians who viewed social activism and social engagement as part of advancing the kingdom of God from the social gospel movement in the early 20th century even to the 1960s with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Christians today will look at these different movements with different levels of respect or judgment. How do you view the work that you do as a Christian? Do you consider your daily work as part of advancing the kingdom of God or obeying a calling from God? How do you frame it?
[00:37:12.190] - Caleb
Yeah, I think I view my calling and certainly the work that inspire progress is doing at a very high level, is just trying to improve very basic conditions of the world and in some sense like increase human autonomy at the highest level and think deliberately about sort of the impacts of technology and science. You could certainly point to the fact that we have a strong calling to sort of care for the poor and the fact that over the long run it seems like the greatest reductions in poverty come from changes in science and technology. We're supposed to one part of caring for the poor is curing new diseases and all the people who would suffer from a disease. But now we have some new mRNA vaccine to help prevent them and enable them to sort of live long healthy lives. And there's a lot of people who die prematurely before they have a chance to sort of engage with the church or engage with the gospel. And so providing better tools to just kind of generically improve the status or the condition of the world I think is a very high level, broad, maybe vague, you could even call it tool for sort of directly advancing the gospel.
[00:38:20.120] - Caleb
But I do think it's actually important and if we spend all of our time just on evangelism both, the church itself kind of has fewer avenues to impact the world. I think we have a long tradition of seeing that direct sort of material advances in human conditions when done by the church, actually enable the church to then have greater spiritual focus or spiritual impact. That connection between spiritual and physical blessing is something I think the church has maybe neglected at sometimes seems like one.
[00:38:49.200] - JD
Impact of Institute for Progress is definitely helping the global poor, also helping those who are victims of, let's say less than optimal immigration policies. And we see biblical precedents for caring about both of these. Yet you work on a very abstract level. When we look in the gospels and we look at the life of Jesus and of his apostles and the disciples, we see people who are doing many.
[00:39:17.250] - JD
Times very direct acts of kindness.
[00:39:19.810] - JD
How do you square that? How do you remind yourself of this biblical story and this calling when as you mentioned, it is a very different context today and you're working at a much more abstracted high level.
[00:39:34.310] - Caleb
Yeah, I think this is at some level kind of like a pretty basic trade off where direct action, you can have much higher confidence in some sense like what you're doing, who you're affecting, what are the direct impacts of that. And then as you kind of move up layers of abstraction, you can impact more people. And so that is like good, but you have slightly less confidence in terms of what exactly is going to be the impact of it. But I guess at some level it.
[00:39:59.980] - JD
Sounds like you're okay with taking less confident approaches if it's impacting enough people.
[00:40:04.980] - Caleb
Yes, I think that's right. And specifically that if there are particular areas that seem very neglected, then that I think increases the chance even more. I mean, you could say at a very high level, if you have a 5% chance of positively impacting 7 billion people that live in the world, that's a bet worth taking, even though I have less confidence in it over, let's.
[00:40:30.580] - JD
Say 100% chance of saving a handful of people.
[00:40:33.920] - Caleb
Yeah, exactly.
[00:40:34.520] - JD
Okay. I think that's a trade off that many Christians would have a difficult time making and many of us don't feel quite the same motivation to tackle these abstract problems. Do you think God has wired us just in different ways and that we should just go with whatever we feel most excited about? Or do you think there is some important discernment that we need to do about thinking things out and thinking, oh, how can we really impact the most people even if we're less confident about it?
[00:41:03.300] - Caleb
Yeah, I think some combination of the two, certainly. I think people can be more effective at particular jobs when they feel like they are playing into their strengths and to their inclinations and into their calling. But I think it's also a mistake to think that the way our natural kind of preconceived notions are going to play out are always going to be correct. And I've changed my mind a lot about the best ways of sort of having impact in my career and that came not through sort of changes in my desires necessarily, but through careful study and sort of consideration of how I could have the most impact.
[00:41:39.870] - JD
Yeah.
[00:41:40.400] - JD
What were some other things you were considering doing that you updated your views on and so you parted paths?
[00:41:46.530] - Caleb
I went through a lot of different I mean, I think like most kids do, I think so I'm named Caleb after, you know, Caleb from the Bible. And so for a period I wanted to be a spy, which was sort of funny. I think I was watching James Bond movies or something. I thought that would be fun. I at one point considered like, oh, I think biology is cool. Should I go become a doctor? I thought technology was really fun. Should I go work for Google or a big tech company or something? But one of the things that actually drew me to policy was the idea that you could be solving market failures, which is another way of sort of talking about, I think, like social good. That oftentimes when you're working in the private sector and I think there's lots of really great things to do in the private sector, but when you're working in the private sector and there's, like, a very clear profit motive, for doing something that creates things or creates services that other people value, then there's a very clear direct financial connection there that will motivate people to do it.
[00:42:47.240] - Caleb
But in sort of nonprofit or policy work that can very much not be the case. If Pfizer or some big drug company creates a drug that solves some major disease, they will directly, financially profit it from it. But if you create a better R and D system that then in a very downstream way, allows you to create new medications. The policy people won't directly, financially benefit from it. And so I think there's actually a lot less incentive to do that at kind of like a social level, to spend a lot of time and careful consideration in the design of things like R and D policy. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted to go work in it, because I thought, yeah, it was a market failure. Other people were less likely to do it because there wasn't like a direct financial stake in it.
[00:43:28.770] - JD
Do you think, as Christians were called, to go to places where other people are less likely to go?
[00:43:34.530] - Caleb
I think so, yeah.
[00:43:37.430] - JD
I'd love to hear some career advice from you if you have any. Maybe we could replay a little bit more about your story and particular steps you took, especially for those interested in working in policy. I know you studied at George Mason. You got a master's there in economics. I think you studied economics before then at a bachelor's level, is that right?
[00:43:56.830] - Caleb
Sort of. My school is really small. I went to Sterling College for my undergraduate, and it was not big enough to have an economics department. So I think I would have done economics if we had had a department. But I did business administration, kind of generically, and then I got like a minor in economics, basically economics, good or.
[00:44:14.790] - JD
Bad, major for influencing policy. I think everyone I've actually talked to you on this podcast so far has studied economics.
[00:44:23.730] - Caleb
Unsurprisingly, maybe. I think economics is great and lots of people should study it. It's very helpful as kind of a general framework for understanding the world, for thinking about complex sort of interactions of human incentives at sort of a system level, which are really broadly applicable both in policy and in business and just like even in your personal life. I think there's a lot of times when people are frustrated with why systems aren't especially human systems aren't operating in the way that they think they intended or that they feel like they should. And economics can definitely give you a set of tools for kind of understanding why people at kind of this abstract level behave in different ways, I think, for policy impacts. What I liked about economics is that I had some uncertainty about whether I wanted to do business or technology or policy or academia maybe. And so economics felt like it actually had some sort of flexibility that I could use it across a lot of different domains. And so that was one of the reasons I liked it. But now that I'm in policy, I do find that a lot of the thinkers I find most helpful are other economists, not to say exclusively, but that is a pattern.
[00:45:30.870] - JD
Working at Thinktanks to get experience in the policy world, is that something you would recommend others try out?
[00:45:36.860] - Caleb
Yeah, for sure. I think Think tanks give you a.
[00:45:39.560] - JD
Nice what are the names of some that you were at?
[00:45:42.190] - Caleb
So when I was at George Mason, I was a research assistant at the Mercado Center, which is a research center attached to George Mason. I then spent a couple of years at the R Street Institute, the letter R. And then I went to the Progressive Policy Institute PPI. And then from there I met my co founder Alec, and then the two of us started in super progress.
[00:46:03.250] - JD
I'm not as familiar with the policy world, but those sound like quite different kinds of think tanks. Would you recommend trying out different types of policy think tanks, or do you think you do kind of have to plan ahead and pick sides when you're in that world?
[00:46:19.350] - Caleb
That's a good question. Yeah. It is somewhat unusual that I've worked both at center right and center left think tanks, partially. I think I was able to do that because I was working on a set of issues that are less polarized. So things like technology and science funding, sometimes they have sort of partisan valences, but on average, compared to lots of other issues, they tend to be less polarized. And so that sort of enabled me to feel like I could go wherever, would let me do the best work on those topics, sort of separate from the partisan valence. But it can sometimes be hard. I appreciate it now, especially being at a nonpartisan think tank, that I feel like I have some ability to speak the language and talk about the political priorities of each side, having sort of, you know, been involved in both of those coalitions. And so I found that quite helpful. I think one maybe major difference for for early career researchers to think about is the difference between a big think tank versus a small think tank. That big think tanks tend to be a bit more bureaucratic, but also structured.
[00:47:21.080] - Caleb
And so if you would like a more structured environment, certainly a big think tank might be better on those margins, but it's also going to have more barriers. It's going to be harder for you to solo publish. Oftentimes they want you to have like a PhD or a law degree to be able to solo publish things at a place like Brookings or to sort of advance. And so I sort of went the route of the smaller think tanks where I felt like I was able to kind of put myself out there at an earlier stage, maybe make mistakes at an earlier stage. But I think that was actually quite critical for my own development.
[00:47:54.930] - JD
What are some other paths that people could take? Is it mostly studying economics or some quantitative social science and then work in think tanks? Or what are some other, maybe more agency level paths people can go to influence policy?
[00:48:10.910] - Caleb
Yeah, I think that there's a number of paths. So, I mean, in terms of school disciplines like, yeah, economics is a bit but also public policy for each of the agencies. There's a lot they draw a lot from that particular discipline. So, you know, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health take from a lot of different science fields, and especially PhDs or masters kind of in those various fields for other agencies. If you're working with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, you're probably going to be taking either from background, working in banking or some sort of relevant academic skill in there. If you're working at the Federal Aviation Administration, again, you're probably going to want skills and academic backgrounds kind of from those. So the agencies can be quite varied, sort of pulling from those different technical subfields. Another maybe career path that's worth talking about is going to The Hill directly. The hill is kind of funny in the sense that there's lots of avenues to come in at a very early stage kind of as an intern and maybe work your way up or from a very high stage kind. Of. Once you're very established, you can come in and be a technical advisor or maybe work as committee staff on one of the various congressional committees.
[00:49:18.450] - Caleb
There's not actually that many opportunities to kind of come in at a mid level. And actually, one thing I do kind of wish is, while I have lots of friends and I feel like I've intuited some of the various congressional happenings almost through Osmosis, just like talking and being around people on The Hill, I never actually did a stint on The Hill, and I kind of wish that I had. So that's definitely one thing I might advise people at an earlier stage to do is to consider taking on a congressional internship. Or there's a variety of fellowships that can also help you get a foot in the door that way.
[00:49:48.190] - JD
Are there any particular internships that you think are a pretty good, let's say, open to many people, or any particular kind of internship besides general congressional internships or maybe any particular fellowships? And maybe you could share a bit what a fellowship would entail and what, like, a typical week might look like for an intern or a fellow.
[00:50:10.920] - Caleb
For sure. I think the typical week will sort of vary quite a lot based on, are you working at a think tank, Ara? You working at an agency or you're working in Congress? And then also within that, what kind of committee structure, or sort of if you're in a personal office for a member, kind of what their interests are. It can vary quite a lot, but at a high level, maybe talk about some of the specific fellowships that might be helpful. So one that actually we started in coordination with our friends at the Federation of American Scientists and at the Lincoln Network is this thing called the Endless Frontier Fellowship, which is meant for kind of early career folks who are trying to get started in the think tank world. And so we just kind of are currently doing the first year of that. We're probably going to be opening applications in the next couple of months for sort of the second cohort, but they're being placed at one of our three think tanks and that's kind of a good on wrap to figure out what is think tank world like. You can get some early career writing under your belt, but we're really looking for kind of like entrepreneurial people who can be creative and thoughtful about doing policy design.
[00:51:17.130] - Caleb
Some other ones. There's tech Congress, which is meant specifically for kind of people with some technical expertise who are wanting to make somewhat of a pivot to Congress. And you'll get placed within an office on the Hill to help provide technical expertise on issues like cybersecurity or AI or any number of kind of other areas. There's also the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which has a big fellowship kind of focused on both think tanks and agency. And Congress, they kind of have like a triple track where you can get placed in a variety of places. There's also AAA EAS. The association for the Advancement of American Science, I think they're called it's. A lot of a's they're really good if you have sort of a science background and Ara wanting to get placed on the Hill. So that's kind of a brief overview. But fellowships are great because it really lowers sort of the entry cost for getting placed in either a Hill office or in a think tank. Oftentimes I think people are hesitant to take people on full time, but a fellowship kind of provides a structured one or two year experience where the person can gain experience and the office can kind of take a swing on someone that they might feel less confident on.
[00:52:31.090] - JD
And a bit of a few more somewhat random questions as we start to close up. Of these three cause areas, would you say that you're most drawn to each of them equally, or do you think that there's a compelling case that one is vastly more important than the others and yet all are among the most important problems? They probably each have their own risk profiles and their own likelihood, of course, likelihood of success. And they're all very different in how you go about them. But are you particularly bullish on one of the three?
[00:53:09.800] - Caleb
Yeah, so I think all three are really important and in some sense, like, if you're using again this kind of tractability significance neglected in this framework, they score kind of differently across the three margins. So PETA science in particular feels kind of tractable right now. It feels like there's a number of new science funding offices and institutions, specifically the ARPA H, which is sort of modeled after DARPA, which is a quite innovative science funder on the defense side. And so now they're trying to take that. Same model and apply it for healthcare, but it's under NIH and and they just started. And then there's also this new directorate within the NSF called the Tip Directorate, technology Innovations and Partnerships, but it's the first new directorate they started in 30 years. But both of these kinds of new science funding offices have sort of clear mandates for pushing the envelope in interesting ways, trying out new innovative financing mechanisms, new ways of supporting earlier career scientists, working with outside partners. And so we're really excited to kind of work with those offices right now as sort of the concrete still wet. They haven't totally been solidified into their final version yet.
[00:54:19.810] - Caleb
And so if we can help nudge them in the right direction or provide them resources or technical advice in ways that enable them to do a better job, I think that could have really long run consequences. And so we're particularly excited about working with those institutions personally. I manage our sort of science and immigration portfolios and then my co founder Alec manages our biosecurity and sort of other emerging areas like infrastructure. So I think those are probably my two favorite issues just because I work on them and I have a lot of personal interest. Immigration is a bit harder on the tractability side, but I think it's just enormously significant. It feels like in some sense that the biggest no brainer is to just like, let more high skilled immigrants into the country. And I should note we're particularly focusing on high skilled and not necessarily because those are the only immigrants that we like into our country. We're broadly in favor of immigration across the board, but we think that's particularly tractable, that's kind of the one narrow corner of immigration where we think we can get some bipartisan compromise. And so it's also weirdly neglected.
[00:55:24.480] - Caleb
I think oftentimes the business community doesn't focus as much on broad based kind of flexible visas like the one visa for immigrants of extraordinary ability. Oftentimes the business community spends a lot of time on the H One B or some of these other visa categories that are specifically tied to an employer, which kind of makes sense, I guess, from their perspective. But it means that advocacy on programs like the O one or the J one or just kind of broadly increasing the number of green cards available for.
[00:55:54.080] - JD
Stem it seems like businesses nowadays are, I guess, not as excited. About immigration as they used to be when we had labor shortage is just as bad in the but seems like back then there's maybe more tolerance for getting Americans working regardless of where they came from. And now it's maybe a little more protectionist. Would you agree with that?
[00:56:15.750] - Caleb
I'm not sure. It's hard to say. I think immigration has become maybe more polarized than it was in like the 70s or the so it's like more of a hot button issue. And so that might be a reason for businesses to kind of stay away from engaging on the issue, but just to kind of get back to how much of a no brainer it is. We have lots of people that are coming to the United States, especially as international students, to get PhDs. And quantum computing and artificial intelligence and electrical engineering. Actually, for some of these programs, like electrical engineering, I think something like 78% of our grad students are international students, which is just like a massive percentage. And in an AI, it's like well above 50%. I think for semiconductor manufacturing, it's something like 60%. And so a large fraction of our sort of available could be technical workforce are international students. And then there's not very clear cut sort of pathways for them to be able to stay in the United States. And so this seems especially counterproductive insofar as we're concerned about a budding technological rival ship with China and see if a lot of Chinese students are coming to the United States.
[00:57:24.690] - Caleb
We're training them and then sending them back, in some sense to work against us. At some level, we're working to try to build more of a consensus, especially within the national security community, that this should be, like, a really top priority for us.
[00:57:39.830] - JD
And two other somewhat random questions. First, you were talking a lot about careers and policy earlier. It sounds like for a lot of these, you need to be in DC. You need to be on the Hill. Is that the case for this path, or is it pretty amenable to wherever you are in the US.
[00:57:55.750] - Caleb
Yeah, I think for policy impact, it is pretty important to be in DC. It's why we're based in DC. I think if you're really focused on the research side, it's possible to live elsewhere. I mean, there's a bunch of scholars whose work we build on, certainly, or even publish that aren't based in DC. So if you're primarily a research scholar, you don't necessarily need to be in DC. But as much as possible, I think, for actually understanding what are the real constraints that agency or Congress themselves feel like they have. It's actually really essential to be in DC. And have those in person conversations.
[00:58:28.060] - JD
How much of the advice earlier about policy generalizes to other western countries, especially in Western Europe, particularly the UK. Is it a completely different process, or is there a similar reasoning that Christians interested in policy careers in those countries could follow, like the ITN framework or some other things that you mentioned that would be helpful?
[00:58:51.090] - Caleb
Yeah, certainly. The ITN framework is, I think, broadly applicable. I think a lot of policy engagement in DC is kind of idiosyncratic and based around the weird particularities of the US. System. I mean, it's just one example. Think tanks do exist in other countries, but they play a much smaller role in terms of the policy shaping process. I think part of this is actually US. Like civil servant pay is really low and so it creates a system where if you want to go impact the way in which policy operates, if you're in the UK, it's kind of like an obvious next step for you to just go work directly within the government at some agency. And in the US that's a much less obvious case because it's much more bureaucratic to try to get in the pay is lower, and because I think there's a lot more it's like harder to actually get things across the board, especially in Congress. We have a lot more sort of like veto points across the system than I think other countries do, especially parliamentary systems like the UK, where once you can have consensus within Parliament, you can just kind of do the thing directly.
[00:59:58.030] - JD
It also seems like in the US, maybe with a lot of policy, or at least a lot of agencies, it is split by which side of the aisle you're on, which political party you're part of. Whereas in the UK it seems like the civil service is much more a professional operation. I mean that in the sense that people don't get in and out of office depending on, or rather professionals don't exit or leave, depending on who's in office. Is that a unique aspect of the US or am I just looking too narrowly at the US versus the UK?
[01:00:31.250] - Caleb
Yeah, it's a good question. Beyond the UK, like in the rest of it, I'm not sure exactly how the Spanish civil service works. And even within the US, we do definitely have political appointees who kind of rotate in every time that there's a new president elected. But a lot of the kind of like lower levels of the civil service stay pretty steady. So there's career civil servants who aren't political appointees and they will kind of stick beyond any one administration and they tend to be less partisan in general. There's also some agencies, like the Congressional Budget Office, that sort of really pride themselves and have an internal culture of being nonpartisan. And so this isn't to say that all civil servants are partisan or have to deal with that. There's a lot of parts both at the lower levels of basically all agencies and then at particular agencies that kind of have some sort of a nonpartisan role that wouldn't be the case in, but I'm not exactly sure how it compares to the rest of the world.
[01:01:28.990] - JD
The civil service as a path, is that something that you think is also quite neglected for careers that have an outsized impact? It's related to policy, but distinct from the kind of world that you've worked in.
[01:01:43.890] - Caleb
Yeah, I think it depends a lot on the specific agency. So one thing that I guess I like about think tanks is that you can be somewhat flexible. And as policy windows kind of open or close, you can really shift to whatever you think is the most important topic within an agency or within if you're working at a particular committee for Congress, if that issue is happening, if you happen to be working in the office or the agency where the really key decision is being made, that's pretty unrivaled in terms of your ability to impact that. But you have less certainty that you're actually going to be working there during the particular moment where impactful decisions may be happening. So I think if you can be quite careful and judicious about which agencies you're going to go work for based on kind of where you see the most important policy decisions needing to be made, then absolutely it can be very impactful. I mean, if you're thinking about something like biosecurity, it seems like going to go work for the CDC or going to go work on the Congress side. For someone that's on the Health Committee, which is sort of the Senate committee that oversees a lot of these biosecurity issues, then that can be extraordinarily impactful.
[01:02:51.980] - Caleb
But maybe it would be a less general endorsement and more of like a specific endorsement for very particular agencies.
[01:02:58.620] - JD
Yeah, that's a very different kind of shape when you think about your impact. I know some people really want to have that immediately fulfilling, gratifying, day in, day out kind of impact that they can see, whereas if you're going in policy, but especially in the civil service, you might only have one shot in 20 years to make a change like that. I was talking to a lawyer recently who works for the EPA who was telling me that he thinks yeah, he thinks in six years there's been just a couple of paperworks that he's filed that have been by far the most impactful, more impactful than everything else he's done at his work. And I can see how for some that might be just incredibly exciting, but for others just really demotivating.
[01:03:37.660] - Caleb
Right. Also, if you're working at an agency, you don't sort of get the option of going to go work on other issues, so you better really like the specific niche that you're working in.
[01:03:46.650] - JD
Great. Then any other career advice that you think is particularly neglected for policy careers or even just in general?
[01:03:57.450] - Caleb
I think especially if you want to have some sort of a writing output eventually, like you want to be a researcher or public intellectual or something like that. Getting started on that earlier rather than later is, I think, highly recommended. I know a lot of people who through tools like either blogging or Substac or Twitter have really been able to kind of make kind of a portfolio or a case for themselves kind of before they've even met their employer. I know I've gotten several jobs kind of through people that I met on Twitter or I've hired people that I sort of saw their work or knew their work either from substant or Twitter. And so having sort of a public presence and being able to show that you're actively engaging in kind of the world of ideas is really important for those kind of set of careers. But that's not to say that everyone in policy should be doing that. There's a lot of people who, if you're quite focused on, say, the national security establishment and you want to go work for the Pentagon, I would advise you not necessarily tweet because they have a lot more robust background checks and whatnot, but for more general sort of policy engagement.
[01:05:01.780] - Caleb
I think being willing to put yourself out there publicly and sort of the world of ideas is really, I think, both impactful and helpful for your own professional development.
[01:05:11.010] - JD
Any final words about how listeners can hear more about Institute for Progress or what you were doing?
[01:05:17.430] - Caleb
Yeah, well, on topic, we are quite active on Twitter and so Institute for Progress is at IFP I'm at Caleb Watney, you can also sort of follow our work. We have a newsletter that you can subscribe to from our website, which is Progress Institute. And yeah, in general I think, yeah, the website and Twitter are probably the two best ways to follow us.
[01:05:37.390] - JD
Awesome Caleb. Thank you so much.
[01:05:38.960] - Caleb
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
[01:05:40.990] - JD
Hi listeners. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you are interested in working in policy or politics to make an impact, we would love to help. We've written a guide on how to discern your call to an impactful career in policy and how to think about this. As a Christian whose priority is to have an impact for the kingdom rather than for one tribe or political party, we think it's potentially a very impactful path. Check out our report on why and consider signing up for one on one mentorship if you are interested in pursuing a career in this space. All this and more@christiansforimpact.org.
