politicians don't actually do anything you know they change the world by talking about it they pass legislation which is just words on a page but then that policy is actually breathed into Life by a whole cadra of of street level bureaucrats people who actually
Downstream of the speech act do something differently in response to it Ireland has one of the highest patent per capita in Europe and yet you also have one of the lowest startup formation that would seem like a contradiction to Ireland does suffer quite a large and
pricious brain drain in in different ways so a lot of our entrepreneurs are all in Silicon valy so you can have a great idea and you can go and set up your company but you might not be effective or a successful spin out because you can't attract the necessary
venture capital investment not that the IR population are not ambitious but they haven't been convinced of a maybe a techno optimistic future what we trying to do is in gender win-win situations you need to give people a motivation to
agree with you you want somebody do something you have to give them a reason that's better than because I want you to well hello everybody it's Jim oasy with yet another infinite Loops today my guest I have spent time with Luke beely who is the director of innovation at the
progress Ireland an independent Think Tank to connect Ireland to proven policy Solutions from around the world you're specifically looking at housing infrastructure Innovation welcome first off but let's let's level set for our audience who who
might not know what's been going on in Ireland because Ireland really was a remarkable transformation for the country you sort of jumped the line on traditional development uh you know it's typically uh you know the ricardio
Ricardo advantage in various Nations you start agriculture then you move to manufacturing then you get the services but you've formed Partnerships in Ireland with large primarily American Tech and pharmaceutical companies that have bed you to be from going as my
Irish brother-in-law would say as the redheaded stepchild of Europe to being one of the Kings one of the highest per capita incomes in the Euro Zone Luke welcome and let's let's talk a bit about how that happened well thank you so much
first of all for having me on the podcast gym I've been a admir of it for some time and friends with Julian gof who who was recently on an episode so it's uh you know they the Irish mafia are slowly working their way up through the American Media it's it's great
to I suppose to to address your first point about Ireland's very rapid Economic Development it's um unquestionable that we skipped some steps we went from a peripheral Rock on the the edge of Europe with no natural resources and a very low GDP per capita
um a declining population from the famine right through to the middle of the last century into what is not just on paper but on in in Practical senses quite a successful country with a with a booming GDP per capita now this was achieved primarily through attracting in
very very large volumes of foreign direct investment and that was principally from America and this was done in in in two ways one of our former ambassadors to the US Danel Hall called transparent corporate tax regime and it is very good but also a
very strong investment in human capital so from the 60s and maybe a bit earlier right through to now there has been large investment in the secondary and tertiary education sectors principally providing like labor feed stock for a multinational sector and this had like
many tremendous Spillers so then let's talk about your goal uh you know you you talk about some at least in our conversations I've I've been very impressed by some of your ideas or moving it up uh to to the next length so let's let's talk about
progress Ireland uh wh why why did it get started um who who's who's interested and as I mentioned your your specific goals at least as I understand it are addressing how infrastructure and Innovation I want to go through each of those in turn but what was what was the
founding myth if you will of hey we need a we need a new Think Tank called progress irand and it's going to have these objectives yes yeah as was all new institutions have to satisfy some vacant niche in an ecosystem or or something like this and the vacant Niche that we
identified was in policy ideation in Ireland so there were there are a couple of problems in our political system these are generally speaking resourse constraints on particular actors so we don't we don't have think tanks we don't have
people whose job it is generally to sit about and think about good good uh solutions to certain problems we have a very um active and busy at political core with a couple of parties and these are politicians modeled on the British system and then we have a very active
set of officials and these are the people who develop and bake in and come up with various policy Solutions but they are so I suppose involved in the Practical implementation of policies that sometimes they don't have the opportunity to kind of look around and
see what other ideas have made tremendous progress in other jurisdictions now there's a if you're talking about founding mths there's a great founding myth for I I think it was like the National Defense research Committee in the states it was um Bush
before before the National Science Foundation and he was um trying to connect civilian scientists into the Defense Forces during the early days of the second world war and making you some progress through the standard bureaucratic uh hurdles but once the
nais had invaded France he was like well we don't have time to to mock you around anymore we really have to get very serious about joining everything together so he through FDR's uncle got an audience with the president went into the overall office with a one pager
outlining this new institution that he had designed and within 15 minutes FDR wrote okay FDR on the top margin and then that that was that was story um and I I don't think that exactly replicates or rather we didn't exactly replicate
that when we pitched to our original funders but there is some kind of a analogy there right we said with a we we were filling a vacant Niche with connecting ideas and it was a very short one pure I think it's like the Gettysburg address here in the United
States that Abraham Lincoln so eloquently gave they use it there's a meme that uses the length of the Gettysburg address and its impact which was huge length was very short impact huge and then compared it to some Modern political speeches here in the United
States and I gotta say we we're we're degrading yeah there's an economy of language that is as important as the economy of politics and I think sometimes you know particularly it's a late you know you'd be late on a Friday working through a 150 page report and
you'd wish that they had been like me to had said it would be much um shorter to read if it were not so long right yeah yeah that's the the story I can't remember the writer but he apologized at the beginning of the letter uh for saying I apologize for how long this
letter is that I didn't have the time available to make it shorter yes yes exactly exactly that's so so um what I'm hearing is kind of like you you had all this acceleration in Ireland due to these IP Partnerships with big International
companies but it sounds a bit like Ireland right now sort of lacks the institutional mus uh muscle to nurture domestic Industries infrastructure Etc and then so one of the goals of your think tank is to sort of be an external module um I think that's something I
read uh in your material and and sort of bypass the bureaucratic constraints and turf wars Etc but how do so so my question is great idea love that idea but how do you do that how do you practically aboard the bureaucratic constraints because you're working with
the government in Ireland obviously um and and you know bureaucratic Turk Wars misaligned incentives Etc uh like are do you have any legal or political vulnerabilities that you've prepared for that's a a very good question Jim there's there's a lot in it I suppose if
we take take one step back what we're trying to do is remove constraints on economic growth which are like insufficient housing Supply and poor infrastructure and then drive Innovation which will grow the economy more generally this is the fuel that goes
into the engine so when when we try to help the people who actually do the work you know who actually Implement policy or who make you very difficult political decisions there's a number of ways that think tanks have historically done this
and then we have a slightly different way to cut through the bureaucratic morass as you put it so think tanks traditionally have either worked to change the Overton window which is the the kind of set of acceptable policies that people think all right that that's
that's fine you can go ahead government do that that's no problem but if you try to do something outside of that then there can be very serious political costs associated with implementation so if you're a standard Think Tank you might try and release material that
drags this window one way or another and therefore make your particular policy objectives more palatable to to most people that that's not as big a problem like that would be very standard in the UK and so on and then there's there's a
kind of a version of this that Alex stap in The Institute for Progress talks about he has a really good Pro uh podcast I think Richard hania called practical progress in DC they talk about how to shift the Overton window with a like Twitter first approach targeting
almost particular elements of the ecosystem with I'm short but very persuasive arguments now the way we have gone about it instead because we're a lone actor like Pro is the pretty much the only think tank it's not as if we have a an enormous group that can drag
the open window one way or another um and and manly many of the ideas that we're pushing are already perfectly salable um their supply side reforms which are not like unpopular it's just the implementation side is quite difficult so what we have done is try to
identify and meet and be be open to very effective actors within the system so it's like there's a common misconception that the the public service or the government sector has been uh bled dry of any Talent by you know booming
Private Industry and if there's just nobody with any skill left at all that's not not true not not even not even slightly there are plenty of very talented people but they might be sub subject to certain constraints from a risk averse atmosphere or they might be
curtailed by what exactly they can say how they can interact with um other parts of the system even if they're like Downstream of a particularly big uh and more powerful entity than how they interpret that can also be subject to certain political pressures which means
that if they would like something done we can sometimes from an external perspective achieve that much more quickly or without the same constraint and then feed that research or that um that outcome back to them supporting them like uh I think the the phrase I
used to First was offensive linemen that's a an American football thing and the extent to which I know about American football it's that these people work to clear blockages for others so we have some um great colleagues in in the Civil Service and we work in so far as
we can to clear blockages for them fascinating approach and um does does that subject you to um at least here in the United States when a government changes uh and then the like we just had uh a new party has taken control of the various now we're we're organized
differently than Ireland obviously we're constitutional republic um but um are you are you trying to help uh people who are in service but associated with particular political Pary are you trying to make sure that it doesn't get lopsided to
just one particular party getting all your research and the other one going begging yes um that's a very good question and it's it's almost easy to explain from first principles when you look at the Irish political system so we're a um a parliamentary democracy if
you're more familiar with the UK that is roughly speaking our model but because our voting system is is quite representative we have a thing called uh proportional representation single transferable vote it tends to lead to Coalition governments so we have um as
of only a few weeks ago a government composed of two quite large parties so two of the largest three parties uh in association with a group of Independents and what they do is they form a government with various Ministries or departments and these oversee civil
service departments that are like a an inline assembly act on certain policy portfolios so we have a a party that has a minister for say research Innovation and science which is a role that I'd be particularly interested in and Reporting
into that person are permanent non-political actors so civil servants who have a long-term contracts they have great job security who many other benefits but they are professional generalists who rotate throughout the Departments but work on a particular
project for a particular minister at any given time now some things that are common between say The American or the British and and the honor systems are that you you have at one level a speech act which is to say that politicians don't actually do anything you know they
change the world by talking about it they they declare something they they pass an executive order as you might have seen recently or they they pass legislation which is just words on a page so you can we can act as like Consultants to make sure that the speech
act itself is well optimized to achieve particular outcome like you move vagaries or you um or exhaustive to make sure that say uh incentives are aligned by the people it's supposed to look at and so on but then that policy is actually breathed into Life by uh a
whole cadra of of street level bureaucrats so the the people who actually Downstream of the speech act do something differently in in response to it there's a a really good academic I quite like in MIT called Bernardo zaka who's wrote a wrote a book called where
the state meets the street and he was looking at us Health policy on like scheduling and things like this and how the actual appointment sets in various clinics set set the appointments so and then they the the legislation itself was
almost orthogonal to how these people were behaving right so they would make their own moral judgment in any given situation and that became the policy as as lived so when we go about helping people we can help either at the like speech at legislative stage or feeding
maybe to ideas within the system that's like through opets or consultative work or we can help in the street level bureaucrat state where it's like you are Downstream of what was decided but there's still so much to be filled in in determining how this gets implemented so
yeah that makes sense to me um are you feeling any uh of the Tremors of what we in the United States would call the vibe shift away from you know at least here in the United States and in some other countries as well there's been a precipitous decline in the Public's
faith in the capacity of the state in the intelligence of the state um and and I guess what I'm asking is how do you reconcile your kind of meta scientific ocratic approach uh with this widespread distrust of of for lack of a better word experts Andor officials
Etc or or are you not experiencing that in Ireland like we are in the United States no no I I think we're not experiencing it like it's being experienced in the US but that's not to say we're not experiencing it in some some other way
um there are a couple of parts to this the first is maybe the decrease in the state's Capac right this is the perception that the state is less capable than than it used to be for a variety of reasons now in the UK that is a widespread belief I
think among a lot of political commentators and it's mainly attributed to a human capital problem that you just you you don't have the right people in the right positions and even if you do they're told that they can't do certain things for bureaucratic reasons right
and there are accommodators like Dar Cummings or Lord Adis who would have been part of the labor party who attributed this to a move away from political appointments so they might they might think that political appointments allow the US is actually
better because you can staff certain positions with people known to be competent and cummings lays a lot of this at the feet of the north coat travelan report which came out in the the middle of the 1800s and moved the U or the UK Civil Service onto a merit
based appointment approach I mean Tran's name might be familiar to you actually from um the fields of a and Ry you know they corn he was a civil servant responsible for not just famine relief in Ireland but at a later stage this uh broadscale
whiteall reform so we could blame him for at least two big big big things there now in Ireland I don't think there's that same sophisticated um critique of the civil service system I think it has performed quite well over a long period of time we have seen as we
mentioned at the beginning of this podcast very significant growth economically and an undeniable and huge gain in living standards such as IR went from like third world to first like maybe Le one you might might might say so there's not the same I suppose resentment we
haven't seen managed decline in Ireland like we've seen managed decline in our nearest neighbor but the general distrust toward the political system I think is is growing partly because we evened that Vibe if not that analysis from from the
states and and we we see like um Elon Musk tweets a lot about Ireland for example disproportionately about Ireland and this might be because we have a a large corporate presence in Dublin and in Cork there could be other reasons but those um those interesting
takes are filtering through into the public Consciousness but they haven't been reflected at the latest election so so largely speaking unchanged so maybe maybe the mood has shifted but not the not the politics not the politics um but you mentioned the British uh Civil
Service the UK Civil Service uh I was doing some reading to get ready for my chat with you and I I saw a line that my friends in the UK I've often heard variations on it and it was despite this move to Merit for uh for uh people being appointed you know sort of permanent uh
appointments for the people doing the real work not the politician yeah doing the speech uh but but the line I read was you know Poe performers in the British Civil Service are not sacked they get moved sideways do do you have a similar problem in
Ireland yes I mean we we the fundamental uh feature I suppose that your British friends are identifying as quite a large bug which is that civil servants have um like goldplated job security and it even if there is quite poor performance identified by their
manager or or by somebody else they really have they really enjoy um impregnable security and then they can't be sacked so the best thing you can do is move them onto a new project and we we also have that so we we have um some features that problem I think where it
ends up most um I suppose insidiously represented and somewhat careful in how I how I phrase this is like think think about your the t-u the Irish Prime Minister and you want to set up a new Department that's dealing with the like the most pressing problem I don't know
what like climate change you pick whatever you like and you say we can resource this new Department in multiple different ways we can either hire all new people which would be quite difficult and quite costly or we can move people from the Civil other civil
service positions and departments into this new department or we can do a combination of both and maybe there are other ways to do it as well so if you want to use the the combined approach say where you take some maybe very senior people from other departments put
them in to this new department on your top priority you think who are the people that will be moved right and if you are in another department and you're leading that department and somebody tries to requisition your staff it is
unlikely that you willingly let them requisition your best sta so rather than just maybe moving people sideways generally within your own teams when a top priority is identified and a reorganization a follows I think a lot of people are incentivized to um we say
offload Deadwood from their own teams so it's it's really difficult to well resource a new team in in I think any civil service that uses this model um for the simple reason that everybody wants to stock all of their worst people into this new entity um and it's very
it's very very challenging to work around that um of course then when people inherit it they try their best to bring in in really good people to counterbalance it but it's certainly not a trivial problem yeah and you mentioned FDR with the one pager and I was uh
interested when I was reading about him and his views on unionization of federal workers uh I I was you know historically uh uh Roosevelt has seen as one of America's more liberal more Progressive presidents um and yet he was vehemently
opposed to allowing Federal United States workers to uh unionize and and and the reason he I read he wrote why he was so opposed and it was essentially for uh avoiding problems just like you have just described to me and yet it was
allowed right and right now in the United States uh so for example uh in the US we have a very powerful teachers union it and you already see some fights bubbling up uh from opposition to truly innovative ways to augment student learning Etc now full disclosure I
always say I'm talking my book and so I'm talking my book because we are investors in like the synthesis school which is AI tutoring but has always been looked at as a a Bolton not a replacement for traditional education uh but I've got to guess that
you're facing similar problems in Ireland as well no yes yeah I think these are like europe-wide problems I think um lagard who's the governor of the ECB the European Central Bank and vand Deion who is the president of the EU commission had a a pretty interesting
uped in the financial times just yesterday or the day before where they sort of held their hands up and said we made Europe uncompetitive we have regulated um in in many different dimensions to reduce the competitiveness of of the the continent of the block and
this includes not just very onerous environmental um legislation and there's um like a you some of my colleagues work closely on how to get more houses built in Ireland and this can interact very negatively with um quite stringent
environmental legislation for example but the yeah the presence of of unions and I think a very strong WR prioritization of Labor has made Europe uncompetitive in that sense too I I know anecdotally from some um companies in America that they don't wish to very
heavily invest in more jobs in Europe because the layoff procedure is so expensive for example so and this is partly driven by the presence of your unions I don't know exactly how it interacts with um the Irish system I know that change in the third level
sector which is the one that I pay most attention to is um sometimes difficult to achieve because of the unions but it's it's impossible in some senses to strike the right balance between the protection of capital and the protection of Labor yeah
and uh you know that's also a common view of the EU in the United States um especially with entrepreneurs business Builders Etc um and for example we invested in a company European company uh that was attempting to do kind of a y combinator um in in Europe and we're
still invested uh but but they literally had to shut down for several months because of EU regulations and and it seems that that memes are our our our quickest uh emerging way to get to what people are really vibing if we want to stay with that term about and I'm sure
you've seen the one that have side by side EU and it shows a water bottle with the top on being able to not be removed and then on the US it shows musk's rocket being landing and the Chopsticks uh grabbing it I mean it's a funny meme but I I think one of the
reasons it works is because it is reflecting a lot of people's um you know actual beliefs as opposed to their stated beliefs how how do you how do you deal with what at least from an American point of view is is the odorous and Incredibly
restrictive regulatory environment that the EU primarily Brussels promulgates and that you have to live under in Ireland yeah how do we how do we navigate I suppose the European laws that we and and like as a EU member State have had our part in shaping right
so Ireland has fed into many of these regulations as have the 26 member states um I think that harmonization was one of the major um objectives of the EU right that they wanted to create a a market whereby goods and services could flow across
borders and this meant that regulation need to be harmonized but the the that's was Temptation when harmonizing regulation is to make one Superior regulation that covers everything right and this this places compliance costs that on each National actor to try and
uh to meet this new criteria and then when this is done across you know many many different jurisdictions and the Temptation is always to make it their best-in-class regulation because this is your this is your best speech Act of the
day you know this is all you all you get up to do um you you can go very far now it's it's hard to know how you can um I suppose work around this like if it's a created by the EU then it must be changed by the EU it's at it's at a level that is um legally Superior to
anything that we can do nationally so um the the mechanism by which we are incorporated into this uh supernational structure is that the EU treaties sit at um a level like somewhere around our constitution right so it's it's above the parliament we must Implement EU law
and we must comply with it and like the provisor is then obviously then we get to get to shape it um changing it is very difficult and there is an emerging progress movement in Europe so like we progress Ireland we're a a a small unaffiliated think tank that work on
these three three areas but there are um other groups other like non-aligned groups who are popping up all over Europe some some in Brussels and some in other member states who are concerned with the same problems like not not just how certain types of
Regulation can NE negatively affect economic growth but also like how do we get much more value out of the signs that we're trying to do the signs that in the EU is a really big topic how do we get more value how do we get more Innovation out of this um and how do we
like properly tackle as a block competitiveness and say the the great climate concerns that other people have but this is um yes to answer your question I think it is a a unified approach is necessary it's very difficult as a a member state to affect
um significant change unless you're dragging the Overton window around as a very recalcitrant small nation which Ireland has been known to do in the past but hard how hard to do that on everything yes yeah um and it reminds me uh when the Euro was first being
introduced uh I was invited to give a speech in uh London uh primarily about investment methodologies uh but one of the first questions that I was asked was do do you think that we should give up the pound and go on the Euro and honestly I I was
I wasn't surprised by the question because it was obviously in much discussion internationally and particularly in Europe and and but I chose to answer the question in kind of a cute way which was well I can't ever see the United States of America letting
any of our neighbors uh in North America have control over our currency or over our Treasury and here's what surprised me the room exploded into thunderous Applause and that's that's when I learned that I was I was basically touching a third rail when I was over
there in London uh BEC because uh I had no idea how strong the opposition was to giving up the pr uh the pound and how deep and this is the question I'm getting to how deep some of the ancient animosities ran one fellow came up to me after the speech and said I'm G to say
it the polite way um if you think that we would ever surrender our sovereignty to the exploitive exploitive uh French or Germans you're out of your exploitive mind as as someone from the United States who loves Europe and goes there often and have a ton of European friends
like I have in fact noticed that some of those ancient animosities are still causing cruffles and and dust UPS I how do you how do you how do you navigate those I did the national frictions well first of all I should say that it seems
you passed up a very promising career as an after dinner speaker in in the UK you could have been going entertaining audiences for the rest of your life with speeches like that um I think there are yeah interesting Nation tation relationships I mean the
Anglo Irish relationship is there very very long and very very complicated and made more complicated by having a a jurisdiction in in Northern Ireland that is um unique as far as I can tell in most contexts there is um I think a hemony among the maybe the Old Guard of Europe
the French and the Germans and this is and the and the British and then there histories can sometimes come to the four but it I think it happens less frequently than external um observers would imagine right there the actual Europe so that the bureaucrats who have
their permanent jobs um work to my mind quite seamlessly with each other and maybe they're Nations have different priorities in this pulls in one way or another but the institutions themselves function very well now where Europe is
moving in the next couple of years may see a different type of international tension emerge for example at Poland there's a lot of really good writing about this Poland's economic performance has been exceptionally good over the last 30 years is
um putting to shame I think some other nations in Europe who had a better competitive Advantage going in and you know historically much more wealth um but they these I suppose incumbent winners looked with some kind of Suspicion on Poland's traic performance
and there's another very good article in the FTE here day or yesterday by Janan Ganesh about the rise of Poland and the Mediterranean countries like Spain and Italy who only 10 years ago were um really doing very very badly post financial crash and are now contenders
as the major economic powers and maybe major political powers of the block so I think the inversion of maybe the the historical hierarchy here could lead to new tensions Ireland has a s different role in all this right we we were never
a I suppose a major economic player we had a extensive good diplomatic Goodwill by being friends with lots of people um that for one reason or other may be declining but perhaps the world is just evolving differently um but Ireland also supplied a lot of very senior um
bureaucrat civil servants so the the um pop of the European civil service was an Irish person for about 15 or 20 years of of the last 30 which is very unusual for one small nation of four million people to have supplied the top job first it
was uh I think David O solivan and then Katherine day really exceptionally capable people so our integration with the block has been profound but also our benefit from the block has been um miraculous like you can't walk through an Irish train station without seeing a
plaque on the wall that says partly funded by the European Union what little infrastructure we have um has been built bricks and morar by European money and I think where everybody here is is delighted to contribute back into that
project now uh there's no EOS skpm of any major strength in this country so let's let's start diving into the the three problems so let's start with housing now you have a project where you're hoping that 150,000 uh houses can can be built uh when I looked at it one of my
observations was it seemed to assume linear scaling and one of the things that I wondered about I I uh love Ireland I spent a summer there as a child um and had some of my most formative experiences while living there uh as an eight-year-old uh but there's also one
of the reasons for that is because of the incredibly unique Irish world viiew if you will um and it's like I love the old story about the guy when asked they asked a farmer do you believe in pukas uh which for those who don't know it um are are
mythical creatures in Irish mythology and he pondered this for a minute and he goes not I don't believe in pukas and then he paused he goes but I suspect they don't believe in me either but the point is the the Irish truly are unique and maybe this is just
my American irishness coming out but do you think that there are unique Irish Cultural factors that could derail uh the housing 150,000 Home Project or no yes I actually think one of the most serious um let's suppose cultural issues that AR faces is the sort of
exceptionalism that you've just touched upon so when when Ireland encounters a problem very frequently it is a problem that has been encountered by another problem or another country rather and that other country may have encountered it sooner and therefore may have come up
with a solution sooner and maybe there's a lot of benefit or profit to be had um by contextualizing that solution for Ireland um where you you can come across a significant amount of sentiment that would be like well um it would sooner
work on the moon than it would work in because Ireland is unique in every sense like there's no use translating policy solutions from XYZ country here because you know everything is just the people are different the land is different and so on um and this becomes quite
interesting when you look at Irish land law which is very its basis is is very similar to the British land law it was copied over in many senses at post Independence there were changes made and and new acts past but in uh in Broad Strokes it is quite
similar so when an experiment is run in in Britain and they try to bring online I don't know 150 homes through a new scheme and you make the case that well if they tried it there and almost everything is identical we should try it here yeah you still come across this
Irish exceptionalism are other cultural barriers to I think increased densification which is perhaps what your question gets at so um changing the landscape or changing the style of Irish cities is perhaps necessary to deliver more homes I think people are rightly
suspicious that can be this can be done in a way that's sympathetic to what we already have so people are reluctant to give up on the unique character of the Irish town and have many places in the world and nowhere that quite feels like
home and not just for sentimental reasons um I think people are rly suspicious of this but by no means is it impossible what I think they needs to be done and and one of my colleagues has done a lot of work on this is to try and incorporate this increased delivery of
houses in a way that is not disruptive to the um visual immunity of our current cities so either you change land use regulation or you try to replicate the old and very beautiful gean stock housing stock of Dublin and then the the aesthetic is the same you don't
necessarily need to build Modern Skyscrapers to increase the density of urban living in Ireland there are many places in the centers of cities that have one-story houses for example that were built in the um you know latter half of the last century so they're not
uh protected structures and they're not particularly providing accomodation for lots of people either so you you could build something that was being built in the 1800s or replica of that and and Achieve like a very very pleasing
streetcape at the same time as increasing your accommodation provision by a factor of 10 yeah and uh just staying with the with the idea that um sometimes you can get mismatches right like Hugo builds metros cheaply for example but they have astronomically
High youth unemployment there um and and you know the curement system in Ireland as analyzed by the OED uh you're spending about and correct me if I'm wrong if these are old figures you're you're you're spending about 7.7% of gvp uh on procurement vers 12.9 in the
average uh OC uh country and then things again back to housing uh you know the procedures divided into Lots uh 14% IR 30% in the average this according to the EU single Market scorecard um and the one that caught my eye was Awards to the cheapest bid in
Ireland it came back with 12% versus 56% in the EU membership countries how do you negotiate those types of problems yeah public procurement is a very complicated issue Ireland has not I think done particularly well in um certain public contracts so there's a an ongoing large
political Scandal associated with our National Children's Hospital which is a new state-of-the-art facility um in um and around pre-existing Hospital in the west of Dublin and it's supposed to be fantastic like Best Care in the world
when it's completed but it was budgeted at I think roughly half a billion euros and is now overtime and over budget by very significant margins and such that the accusation was level at the government that it was the most expensive healthc care facility in the
world this has this has recently been I suppose there has been push back against that characterization um but you would wonder why um and like for example talking about the memes again where you were saying like the EU with its bottle
caps that I live with every day and the the SpaceX uh PCH which I unfortunately don't get to live with every day but there's a there's a meme in Ireland that goes around of the profile of the um National Children's Hospital not yet finished and the bur Khalifa the world's
tallest building and asked like which was more expensive to build and it's the National Children's Hospital which is like this tiny squat it looks like new Grange in the images now the the problems with there have been like a lot of inquiries as to figure out what
exactly went wrong with public procurement and whether it's a contract problem or it's a delivery problem right and I I think most of our analysis would suggest that it is a delivery problem so that there are there's insufficient expertise on the side of the government manager in
controlling and making certain decisions such that you end up with quite significant rolling cost overruns that were not in the original bees so it's like the the problems and the overrun that the the cast is introduced after the public procurement process is was
completed and then it's the the second half that we have to focus on now Sean Shan Keys another one of my colleagues looks at this and says that well you end up with that gold plating because if you are a a government manager that doesn't
quite know what the difference is between I don't know a a Stairway that's I know 200 cmers and a lift that's whatever many centimeters then you you don't know what these things are supposed to cost so it's very difficult to push back against a contractor and
say this change is not necessary that change is necessary we don't want to deviate from the original plans because every time we do it costs more money so I think that's actually much more closely linked to the human capacity project or problem we talked about
earlier in relation to generalists serving in specialist functions and like Merit based Appo appointments and so on rather than the the Contracting I think that conal is Rec solid yeah and uh the the other thing I I just wondered about when I was looking
at your proposals uh which I found very intriguing was you know like opt in Street planning zones what What mechanisms do you have in place to avoid here in the United States we have the nimi crowd not in my backyard um and it it has caused
dislocations of being able to build an appropriate level of housing for areas that are booming that are uh doing doing very well and attracting a lot of people to that area and I just wonder do do you have in place uh an answer for dealing with uh
nimi type uh people who are like yeah that's great we're over there but not in my backyard yes I that this um sentiment is is very common you know I think it's very common in the UK and the us as well Sam Bowman who is um who works in uh policy in the UK has a really good
podcast on 80,000 hours about exactly this problem basically be beating the nimes so to speak and I would highly recommend it but in in our context what we try to do is in gender win-win situations so rather than saying look we're going to put we're going to try
and put these homes in your community and you don't want it because you don't benefit let's see how we can disperse the um maybe the increase in land value or disperse the benefits in a way that everybody in the commun community gets
something out of it and this can overcome maybe their original reluctance so in The Proposal the policy proposal Street plans that we we had this worked by trying to coordinate all of the owners along a particular Street to um redevelop their homes in conjunction
with each other so rather than say your neighbor deciding to put two stories on their house and this kind of construction is really disruptive to your way of life for a period of time that you we don't want that to happen so you exercise a veto over the planning
process which which does happen you would be invited to partake in the same unified design scheme and you the value of your house would would increase if you decided to do that and even if you didn't you would be awarded the planning
permission to do so which would still add very significant um value to your plot so this is like a way of I supp Bri leing people in to be Pro development in a way that they otherwise wouldn't be like aligning incentives I think we've discussed this this before where you
need to give people a motivation to agree with you or like H you need people give people a golden bridge over which Retreat and all these different phrases which mean roughly the same thing if you want to you want somebody to do something you have to give them a reason
that's better than because I want you to right because I said so yes that that that does not tend to work uh terribly well in in any sort of uh negotiation but that also bleeds into infrastructure right so um Metro costs in Ireland are I and again correct me
this is just what I found when I was doing the research uh between four and eight times those of Spain is that first off is that correct yeah so Spain and particularly Madrid are exceptionally good at delivering metros for a low cost
per kilometer in the order of like 100 million or between 100 200 million per kilometer but it's it's a mistake to say that Ireland's metros cost four to eight times more because those are projected costs Ireland has no Metro but it is projected that it will be much more
expensive like that there has been there have been hundreds of millions spent on the Metro project already but no construction has begun this is purely the the necessary legal loopholes and consultative process that our regime requires to award the necessary planning
permission so we've gone yeah yeah but that kind of brings me to the essence of my question which is um Dublin essentially rejected the Metro Link solution in 2002 it's now 2025 and I just wonder if it well more than anything does that would really
depress me if I was like the author of the 2002 proposal and and and I was still trying to deal with it and I'm just wondering are there any kind of unique externalities uh that are specific to Ireland that are not exent in other places so uh you know uh Union work
rules institutional capture there's I'm I'm actually just kind of throwing thr throw things out there and and if that if those externalities that are unique to Ireland it would and again if we were using like first order thinking about
this thing you would you would hope that you would be able to come up with Solutions uh that address those uniquely Irish problems and I know that you have come up with some of those proposals so I'm inviting you to kind of give me your your your best one I don't think I might
disagree and say I don't think the money the problems are actually unique to Ireland there are lots of other countries that are build very expensive metros but they have managed to reduce the costs through different strategies and one of the such as um setting up
commercial entities that have a lot of inhouse expertise for managing the project this is the same as the National Children's hosp we talked about earlier you got a big project it makes sense that you have people who have experience
of delivering these kind of things managing it which is not particularly common in our current like generalist Civil Service structure so while those Solutions have been implemented by other jurisdictions in response to similar problems that we have in Ireland we have
we have not really pulled those levers yet like we've just uh I say we've just complained about the cost um but we we haven't come up with very inventive ways of um solving these problems if we believe they're unique and we also haven't tried the the already tested
Solutions so for infrastructure this would be the main one right you would want to um up staff with a lot of human like great human talent and capital the delivery agency as responsible for the metro and while some hires have been made in the last I just couple of months
that moving this direction they don't necessarily have the autonomy required to actually make good decisions then so it's like you you need to do two things you need get really really good people in and then you need to let them do what
really good people do which is not necessarily legible to not really good people like I me you know it's it's no point me hiring for example somebody somebody that's better than me and then micromanaging them and telling them exactly what to do we don't benefit in
that sense from their talent expertise and wisdom so we yeah we need to two things in in in that way we need to hire the right people and then get out of their way to deliver a good Metro yeah and it's the getting out of the way that
becomes my next question right so uh if you mentioned you're you're saying hey let's look at these already tested Solutions uh isn't one of the risks of doing that locking in a path dependency where you're focusing on Metro expertise and you're looking at you know great
20th century Transit Solutions just does that in any way miss the potential game changers like autonomous microtransit uh uh Elon mus always talking about the hyperloop um and that would allow I guess my question is it seems to me that
Ireland is in kind of a unique position given the size of the population given the fact that you are a member of the euu uh could could does does that lock you into things that you might excel at for example the ability to LeapFrog all of that Legacy infrastructure with
something new or or am I misguided in that oh no it's a really good point Jim there's um I don't know if it's that well known a story about the Irish postal service on post so it was one of the last postal services in the world to effectively digitize and the the reason
for that was because the Post men and women on the ground was so good you could write you know Mary car and you'd send it from you know New Zealand and it end up where it was supposed to go but when all of these people retired I think
that was like the late 90s or 2000s they were confronted with a problem where they had to digitize a really archaic system where and they were probably one of the last countries to redo this but because they had they hadn't done anything they were able to implement A
system that was much much more sophisticated than anywhere else so they could learn from the mistakes of everywhere and say look well we we've we Incorporated all these learnings and we can go with the next generation of solutions and now Ireland's poster
system is is again one of the best in the world but not because you've got people on the ground who have a perfect memory of every Bine down the country so like we we we definitely could replicate something like this in Ireland for Transit and infrastructure and the the
public realm generally the problem is not in exactly what you want to do it's how you want to deliver it so there's um like if you rather than trains you could imagine a system of drones and there's great drone delivery trials going on in
Dublin at the moment actually where Mana drone delivery can get you a coffee from you know couple of streets over and the coffee drops out of the sky you have and this is like science fiction but but you get in parts of Dublin now um the the
problem is is that if you were going to try and Implement that in the public realm you'd still encounter all of these same capacity problems you'd still encounter the difficult ities in getting the um land use regulation in check you'd still encounter the legal
difficulties you'd still encounter the management problems whereby it's costed as X and it ends up actually costing the Checker 10x so maybe it would be better I think to deliver you know one Metro and learn as much as we can from tackling a really big infrastructure
project and then going on to these next Generation things oh maybe we should just fail at the Next Generation things and be even more ambitious um and learn from those but I think that we will we have to try to deliver something uh full stop and it's more
likely that we succeed with existing Technologies then then well maybe I'm being too um too Meek maybe we should be going for everybody getting their own drone well a actually I'm not going to accuse you of being too Meek but it it
was one of the things that that as I was reading your stuff and recalling our conversations uh that I was kind of like wow you know Ireland island of Saints and Scholars right kept uh kept much of culture alive during the Dark Ages got a long history
of being able to do extraordinary things for a small population different way of looking at the world Etc and could be like hey let's give I just to take your example a drone for every cup of coffee at least at at least in Dublin and the idea uh that that just continues to
interest me is like I was in London not long ago and I took a a taxi um and and I asked him uh do you regret if for those who have never been to London the the taxi drivers the cab drivers there are legendary because of something called the
knowledge and the knowledge is they're not around it's like very very serious you need to know where every oddly named or play or streak uh is and and and and I guess in in retrospect it was kind of a provocative question because I'm like are you like upset that
you spent years and years learning the knowledge when there's an Uber over there that's completely doesn't need it and right and and so and but it made me start thinking about because we talked about Poland earlier um uh Poland has astounded me honestly looking at what
they've achieved um and in fact what many of the Eastern European countries and and my original assumption was just like well you know the pendulum to and fro the pendulum flows right and they had been under the boot of the Soviet Union and didn't like it very much and
so you know you see Estonia and Poland and other Eastern European countries kind of going in the opposite direction and then just the thought um gosh you know Ireland Ireland could still comply with quite a few of the EU regulations
that you have to live under but your population is bright enough smart enough and small enough to give these kind of LeapFrog uh you know Blue Sky ideas a try what what am I missing what am I missing no like I think there's a really
there's a small and dedicated C of people that really really want to see this happen and it's um maybe a cultural change is necessary not that the our population are not ambitious but they haven't I think been convinced of a maybe a techno optimistic future that
you and I would um and many others would be be very um admir we would admire would admire greatly I I think that um part of this and we discussed it before is that a lot of um the Irish focus is on either mistakes or things that went badly or maybe things that could go
badly and it's like it's it's a great topic of conversation you can waste a day talking about the ways in which things have gone wrong and could go wrong but that maybe a dedicated um reorientation toward more positive um art and and culture could enable great
ambition and that could be manifested in very small ways like I think New Zealand was used as a test bed for a lot of um different digital products because they could um file them there before rolling them out to other English speaking
countries you I think Ireland should in by the same token get the beta version well before the rest of the world why not why shouldn't we live you know a couple of years in the future or or could manifest itself as this dard pursuit of growth like what we have seen
in in Poland this like great drive to improve their country this um tenacity and tarity I we need to recapture some of that too it's difficult in some ways to know exactly how um to get there because the last time Ireland did this was during the
Celtic tiger where we thought we could have everything and I think people feel slightly burnt by how badly the financial crash affected the um affected the state of the country they they're like slightly I suppose cautious about being optimistic and ambitious again
again they need to be um probably by through the political system or a cultural movement brought back into this then we we discuss something like arts for Progress which is uh we were going to run we're still looking at we need to figure out some of the particulars but
run a some kind of like Grand prog program where we commission very positive work that looks toward the future with optimism and ambition and imagines in Ireland for the 24th century delivered you know tomorrow rather than you know one day per day like the of the
world yeah um I'm a I'm a big fan of that that's why I'm kind of obsessed on it and it tends to work very very well in countries uh or um uh social environments that are smaller uh rather than like unwieldly you know India with its one plus billion people uh has has a very
difficult time doing that type of thing you but on the Innovation front you you call kind of your approach metascience so please for listeners and viewers just give a a working definition of what you mean by that so metascience is um it's
being popularized and implemented in the UK and the US and in in a few European countries and what it involves is turning the scientific method of experimentation and testing and making a change in evaluating that change back on the process of funding
and conducting science so for a long time um different procedures for funding science arose naturally you know somebody say oh we we'll we'll disseminate funds through a grant making process and we'll have a call say and then we will give out money to the best
applicants but it was not done rigorously it was not nobody tested see is this the actual best way of funding science does this produce most out whatever metric you you'd like to choose high impact P patent or high impact papers patents um you know expert PhD
students who are graduating into um really really good jobs or spin out companies like what's the best way to fund science to to optimize for all of these outcomes now there's um a couple of people working in the US like Jordan D dwan and Caleb Watney in in ifp and
open Phil the other way around and then there's a metascience working group in the department of science Innovation and technology in the UK there's a consortia called Rory the research on Research Institute that operates throughout
Europe and what all of these groups are trying to do is apply the rigor that they have as scientists to how they fund and conduct science and that's not it's not a trivial problem at all many people might uh um question like how exactly this is done but that's the the
fundamental kind of principle is that we want to we want to accelerate scientific progress by getting very serious about how it is funded and supported yeah which I generally uh support and as I Was preparing again though I I did come across some things that like
what one of the contradictions that I see in that approach is kind of what I guess they refer to as Charles goodhart's law that a metric loses value when it becomes a Target goal and and and is one of the things also one one of the proposals for a national R&D
database um it SS a little bit like China's social credit system no no no I I understand what you mean so like if we put a particular metric in place then it gets gamified and you end up um losing the ability to properly measure the the
fundamental behavior that you think is important yeah this is this is 100% true and I think it's it has actually happened with things like H indices which are a way of measuring the output of professors and principal investigators so that's a way of of
checking basically the quality of their publication that has been shown over the last maybe decade or so to be um imprecise in in measuring somebody's quality um Publications themselves have been called into question like the the volume of scientific Publications makes
it very difficult to assess all of their quality so a lot of the traditional metrics have already fallen in the way that you suggest right I'm I'm not saying that we need to replace all of these metrics so there are many meta scientists who think that new
metrics are the solution and but but others think that maybe introducing more flexibility for scientists or saying I a very good example is the average age of the person who gets a grant just to pursue their own work has increased very
dramatically in the US UK Europe and Ireland over the last number of decades so it went from being maybe your mid 20s right up to your early 50s now and this does not seem to gel well with the fact that a lot of the most productive science is done by young people young
people who are not afraid of failure young people who have great ambition so another field of Med scien is trying to figure out well how do we recalibrate how do we get what what Grant systems do we need to put in place to get money back in the
hands ambitious young researchers who are una afraid of failing and that's slightly different from the metrics approach now the the national research database that that you mentioned um is is another feeds into another part of meta science where you do retrospective analysis so
you say look we we put in you know x billion euros into the system and these are the outcomes that we measured um maybe we can like economists go back and sift through the data and understand what were the correlations maybe grants
of duration five years are not as good as grants of duration eight years maybe giving research is that bit of extra time allows them to really mature their ideas before publication or gives them enough time with the idea to spin it out into a company or something
like this and a a national research database where you collect the grant information from all of the different Grant awarding bodies or research institutes would allow you to assess an entire nation's uh scientific output um the that there are people within
research Ireland which is our new research agency who are very key to to see something like that happen because they they want to themselves know what they're doing right and in the absence of data that's almost imp determine yeah I I completely agree that in the absence of
data you're just uh putting a finger licking a finger and putting it up and see which way yeah which see see which way the wind is blowing and yet uh you know you bring up patents and or patents as you would say um Ireland has one of the highest uh patent uh per capita in
Europe and yet you also have one of the lowest startup formation that that would that would seem like a contradiction to me listen we there like two features of this one is that Ireland does suffer um quite a a large and pernicious brain drain in in
different ways so a lot of entrepreneurs um and many of whom like my generation I know are all in Silicon Valiant because that is one of the best place in the world to set up a company and the availability of town there is is phenomenal so not not to say that
Ireland needs to compete with these places but a lot of people might maybe paintting something and then you know they refine the idea and then they move on but the availability of capital in Ireland is much poorer than other countries and one of these one of the
causes of this is quite a high tax on Capital so like capital gains taxes and other tyes of exit taxes even with entrepreneurial relief end up uh limiting the availability of of funding so you can have a great idea and you can go and set up your company but you might
not be effective or a successful spin out because you can't attract the necessary um venture capital investment now we we also since the financial crash like some other countries have very risk averse Banks so the banks by and large
view startups as too risky in investment it's much better to invest in property again or you know do what do whatever you like but somebody who has the tarity to set up a new company that's that's that's too much we're not going to give
that money so I think there has to be and this is something that we I suppose we're working on is to try and get a critical mass or like yeah critical mass of VCH capital investment in Ireland so that you can get Capital the necessary Capital much more easily than than you
can now and and part of that is centralization so Ireland has in many different ways a um policy of regional development so resources are distributed more evenly across the country but they'd naturally be if you just had a l Fair approach they probably aggregate
more in Dublin but Ireland as you've noted is quite small and if you try to artificially split up startups prevent an innovation cluster from developing it means that you don't get enough uh startups to get the VCS you don't get
enough VCS to get the startup to you're sending people who want to work on the Forefront of AI to a field in Monahan to set up their company and that's nobody particular wants that so calization is is a very big killer in in our policy for this it's like how to get all of the
clever orange people in one place and then how to get all of the necessary capit from their ideas in one place yeah it kind of makes me think of the Bucky Fuller quip that uh rather than trying to change an Antiquated and illw workking system
just invent a new one and have that new one have that new one replace the old one well Luke it has been such an amazing conversation with you I have great admir admiration for than you're trying to do I think uh I obviously I have a soft spot in my heart for my uh
the country where my ancestors came from um and uh we'll we'll definitely have you back on to get all to all the stuff I didn't get to but I do want to hear if you've listened to the podcast in the past you know that we're going to wave a
wand and we're going to make you the emperor of the world you cannot kill anyone and you cannot put anyone in a re-education camp but what you can do is we're GNA hand you a magical microphone and you can speak two things into it that will incept all 8 billion people on
the planet whenever their morning is the next morning they're going to wake up and they're going to think I've just had two of the best ideas and like unlike all the other times when I woke up with those great ideas I'm actually G to start acting on
both of these ideas today what are you going to incept into the world look um there going to be two very simple things Jim the first one is go for a walk I love that one and something quite short and preferably something that's creation
other than just a piece of work I think both of those things unlock so much more value in every other Endeavor I don't want to prescribe to them a particular activity just walk and write and then they'll be pretty good you're nailing some of my sentiments exactly uh those
two things probably two of the best things you can do to make the world a better place walk and think and write Luke how can everyone find you I'm on Twitter at for helium um so F he e l i u m like iron and helium put together it's just a joke on my last name and our
website is progress island.org so it's as it's as it sounds you can find us there terrific thank you so much for joining me today and I really look forward to watching your progress and absolute Delight thank you so much I always enjoy our conversations Jen for