About
About
“This was perhaps the best conference I’ve been to. The theme couldn’t have been more poignant, and you couldn’t have chosen a better cast list to explore it. Everyone in the room was doing something in their life to make the UK better, and we all left with our network and our motivation being stronger.”
Conference attendee
Summary
With living standards, wages and productivity flatlining – if not declining – the Summit explored ways to encourage growth and how to reinvigorate faith in progress.
In his opening keynote address Professor Tyler Cowen outlined reasons why Britain should be optimistic about its economic fortunes, pointing to major technology firms such as DeepMind and government agencies such as ARIA, however Professor David Edgerton pushed back, warning against boosterism and calling for modesty on the UK’s position in the world. Economist Sam Bowman argued that elites do not believe in growth as much as they claim and that, rather than viewing ourselves as a world leader, Britain should instead view itself as a developing country in need of catch up growth. Professor Diane Coyle, co-director of event partner the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, argued optimistically that we ignore the impact of everyday innovations which will change people’s lives, and pessimistically that for a long time ‘we’ve been using nature free’ and this had become a binding constraint on growth.
Over the next day and a half, the themes of the summit included effective ways to counter pessimism, fatalism, and conformity, navigating institutional obstacles and vested interests, and how to accelerate supply-side reforms in housing, energy and childcare. Informed debates covered alternative funding structures to promote high-quality research and development, and the best ways to adopt and manage AI.
A two-hour Unconference led by the excellent Ben Yeoh handed the floor to participants, with more than twenty sessions on everything from meritocracy, education and state capacity to how to create a pro-baby and family culture. The summit ended with a historic tour of science and innovation in Cambridge on Saturday 15th July.
“Congratulations on a great event… I felt that there was a lot of fresh and interesting thinking… It is a critical moment for us all as we need to ensure that there is a space for open discussion and transcend the narrowness of a lot of political discussion while still staying grounded in reality. This means being both radical and optimistic to combat what is a generally downbeat mood which seems now to have become entrenched in the Zeitgeist”
Professor Tim Besley, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science
Photos gallery
Convenors
Nico Macdonald
Co-programmer and BIG POTATOES manifesto co-author
Aria Babu
Co-programmer and Policy Fellow at Coadec
Advisors
Sam Bowman, Founder and Editor of Works in Progress at Stripe
Professor Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; author of The Great Stagnation (2011)
Professor Diane Coyle CBE, Bennett Professor of Public Policy and co-Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge
Saffron Huang, Co-director of the Collective Intelligence Project Future (2022)
James Phillips, Former Special Adviser to the Prime Minister and to the Secretary of State for Science and Technology
Paul Reeves, Senior Software Developer, Simulation Technologies Omniverse, Nvidia
Stian Westlake, Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council; co-author of Capitalism Without Capital and Restarting the Future (2022)
Ben Yeoh, Angel Investor
