Works in Progress
43 episodes listed below
Progress, examined without the slogans.
Works in Progress Podcast treats progress as a practical problem, not a slogan. Its episodes move from monopoly measurement and clean-air technology to fertility economics, AI in radiology, architecture, geoengineering, and artificial gravity.
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Works in Progress Podcast is a measured, argument-driven show about the machinery of progress. It treats growth, science, technology, and policy as concrete subjects that can be investigated rather than admired from a distance. Episodes often begin with a puzzle. Why is competition so hard to measure if everyone agrees it matters? Why has clean water become a public expectation while clean indoor air has not? Why has radiology, supposedly ideal for AI replacement, continued to need more human radiologists? The show answers those questions with historical comparison, technical detail, and a willingness to follow evidence past the obvious headline. Some installments are narrated essays, with close attention to the shape of an argument. Others are conversations among Works in Progress editors and guests. The range is broad but not random. Antitrust policy, airborne disease, egg freezing, artificial gravity, architecture, solar geoengineering, and falling birth rates all appear as versions of the same deeper concern: how societies notice problems, build tools, and sometimes fail to use them. The show is comfortable with numbers. It also knows that numbers need context. An episode on monopoly measurement moves from abstract economics to AT&T and Colombia. A piece on far-UVC turns a technical wavelength question into a public-health analogy with water treatment. A discussion of fertility pushes past simple alarm or reassurance and asks how social norms, measurement, and economic incentives interact. The pacing is deliberate. Claims are narrowed, corrected, and qualified as they go. That makes the show less suited to background chatter than to focused listening. Its appeal is the pleasure of watching an idea become more precise. It is not trying to make progress sound easy. It is trying to make it intelligible.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy economics, science, technology, and public policy when the argument is allowed to take its time. It fits people who prefer evidence, historical cases, and careful caveats over quick takes.
What sets it apart: The show connects abstract progress questions to specific mechanisms: market share, hospital workflows, fertility data, building incentives, ultraviolet wavelengths, and orbital design. Its strength is not novelty alone, but the discipline of asking what would actually have to be true.
Works in Progress is an online magazine devoted to new and underrated ideas about economic growth, scientific progress, and technology. Subscribe to listen to the Works in Progress podcast, plus Hard Drugs by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Works in Progress Podcast makes policy arguments legible by following their evidence, mechanisms, tradeoffs, and unresolved questions.
Works in Progress Podcast follows public problems down to the mechanism: how status and cost shape architecture, how falling fertility changes economies, and how competition might be measured more accurately.
Beautiful buildings, baby busts, monopoly metrics: this is where your stray policy questions get properly cross-examined.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A competition-policy episode that treats measurement as the central problem.
The episode makes a careful case that competition is easy to praise but hard to measure. It argues that standard signals like concentration can pull in different directions, and that the Olypacus decomposition is useful because it tries to separate technological progress from…
The case for cleaning air is framed through the history of water sanitation.
The piece builds a clear public-health case by linking past victories in water sanitation to a harder modern task: making the air in schools, clinics, and public buildings safer.
A careful argument for why architectural ugliness can read as thrift dressed up as progress.
Works in Progress makes a familiar gripe about ugly modern buildings feel less like a rant and more like a careful case for how things get built, what gets cleared away, and why older survivors can appear to win by default.
A careful case for studying geoengineering without mistaking it for a fix.
Daniele Vizzioni and Dakota Gruner make a measured case for treating solar geoengineering as a subject worth studying, starting with the familiar fact that volcanoes can cool the planet by sending reflective particles into the stratosphere.
A careful look at low fertility, from demographic cliffs to the Israel comparison.
Works in Progress frames Jesus Fernandez-Villeverde's argument that very low fertility can set off a demographic cliff, with South Korea, China, Spain, and Italy doing the heavy lifting as reference points.
Small things, real markets, strange incentives.
Markets, money, and Germany in motion.
The episode begins with a familiar problem.
The episode starts with a public-health puzzle.
This episode debunks common misconceptions about egg freezing success rates and fertility decline with age, using data from Issue 23 of Works in Progress to challenge mainstream media narratives.
This episode explores the history and future of artificial gravity in space, focusing on how NASA's abandonment of rotating-wheel stations in favor of the Apollo program delayed progress toward permanent orbital settlements.
This episode explores why radiologists haven't been replaced by AI despite the technology's superior accuracy and speed in analyzing medical scans.
The episode opens with a blunt test for ugly buildings.
Daniele Vizzioni and Dakota Gruner start with a question.
They begin with fertility.
Dr.
This episode features an interview with Dan Wang about his book 'Breakneck, China's Quest to Engineer the Future,' exploring the internal factions and ideological dynamics within the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese politics.
Mike Bird discusses his forthcoming book 'The Land Trap', exploring land as a financial asset throughout history, from colonial America to modern Asia, and its impacts on housing, inequality, and credit.
Anton Howes discusses his theory on why Britain had the Industrial Revolution, challenging common perceptions and focusing on the role of invention and progress.