Hi! We're thrilled to share the Library of Economic Possibility (LEP), a new kind of knowledge-base for discovering, organizing, and sharing economic research around high-impact policies that have remained outside the mainstream despite significant research.

Options for discovering economics research today — especially for non-specialists — are slim. Activists tend to cherry-pick, journalists don't have the room to present a wide range of evidence in a single article, academics share their work through papers and conferences that general audiences generally don't engage with, think tanks wind up burying research beneath article archives. Search functions on major databases aren't the greatest.

This is consequential in a moment where interest is rising around new economic ideas — LEP hopes to ground this rising interest in the wealth of existing evidence, and build a bridge between general audiences and economics research. We're also trying out a new way of organizing and connecting information.

We're passionate about debating what the next economic system might look like, but we're also nerds about information architecture, and LEP's search features reflect that. Bidirectional links create associative trails between the network of information, and advanced search filters let you mix & match policies with specific areas of interest to hone in on precise relationships between information.

So if you're curious to learn more about how basic income might affect entrepreneurship, you can select the policy "basic income" and the tag "entrepreneurship," and scroll through all our insights and sources that relate to both of those filters.

Or, you could select "land value tax" and "urban development," or "codetermination" and "innovation." You get the idea.

You can find those by clicking "filters" on the left column:

Our policy reports also use a little feature we call "insight cards." Any statistic or claim we use in a policy report is interactive, letting you pop open the card to see the source it come from, further context, the authors behind it, etc:

We have more information in our launch announcement and Twitter thread. We're eager to continue developing LEP, from multimedia to community input interfaces. But for now, happy to hear any feedback or answer questions.

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Sounds interesting, thanks for announcing this here!

I hope we get more attempts to bridge economics research and the broader public, like this and New Things Under the Sun.