I'm Karthik, a second year PhD in economics at Berkeley. My current work is at the intersection of development, climate change and international trade. I would like to work on growth/innovation, but I haven't had any particular insights there yet :)

I wouldn't say I'm totally sold on progress as my #1 priority; I have attachments that make me focus more on catch-up than expanding the frontier. But I'm certainly convinced that it's important.

In keeping with that, my recommendation is Technology and Underdevelopment, by Frances Stewart. Even if you aren't interested in development, it has a very lucid discussion of what technology is and what improving a production process really means. It challenged a lot of assumptions for me.

Isn't this already captured by the heuristic of executing ideas based on their expected value? If the potential impact of an idea is large enough, a sober accounting of all the barriers won't actually stop EV-minded founders from working on them. "Workability" in general isn't a clean concept; what matters is that an idea's probability of success is enough to be worthwhile given its impact if it succeeds.