On Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, posted the text of the “America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength Act of 2022,” or “The America COMPETES Act.” As far as industrial policy measures go, the COMPETES Act is one of the most ambitious and expensive central planning efforts in American history. It represents the triumph of top-down, corporatist, techno-mercantilist thinking over a more sensible innovation policy rooted in bottom-up competition, entrepreneurialism, private investment, and free trade.
Unprecedented Planning & Spending
First, the ugly facts: The full text of the COMPETES Act weighs in at a staggering 2,912 pages. A section-by-section “summary” of the measure takes up 109 pages alone. Even the shorter “fact sheet” for the bill is 20 pages long. It is impossible to believe that anyone in Congress has read every provision of this bill. It will be another case of having “to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” as Speaker Pelosi once famously said about another mega-measure.
Of course, a mega bill presents major opportunities for lawmakers to sneak in endless gobs of pork and unrelated policy measures they can’t find any other way to get through Congress. The Senate already passed a similar 2,600-page companion measure last summer, “The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act.” Lawmakers loaded up that measure with so much pork and favors for special interests that Sen. John N. Kennedy (R-La.) labelled the effort an “orgy of spending porn.” Like that effort, the new COMPETES Act includes $52 billion to boost domestic semiconductor production as well as $45 billion in grants and loans to address supply chain issues.
But there are billions allocated for other initiatives, as well as countless provisions addressing other technologies and sectors. The list is seemingly endless and includes: Continue reading →
This is a compendium of readings on “progress studies,” or essays and books which generally make the case for technological innovation, dynamism, economic growth, and abundance. I will update this list as additional material of relevance is brought to my attention.
[Last update: 10/11/22]
Recent Essays
- Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z.com, October 16, 2023.
- Will Rinehart, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Exformation Newsletter, October 15, 2022.
- Sarah Constantin, “Unblocking Abundance: A Model for Activism,” Rough Diamonds, October 10, 2022.
- Derek Thompson, “The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2022.
- Adam Thierer, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Forum, April 23, 2022.
- Katherine Boyle, “The Case for American Seriousness,” Common Sense, April 18, 2022.
- William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022.
- James Pethokoukis, “Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America?” Faster Please, March 23, 2022.
- John W. Lettieri & Kenan Fikri, “The Case for Economic Dynamism and Why it Matters for the American Worker,” Economic Innovation Group, March 2022.
- Adam Kovacevich, “Saying YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) to “Civic Innovation,” Chamber of Progress, March 21, 2022.
- Eli Dourado, “Remove Barriers to Productivity,” City Journal, March 18, 2022.
- “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” (A conversation with Jason Crawford), Discourse, March 2, 2022.
- Noah Smith, “A New Industrialist Roundup,” Noahpinion, February 3, 2022.
- James Pethokoukis, “When Will the Next Big Thing Arrive?” Faster Please, February 3, 2022.
- Alec Stapp & Caleb Watney, “Progress is a Policy Choice,” Institute for Progress, January 20, 2022.
- Adam Thierer, “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
- Katherine Boyle, “Building American Dynamism,” Future, January 14, 2022.
- Derek Thompson, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
- Jason Crawford, “Progress, Humanism, Agency: An Intellectual Core for the Progress Movement,” Roots of Progress, January 11, 2022.
- Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
- Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for More Energy,” October 7, 2021.
- Jason Crawford, “We need a new philosophy of progress,” The Roots of Progress, August 23, 2021.
- Gale Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index 2021,” Human Progress, April 22, 2021.
- Noah Smith, “Techno-optimism for the 2020s,” December 3, 2020.
- Ezra Klein, “Why We Can’t Build,” Vox, April 22, 2020.
- Marc Andreesen, “It’s Time to Build,” Future, April 18, 2020.
- Eli Dourado, “How do we move the needle on progress?” September 26, 2019.
- José Luis Ricón, “About the ‘Progress’ in Progress Studies” September 6, 2019.
- Will Rinehart, “Progress Studies: Some Initial Thoughts,” August 30, 2019.
- Adam Thierer, “Is There a Science of Progress?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
- Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
- Tyler Cowen, “The Case for the Longer Term,” Cato Unbound, January 9, 2019.
- Vinod Khosla, “We Need Large Innovations,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
- Chelsea Follett, “Utopianism: One of the Biggest Obstacles to Progress,” Human Progress, August15, 2018.
- Eli Dourado, “How Technological Innovation Can Massively Reduce the Cost of Living,” PlainText, January 29, 2016.
Continue reading →
Discourse magazine has just published my review of Where Is My Flying Car?, by J. Storrs Hall, which I argue is the most important book on technology policy written in the past quarter century. Hall perfectly defines what is at stake if we fail to embrace a pro-progress policy vision going forward. Hall documents how a “Jetsons” future was within our grasp, but it was stolen away from us. What held back progress in key sectors like transportation, nanotech & energy was anti-technological thinking and the overregulation that accompanies it. “[T]he Great Stagnation was really the Great Strangulation,” he argues. The culprits: negative cultural attitudes toward innovation, incumbent companies or academics looking to protect their turf, litigation-happy trial lawyers, and a raft of risk-averse laws and regulations.
Hall coins the term “the Machiavelli Effect” to identify why many people simultaneously fear the new and different, and they also want to protect whatever status quo they benefit from (or at least feel comfortable with). He builds on this passage from Niccolò Machiavelli’s classic 1532 study of political power, “The Prince”: Continue reading →
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