Articles by Adam Thierer 
Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
An important new book launched this week in Europe on issues related to innovation policy and industrial policy. “Questioning the Entrepreneurial State: Status-quo, Pitfalls, and the Need for Credible Innovation Policy” (Springer, 2022) brings together more than 30 scholars who contribute unique chapters to this impressive volume. It was edited by Karl Wennberg of the Stockholm School of Economics and Christian Sandström of the Jönköping (Sweden) International Business School.
As the title of this book suggests, the authors are generally pushing back against the thesis found in Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State (2011). That book, like many other books and essays written recently, lays out a romantic view of industrial policy that sees government as the prime mover of markets and innovation. Mazzucato calls for “a bolder vision for the State’s dynamic role in fostering economic growth” and innovation. She wants the state fully entrenched in technological investments and decision-making throughout the economy because she believes that is the best way to expand the innovative potential of a nation.
The essays in Questioning the Entrepreneurial State offer a different perspective, rooted in the realities on the ground in Europe today. Taken together, the chapters tell a fairly consistent story: Despite the existence of many different industrial policy schemes at the continental and country level, Europe isn’t in very good shape on the tech and innovation front. The heavy-handed policies and volumes of regulations imposed by the European Union and its member states have played a role in that outcome. But these governments have simultaneously been pushing to promote innovation using a variety of technocratic policy levers and industrial policy schemes. Despite all those well-intentioned efforts, the EU has struggled to keep up with the US and China in most important modern tech sectors. Continue reading →
This weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran my short letter to the editor entitled, “We Can Protect Children and Keep the Internet Free.” My letter was a response to columnist Peggy Noonan’s April 9 oped, “Can Anyone Tame Big Tech?” in which she proposed banning everyone under 18 from all social-media sites. She specifically singled out TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram and argued “You’re not allowed to drink at 14 or drive at 12; you can’t vote at 15. Isn’t there a public interest here?”
I briefly explained why Noonan’s proposal is neither practical nor sensible, noting how it:
would turn every kid into an instant criminal for seeking access to information and culture on the dominant medium of their generation. I wonder how she would have felt about adults proposing to ban all kids from listening to TV or radio during her youth.
Let’s work to empower parents to help them guide their children’s digital experiences. Better online-safety and media-literacy efforts can prepare kids for a hyperconnected future. We can find workable solutions that wouldn’t usher in unprecedented government control of speech.
Let me elaborate just a bit because this was the focus of much of my writing a decade ago, including my book, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods, which spanned several editions. Online child safety is a matter I take seriously and the concerns that Noonan raised in her oped have been heard repeatedly since the earliest days of the Internet. Regulatory efforts were immediately tried. They focused on restricting underage access to objectionable online content (as well as video games), but were immediately challenged and struck down as unconstitutionally overbroad restrictions on free speech and a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Continue reading →
Almost every argument against technological innovation and progress that we hear today was identified and debunked by Samuel C. Florman a half century ago. Few others since him have mounted a more powerful case for the importance of innovation to human flourishing than Florman did throughout his lifetime.
Chances are you’ve never heard of him, however. As prolific as he was, Florman did not command as much attention as the endless parade of tech critics whose apocalyptic predictions grabbed all the headlines. An engineer by training, Florman became concerned about the growing criticism of his profession throughout the 1960s and 70s. He pushed back against that impulse in a series of books over the next two decades, including most notably: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (1981), and The Civilized Engineer (1987). He was also a prolific essayist, penning hundreds of articles for a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers beginning in 1959. He was also a regular columnist for MIT Technology Review for sixteen years.
Florman’s primary mission in his books and many of those essays was to defend the engineering profession against attacks emanating from various corners. More broadly, as he noted in a short autobiography on his personal website, Florman was interested in discussing, “the relationship of technology to the general culture.”
Florman could be considered a “rational optimist,” to borrow Matt Ridley’s notable term[1] for those of us who believe, as I have summarized elsewhere, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment.[2] Rational optimists are highly pragmatic and base their optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on dogmatism or blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling. But they are unified in the belief that technological change is a crucial component of moving the needle on progress and prosperity.
Florman’s unique contribution to advancing rational optimism came in the way he itemized the various claims made by tech critics and then powerfully debunked each one of them. Continue reading →
I recently joined Rep. Dan Crenshaw on his Hold These Truths podcast to discuss, “What’s Wrong with Industrial Policy.” We chatted for 25 minutes about a wide range of issues related to the the growing push for grandiose industrial policy schemes in the US, including the massive new 3,000-page, $350 billion “COMPETES Act” legislation that recently passed in the House and which will soon be conferenced with a Senate bill that already passed.
On the same day this podcast was released this week, I also had a new op-ed appear in The Hill on “The Coming Industrial Policy Hangover.” In both that essay and the podcast with Rep. Crenshaw, I stress that, beyond all the other problems with these new industrial policy measures, no one is talking about the fiscal cost of it all. As I note:
In the rush to pass legislation, we’ve barely heard a peep about the $250-$350 billion price tag. This follows a massive splurge of recent government borrowing, which led to the U.S. national debt hitting another lamentable new record: $30 trillion. China already owns over $1 trillion of that debt, making one wonder if we’re really countering China by adopting a massive, new and unfunded industrial policy that they will end up financing indirectly.
Read my oped for more details and for a deeper dive of what’s wrong with the bills, see my earlier essay here on “Thoughts on the America COMPETES Act: The Most Corporatist & Wasteful Industrial Policy Ever.”
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Are you a student or young scholar looking for opportunities to advance your studies and future career opportunities? The Mercatus Center at George Mason University can help. I’ve been with Mercatus for 12 years now and the most rewarding part of my job has always been the chance to interact with students and up-and-coming scholars who are hungry to learn more and make their mark on the world. Of course, learning and researching takes time and money. Mercatus works with students and scholars in many different fields to help them advance their careers by offering them some financial assistance to make their dreams easier to achieve.
The Mercatus Center’s Academic & Student Programs team (ASP) are the ones that make all this happen. ASP is currently accepting applications for various fellowships running through the 2022-2023 academic year (for students) and 2023 calendar year (for our early-career scholars). ASP recruits, trains, and supports graduate students who have gone on to pursue careers in academia, government, and public policy. Additionally, ASP supports scholars pursuing research on the cutting edge of academia. Mercatus fellows have an opportunity to learn from and interact with an impressive collection of Mercatus faculty, affiliated scholars, and visitors.
ASP offers several different fellowship programs to suit every need. Our fellows explore and discuss the foundations of political economy and public policy and pursue research on pressing issues. For graduate students who follow this blog and are generally interested in the big questions surrounding innovation, we especially encourage you to consider the Frédéric Bastiat Fellowship which will be premiering its innovation study track for the 2022-2023 academic year. I usually am an instructor at the session on tech and innovation policy.
Here are more details on all the academic fellowships that Mercatus currently offers. Please pass along this information to any students or early-career scholars who might be interested.
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Gabrielle Bauer, a Toronto-based medical writer, has just published one of the most concise explanations of what’s wrong with the precautionary principle that I have ever read. The precautionary principle, you will recall, generally refers to public policies that limit or even prohibit trial-and-error experimentation and risk-taking. Innovations are restricted until their creators can prove that they will not cause any harms or disruptions. In an essay for The New Atlantis entitled, “Danger: Caution Ahead,” Bauer uses the world’s recent experiences with COVID lockdowns as the backdrop for how society can sometimes take extreme caution too far, and create more serious dangers in the process. “The phrase ‘abundance of caution’ captures the precautionary principle in a more literary way,” Bauer notes. Indeed, another way to look at it is through the prism of the old saying, “better to be safe than sorry.” The problem, she correctly observes, is that, “extreme caution comes at a cost.” This is exactly right and it points to the profound trade-offs associated with precautionary principle thinking in practice.
In my own writing about the problems associated with the precautionary principle (see list of essays at bottom), I often like to paraphrase an ancient nugget of wisdom from St. Thomas Aquinas, who once noted in his Summa Theologica that, if the highest aim of a captain were merely to preserve their ship, then they would simply keep it in port forever. Of course, that is not the only goal of a captain has. The safety of the vessel and the crew is essential, of course, but captains brave the high seas because there are good reasons to take such risks. Most obviously, it might be how they make their living. But historically, captains have also taken to the seas as pioneering explorers, researchers, or even just thrill-seekers.
This was equally true when humans first decided to take to the air in balloons, blimps, airplanes, and rockets. A strict application of the precautionary principle would have instead told us we should keep our feet on the ground. Better to be safe than sorry! Thankfully, many brave souls ignored that advice and took the heavens in the spirit of exploration and adventure. As Wilbur Wright once famously said, “If you are looking for perfect safety, you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.” Needless to say, humans would have never mastered the skies if the Wright brothers (and many others) had not gotten off the fence and taken the risks they did. Continue reading →
This week, I hosted another installment of the “Tech Roundup,” for the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project. This latest 30-minute episode was on, “Autonomous Vehicles: Where Are We Now?” I was joined by Marc Scribner, a transportation policy expert with the Reason Foundation. We provided an quick update of where federal and state policy for AVs stands as of early 2022 and offered some thoughts about what might happen next in the Biden Administration Department of Transportation (DOT). Some experts believe that the DOT could be ready to start aggressively regulating driverless car tech or AV companies, especially Elon Musk’s Tesla. Tune in to hear what Marc and I have to say about all that and more.
Related Reading:
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.
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