1. What is progress studies and why is it so needed today?

In a sense, Progress Studies is nothing new. Progress studies goes back at least to the days of Adam Smith and plenty of important scholars have been thinking about it ever since. Those scholars and policy advocates have long been engaged in trying to figure out what’s the secret sauce that powers economic growth and human prosperity. It’s just that we didn’t call that Progress Studies in the old days.

The reason Progress Studies is important is because technological innovation has been shown to be the fundamental driver in improvements in human well-being over time.  When we can move the needle on progress, it helps individuals extend and improve their lives, incomes, and happiness. By extension, progress helps us live lives of our choosing. As Hans Rosling brilliantly argued, the goal of expanding innovation opportunities and raising incomes “is not just bigger piles of money” or more leisure time. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”

2. What don’t policymakers get about progress?

Policymakers often fail to appreciate the connection between innovation policy defaults and actual real-world innovation outcomes. Here is the biggest no-duh statement ever uttered: If you discourage innovation by default, you’ll get a lot less of it. In other words, incentives matters if you hope to create a positive innovation culture. Innovation culture refers to the various social and political attitudes, policies and entrepreneurial activities that, taken together, influence the innovative capacity of a particular region.

Thus, when policymakers make the Precautionary Principle the legal default for innovative activities, it means that government has put a red light in front of entrepreneurs and treated them and their innovations as guilty until proven innocent.  That’s a sure-fire recipe for stagnation.

The better approach is to make Permissionless Innovation our policy default and treat entrepreneurs and innovations as innocent until proven guilty. When our policy defaults offer entrepreneurs more green lights instead of red ones, it encourages more experimentation with new and better ways of doing things. In turn, this spurs business formation, job creation, new industries and products, and broad-based economic growth.

But policymakers consistently ignore this fundamental reality about the connection between policy and progress.

3. Can you think of any states or governments that are doing a good job of putting the insights of progress studies into practice?

This summer, I co-authored an essay about, “How Arizona Is Getting Innovation Culture Right,” and highlighted the many important reforms undertaken over the past eight years by Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona Legislature. Arizona has advanced several reforms that have helped the state get its innovation culture right both broadly and narrowly. Broadly speaking, the state took steps to minimize red tape burdens and streamline permitting process and occupational licensing mandates. They also promoted “right to earn a living” and “right to try” initiatives to broaden worker and patient opportunities.

In terms of more targeted reforms, Arizona took steps to clear the way for greater broadband rollout and encouraged experimentation with commercial drones and driverless cars. The state also helped pioneer the use of “regulatory sandboxes,” which grant innovators a temporary safe space free of excessive regulatory burdens so they can experiment with new products and services.

And then there’s the city of Miami. At the JMI event, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez delivered a keynote address and he identified 3 keys to attracting talent and building opportunity: (1) Keep taxes low, (2) keep people safe, and (3) focus on innovation. He’s following that script and making Miami a hotbed of entrepreneurial opportunity.

Mayor Suarez spoke of how he is embracing emerging technologies like blockchain to compete with the traditional geographic Goliaths of tech, like San Francisco and New York. There’s been a massive inflow of companies and investors as a result. The city has become #1 in tech job growth and the inflow of tech entrepreneurs. “It turns out that if you welcome people… they come,” he said. “They want to migrate to places that are on the cutting edge of technology” and find “pathways to prosperity.”

Miami and Arizona offer great models that other cities and states could follow if they hope to improve their own innovation culture.

4. What is the difference between progress studies and industrial organization, or industrial policy, or “government planning, but for innovation”?

Many policymakers foolishly believe there exists a precise technocratic cocktail that can immediately unlock innovation through highly targeted interventions and spending initiatives. In reality, achieving consistent growth and prosperity requires more than Big Government gimmicks. It’s a long game.

Many politicians and pundits are often fond of using machine-like metaphors and insisting that they have the ability to “fine-tune” innovative outcomes or “dial-in” economic development according to a precise formula. This is how we end up trillions in debt without much to show for it. Most recently, we’ve witnessed an “orgy of spending” on industrial policy schemes at the federal level.

The better metaphor for thinking about a nation’s innovation culture might be a plant or garden. Two of the great Progress Studies thinkers are F. A. Hayek and Joel Mokyr. Hayek once suggested that policymakers should aim to “cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.”  And Mokyr has argued that technological innovation and economic progress must be viewed as “a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose flourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can easily be arrested by relatively small external changes.”

Thus, the technocratic industrial policy mindset is always looking for “sexy” initiatives that capture a lot of short-term media attention, but typically fail to produce meaningful innovations or lasting growth. What’s more important to long-term prosperity is that policymakers get the “boring” stuff right.

The building blocks of the “boring” general approach economic development is a mix of broadly applicable tax, spending, regulatory and legal rules that help create a stable innovation ecosystem. Again, it’s like Mayor Suarez’s 3-prong approach of low taxes, safe communities, and a welcoming embrace of entrepreneurialism. That’s the secret sauce that fuels long-term progress and a sustainable prosperity.

5. Is there a disconnect between the theories of progress and the practice – in other words, is it a problem of governance forms?

Indeed, I already mentioned the difference between the Precautionary Principle and Permissionless Innovation and it’s always interesting to me how my scholars ignore the importance of these governance forms when thinking about how to advance progress. There exists an unfortunate tendency among many to either ignore or repeat the mistakes of the past. Having made significant economic and societal gains thanks to past technological progress, many pundits and policymakers come to take much of it for granted. Thus, Progress Studies requires a process of constant re-education to remind each new generation of what helped raise our living standards so dramatically over the past two centuries.

The dramatic growth in incomes, life expectancy, and human welfare were not the product of sheer luck but of important policy choices. The freedom to think, to innovate, and to trade are the three freedoms that gave us our modern riches. If our governance forms limit those foundational freedoms, our current welfare and future prosperity will suffer. This is the great lesson of Progress Studies.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer on Progress Studies

• “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Studies, April 23, 2022.
• “Is There a Science of Progress?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” Discourse, March 2, 2022 (A conversation between Adam Thierer and Jason Crawford of Roots of Progress).
• “Samuel Florman & the Continuing Battle over Technological Progress,” Medium, April 6, 2022.
• “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
• “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
• “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” Medium, September 18, 2018.
• “Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?” Medium, September 7, 2018.
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014.

1. What is progress?
2. What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?
3. If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I was honored to be asked by Clay Routledge to contribute answers to those questions alongside others, including: Steven Pinker (Harvard University), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), Matt Clancy (Institute for Progress), Marian Tupy (Human​Progress​.org), James Pethokoukis (AEI). I encourage you to jump over the roundtable and read all their excellent responses. I’ve included my answers down below:

What is progress?

Progress is the advancement of human health, happiness, and general well-being. Measures of well-being can be challenging, however, so we should consider a broad range of metrics, including: life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty measures, energy production/consumption, GDP, productivity, agricultural yields/nourishment, and access to various important goods, services, and conveniences. While each of these metrics may have limitations, taken together, they stand for something meaningful that represents a rough proxy for progress.

But we should always remember what progress means at a deeper level for every individual. Innovation and economic growth are important because they allow us to live lives of our own choosing and enjoy the fruits of a prosperous, pluralistic society.  Progress “is not just bigger piles of money,” as Hans Rosling once noted. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.”  Accordingly, we should aim to broaden the range of opportunities available to all people to help them flourish.

What are the most significant barriers holding back further progress?

The most significant threat to continued progress is the risk of stagnation accompanying efforts to protect the status quo. As Virginia Postrel taught us in her wonderful book The Future & Its Enemies, we should reject stasis-minded thinking and instead shoot for a world of dynamism, which cherishes and protects the freedom to think and act differently.

Progress hinges upon the growth of knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience, and the most important experiences involve trial-and-error learning. Public attitudes and policies that restrict people and ideas from intermingling freely are a recipe for intellectual, social, and economic stagnation. Accordingly, when we consider public policies toward progress, we should first seek to identify and remove legal and regulatory impediments that limit risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, and technological innovation. As science writer Matt Ridley provocatively puts it, to unlock more growth and prosperity, we must first remove obstacles to “ideas having sex.”

The free movement of people and capital is essential to this process. Openness to immigration is the easiest way for a nation to expand its potential for innovation and growth. But domestic labor skills and mobility are equally important. For entrepreneurs and workers, we need to reframe the battle for progress as “the freedom to innovate” and “the right to earn a living.”

Unfortunately, many barriers exist to advancing those goals, like occupational licensing rules and permitting processes, cronyist industrial protectionist schemes, inefficient tax schemes, and many other layers of regulatory red tape. Reforming or eliminating such rules is crucial for broadening opportunities.

Finally, we need to address cultural barriers to progress. Technology and entrepreneurs often get a bad rap in the media and popular culture. Fear and pessimism dominate their narratives. We must do a better job communicating the benefits of openness to change and give people more reasons to be optimistic about a dynamic future.

If those challenges can be overcome, what does the world look like in 50 years?

I agree with Yogi Berra that “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Nonetheless, history shows we can achieve remarkable things when we get the prerequisites for progress right and let people tap into their inherent inquisitiveness and inventiveness. Moving the needle on innovation and growth even just a little will yield compounding returns to future generations. But we should dare to dream bigger and think what progress means for each person today and in the future.

A pro-progress agenda will help us lead longer lives and significantly expand our capabilities because that is what people have always desired most. Accordingly, I believe the most significant advance of the next 50 years will be a radical increase in life expectancy and dramatic improvements in our physical and mental capabilities while we are alive.

Today’s tech critics often claim that technological innovation somehow undermines our humanity. They couldn’t be more wrong. There are few things more human than acts of invention. When we take steps to address practical human needs and wants, we enrich our lives and the lives of countless others. The future will be wonderful, so long as we are free to make it so.

It is my honor to have the lead paper in this new series. My 19-page essay is entitled, Governing Emerging Technology in an Age of Policy Fragmentation and Disequilibrium, and it represents my effort to concisely tie together all my writing over the past 30 years on governance trends for the Internet and related technologies. The key takeaways from my essay are:

• Traditional governance mechanisms are being strained by modern technological and political realities. Newer technologies, especially digital ones, are developing at an ever-faster rate and building on top of each other, blurring lines between sectors.
• Congress has failed to keep up with the quickening pace of technological change. It also continues to delegate most of its constitutional authority to agencies to deal with most policy concerns. But agencies are overwhelmed too. This situation is unlikely to change, creating a governance gap.
• Decentralized governance techniques are filling the gap. Soft law—informal, iterative, experimental, and collaborative solutions—represents the new normal for technological governance. This is particularly true for information sectors, including social media platforms, for which the First Amendment acts as a major constraint on formal regulation anyway.
• No one-size-fits-all tool can address the many governance issues related to fast-paced science and technology developments; therefore, decentralized governance mechanisms may be better suited to address newer policy concerns.

My arguments will frustrate many people of varying political dispositions because I adopt a highly pragmatic approach to technological governance. No matter what your preferred ideal state of affairs looks like in terms of technological governance, you’re bound to be disappointed by the way high-tech policy is unfolding today. Many people desire bright-letter hard law that has government(s) establishing comprehensive, precautionary regulation of various tech sectors. Others prefer a clearly defined but more light-touch policy regime for emerging technology. Alas, neither of these preferred hard law dispositions describe the world we live in today, nor will either of them likely govern the future. My essay outlines a variety of reasons why such hard law approaches are breaking down today, including general legislative dysfunctionalism, the endless delegation of power from Congress to regulatory agencies or the states, and the the intensifying “pacing problem” (i.e., the fact that technological change is happening at a must faster rate than policy change).

In light of this, I argue:

it is smart to think practically about alternative governance frameworks when traditional hard-law approaches prove slow or ineffective in addressing governance needs. It is also wise to consider alternative governance frameworks that might address the occasional downsides of disruptive technologies without completely foreclosing ongoing innovation opportunities the way many hard-law solutions would.

I also show that, whether anyone cares to admit it or not, we already live in a world of multiplying “soft law” mechanisms and decentralized governance approaches. I use the example of how these new governance trends are unfolding for autonomous vehicles, but note how we see decentralized governance approaches being utilized in many other sectors. This is equally true across the Atlantic where the United Kingdom is increasingly experimenting with new governance approached for emerging technologies.

What counts as “soft law” or “decentralized governance” is an open-ended and ever-changing topic of discussion. But I note that it, at a minimum, it includes: multi-stakeholder processes, experimental “sandboxes,” industry best practices or codes of conduct, technical standards, private certifications, agency workshops and guidance documents, informal negotiations, and education and awareness building efforts. I unpack these ideas in the essay in more detail.

For social media, soft law approaches are the current governance norm, even as hard law regulatory proposals continue to multiply rapidly. But I note that despite all that pressure for more formal regulatory governance of social media platforms, the First Amendment presents a formidable barrier to most of those proposals. Thus, soft law will continue to be the dominant governance approach here. I also conclude by predicting that that soft law will become the dominant approach for artificial intelligence, too, even as regulatory proposals multiply there as well.

I’ll have more to say about my paper and other papers in the AEI series in coming weeks and month. For now, I encourage you to jump over to the website AEI has set up for the series and take a look at my new paper.

Additional Reading :

• Ryan Hagemann, Jennifer Huddleston Skees, and Adam Thierer, “Soft Law for Hard Problems: The Governance of Emerging Technologies in an Uncertain Future,” Colorado Technology Law Journal 17 (2018): 37–130, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3118539.
• Adam Thierer, “Soft Law in U.S. ICT Sectors: Four Case Studies,” Jurimetrics 61, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 79–119, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3777490.
• Adam Thierer, “Congress as a Non-Actor in Tech Policy,” Medium, February 4, 2020, https://medium.com/@AdamThierer/congress-as-a-non-actor-in-tech-policy-5f3153313e11.
• Adam Thierer, “The Pacing Problem and the Future of Technology Regulation,” Bridge, August 8, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/pacing-problem-and-future-technology-regulation.
• Adam Thierer, “Artificial Intelligence Governance in the Obama–Trump Years,” IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, Vol, 2, Issue 4, (2021), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4013880.
• Adam Thierer, “Left and Right Take Aim at Big Tech—and the First Amendment,” Hill, December 8, 2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/584874-left-and-right-take-aim-at-big-tech-and-the-first-amendment.
• Adam Thierer, “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues,” Technology Liberation Front, December 8, 2021, https://techliberation.com/2021/12/08/the-classical-liberal-approach-to-digital-media-free-speech-issues.
• Adam Thierer, “The Great Deplatforming of 2021,” Discourse, January 14, 2021, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/01/14/the-great-deplatforming-of-2021.

Here’s a slide presentation on “The Future of Innovation Policy” that I presented to some student groups recently. It builds on themes discussed in my recent books, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, and Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. I specifically discuss the tension between permissionless innovation and the precautionary principle as competing policy defaults.

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. He was providing other rational optimists with a blueprint for how defend technological innovation against its many critics and criticisms. As he argued in The Civilized Engineer, we need to “broaden our conception of engineering to include all technological creativity.”^[3] And then we need to defend it with vigor.

In 1982, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers appropriately awarded Florman the distinguished Ralph Coats Roe Medal for his “outstanding contribution toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineer’s worth to contemporary society.” Carl Sagan had won the award the previous year. Alas, Forman never attained the same degree of notoriety as Sagan. That is a shame because Florman was as much a philosopher and a historian as he was an engineer, and his robust thinking on technology and society deserves far greater attention. More generally, his plain-spoken style and straight-forward defense of technological progress continues to be a model for how to counter today’s techno-pessimists.

This essay highlights some of the most important themes and arguments found in Florman’s writing and explains its continuing relevance to the ongoing battles over technology and progress.

What Motivates The “Antitechnologists”?

Florman was interested in answering questions about what motivates both engineers as well as their critics. He dug deep into psychology and history to figure out what makes these people tick. Who are engineers, and why do they do what they do? That was his primary question, and we will turn to his answers momentarily. But he also wanted to know what drove the technology critics to oppose innovation so vociferously.

Florman’s most important contribution to the history of ideas lies in his 6-part explanation of “the main themes that run through the works of the antitechnologists.”^[4] Florman used the term “antitechnologists” to describe the many different critics of engineering and innovation. He recognized that the term wasn’t perfect and that some people he labelled as such would object to it. Nevertheless, because they offer no umbrella label for their movement or way of thinking, Florman noted that opposition to, or general discomfort with, technology was what motivated these critics. Hence, the label “antitechnologists.”

Florman surveyed a wide swath of technological critics from many different disciplines—philosophy, sociology, law, and other fields. He condensed their main criticisms into six general points:

• Technology is a “thing” or a force that has escaped from human control and is spoiling our lives.
• Technology forces man to do work that is tedious and degrading.
• Technology forces man to consume things that he does not really desire.
• Technology creates an elite class of technocrats, and so disenfranchises the masses.
• Technology cripples man by cutting him off from the natural world in which he evolved.
• Technology provides man with technical diversions which destroy his existential sense of his own being.^[5]

No one else before this had ever crafted such a taxonomy of complaints from tech critics, and no one has done it better since Florman did so in 1976. In fact, it is astonishing how well Florman’s list continues to identify what motivates modern technology critics. New technologies have come and gone, but these same concerns tend to be brought up again and again. Florman’s books addressed and debunked each of these concerns in powerful fashion.

The Relentless Pessimism & Elitism of the Antitechnologists

Florman identified the way a persistent pessimism unifies antitechnologists. “Our intellectual journals are full of gloomy tracts that depict a society debased by technology,” he noted.^[6] What motivated such gloom and doom? “It is fear. They are terrified by the scene unfolding before their eyes.”^[7] He elaborated:

“The antitechnologists are frightened; they counsel halt and retreat. They tell the people that Satan (technology) is leading them astray, but the people have heard that story before. They will not stand still for vague promises of a psychic contentment that is to follow in the wake of voluntary temperance.”^[8]

The antitechnologist’s worldview isn’t just relentlessly pessimistic but also highly elitist and paternalistic, Florman argued. He referred to it as “Platonic snobbery.”^[9] The economist and political scientist Thomas Sowell would later call that snobbish attitude, “the vision of the anointed.”[10] Like Sowell, Florman was angered at the way critics stared down their noses at average folk and disregarded their values and choices:

“The antitechnologists have every right to be gloomy, and have a bounden duty to express their doubts about the direction our lives are taking. But their persistent disregard of the average person’s sentiments is a crucial weakness in their argument—particularly when they then ask us to consider the ‘real’ satisfactions that they claim ordinary people experienced in other cultures of other times.”^[11]

Florman noted that critics commonly complain about “too many people wanting too many things,” but he noted that, “[t]his is not caused by technology; it is a consequence of the type of creature that man is.”^[12] One can moralize all they want about supposed over-consumption or “conspicuous consumption,” but in the end, most of us strive to better our lives in various ways—including by working to attain things that may be out of our reach or even superfluous in the eyes of others.

For many antitechnologists and other social critics, only the noble search for truth and wisdom will suffice. Basically, everybody should just get back to studying philosophy, sociology, and other soft sciences. Modern tech critics, Forman said, fashion themselves as the intellectual descendants of Greek philosophers who believed that, “[t]he ideal of the new Athenian citizen was to care for his body in the gymnasium, reason his way to Truth in the academy, gossip in the agora, and debate in the senate. Technology was not deemed worthy of a free man’s time.”^[13]

“It is not surprising to find philosophers recommending the study of philosophy as a way of life,” Florman noted amusingly.^[14] But that does not mean all of us want (or even need) to devote our lives to such things. Nonetheless, critics often sneer at the choices made by the rest of us—especially when they involve the fruits of science and technology. “The most effective weapon in the arsenal of the antitechnologists is self-righteousness,” he noted,^[15] and, “[a]s seen by the antitechnologists, engineers and scientists are half-men whose analysis and manipulation of the world deprives them of the emotional experiences that are the essence of the good life.”^[16]

Indeed, it is not uncommon (both in the past and today) to see tech critics self-anoint themselves “humanists” and then suggest that anyone who thinks differently from them (namely, those who are pro-innovation) are the equivalent of anti-humanistic. I wrote about this in my 2018 essay, “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” I argued that, “[p]roperly understood, ‘technology’ and technological innovation are simply extensions of our humanity and represent efforts to continuously improve the human condition. In that sense, humanism and technology are compliments, not opposites.”

But the critics remain fundamentally hostile to that notion and they often suggest that there is something suspicious about those who believe, along with Florman, that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment. We rational optimists, the critics suggest, are simply too focused on crass, materialistic measures of happiness and human flourishing.

Florman observed this when noting how much grief he and fellow engineers and scientists got when engaging with critics. “Anyone who has attempted to defend technology against the reproaches of an avowed humanist soon discovers that beneath all the layers of reasoning—political, environmental, aesthetic, or moral—lies a deep-seated disdain for ‘the scientific view.’”^[17]

Everywhere you look in the world of Science & Technology Studies (STS) today, you find this attitude at work. In fact, the field is perhaps better labelled Anti-Science & Technology Studies, or at least Science & Technology Skeptical Studies. For most STSers, the burden of proof lies squarely on scientists, engineers, and innovators who must prove to some (often undefined) higher authorities that their ideas and inventions will bring worth to society (however the critics measure worth and value, which is often very unclear). Until then, just go slow, the critics say. Better yet, consult your local philosophy department for a proper course of action!

The critics will retort that they are just looking out for society’s best interests and trying to counter that selfish, materialist side of humanity. Florman countered by noting how, “most people are in search of the good life—not ‘the goods life’ as [Lewis] Mumford puts it, although some goods are entailed—and most human desires are for good things in moderate amounts.”^[18] Trying to better our lives through the creation and acquisition of new and better goods and services is just a natural and quite healthy human instinct to help us attain some ever-changing definition of whatever each of us considers “the good life.” “Something other than technology is responsible for people wanting to live in a house on a grassy plot beyond walking distance to job, market, neighbor, and school,” Florman responded.^[19] We all want to “get ahead” and improve our lot in life. That’s not because technology forces the urge upon us. Rather, that urge comes quite naturally as part of a desire to improve our lot in life.

The Power of Nostalgia

I have spent a fair amount of time in my own writing documenting the central role that nostalgia plays in motivating technological criticism.[20] Florman’s books repeatedly highlighted this reality. “The antitechnologists romanticize the work of earlier times in an attempt to make it seem more appealing than work in a technological age,” he noted. “But their idyllic descriptions of peasant life do not ring true.”^[21]

The funny thing is, it is hard to pin down the critics regarding exactly when the “golden era” or “good ‘ol days” were. But if there is one thing that they all agree on, it’s that those days have long passed us by. In a 2019 essay on “Four Flavors of Doom: A Taxonomy of Contemporary Pessimism,” philosopher Maarten Boudry noted:

“In the good old days, everything was better. Where once the world was whole and beautiful, now everything has gone to ruin. Different nostalgic thinkers locate their favorite Golden Age in different historical periods. Some yearn for a past that they were lucky enough to experience in their youth, while others locate utopia at a point farther back in time…”

Not all nostalgia is bad. Clay Routledge has written eloquently about how “nostalgia serves important psychological functions,” and can sometimes possess a positive character that strengthens individuals and society. But the nostalgia found in the works of tech critics is usually a different thing altogether. It is rooted in misery about the present and dread of the future—all because technology has apparently stolen away or destroyed all that was supposedly great about the past. Florman noted how, “the current pessimism about technology is a renewed manifestation of pastoralism,” that is typically rooted in historical revisionism about bygone eras.^[22] Many critics engage in what rhetoricians call “appeals to nature” and wax poetic about the joys of life for Pre-Technological Man, who apparently enjoyed an idyllic life free of the annoying intrusions created by modern contrivances.

Such “good ol days” romanticism is largely untethered from reality. “For most of recorded history humanity lived on the brink of starvation,” Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip noted in a column in early 2019. Even a cursory review of history offers voluminous, unambiguous proof that the old days were, in reality, eras of abject misery. Widespread poverty, mass hunger, poor hygiene, disease, short lifespans, and so on were the norm. What lifted humanity up and improved our lot as a species is that we learned how to apply knowledge to tasks in a better way through incessant trial-and-error experimentation. Recent books by Hans Rosling,^[23] Steven Pinker,^[24] and many others^[25] have thoroughly documented these improvements to human well-being over time.

The critics are unmoved by such evidence, preferring to just jump around in time and cherry-pick moments when they feel life was better than it is now. “Fond as they are of tribal and peasant life, the antitechnologists become positively euphoric over the Middle Ages,” Florman quipped.^[26] Why? Mostly because the Middle Ages lacked the technological advances of modern times, which the critics loathe. But facts are pesky things, and as Florman insisted, “it is fair to go on to ask whether or not life was ‘better’ in these earlier cultures than it is in our own.”^[27] “We all are moved to reverie by talk of an arcadian golden age,” he noted. “But when we awaken from this reverie, we realize that the antitechnologists have diverted us with half-truths and distortions.”^[28]

The critics’ reverence for the old days would be humorous if it wasn’t rooted in an arrogant and dangerous belief that society can be somehow reshaped to resemble whatever preferred past the critics desire. “Recognizing that we cannot return to earlier times, the antitechnologists nevertheless would have us attempt to recapture the satisfactions of these vanished cultures,” Florman noted. “In order to do this, what is required is nothing less than a change in the nature of man.”^[29] That is, the critics will insist that, “something must be done” (namely be forced from above via some grand design) to remake humans and discourage their inner homo faber desire to be an incessant tool-builder. But this is madness, Florman argued in one of the best passages from his work:

“we are beginning to realize that for mankind there will never be a time to rest at the top of the mountain. There will be no new arcadian age. There will always be new burdens, new problems, new failures, new beginnings. And the glory of man is to respond to his harsh fate with zest and ever-renewed effort.”^[30]

If the critics had their way, however, that zest would be dampened and those efforts restrained in the name of recapturing some mythical lost age. This sort of “rosy retrospection bias” is all the more shocking coming, as it does, from learned people who should know a lot more about the actual history of our species and the long struggle to escape utter despair and destitution. Alas, as the great Scottish philosopher David Hume observed in a 1777 essay, “The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.”^[31]

Why Invent? Homo Faber is our Nature

While taking on the critics and debunking their misplaced nostalgia about the past, Florman mounted a defense of engineers and innovators by noting that the need to tinker and create is in our blood. He began by noting how “the nature of engineering has been misconceived”^[32] because, in a sense, we are all engineers and innovators to some degree.

Florman’s thinking was very much in line with Benjamin Franklin, who once noted, “man is a tool-making animal.” “Both genetically and culturally the engineering instinct has been nurtured within us,” Florman argued, and this instinct “was as old as the human race.”^[33] “To be human is to be technological. When we are being technological we are being human—we are expressing the age-old desire of the tribe to survive and prosper.”^[34] In fact, he claimed, it was no exaggeration to say that humans, “are driven to technological creativity because of instincts hardly less basic than hunger and sex.”^[35] Had our past situation been as rosy as the critics sometimes suggest, perhaps we would have never bothered to fashion tools to escape those eras! It was precisely because humans wanted to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones that we started crafting more and better tools. Flint and firewood were never going to suffice.

But our engineering instincts do not end with basic needs. “Engineering responds to impulses that go beyond mere survival: a craving for variety and new possibilities, a feeling for proportion—for beauty—that we share with the artist,” Florman argued.^[36] In essence, engineering and innovation respond to both basic human needs and higher ones at every stage of “Maslow’s pyramid,” which describes a five-level hierarchy of human needs. This same theme is developed in Arthur Diamond’s recent book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. As Diamond argues, one of the most unheralded features of technological innovation is that, “by providing goods that are especially useful in pursuing a life plan full of challenging, worthwhile creative projects,” it allows each of us the pursue different conceptions of what we consider a good life.[37] But we are only able to do so by first satisfying our basic physiological needs, which innovation also handles for us.

Florman was frustrated that critics failed to understand this point and equally concerned that engineers and innovators had been cast as uncaring gadget-worshipers who did not see beauty and truth in higher arts and other more worldly goals and human values. That’s hogwash, he argued:

“What an ironic turn of events! For if ever there was a group dedicated to—obsessed with—morality, conscience, and social responsibility, it has been the engineering profession. Practically every description of the practice of engineering has stressed the concept of service to humanity.^[38] [. . .] Even in an age of global affluence, the main existential pleasure of the engineer will always be to contribute to the well-being of his fellow man.”^[39]

Engineers and innovators do not always set out with some grandiose design to change the world, although some aspire to do so. Rather, the “existential pleasures of engineering” that Florman described in the title of his most notable book comes about by solving practical day-to-day problems:

“The engineer does not find existential pleasure by seeking it frontally. It comes to him gratuitously, seeping into him unawares. He does not arise in the morning and say, ‘Today I shall find happiness.’ Quite the contrary. He arises and says, ‘Today I will do the work that needs to be done, the work for which I have been trained, the work which I want to do because in doing it I feel challenged and alive.’ Then happiness arrives mysteriously as a byproduct of his effort.”^[40]

And this pleasure of getting practical work done is something that engineers and innovators enjoy collectively by coming together and using specialized skills in new and unique combinations. “[T]echnological progress depends upon a variety of skills and knowledge that are far beyond the capacity of any one individual,” he insisted. “High civilization requires a high degree of specialization, and it was toward high civilization that the human journey appears always to have been directed.”^[41] Adam Smith could not have said it any better.

“Muddling Through”: Why Trial-and-Error is the Key to Progress

My favorite insights from Florman’s work relate to the way humans have repeatedly faced up to adversity and found ways to “muddle through.” This was the focus of an old essay of mine— “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change”—which argued that humans are a remarkably resilient species and that we regularly find creative ways to deal with major changes through constant trial-and-error experimentation and the learning that results from it.[42]

Florman made this same point far more eloquently long ago:

“We have been attempting to muddle along, acknowledging that we are selfish and foolish, and proceeding by means of trial and error. We call ourselves pragmatists. Mistakes are made, of course. Also, tastes change, so that what seemed desirable to one generation appears disagreeable to the next. But our overriding concern has been to make sure that matters of taste do not become matters of dogma, for that is the way toward violent conflict and tyranny. Trial and error, however, is exactly what the antitechnologists cannot abide.^[43]

It is the error part of trial-and-error that is so vital to societal learning. “Even the most cautious engineer recognizes that risk is inherent in what he or she does,” Florman noted. “Over the long haul the improbable becomes the inevitable, and accidents will happen. The unanticipated will occur.”[44] But “[s]ometimes the only way to gain knowledge is by experiencing failure,” he correctly observed[45] “To be willing to learn through failure—failure that cannot be hidden—requires tenacity and courage.”[46]

I’ve argued that this represents the central dividing line between innovation supporters and technology critics. The critics are so focused on risk-adverse, precautionary principle-based thinking that they simply cannot tolerate the idea that society can learn more through trial-and-error than through preemptive planning. They imagine it is possible to override that process and predetermine the proper course of action to create a safer, more stable society. In this mindset, failure is to be avoided at all costs through prescriptions and prohibitions. Innovation is to be treated as guilty until proven innocent in the hope of eliminating the error (or risk / failure) associated with trial-and-error experiments. To reiterate, this logic misses the fact that the entire point of trial-and-error is to learn from our mistakes and “fail better” next time, until we’ve solved the problem at hand entirely.[47]

Florman noted that, “sensible people have agreed that there is no free lunch; there are only difficult choices, options, and trade-offs.”[48] In other words, precautionary controls come at a cost. “All we can do is do the best we can, plan where we can, agree where we can, and compromise where we must,” he said.^[49] But, again, the antitechnologists absolutely cannot accept this worldview. They are fundamentally hostile to it because they either believe that a precautionary approach will do a better job improving public welfare, or they believe that trial-and-error fails to safeguard any number of other values or institutions that they regard as sacrosanct. This shuts down the learning process from which wisdom is generated. As the old adage goes, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” There can be no reward without some risk, and there can be no human advances without unless we are free to learn from the error portion of trial-and-error.

The Costs of Precautionary Regulation

Florman did not spend much time in his writing mulling over the finer points of public policy, but he did express skepticism about our collective ability to define and enforce “the public interest” in various contexts. A great many regulatory regimes—and their underlying statutes—rest on the notion of “protecting the public interest.” It is impossible to be against that notion, but it is often equally impossible to define what it even means.[50]

This leads to what Florman called, “the search for virtues that nobody can define”[51] “As engineers we are agreed that the public interest is very important; but it is folly to think that we can agree on what the public interest is. We cannot even agree on the scientific facts!”^[52] This is especially true today in debates over what constitutes “responsible innovation” or “ethical innovation.”[53] What Florman noted about such conversations three decades ago is equally true today:

“Whenever engineering ethics is on the agenda, emotions come quickly to a boil. […] “It is oh so easy to mouth clichés, for example to pledge to protect the public interest, as the various codes of engineering ethics do. But such a pledge is only a beginning and hardly that. The real questions remain: What is the public interest, and how is it to be served?”[54]

That reality makes it extremely difficult to formulate consensus regarding public polices for emerging technologies. And it makes it particularly difficult to define and enforce a “precautionary principle” for emerging technologies that will somehow strike the Goldilocks balance of getting things just right. This was the focus of my 2016 book Permissionless Innovation, which argued that the precautionary principle should be the last resort when contemplating innovation policy. Experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default because, “living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about,” I argued. The precautionary principle should only be tapped when the harms alleged to be associated with a new technology are highly probable, tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, or directly threatening to life and limb in some fashion.

For his part, Florman did not want to get his defense of engineering mixed up with politics and regulatory considerations. Engineers and technologists, he noted, come in many flavors and supported many different causes. Generally speaking, they tend to be quite pragmatic and shun strong ideological leanings and political pronouncements.

Of course, at some point, there is no avoiding this fight; one must comment on how to strike the right balance when politics enter the picture and threatens to stifle technological creativity. Florman’s perspectives on regulatory policy were somewhat jumbled, however. On one hand, he expressed concern about excessive and misguided regulations, but he also saw government playing an important role both in supporting various types of engineering projects and regulating certain technological developments:

“The regulatory impulse, running wild, wreaks havoc, first of all by stifling creative and productive forces that are vital to national survival. But it does harm also—and perhaps more ominously—by fomenting a counter-revolution among outraged industrialists, the intensity of which threatens to sweep away many of the very regulations we most need.”^[55]

In his 1987 book, The Civilized Engineer, Florman even expressed surprise and regret about growing pushback against regulation during the Reagan years. He also expressed skepticism about “the deceptive allure” of benefit-cost analysis, which was on the rise at the time, saying that the “attempt to apply mathematical consistency to the regulatory process was deplorably simplistic.”^[56] I have always been a big believer in the importance of benefit-cost analysis (BCA), so I was surprised to read of Florman’s skepticism of it. But he was writing in the early days of BCA and it was not entirely clear how well it work in practice. Four decades on, BCA has become far more rigorous, academically respected, and well-established throughout government. It has widespread and bipartisan support as a policy evaluation tool.

Florman adamantly opposed any sort of “technocracy”—or administration of government by technically-skilled elites. He thought it was silly that so many tech critics believe that such a thing already existed. “The myth of the technocratic elite is an expression of fear, like a fairy tale about ogres,” he argued. “It springs from an understandable apprehension, but since it has no basis in reality, it has no place in serious discourse.”^[57] Nor did he believe that there was any real chance a technocracy would ever take hold. “No matter how complex technology becomes, and no matter how important it turns out to be in human affairs, we are not likely to see authority vested in a class of technocrats.”^[58]

Florman hoped for wiser administration of law and regulations that affected engineering endeavors and innovation more generally. Like so many others, he did not necessarily want more law, just better law. One cannot fault that instinct, but Florman was not really interested in fleshing out the finer details of policy about how to accomplish that objective. He preferred instead to use history as a rough guide for policy. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the decline of Britain’s economic might in more recent times, Florman observed the ways in which societal and governmental attitudes toward innovation influenced the relative growth of science, technology, and national economies. In essence, he was explaining how “innovation culture” and “innovation arbitrage” had been realities for far longer than most people realize.[59]

“Where the entrepreneurial spirit cannot be rewarded, and where non-productive workers cannot be discharged, stagnation will set in,” Florman concluded.[60] This is very much in line with the thinking of economic historians like Joel Mokyr[61] and Deirdre McCloskey,[62] who have identified how attitudes toward creativity and entrepreneurialism affect the aggregate innovative capacity of nations, and thus their competitive advantage and relative prosperity in the world.

Debunking Determinism, Anxiety & Alienation Concerns

One of the ironies of modern technological criticism is the way many critics can’t seem to get their story straight when it comes to “technological determinism” versus social determinism. In the extreme view, technological determinism is the idea that technology drives history and almost has a will of its own. It is like an autonomous force that is practically unstoppable. By contrast, social determinism means that society (individuals, institutions, etc.) guide and control the development of technology.

In the field of Science and Technology Studies, technological determinism is a very hot matter. Academic and social critics are fond of painting innovation advocates as rigid tech determinists who are little better than uncaring anti-humanistic gadget-worshipers. The critics have employed a variety of other creative labels to describe tech determinism, including: “techno-fundamentalism,” “technological solutionism,” and even “techno-chauvinism.”

Engineers and other innovators often get hit with such labels and accused of being rigid technological determinists who just want to see tech plow over people and politics. But this was, and remains, a ridiculous argument. Sure, there will always be some wild-eyed futurists and extropian extremists who make preposterous claims about how “there is no stopping technology.” “Even now the salvation-through-technology doctrine has some adherents whose absurdities have helped to inspire the antitechnological movement, Florman said.”^[63] But that hardly represents the majority of innovation supporters, who well understand that society and politics play a crucial role in shaping the future course of technological development.

As Florman noted, we can dismiss extreme deterministic perspectives for a rather simple reason: technologies fail all the time! “If promising technologies can suffer fatal blows from unexpected circumstances,” Florman correctly argued, then “[t]his means that we are still—however precariously—in control of our own destiny.”[64] He believed that, “technology is not an independent force, much less a thing, but merely one of the types of activities in which people engage.”^[65] The rigid view of tech determinism can be dismissed, he said, because “it can be shown that technology is still very much under society’s control, that it is in fact an expression of our very human desires, fancies, and fears.”^[66]

But what is amazing about this debate is that some of the most rigid technological determinists are the technology critics themselves! Recall how Florman began his 6-part taxonomy of common complaints from tech critics. “A primary characteristic of the antitechnologists,” Florman argued, “is the way in which they refer to ‘technology’ as a thing, or at least a force, as if it had an existence of its own” and which “has escaped from human control and is spoiling our lives.”[67]

He noted that many of the leading tech critics of the post-war era often spoke in remarkably deterministic ways. “The idea that a man of the masses has no thoughts of his own, but is something on the order of a programmed machine, owes part of its popularity with the antitechnologists to the influential writings of Herbert Marcuse,” he believed.^[68] But then such thinking accelerated and gained greater favor with the popularity of critics like French philosopher Jacques Ellul, American historian Lewis Mumford, and American cultural critic Neil Postman.

Their books painted a dismal portrait of a future in which humans were subjugated to the evils of “technique” (Ellul), “technics” (Mumford), or “technopoly” (Postman).  The narrative of their works read like dystopian science fiction. Essentially, there was no escaping the iron grip that technology had on us. Postman claimed, for example, that technology was destined to destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Which gets us to commonly heard concerns about how technology leads to “anxiety” and “alienation.” “Having established the view of technology as an evil force, the antitechnologists then proceed to depict the average citizen as a helpless slave, driven by this force to perform work he detests,” Florman notes.^[69] “Anxiety and alienation are the watchwords of the day, as if material comforts made life worse, rather than better.”^[70]

These concerns about anxiety, alienation, and “dehumanization” are omnipresent in the work of modern tech critics, and they are also tied up with traditional worries about “conspicuous consumption.” It’s all part of the “false consciousness” narrative they also peddle, which basically views humans as too ignorant to look out for their own good. In this worldview, people are sheep being led to the slaughter by conniving capitalists and tech innovators, who are just trying to sell them things they don’t really need.

Florman pointed out how preposterous this line of thinking is when he noted how critics seem to always forget that, “a basic human impulse precedes and underlies each technological development”:^[71]

“Very often this impulse, or desire, is directly responsible for the new invention. But even when this is not the case, even when the invention is not a response to any particular consumer demand, the impulse is alive and at the ready, sniffing about like a mouse in a maze, seeking its fulfillment. We may regret having some of these impulses. We certainly regret giving expression to some of them. But this hardly gives us the right to blame our misfortunes on a devil external to ourselves.”^[72]

Consider the automobile, for example. Industrial era critics often focused on it and lambasted the way they thought industrialists pushed auto culture and technologies on the masses. Did we really need all those cars? All those colors? All those options? Did we really even need cars? The critics wanted us to believe that all these things were just imposed upon us. We were being force-fed options we really didn’t even need or want. “Choice” in this worldview is just a fiction; a front for the nefarious ends of our corporate overlords.

Florman demolished this reasoning throughout his books. “However much we deplore the growth of our automobile culture, clearly it has been created by people making choices, not by a runaway technology,” he argued.^[73] Consumer demand and choice is not some fiction fabricated and forced upon us, as the antitechnologists suggest. We make decisions. “Those who would blame all of life’s problems on an amorphous technology, inevitably reject the concept of individual responsibility,” Florman retorted. “This is not humanism. It is a perversion of the humanistic impulse.”^[74]

A modern tweak on the conspicuous consumption and false consciousness arguments is found in the work of leading tech critics like Evgeny Morozov, who pens attention-grabbing screeds decrying what he regards as “the folly of technological solutionism.” Morozov bluntly states that “our enemy is the romantic and revolutionary problem solver who resides within” of us, but most specifically within the engineers and technologists.[75]

But would the world really be better place it tinkerers didn’t try to scratch that itch?[76] In 2021, the Wall Street Journal profiled JoeBen Bevirt, an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has been working to bring flying cars from sci-fi to reality. Channeling Florman’s defense of the existential pleasures associated with engineering, Bevirt spoke passionately about the way innovators can help “move our species forward” through their constant tinkering to find solutions to hard problems. “That’s kind of the ethos of who we are,” he said. “We see problems, we’re engineers, we work to try to fix them.”[77]

When tech critics like Morozov decry “solutionism,” they are essentially saying that innovators like Bevirt need to just shut up and sit down. Don’t try to improve the world through tinkering; just settle for the status quo, the critics basically state. That’s the kiss of death for human progress, however, because it is only through incessant experimentation with the new and different approaches to hard problems that we can advance human well-being. “Solutionism” isn’t about just creating some shiny new toy; it’s about expanding the universe of potentially life-enriching and life-saving technologies available to humanity.

Conclusion

This review of Samuel Florman’s work may seem comprehensive, but it only scratches the surface of his wide-ranging writing. Florman was troubled that engineering lacked support or at least understanding. Perhaps that was because, he reasoned, that “[t]here is no single truth that embodies the practice of engineering, no patron saint, no motto or simple credo. There is no unique methodology that has been distilled from millenia of technological effort.”  Or, more simply, it may also be the case that the profession lacked articulate defenders. “The engineer may merely be waiting for his Shakespeare,” he suggested.^[78]

Through his life’s work, however, Samuel Florman became that Shakespeare; the great bard of engineering and passionate defender of technological innovation and rational optimism more generally. In looking for a quote or two to close out my latest book, I ended with this one from Florman:

“By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease, and privation. Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business.”^[79]

Let us resolve to make sure that Florman’s greatest fear does not come to pass. Let us resolve to make sure that the great human adventure never ends. And let us resolve to counter the antitechnologists and their fundamentally anti-humanist worldview, which would most assuredly make our existence the “dull business” that Florman dreaded.

We can do better when we put our minds and hands to work innovating in an attempt to build a better future for humanity. Samuel Florman, the great prophet of progress, showed us the way forward.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer:

• “How to Get the Future We Were Promised,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
•  “Is There a Science of Progress?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• “How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
• “Is It ‘Techno-Chauvinist’ & ‘Anti-Humanist’ to Believe in the Transformative Potential of Technology?” Medium, September 18, 2018.
• “Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream?” Medium, September 7, 2018.
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014.

Endnotes:

[1]    Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

[2]    Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2021/11/09/defending-innovation-against-attacks-from-all-sides.

[3]    Samuel C. Forman, The Civilized Engineer (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1987), p. 26.

[4]    Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York, St. Martins Griffin, 2^nd Edition, 1994), p. 53-4.

[5]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 53-4.

[6]    Samuel C. Florman, Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 186.

[7]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 76.

[8]    Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 77.

[9]    The Civilized Engineer, p. 38.

[10]   Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

[11]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[12]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 76.

[13]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 35.

[14]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 102.

[15]   Blaming Technology, p. 162.

[16]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 55.

[17]   Blaming Technology, p. 70.

[18]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 77.

[19]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 60.

[20]   Adam Thierer, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 14, no. 1 (2013), p. 312–50, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2012494.

[21]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 62.

[22]   Blaming Technology, p. 9.

[23]   Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).

[24]   Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

[25]   Gregg Easterbrook, It’s Better than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear (New York: Public Affairs, 2018); Michael A. Cohen & Micah Zenko, Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

[26]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 54.

[27]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[28]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 72.

[29]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 55.

[30]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 117.

[31]   David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” (1777), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-essays-moral-political-literary-lf-ed.

[32]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[33]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 6.

[34]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[35]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 115.

[36]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 20.

[37]   Arthur Diamond, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[38]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 19.

[39]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 147.

[40]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 148.

[41]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 30.

[42]   Adam Thierer, “Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change,” Medium, June 30, 2014, https://medium.com/tech-liberation/muddling-through-how-we-learn-to-cope-with-technological-change-6282d0d342a6.

[43]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 84.

[44]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 71.

[45]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 72.

[46]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 72.

[47]   Adam Thierer, “Failing Better: What We Learn by Confronting Risk and Uncertainty,” in Sherzod Abdukadirov (ed.), Nudge Theory in Action: Behavioral Design in Policy and Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 65-94.

[48]   The Civilized Engineer, p. xi.

[49]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 85.

[50]   Adam Thierer, “Is the Public Served by the Public Interest Standard?” The Freeman, September 1, 1996,  https://fee.org/articles/is-the-public-served-by-the-public-interest-standard.

[51]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 84.

[52]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 22.

[53]   Adam Thierer, “Are ‘Permissionless Innovation’ and ‘Responsible Innovation’ Compatible?” Technology Liberation Front, July 12, 2017, https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/are-permissionless-innovation-and-responsible-innovation-compatible.

[54]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 79.

[55]   Blaming Technology, p. 106.

[56]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 158.

[57]   Blaming Technology, p. 41.

[58]   Blaming Technology, p. 40-1.

[59]   Adam Thierer, “Embracing a Culture of Permissionless Innovation,” Cato Online Forum, November 17, 2014, https://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/embracing-culture-permissionless-innovation; Christopher Koopman, “Creating an Environment for Permissionless Innovation,” Testimony before the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, May 22, 2018, https://www.mercatus.org/publications/creating-environment-permissionless-innovation.

[60]   The Civilized Engineer, p. 117.

[61]   Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[62]   Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010).

[63]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 57.

[64]   Blaming Technology, p. 22.

[65]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 58.

[66]   Blaming Technology, p. 10.

[67]   The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 48, 53.

[68]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 70.

[69]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 49.

[70]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 16.

[71]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 61.

[72]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 61.

[73]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 60.

[74]   Blaming Technology, p. 104.

[75]   Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).

[76]   Adam Thierer, “A Net Skeptic’s Conservative Manifesto,” Reason, April 27, 2013, https://reason.com/2013/04/27/a-net-skeptics-conservative-manifesto-2/.

[77]   Emily Bobrow, “JoeBen Bevirt Is Bringing Flying Taxis from Sci-Fi to Reality,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/joeben-bevirt-is-bringing-flying-taxis-from-sci-fi-to-reality-11625848177.

[78]   Existential Pleasures of Engineering, p. 96.

[79]   Blaming Technology, p. 193.

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.

Books

• J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car ? (Stripe Press, 2021).
• Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (New York: Harper, 2020).
• Andrew McAfee, More from Less (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
• Ronald Bailey & Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020).
• Arthur M. Diamond Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018).
• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).
• Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
• Tim Harford, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom , 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• Calestous Juma, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Joe Carlen, A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).
• Larry Downes, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
• Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
• Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
• David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998).
• Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
• Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
• Nathan Rosenberg and L. E.. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
• Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976, 1994).

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”:

[I]t ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

Hall notes that the Machiavelli Effect “has nothing to do with any conspiracy.” Rather, it comes down to human nature: 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). Isaac Asimov identified the same problem in a 1974 lecture when he noted how there had been “bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance . . . to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth.” [On this same point, also see Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, by Calestous Juma. It’s the best history on the topic.]

Hall identifies how the Machiavelli Effect held back nuclear, nanotech, and aviation technologies. “Over the long run, unchecked regulation destroys the learning curve, prevents innovation, protects and preserves inefficiency, and makes progress run backward.” The problem is the Precautionary Principle, which undermines the learning curve is by setting policy defaults to no trial and error as opposed to free to experiment. There can be no reward without some risk! Hall quotes Wilbur Wright on this, who once noted that, “If you are looking for perfect safety, you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.”

Over-regulation of those sectors also resulted in massive misallocation of talent, “taking more than a million of the country’s most talented and motivated people and putting them to work making arguments and filing briefs instead of inventing, developing, and manufacturing.” Hall is equally critical of government R&D efforts. “One of the great tragedies of the latter 20th century, and clearly one of the causes of the Great Stagnation,” he argues, “was the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of science and research funding.”

Hall’s book builds on Jason Crawford’s insight that, “We need a new philosophy of progress,” that is rooted in optimism about the future and support for a culture of trial-and-error experimentation. Hall’s book is a major contribution to that effort. Hall makes a profoundly moral case for innovation. “The zero-sum society is a recipe for evil,” because it leaves us with a “static level of existence” that denies us the ability to improve the human condition. Indeed, Hall’s book is the most full-throated defense of innovation by a trained scientist or engineer since Samuel Florman’s 1976 “Existential Pleasures of Engineering.” Both are celebrations of the potential for humanity to build more and better tools to improve the world.

Hall’s book should also be read alongside books from Virginia Postrel (“The Future and Its Enemies”), Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”), Matt Ridley (“How Innovation Works”) and Deirdre McCloskey’s three-volume trilogy about the history of modern economic growth. These scholars argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism and human betterment, and that to deny people the ability to improve their lot in life is fundamentally anti-human.

I just cannot recommend Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car? highly enough. It’s a masterpiece. And bravo to Stripe Press for publishing a beautiful hardbound edition. It is a stunning book both to behold and read. Order it now, and jump over to Discourse to read my entire review of it.

On December 13th, I will be participating in an Atlas Network panel on, “Big Tech, Free Speech, and Censorship: The Classical Liberal Approach.” In anticipation of that event, I have also just published a new op-ed for The Hill entitled, “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment.” In this essay, I expand upon that op-ed and discuss the growing calls from both the Left and the Right for a variety of new content regulations. I then outline the classical liberal approach to concerns about free speech platforms more generally, which ultimately comes down to the proposition that innovation and competition are always superior to government regulation when it comes to content policy.

In the current debates, I am particularly concerned with calls by many conservatives for more comprehensive governmental controls on speech policies enforced by various private platforms, so I will zero in on those efforts in this essay. First, here’s what both the Left and the Right share in common in these debates: Many on both sides of the aisle desire more government control over the editorial decisions made by private platforms. They both advocate more political meddling with the way private firms make decisions about what types of content and communications are allowed on their platforms. In today’s hyper-partisan world,” I argue in my Hill column, “tech platforms have become just another plaything to be dominated by politics and regulation. When the ends justify the means, principles that transcend the battles of the day — like property rights, free speech and editorial independence — become disposable. These are things we take for granted until they’ve been chipped away at and lost.”

Despite a shared objective for greater politicization of media markets, the Left and the Right part ways quickly when it comes to the underlying objectives of expanded government control. As I noted in my Hill op-ed:

there is considerable confusion in the complaints both parties make about “Big Tech.” Democrats want tech companies doing more to limit content they claim is hate speech, misinformation, or that incites violence. Republicans want online operators to do less, because many conservatives believe tech platforms already take down too much of their content.

This makes life very lonely for free speech defenders and classical liberals. Usually in the past, we could count on the Left to be with us in some free speech battles (such as putting an end to “indecency” regulations for broadcast radio and television), while the Right would be with us on others (such as opposition to the “Fairness Doctrine,” or similar mandates). Today, however, it is more common for classical liberals to be fighting with both sides about free speech issues.

My focus is primarily on the Right because, with the rise of Donald Trump and “national conservatism,” there seems to be a lot of soul-searching going on among conservatives about their stance toward private media platforms, and the editorial rights of digital platforms in particular.

In my new  Hill essay and others articles (all of which are listed down below), I argue there is a principled classical liberal approach to these issues that was nicely outlined by President Ronald Reagan in his 1987 veto of Fairness Doctrine legislation, when he said:

History has shown that the dan­gers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and compe­tition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.

Let’s break that line down. Reagan admits that media bias can be a real thing. Of course it is! Journalists, editors, and even the companies they work for all have specific views. They all favor or disfavor certain types of content. But, at least in the United States, the editorial decisions made by these private actors are protected by the First Amendment. Section 230 is really quite secondary to this debate, even though some Trumpian conservatives wrongly suggest that it’s the real problem here. In reality, national conservatives would need to find a way to work around well-established First Amendment protections if they wanted to impose new restrictions on the editorial rights of private parties.

But why would they want to do that? Returning to the Reagan veto statement, we should remember how he noted that, even if the First Amendment did not protect the editorial discretion of private media platforms, bureaucratic regulation was not the right answer to the problem of “bias.”  Competition and choice were the superior answer. This is the heart and soul of the classical liberal perspective: more innovation is always superior to more regulation.

For the past 30 years, conservatives and classical liberals were generally aligned on that point. But the ascendancy of Donald Trump created a rift in that alliance that now threatens to grow into a chasm as more and more Right-of-center people begin advocating for comprehensive control of media platforms.

The problems with that are numerous beginning with the fact that none of the old rationales for media controls work (and most of them never did). Consider the old arguments justifying widespread regulation of private media:

• “Scarcity” was the oldest justification for media regulation, but we live in the exact opposite world today, in which the most common complaint about media is the abundance of it!
• Conversely, the supposed “pervasiveness” of some media (namely broadcasting) was used as a rationale for government censorship in the past. But that, too, no longer works because in today’s crowded media marketplace and Internet-enabled world, all forms of communications and entertainment are equally pervasive to some extent.
• State ownership and licensing of spectrum was another rationale for control that no longer works. No digital media platforms need federal licenses to operate today. So, that hook is also gone. Moreover, the answer to the problem of government ownership of media is to stop letting the government own and control media assets, including spectrum.
• “Fairness” is another old excuse for control, with some regulatory advocates suggesting that five unelected bureaucrats at the Federal Communications Commission (or some other agency) are well-suited to “balance” the airing of viewpoints on media platforms. Of course, America’s disastrous experience with the Fairness Doctrine proved just how wrong that thinking was. [I summarize all the evidence proving that here.]

That leaves a final, more amorphous rationale for media control: ” gatekeeper” concerns and assertions that private media platforms can essentially become “state actors.” In the wake of Donald Trump’s “de-platorming” from Facebook and Twitter, many of his supporters began adopting this language in defense of more aggressive government control of private media platforms, including the possibility of declaring those platforms common carriers and demanding that some sort of amorphous “neutrality” mandates be imposed on them. But as Berin Szóka and Corbin Barthold of Tech Freedom note:

Where courts have upheld imposing common carriage burdens on communications networks under the First Amendment, it has been because consumers reasonably expected them to operate conduits. Not so for social media platforms. [. . . ] When it comes to the regulation of speech on social media, however, the presumption of content neutrality does not apply. Conservatives present their criticism of content moderation as a desire for “neutrality,” but forcing platforms to carry certain content and viewpoints that they would prefer not to carry constitutes a “content preference” that would trigger strict scrutiny. Under strict scrutiny, any “gatekeeper” power exercised by social media would be just as irrelevant as the monopoly power of local newspapers was in [previous Supreme Court holdings].

Put simply, efforts to stretch extremely narrow and limited common carriage precedents to fit social media just don’t work. We’ve already seen lower courts declare that recently when blocking the enforcement of new conservative-led efforts in Florida and Texas to limit the editorial discretion of private social media platforms. If conservatives really hope to get around these legal barriers to regulation, what would be needed would be a more far-reaching strike at the First Amendment itself. That would entail a jurisprudential revolution at the Supreme Court — reversing about a century of free speech precedents — or an some sort of an effort to amend the First Amendment itself. These things are almost certainly not going to occur.

But, again, this hasn’t stopped some conservatives from pitching extreme solutions in their efforts to regulate digital media at both the state and federal level. I discuss these efforts in previous essays on, “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality,“ “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet,“ and “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’.“ Perhaps some Trump-aligned conservatives understand that these legislative efforts are unlikely to work, but they continue to push them in an attempt to make life hell for tech platforms, or perhaps just to troll the Left and “own the Libs.”

On the other hand, some conservatives seem to really believe in some of the extreme ideas they are tossing around. What is particular troubling about these efforts is the way — following Trump’s lead — some conservatives, including even more mainstream conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, are increasingly referring to private media platforms as “the enemy of the people.” That’s the kind of extremist language typically used by totalitarian thugs and Marxist lunatics who so hate private enterprise and freedom of speech that they are willing to adopt a sort of burn-the-village-to-save-it rhetorical approach to media policy.

And speaking of Marxists, here’s what is even more incredible about these efforts by some conservatives to use such rationales in support of comprehensive media regulation: It is all based on the “media access” playbook concocted by radical Leftist scholars a generation ago. As I summarized in my essay on, “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“:

Media access advocates look to transform the First Amendment into a tool for social change to advance specific political ends or ideological objectives. Media access theory dispenses with both the editorial discretion rights and private property rights of private speech platforms. Private platforms become subject to the political whims of policymakers who dictate “fair” terms of access. We can think of this as communications collectivism.

Media access doctrine is rooted in an arrogant, elitist, anti-property, anti-freedom ethic that suggest the State is a better position to dictate what can and cannot be said on private speech platforms. “It’s astonishing, yet nonetheless true,” I continued on in that essay, “that the ideological roots of Trump’s anti-social media campaign lie in the works of those extreme Leftists and even media Marxists. He has just given media access theory his own unique nationalistic spin and sold this snake oil to conservatives.” Yet, Trump and other national conservatives are embracing this contemptible doctrine because now more than ever the ends apparently justify the means in American politics. Nevermind that all this could come back to haunt them when the Left somehow leverages this regulatory apparatus to control Fox News or other sites and content that conservatives favor! Once media platforms are viewed as just another thing to be controlled by politics, the only question is which politics and how are those politics enforced? Certainly both the Left and the Right cannot both have their way given all that current divides them.

Finally, what is utterly perplexing about all this is how much thanks national conservatives really owe to the major digital platforms they now seek to destroy. As I noted in my new Hill op-ed:

There has never been more opportunity for conservative viewpoints than right now. Each day on Facebook, the top-10 most shared links are dominated by pundits such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Dinesh D’Souza and Sean Hannity. Right-leaning content is shared widely on Twitter each day. Websites like Dailywire.com and Foxnews.com get far more traffic than the New York Times or CNN.

Thus, conservatives might be shooting themselves in the foot if they were able to convince more legislatures to adopt the media access regulatory playbook because it could have profound unintended consequences once the Left uses those tools to somehow restrict access to “hate speech” or “misinformation” — and then define it so broadly so as to include much of the top material posted by conservatives on Facebook and Twitter ever day.

Not all conservatives have drank the media access kool-aid. In the wake of Trump’s deplatforming from a few major sites, a wave of new Right-leaning digital services are being planned or have already launched. (Axios and Forbes recently summarized some of these efforts.) I don’t know which will of these efforts will succeed, but more competition and platform-building are certainly superior to current calls by some Trump supporters for government regulation of mainstream social media services.

Again, this is the old Reagan vision at its finest! We can achieve a better media landscape, “only through the freedom and compe­tition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee,” not through bureaucratic regulation. It remains the principled path forward.

Additional Reading :

• “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment“
• “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer“
• “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“
• “Conservatives & Common Carriage: Contradictions & Challenges“
• “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“
• “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“
• “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“
• “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“
• “The Not-So-SMART Act“
• “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

Older essays & testimony :

• Adam Thierer, “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age,” Catholic University Law School, 15 CommLaw Conspectus (Summer 2007): 431-482.
• Adam Thierer, Testimony at FCC’s Hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era”, March 3, 2010.
• Adam Thierer, “FCC v. Fox and the Future of the First Amendment in the Information Age,” Federalist Society, Engage (Feb. 2009).

We zero in on the distinction between general versus targeted economic development efforts and argue that:

whether we are referring to federal, state, or local planning efforts—the more highly tar­geted development efforts typically involve many tradeoffs that are often not taken into consider­ation by industrial policy advocates. Downsides include government steering of public resources into unproductive endeavors, as well as more serious problems, such as cronyism and even corruption.

We also stress the need to more tightly define the term “industrial policy” to ensure rational evaluation is even possible. We argue that, “industrial policy has intentionality and directionality, which distinguishes it from science policy, innovation policy, and economic policy more generally.” We like the focus definition used by economist Nathaniel Lane, who defines industrial policy as “intentional political action meant to shift the industrial structure of an economy.”

Our report examines the so-called “Japan model” of industrial policy that was all the rage in intellectual circles a generation ago and then compares it to the Chinese and European industrial policy efforts of today, which many pundits claim that the US needs to mimic. We find problems with those models and argue that:

America’s goal should not be to “imitate China” or “copy its playbook” when it comes to targeted industrial policy and technological governance of AI and other high-tech sectors. Europe’s approach, although not as heavy-handed, is also not a good model. Not only would the Chinese and European approaches potentially undermine the permissionless innovation ethos that made America’s tech companies become global powerhouses, but expanded industrial policy efforts would entail massive state bets on risky ventures using taxpayer resources.

We discuss the public choice dynamics surrounding many industrial development efforts and note that, “what is often described as “industrial policy” is in reality nothing more than industrial politics.” We highlight how many of the largest industrial policy programs have been prone to highly inefficient contracting procedures and massive cost overruns. Sometimes outright corruption even becomes a problem with some of the largest programs. But that’s not the only cost. Sometimes, in their effort to promote specific industrial outputs or outcomes, government undermines the very innovation they hope to spur.

When governments repress the entrepreneurial spirit of their most innovative creators and companies, this is bound to have negative ramifications for long-term competitiveness and economic growth. Heavy-handed industrial policy schemes can contribute to this sort of repression as the state gains more levers of control over private companies.

We note how that has certainly been the case in the European Union, where “countries have adopted a highly precautionary regulatory model for new digital sectors that shuns risk-taking and focuses on maximizing other values at the expense of disruptive change. This approach has resulted in fewer national champions, and it has cost Europe in terms of global competitive advantage,” we note. We also highlight the long string of failed European industrial policy programs.

Ours is not a doctrinaire analysis; we take a pragmatic approach to the evaluation of industrial policy programs and proposals. Some of them may succeed based simply on the reality that “if government officials roll the proverbial industrial policy dice enough times, some bets are bound to pay off, at least indirectly.” But any serious analysis of these efforts, we argue, must fully weigh the trade-offs associated with the potential tax and compliance burdens associated with funding them to begin with.

But we admit that, “industrial policy will always be with us to some extent, given the sheer size of government and the many existing programs already devoted to economic development or high-tech initiatives.” Toward that end, we wrap up the paper with a variety of high-level recommendations about industrial policy. We highlight how:

The priority should be generalized economic development over targeted development efforts. The most important thing that policymakers can do to boost economic opportunities is to create a legal and regulatory environment that is conducive to entrepreneurship, investment, innovation, and free trade.  [. . . ] government should focus on setting the table for entrepreneurial activity instead of trying to determine everything on the plate. To put this differently, policymakers need to avoid the “fun stuff” and focus on “boring” issues that often get neglected.

We apply these insights to the ongoing debate over regional economic development and the specific effort currently underway at the federal level to encourage “regional innovation hubs,” as federal and state lawmakers look to create “the next Silicon Valley” elsewhere.

In terms of our nation’s overall investment in R&D, we note that “[t]he United States has the most vibrant venture capital (VC) market in the world, and this market helps support risky ventures without gambling with taxpayer dollars.” While some bemoan the fact that private enterprise provides the bulk of R&D expenditures in the US – and that amount is increasing relative to governmental sources – this is actually something that should be celebrated. The strength of private-funded R&D helps set the US apart and make investment markets nimbler and more responsive to real-world needs. Moreover, global unicorn growth in the US continues at a healthy clip. From 2010 to mid-2021, the US created 53 percent of global unicorns, compared with 20 percent for China. These facts are often overlook in industrial policy debates.

While our paper is comprehensive, admittedly, there are some things we leave out of the analysis or do not spend as much time discussing. For example, there is a never-ending debate about the relationship between national security and industrial policy that raises many hard questions. A nation needs military hardware to defend itself, and almost every program to provide weapons and military equipment in the US involve private contracting to get them. These are the biggest industrial policy programs at all, but we don’t spend a lot of time focus on them in our paper because that would have taken us far afield.

We have a short section on these issues that notes how “defense-related programs have also been prone to highly inefficient contracting procedures and massive cost overruns.” Many of these programs remain vital, however, and must find a way to make them more efficient and cost-effective. But there are still other issues related to national security and industrial policy that raise hard questions, including: export or import controls, trade restrictions, and more. These continue to be challenging issues and I personally hope to revisit some of them in upcoming essays.

With Congress still trying to finalize its mega industrial policy bill, our paper is relevant to the short-term debate over these issues. But our hope is that this paper offers a big-picture, long-term framework for thinking through the challenges associated with industrial policy issues both here and abroad.

Here is the outline of the paper and, again, you can find it at this link. (The report can also be found on SSRN & Research Gate).

1. Introduction: Definitional Challenges 5
2. Calls for Expanding Industrial Policy to Boost High-Tech Innovation 8
3. Some (Quickly Forgotten) Recent History 11
4. The Romantic View of Industrial Policy vs. Reality 15
5. The Challenge of Creating “National Champions”: Europe’s Failures 20
6. Adverse Effects of State-Led Promotion: The China Model Examined 23
7. Where Does Real Competitive Advantage Come From? 27
8. Industrial Policy Did Not Give Us the Internet and the iPhone 33
9. Evaluating Other Industrial Policy Efforts 39
10. Using Competitions and Prizes to Encourage Innovation More Efficiently 46
11. Conclusion: Generality Is Better Than Targeting

Additional Reading:

• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy Advocates Should Learn from Don Lavoie,” Discourse, November 5, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Government Planning and Spending Won’t Replicate Silicon Valley,” Discourse, August 18, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “To Promote Tech Hubs Across the Country, Governments Should Focus on Improving the General Business Environment,” Discourse, September 9, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse,” Discourse, June 28, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy as ‘Casino Economics‘,” The Hill, July 12, 2021.
• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” Discourse, March 11, 2021.
• Connor Haaland & Adam Thierer, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” Discourse, February 11, 2021.
• Matthew D. Mitchell and Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy is a Very Old, New Idea,” Discourse, April 6, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy,’” Technology Liberation Front, September 3, 2020.
• Adam Thierer, “Skeptical Takes on Expansive Industrial Policy Efforts,” Technology Liberation Front, ongoing series.

Wishful thinking is a dangerous drug. Some pundits and policymakers believe that, if your intentions are pure and you have the “right” people in power, all government needs to do is sprinkle a little pixie dust (in the form of billions of taxpayer dollars) and magical things will happen.

Of course, reality has a funny way of throwing a wrench into the best-laid plans. Which brings me to the question I raise in a new 2-part series for  Discourse magazine: Can governments replicate Silicon Valley everywhere?

In the first installment, I explore the track record of federal and state attempts to build tech clusters, science parks & “regional innovation hubs” using state subsidies and industrial policy. This is highly relevant today because of the huge new industrial policy push at the federal level is building on top of growing state and local efforts to create tech hubs, science parks, or various other types of industrial “clusters.

At the federal level, this summer, the Senate passed a 2,300-page industrial policy bill, the “United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021,” that included almost $10 billion over four years for a Department of Commerce-led effort to fund 20 new regional technology hubs, “in a manner that ensures geographic diversity and representation from communities of differing populations.” A similar proposal that is moving in the House, the “Regional Innovation Act of 2021,” proposes almost $7 billion over five years for 10 regional tech hubs. Meanwhile, the Biden administration also is pitching ideas for new high-tech hubs. In late July, the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration announced plans to allocate $1 billion in pandemic recovery funds to create or expand “regional industry clusters” as part of the administration’s new Build Back Better Regional Challenge. Among the possible ideas the agency said might win funding are an “artificial intelligence corridor,” an “agriculture-technology cluster” in rural coal counties, a “blue economy cluster” in coastal regions, and a “climate-friendly electric vehicle cluster.”

In my essay, I note that the economic literature on these efforts has been fairly negative, to put it mildly. There is no precise recipe for growing tech clusters, as most economists and business analysts note.

“Despite several attempts, Silicon Valley has not been successfully copied elsewhere,” notes Mark Zachary Taylor, author of “The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology.” Judge Glock, a senior policy adviser with the Cicero Institute, offers a more blistering assessment of such efforts: “Almost every American state has tried to fund the creation of biotech clusters, projects that almost inevitably end with weeds growing through the parking-lot pavement and a trail of corrupt bargains.”

I then highlight the key findings from several major studies of these efforts, all of which make it clear that, as cluster scholars by Aaron Chatterji, Edward Glaeser and William Kerr noted in 2014 after gathering all the research conducted on the topic: existing evidence “suggests that the regional foundation for growth-enabling innovation is complex and that we should be cautious of single policy solutions that claim to fit all needs.” Furthermore, “even if clusters of entrepreneurship are good for local growth, it is less clear that cities or states have the ability to generate those clusters.”

I also highlight research from my Mercatus Center colleagues on “The Economics of a Targeted Economic Development Subsidy” documenting costs of state-level planning & case study of Foxconn fiasco. They summarize the fairly miserable track record of state and local mini-industrial policy efforts. As they note, the extensive economic literature on this matter finds that “the net effect of targeted economic development subsidies is likely to be negative” because “the taxes funding the subsidies will discourage more economic activity than will be encouraged by the subsidies themselves.” Similarly, Harvard Business School economist Josh Lerner evaluated dozens of similar targeted development efforts from around the globe in his 2009 book Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed—and What to Do About It. He concluded that “for each effective government intervention, there have been dozens, even hundreds, of failures, where substantial public expenditures bore no fruit.”

In my essay, I also discuss the astonishing array of federal efforts to promote the geographic spread of high-tech sectors and jobs since 2000. Throughout Bush, Obama, Trump & Biden admins, there’s been a lot of spending, but not a lot of success. Just lots of new laws and bureaucracies:

In 2012, the Obama administration launched the multiagency Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge and Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge. This occurred at roughly the same time President Obama was launching his Startup America initiative. He also signed the JOBS Act (Jump-start Our Business Startups) in 2012. All these efforts included various measures to support the spread of advanced manufacturing and high-tech startups across the U.S. But none of these efforts have borne much fruit so far.

In the second installment of this series, I explore better ways to encourage regional tech innovation and economic development without doubling down on failed programs of the past. Specifically, I explain why, when it comes to economic development efforts, policymakers would be wise to avoid the costly, ineffective “fun stuff” and refocus on time-tested “boring” strategies:

The boring approach to economic development seeks to promote an open innovation culture that is conducive to risk-taking, investment and growth without the need to extend targeted privileges to particular firms or industries. Such a culture comes down to a classic mix of simplified and equally applied taxes, streamlined permitting processes and sensible regulations, limits on frivolous lawsuits, and clear protection of contracts and property rights. As Matt Mitchell and I argued previously, policymakers need to resist the urge to go for broke with splashy policies and programs. They need to appreciate the benefits of generalized economic development policy (a.k.a. the boring approach) as opposed to far riskier targeted development efforts.

I also highlight recent research explaining how perhaps the simplest way to strengthen existing clusters, or give rise to new ones, is to make sure America’s immigration policies are hospitable to the best and brightest minds from across the globe.

And I note how, due to the problems associated with many other forms of government-sponsored R&D assistance, many scholars and policymakers are increasingly turning to the idea of government-sponsored competitions and prizes as a superior way to distribute R&D assistance.

With competitions, governments can set broad goals to help facilitate the search for important societal needs. The prizes then create a powerful incentive for innovators to pursue those goals, not only to win money, but also to gain recognition from peers and the public. Another alternative is just using lotteries to distribute R&D money instead of having agencies target grants. That at least avoids political shenanigans and paperwork delays, although it may not be a particularly effective approach.

There is also some good news is overlooked in today’s rush to make big industrial policy gambles: Venture capitalists and new startups are already spreading out naturally.

A 2021 study on “The State of the Startup Ecosystem” by Engine, a research and advocacy organization supporting startups, revealed that “as Series A funding grew over the last fifteen years, more of that growth has started to shift to areas located outside of the largest ecosystems.” Series A funding refers to the initial round of outside venture capitalist investment in startups. The report looked at Series A deals from 2003 to 2018 and found that “Series A rounds outside of the top five ecosystems grew nearly 900 percent, while the number of rounds outside of the top nine grew nearly tenfold.” Whereas Series A fundings outside of the top five ecosystems stood at 38% in 2003, they had jumped up to 43% in 2018. “The increase in deal location diversity over this period reflects an increasing spread in venture capital investment across the country and less centralization of investment in areas like Silicon Valley,” the report concluded.

Meanwhile, tech innovators and investors are increasingly engaging in innovation arbitrage as they move to cities and states across the nation that are more hospitable to entrepreneurial activities. Firms and investors are voting with their feet (and dollars) by flocking to areas where tech clusters can more naturally sprout because the general policy environment is sound.

But government efforts to artificially try to create regional innovation hubs in a top-down, technocratic fashion will almost certainly persist. As they do, some will argue that this time will be different! Perhaps, but it is more likely that the past is prologue; these new hubs will likely cause federal politicians to jockey for position to have their regions named one of the winners and get a big cut of all the new high-tech pork being served up by Washington. We can do better.

Jump over to  Discourse to read both installments here and here.

Also, down below I list several other things I have written recently on industrial policy efforts more generally.

• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Does the US Need a More Targeted Industrial Policy for AI & High-Tech?” Presentation for IHS Papers Workshop: Does America Need a New Industrial Policy?, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Government Planning and Spending Won’t Replicate Silicon Valley,” Discourse, August 18, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “To Promote Tech Hubs Across the Country, Governments Should Focus on Improving the General Business Environment,” Discourse, September 9, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse,” Discourse, June 28, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy as ‘Casino Economics‘,” The Hill, July 12, 2021.
• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” Discourse, March 11, 2021.
• Connor Haaland & Adam Thierer, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” Discourse, February 11, 2021.
• Matthew D. Mitchell and Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy is a Very Old, New Idea,” Discourse, April 6, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy,’” Technology Liberation Front, September 3, 2020.
• Adam Thierer, “Skeptical Takes on Expansive Industrial Policy Efforts,” Technology Liberation Front, ongoing series.

In my latest column for The Hill, I consider that dangers of government gambling our tax dollars on risky industrial policy programs. I begin by noting:

Roll the dice at a casino enough times, and you are bound to win a few games. But knowing the odds are not in your favor, how much are you willing to risk losing by continuing to gamble? This is the same issue governments confront when they gamble taxpayer dollars on industrial policy efforts, which can best be described as targeted and directed efforts to plan for specific future industrial outputs and outcomes. Throwing enough money at risky ventures might net a few wins, but at what cost? Could those resources have been better spent? And do bureaucrats really make better bets than private investors?

I continue on to note that, while the US is embarking on a major new industrial policy push, history does not provide us with a lot of hope regarding Uncle Sam’s betting record when he starts rolling those industrial policy dice. “How much tolerance should the public have for government industrial policy gambling?” I ask. I continue on:

Generally speaking, “basic” support (broad-based funding for universities and research labs) is wiser than “applied” (targeted subsidies for specific firms or sectors). With basic R&D funding, the chances of wasting resources on risky investments can be contained, at least as compared to highly targeted investments in unproven technologies and firms.

I also argue that “The riskiest bets on new technologies and sectors are better left to private investors,” and note how, “America’s venture capital industry remains the envy of the world because it continues to power world-beating advanced technology.” Accordingly, I conclude:

While some government investments will always be necessary, policymakers engaging in casino economics means bad industrial policy bets and taxpayer money squandered on risky ventures best made by private actors. We need to keep Uncle Sam’s gambling habits in check.

Read the whole thing here. And here’s a list of more of my recent writing on industrial policy:

• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Does the US Need a More Targeted Industrial Policy for AI & High-Tech?” Presentation for IHS Papers Workshop: Does America Need a New Industrial Policy?, forthcoming, July 23, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse,” Discourse, June 28, 2021.
• Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” Discourse, March 11, 2021.
• Connor Haaland & Adam Thierer, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” Discourse, February 11, 2021.
• Matthew D. Mitchell and Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy is a Very Old, New Idea,” Discourse, April 6, 2021.
• Adam Thierer, “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy,’” Technology Liberation Front, September 3, 2020.
• “Skeptical Takes on Expansive Industrial Policy Efforts,” Technology Liberation Front, ongoing series.

Industrial Policy is a red-hot topic once again with many policymakers and pundits of different ideological leanings lining up to support ambitious new state planning for various sectors — especially 5G, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors. A remarkably bipartisan array of people and organizations are advocating for government to flex its muscle and begin directing more spending and decision-making in various technological areas. They all suggest some sort of big plan is needed, and it is not uncommon for these industrial policy advocates to suggest that hundreds of billions will need to be spent in pursuit of those plans.

Others disagree, however, and I’ll be using this post to catalog some of their concerns on an ongoing basis. Some of the criticisms listed here are portions of longer essays, many of which highlight other types of steps that governments can take to spur innovative activities. Industrial policy is an amorphous term with many definitions of a broad spectrum of possible proposals. Almost everyone believes in  some form of industrial policy if you define the term broadly enough. But, as I argued in a September 2020 essay “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy‘,” I believe it is important to narrow the focus of the term such that we can continue to use the term in a rational way. Toward that end, I believe a proper understanding of industrial policy refers to targeted and directed efforts to plan for specific future industrial outputs and outcomes.

The collection of essays below is merely an attempt to highlight some of the general concerns about the most ambitious calls for expansive industrial policy, many of which harken back to debates I was covering in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I first started a career in policy analysis. During that time, Japan and South Korea were the primary countries of concern cited by industrial policy advocates. Today, it is China’s growing economic standing that is fueling calls for ambitious state-led targeted investments in “strategic” sectors and technologies. To a lesser extent, grandiose European industrial policy proposals are also prompting new US counter-proposals.

All this activity is what has given rise to many of the critiques listed below. If you have suggestions for other essays I might add to this list, please feel free to pass them along. FYI: There’s no particular order here.

Scott Lincicome and Huan Zhu, “Questioning Industrial Policy: Why Government Manufacturing Plans Are Ineffective and Unnecessary,” Cato Institute Working Paper, June 16, 2021.

[I]ndustrial policy – properly defined – has an extensive and underwhelming history in the United States, featuring high costs (seen and unseen), failed objectives, and political manipulation. Surely, not every U.S. industrial policy effort has ended in disaster, but facts here and abroad argue strongly against new government efforts to boost “critical” industries and workers and thereby fix alleged market failures. Such efforts warrant intense skepticism – skepticism that today is unfortunately in short supply.

Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy as Casino Economics,” The Hill, July 12, 2021.

While some government investments will always be necessary, policymakers engaging in casino economics means bad industrial policy bets and taxpayer money squandered on risky ventures best made by private actors. We need to keep Uncle Sam’s gambling habits in check.

Adam Thierer, “Thoughts on the America COMPETES Act: The Most Corporatist & Wasteful Industrial Policy Ever,” Technology Liberation Front, January 26, 2022.

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.

Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Does the US Need a More Targeted Industrial Policy for AI & High-Tech?” Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Special Study, November 2021.

This paper considers how both the recent history of high-tech industrial policy efforts at the national and international level—as well as some state and local economic development efforts in the United States—might better inform the wisdom of proposed efforts for AI or other high-tech sectors. That history is spotted with some limited successes alongside a long string of costly failures. We explore the reasons for those failures and recommend that the US refocus on the policy prerequisites that helped give rise to the computing and internet revolutions: a more generalized approach to economic development rooted in light-touch regulation and taxation of emerging technology.

Samuel Gregg, “Can America Build A Broad-Based Economy?”  Law & Liberty, March 1, 2022

Of course, if a government decides to put enough money and resources behind a given industrial policy, it will likely produce some results. Yet the same is true of the gambler. If she stays in the casino long enough and spends enough money, she will win a few hands of cards. But the odds are that she will also lose a great deal of money, especially if she is as inept a gambler as the government is maladroit at identifying industry trends or entrepreneurial opportunities. Moreover, just as a compulsive gambler’s behavior will have numerous negative effects on her family’s well-being, so too does industrial policy risk inflicting wider damage upon a nation’s economy and political system. The harms range from gross misallocations of resources to the rampant cronyism and rent-seeking that seems inseparable from industrial policy (which, I again note, its advocates studiously avoid discussing), to name just a few.

Phil Gramm & Mike Solon, “Peace Through Strength Requires Economic Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022.

The America Competes Act is the House’s effort to outdo the Chinese Communist Party’s latest five-year plan. The 2,900-page bill would make an old Soviet commissar blush.  [. . . ] America’s success in the world economy has never depended on industrial policy or government subsidies. It has come from the relative absence of government planning and subsidies. This is hardly news. The U.S. government provided support for the efforts of Samuel Langley, the greatest aviation expert of the 1890s, in his effort to make America first in powered flight. His manned Aerodrome flopped into the Potomac River. It was the Wright brothers, two unsubsidized but determined bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, who flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and changed the world.

Scott Lincicome, “Moving Fast and Breaking Things,” Capitolism, February 2, 2022.

Adam Thierer, “The Coming Industrial Policy Hangover,”  The Hill, February 16, 2022.

Podcast: “What’s Wrong with Industrial Policy,” Hold These Truths with Rep. Dan Crenshaw, February 16, 2022.

Tad DeHaven and Adam Thierer, “ The Military-Industrial Complex Offers a Cautionary Tale for Industrial Policy Planning,” Discourse, March 25, 2022.

Wayne Crews, “What To Do Instead Of The America COMPETES Act,” Forbes, February 2, 2022.

All this spending and expansion of the federal government, atop which our leaders would lay the America COMPETES Act and doubtless its own accompanying guidebook, has massive, ignored regulatory effects. Trillions in government spending (”investment”) have altered and will alter the entire trajectory and competitive environment of industries engaged in large-scale enterprises and transactions. This removes vast swaths of business activity from free competitive enterprise altogether, and creates displacements and distortions such that the restoration of free enterprise becomes a near-impossible disentanglement. The result is, after 100 years of big government and seduction of and fusion with big business, the greatest endeavors—from infrastructure to artificial intelligence, from smart cities to space—now consist of “partnerships” with governments rather than free enterprise, at scales and at costs so gigantic they can only be ignored.

Adam Thierer, “‘Japan Inc.’ and Other Tales of Industrial Policy Apocalypse,” Discourse, June 28, 2021.

Perhaps the most ironic indictment of industrial policy punditry lies in the way all the earlier books and essays about Japanese planning not only failed to forecast the many flops associated with it, but also did not foresee China as a potential future economic juggernaut. [. . .] What might that tell us about the ability of experts to predict the future course of countries and economies?

Adam Thierer, “Can Government Reproduce Silicon Valley Everywhere?”  Technology Liberation Front, September 12, 2021.

government efforts to artificially try to create regional innovation hubs in a top-down, technocratic fashion will almost certainly persist. As they do, some will argue that this time will be different! Perhaps, but it is more likely that the past is prologue; these new hubs will likely cause federal politicians to jockey for position to have their regions named one of the winners and get a big cut of all the new high-tech pork being served up by Washington.

Weifeng Zhong, “Beijing Can’t Make Sense of Biden’s China Strategy. Can Biden?” Washington Examiner, July 01, 2021.

America is not China, and it would be a fatal mistake to equate competing with China with imitating what China does. Doing so would risk the advantageous U.S. position as the world’s chief innovator, whose ideas are turned into products by vibrant private sectors both domestically and internationally.

Mike Watson, “Industrial Policy in the Real World,” National Affairs, Summer 2021.

Given the nature of industrial policymaking in the United States, there’s little reason to believe future attempts at industrial planning will result in a more coherent, rational, or strategic allocation of resources than they have in the past. [. . .] In short, industrial policy in the United States cannot be steered by a small group of enlightened individuals, because a small group of enlightened individuals will never be at the helm. Indeed, in some sense, there is no single “helm” to speak of.

Samuel Gregg, “Industrial Policy Mythology Confronts Economic Reality,” Law & Liberty, September 3, 2021.

If prizes in policy debates were given out for persistence, those advocating for more widespread use of industrial policy in America would be first in line. No matter how many times it is pointed out that they don’t understand the nature and workings of comparative advantage; or avoid acknowledging how industrial policy fosters rampant cronyism and corruption; or highlight what they consider examples of countries in which industrial policy has been employed successfully (only to have it demonstrated that it didn’t quite work out the way they suggested), they don’t give up.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “If This Is How America COMPETES, We’re Going to Lose,” Reason, January 26, 2022.

the bill can’t simply address one main issue or a few critical needs. Instead, it tries to insert the government into every aspect of all sorts of industries and markets and pretend that bureaucrats can solve complex social and cultural issues.

Chang-Tai Hsieh, “Countering Chinese Industrial Policy Is Counterproductive,” Project Syndicate, September 15, 2021.

US political leaders have long tried to counter Chinese industrial policy. And now they seem to have decided that the best way to do that is to emulate it. But their agenda betrays a profound lack of understanding of the unique challenge posed by China’s coupling of an authoritarian political regime with a dynamic market economy.

Adam Thierer, “Industrial Policy Advocates Should Learn from Don Lavoie,” Discourse, November 5, 2021.

“In light of the inherent deficiencies of central planning,” Lavoie said, “it might be argued that the U.S. should instead try to reduce current government interference with the competitive process to the absolute minimum consistent with other political goals.” It remains wise advice for today’s policymakers.

Anne O. Krueger, “America’s Muddled Industrial Policy,” CGTN, June 25, 2021.

Governments have a poor track record of identifying “winners” – be it a company or a category of technology – whereas private companies have proved better at transforming new discoveries into new products or cost savings. That is why the U.S. state traditionally has stuck to funding basic research.

Eric Boehm, “Massive Subsidies Won’t Solve the Semiconductor Supply Chain Crisis,” Reason, January 28, 2022.

Tracy C. Miller, “The Case for Limiting Government Semiconductor Subsidies,” The Hill, June 26, 2021.

Without the subsidies, firms would be more cautious about building or expanding foundries. If long-term production capacity is truly insufficient, high prices and anticipated profits give firms the right incentives to build or expand and satisfy demand at cost-covering prices.

Scott Lincicome, “The ‘Endless Frontier’ and American Industrial Policy,” Cato Institute Blog, May 26, 2021.

U.S. industrial policy has a long history of struggling to overcome political pressures, just as public choice predicts, and the EFA is no different. None of this means that all legislating is bad, or that politicians don’t at least occasionally vote in the national interest. Instead, the public choice framework simply adds another hurdle—along with things like the “knowledge problem,” seen and unseen costs, and misaligned incentives—to designing and implementing commercial policies specifically intended to beat the admittedly messy and imperfect situation that the market generates. It’s imperative that we understand these risks before supporting policies that, while they might look good on paper, could easily morph into a counterproductive boondoggle—one we’ve seen countless times with respect to U.S. industrial policy.

Daniel W. Drezner, “Is the United States capable of industrial policy in 2021?” Washington Post, June 14, 2021.

To believe that the United States can pursue a high-caliber industrial policy, however, requires assuming a more competent state than I have seen in the past decade.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, “The Nicest Thing I Can Write About Supply Chain Policy,” The Daily Dish, June 10, 2021.

Nevertheless, the Senate just passed a provision for $50 billion to subsidize chip fabrication – something the president had requested – and the House will doubtlessly concur. That might seem like an industry victory, but wait until it realizes that the administration will assume it gives it the right to insist on union jobs, micromanage the design of chips, and dictate the pricing and distribution of the products. Good luck with that. As the definitive volume on policy analysis (Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack) put it, “He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”

Lipton Matthews, “Industrial Policy—a.k.a. Central Planning—Won’t Make America Great,” Mises Wire, November 5, 2021.

Although industrial policy is in vogue, the evidence suggests that it is not necessary for long-term development. Moreover, despite the popularity of industrial policy in China, America remains the world’s economic power, and by following China, it may lose this vaunted position.

Richard Beason, “Japanese Industrial Policy: An Economic Assessment,” National Foundation for American Policy, November 2021.

There is no evidence to support the claim that Japanese industrial policy during the 1955-1990 period enhanced growth rates by sector, industries with economies of scale (greater efficiency when produced in increased amounts), productivity growth or “competitiveness.” The reality of the political process and government spending priorities makes it very difficult for such policies to be effective. Furthermore, even if political pressures had not intervened, it seems questionable to suggest that government policymakers would be better than actual market participants in determining the most efficient allocation of resources to produce the best economic outcomes.

Douglas Irwin, “ Memo to the Biden administration on how to rethink industrial policy,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, October 2020.

The challenge for policymakers is to identify such industries without succumbing to the notion that every industry is vital to some public objective. For example, the goal of “economic security” is so broadly defined and open-ended that virtually every domestic producer could claim the need for government support on that basis. The risk is that ill-conceived government programs will encourage corrupt behavior in which industries benefit themselves without contributing to national welfare.

Jim Pethokoukis, “Will Biden’s embrace of industrial policy pay off?” AEI Blog, January 15, 2021.

The history of such efforts in advanced capitalist economies gives ample reason for skepticism about the effectiveness of such top-down government planning, from Japanese economic stagnation to the now-mothballed Concorde supersonic jet to France’s failed attempt to create a thriving tech sector. The Internet might seem like the exception that negates the rule, but what turned out to be a successful partnership of government and entrepreneurs didn’t arise out of some master plan from Washington. And what do even the smartest plans look like when filtered through the dodgy quality of American governance? Maybe as an excuse for cronyism and protectionism.

Adam Thierer & Connor Haaland, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” Discourse, March 11, 2021.

America needs to embrace its already vibrant venture capital market, the benefits of basic science and prize competitions, and a light-touch regulatory approach instead of gambling taxpayer dollars on grandiose industrial policy schemes that would likely become boondoggles.

Connor Haaland & Adam Thierer, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” Discourse, February 11, 2021.

Thus far, however, the Europeans don’t have much to show for their attempts to produce home-grown tech champions. Despite highly targeted and expensive efforts to foster a domestic tech base, the EU has instead generated a string of industrial policy failures that should serve as a cautionary tale for U.S. pundits and policymakers, who seem increasingly open to more government-steered innovation efforts.

Phil Levy & Christine McDaniel, “ Does the U.S. Need a Vigorous Industrial Policy?” Discourse, February 16, 2021.

we are certainly hearing new enthusiasm these days about industrial policy. It seems to have proponents or converts on both sides of the aisle. This either means that a new consensus has emerged, or it means that the term is being used so loosely that it has lost its original meaning. I’ll go with the latter; it now means different things to different people.

Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip discussing why “ The traditional skepticism toward industrial policy is well deserved.”

The traditional skepticism toward industrial policy is well deserved. Once Washington starts writing checks for semiconductors, other industries may get in line with the outcome determined more by political clout than economic merit. As in shipbuilding, the targeted companies may end up in perpetual need of federal protection and unable to compete internationally

David Ignatius, “The U.S. is quietly mobilizing its economy against China,” Washington Post, March 4, 2021.

The industrial policy the AI commission recommends could unlock talent and innovation. But if officials aren’t careful, government intervention could also afflict our best companies with the dead weight and dysfunction of our broken political system. We need government to spawn brainpower, not bureaucracy.

Veronique de Rugy, “Support for Industrial Policy is Growing,” AIER, January 18, 2020.

Looking at the federal government today tells me that the problems surrounding R&D programs in the past continue today, and will continue tomorrow, because they are simply a consequence of the normal functioning of government. It is hard to wish these problems away, even in the face of the private sector’s “imperfections.” Those arguing for more funding in R&D should proceed with caution.

This bill is proposing to give money with risk-averse restrictions to a risk-averse organization (the NSF) to be dispersed among other risk-averse organizations (Universities) into a system with increasingly risk-averse incentives. Note that I’m not saying “it’s all fubar’d lets burn it to the ground!” but I am suggesting that instead of slamming on the accelerator, we should be asking “what would a tune-up and an oil change look like instead?”

Ryan Bourne, “Do Oren Cass’s Justifications for Industrial Policy Stack Up?”  Cato Commentary, August 15, 2019.

Oren Cass asserts that markets cannot generally allocate resources efficiently by industry. Yet he provides no meaningful metrics to show this is the case, nor shows why his policies would deliver better outcomes. His two main claims about the benefits of a manufacturing sector — “stable employment” and “strong productivity growth” — are directly contradictory. A plethora of evidence suggests as countries’ get richer due to automation and technological improvements, they demand relatively more services, and so the industrial sector declines in employment terms.

In our latest feature for Discourse magazine, Connor Haaland and I explore the question, “Should the U.S. Copy China’s Industrial Policy?” We begin by noting that:

Calls for revitalizing American industrial policy have multiplied in recent years, with many pundits and policymakers suggesting that the U.S. should consider taking on Europe and China by emulating their approaches to technological development. The goal would be to have Washington formulate a set of strategic innovation goals and mobilize government planning and spending around them.

We continue on to argue that what most of these advocates miss is that:

China’s targeting efforts are often antithetical to both innovation and liberty, and involve plenty of red tape and bureaucracy. China has become a remarkably innovative country for many reasons, including its greater tolerance for risk-taking, even as the Chinese Communist Party continues to pump resources into strategic sectors. But most Chinese innovation is permissible only insomuch as it furthers the party’s objectives, a strategy the U.S. obviously wouldn’t want to copy.

We discuss the problems associated with some of those Chinese efforts as well as proposed US responses, like the recently released 756 page report from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The report takes an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to state direction for new AI-related efforts and spending. While that report says the government now must “drive change through top-down leadership” in order to “win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China,” we argue that there could be some serious pitfalls with top-down, high price tag approaches.

Jump over to the  Discourse site to read the full essay, as well as our previous essay, which asked, “Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?” These two essay build on the research Connor and I have been doing on global artificial intelligence policies in the US, China, and the EU. In a much longer forthcoming white paper, we explore both the regulatory and industrial policy approaches for AI being adopted in the US, China, and the EU. Stay tuned for more.

Over at Discourse magazine, Connor Haaland and I have an new essay (“Can European-Style Industrial Policies Create Tech Supremacy?”) examining Europe’s effort to develop national champion in a variety of tech sectors using highly targeted industrial policy efforts. The results have not been encouraging, we find.

Thus far, however, the Europeans don’t have much to show for their attempts to produce home-grown tech champions. Despite highly targeted and expensive efforts to foster a domestic tech base, the EU has instead generated a string of industrial policy failures that should serve as a cautionary tale for U.S. pundits and policymakers, who seem increasingly open to more government-steered innovation efforts.

We examine case studies in internet access, search, GPS, video services, and the sharing economy. We then explore newly-proposed industrial policy efforts aimed at developing their domestic AI market. We note how:

no amount of centralized state planning or spending will be able to overcome Europe’s aversion to technological risk-taking and disruption. The EU’s innovation culture generally values stability—of existing laws, institutions and businesses—over disruptive technological change. […] There are no European versions of Microsoft, Google or Apple, even though Europeans obviously demand and consume the sort of products and services those U.S.-based companies provide. It’s simply not possible given the EU’s current regulatory regime.

It seems unlikely that Europe will have much better luck developing home-grown champions in AI and robotics using this same playbook. “American academics and policymakers with an affinity for industrial policy might want to consider a model other than Europe’s misguided combination of fruitless state planning and heavy-handed regulatory edicts,” we conclude.

Head over to Discourse  to read the entire essay.

After a slight delay, Jurimetrics has finally published my latest law review article, “Soft Law in U.S. ICT Sectors: Four Case Studies.” It is part of a major symposium that Arizona State University (ASU) Law School put together on “Governing Emerging Technologies Through Soft Law: Lessons For Artificial Intelligence” for the journal. I was 1 of 4 scholars invited to pen foundational essays for this symposium. Jurimetrics is a official publication of the American Bar Association’s Section of Science & Technology Law.

This report was a major undertaking that involved dozens of interviews, extensive historic research, several events and presentations, and then numerous revisions before the final product was released. The final PDF version of the journal article is attached.

Here is the abstract:

Traditional hard law tools and processes are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation in many emerging technologies sectors. As a result, policy­makers in the United States rely increasingly on less formal “soft law” governance mech­anisms to address concerns surrounding many newer technologies. This Article explores four case studies from different information technology areas where soft law mechanisms have already been utilized to address governance concerns. These four sectoral case stud­ies include domain name management, content oversight, privacy policy, and cyberse­curity matters. After considering the various soft law mechanisms used to address those issues, the Article concludes with some general thoughts about the effectiveness of those approaches and what lessons those case studies might hold for the use of soft law in other emerging technology sectors and contexts.

Marc Andreessen is interviewed by Sriram Krishan in his new newsletter, The Observer Effect, and asked what motivates him to support technological innovation and “to go read up on a new topic every day” related to tech and progress. His answer is inspirational and perfectly encapsulates why I also have made technological progress the focus of my life’s work:

I am a deep believer in – after learning a lot over the years about economic history and of cultural history – that technology really is the driver. There were basically millennia of just subsistence farming industry and all of a sudden, there was this vertical takeoff a few hundred years ago. And quality of life exploded around the world. Not evenly but starting in Europe and expanding out. It’s basically all technology. It’s always the printing press, it’s the internet and on and on. And you get this incredible upward trajectory. We have the potential over the course of the next century or over the next few centuries to really dramatically advance and have life be better for virtually everybody. Technology is quite literally the lever for being able to take natural resources and able to make something better out of them. And so it’s just it’s the most interesting and by far the most useful and the most beneficial thing I can think of doing.

Amen, brother! I devoted my last two books (Permissionless Innovation and Evasive Entrepreneurs) and all my life’s work, to proving that exact point. Also, I really like Andreessen’s definition of technology as, “the lever for being able to take natural resources and able to make something better out of them.” I’ve added that to my running compendium, “Defining Technology,” which features various definitions of technology.

I’m making the opening chapter of my new book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments, available here. Also here’s the launch essay and the event launch video, which discuss how the themes discussed throughout the book have become even more visible during the coronavirus crisis.

Also, here are some lists of 10 major themes from the book; 13 key terms found in the book, and 5 innovation policy scholars who inspired my thinking. Reminder: this book is a sequel to my previous book, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.

I hope you will consider buying Evasive Entrepreneurs after reading this opening chapter.

Here’s yesterday’s full launch event video for the release of my new book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. My thanks to Matthew Feeney, Director of the Project on Emerging Technologies at the Cato Institute, for hosting the discussion and sorting through audience questions. The video is below and some of the topics we discussed are listed down below:

[Originally published on the Cato Institute blog.]

Examples were everywhere. Distilleries started producing hand sanitizers to address shortages while average folks began sharing do‐​it‐​yourself sanitizer recipes online. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looked to modify hand sanitizer guidelines quickly to allow for it, but few really cared because those rules weren’t going to stop them. Gray markets in face masks, medical face shields, and respirators developed. Some people and organizations worked together to make medical devices using off‐​the‐​shelf hardware and open source software. More simply, others just fired up sewing machines to make masks—and then, faced with an emerging public health consensus, the guidance from the federal government shifted dramatically: where formerly ordinary people were instructed not to buy or use masks, within a matter of days, the policy reversed, and all were encouraged to make and use cloth protective masks.

Meanwhile, doctors and nurses started “writing the playbook for treating coronavirus patients on the fly” by improvising treatments and then sharing them on social media. A few doctors even converted breathing machines to ventilators themselves using 3-D printed parts to address shortages for their patients even though the FDA had not yet authorized it.

Social media sites were also suddenly filled with discussions about how average people might come together to build tools or share information to assist with virus testing or treatments. A 17‐​year‐​old used his coding skills to build one of the most popular coronavirus‐​tracking websites in the world (ncov2019.live) after noticing how hard it was to use government sites. And two high school science teachers in Tennessee set up testing operations in their school lab to help reduce testing time in their area.

Meanwhile, journalists and columnists like the  Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler cheered on such activity, encouraging the public to “innovate from your couch.” Modern digital technologies and platforms that had been pariahs and the target of a regulatory‐​minded “techlash” just a few months earlier suddenly became essential public services that were showered with praise for helping people cope with social distancing and the solitude associated with shelter‐​in‐​place requirements. Headlines in major media outlets explained how “Facebook Is More Trustworthy than the President” and “Twitter Is Making the Coronavirus World a Better Place.”

Philanthropists like Bill Gates were also funding their own solutions. The former Microsoft founder and CEO pointed out that, in an effort to find testing solutions and vaccines, private groups like his Gates Foundation could likely mobilize faster than governments. Gates likely had grown frustrated with government responses after a Seattle‐​based lab that the Gates Foundation funded figured out an effective way to test for coronavirus, only to be blocked from expanding it by over‐​cautious federal bureaucrats. Frustrated by federal intransigence, that Seattle lab started testing for COVID-19 anyway to prove they indeed had an effective test. Commenting on the case study, the New York Times  expressed exasperation about “how existing regulations and red tape—sometimes designed to protect privacy and health—have impeded the rapid rollout of testing nationally.”

Wait, Isn’t All This Illegal?

What is interesting about all these examples of bottom‐​up innovation and evasive entrepreneurialism is that they are remarkably inspiring, but also mostly illegal. Almost all these activities butted up against longstanding regulations governing medical devices, practices, or therapies. Some of those rules are enforced by large and powerful federal bureaucracies like the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Others take the form of state‐​based occupational licensing limitations or certificate‐​of‐​need laws, which require healthcare providers to first obtain permission before they open or expand their facilities or services. This crazy quilt of medical laws and regulations accumulated steadily over time, creating what constitutional scholar Timothy Sandefur calls a “permission society,” which values proceduralism and conformity over practicality and common sense.

Eventually, however, the mountains of red tape that the permission society is built upon start to collapse under their own weight. Laws and agencies that previously commanded obedience are now viewed as an opaque, ossified, and confusing morass of one‐​size‐​fits‐​all mandates, prohibitions, and penalties that actually undermine the very health goals they were put in place to achieve. Suddenly, headlines in every major newspaper screamed of how, as it pertained to virus testing procedures, “The Government Failed” (Wall Street Journal) because of “Flawed Tests, Red Tape and Resistance” (Washington Post) and this resulted in “The Lost Month” (New York Times) in the United States.

Eventually, people take notice of how regulators and their rules encumber entrepreneurial activities, and they act to evade them when public welfare is undermined. Working around the system becomes inevitable when the permission society becomes so completely dysfunctional and counterproductive.

Technological Empowerment vs. the Status Quo

What’s going on here, and what lessons can we derive from it?

In a new Cato Institute book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance, I document how the sort of behavior we have recently witnessed was growing rapidly even before the COVID-19 crisis. In many different contexts, evasive entrepreneurs—innovators who don’t always conform to social or legal norms—are using new technological capabilities to circumvent traditional regulatory systems. They at least want to put pressure on public policymakers to reform or selectively enforce laws and regulations that are outmoded, inefficient, or counterproductive.

Evasive entrepreneurs rely on a strategy of permissionless innovation in both the business world and the political arena. They push back against the permission society by creating exciting new products and services without always receiving the blessing of public officials before doing so. While evasive entrepreneurialism has always been with us to some extent, many of the responses to the pandemic would not have been possible even just a few decades ago. Recent advancements have supercharged in a more technologically empowered world of information abundance and decentralized, inexpensive tools.

As I show in the book, evasive entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the growth of what we might think of as technologies of freedom or resistance. These are devices and platforms that let citizens circumvent (or perhaps just ignore) public policies that limit their liberty or freedom to innovate or to enjoy the fruits of innovation. These can include common tools like smartphones, computers, and various new interactive platforms, as well as more specialized technologies like cryptocurrencies, private drones, immersive technologies (like virtual reality), 3D printers, the “Internet of Things,” and sharing economy platforms and services. But that list just scratches the surface. When the public uses tools such as these to explicitly evade public policies on moral grounds because they find then offensive, illogical, or perhaps just annoying, we can think of that as technological civil disobedience.

Common Sense Prevails

Evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience accelerated during the pandemic because both the practicality and morality of government policies came into question in stark fashion. The first month of the crisis witnessed “a torrent of governmental incompetence that is breathtaking in scale,” my Mercatus colleague Scott Sumner argues. “There are regulations so bizarre that if put in a novel no one would believe them,” he notes. “In contrast, the private sector has reacted fairly well, and has been far ahead of the government in most areas.”

Indeed, the pandemic has been a stress test for our institutions, and many of them have failed it. Confusing rules and inflexible agencies that should have been reformed years ago were suddenly exposed and judged harshly. Philip K. Howard, founder of Common Good, says that “Covid‐​19 is the canary in the bureaucratic mine.” Bloated bureaucracies and overbearing regulatory systems, he argues, have created a “toxic atmosphere that silenced common sense” and managed to “institutionalize failure.” Cato’s Paul Matzko has documented how the FDA has been particularly guilty of blocking sensible forms of progress on simple things like face mask production or distribution.

While countless others lambasted the practical failures of our institutions, the morality of government policies was also coming into focus. Why should citizens have their innovative efforts to help others stifled at seemingly every juncture? Must we really follow the law when it undercuts the basic human need to care for others and ourselves?

These are the issues addressed in my new book, which explains the practical reasons why evasive entrepreneurialism is on the rise and then provides a moral defense of it. When innovators and average citizens use tools and technological capabilities to pursue a living, enjoy new experiences, or improve the human condition, they often disrupt legal or social norms in the process. That is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, evasive entrepreneurialism can transform our society for the better because it can help expand the range of life‐​enriching (and often life‐​saving) innovations. Evasive entrepreneurialism can help citizens pursue lives of their own choosing—both as creators looking for the freedom to earn a living and as individuals looking to discover and enjoy important new goods and services.

Defending evasive entrepreneurialism is easy  after it occurs, but few defend it before or as it is happening. I argue in the book that the freedom to innovate is essential to human betterment—for each of us individually and for civilization as a whole—and that freedom deserves to be taken more seriously today. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this more apparent than ever before.

There are few things more human than acts of invention. At its root, innovation involves efforts to discover new and better ways of solving practical human needs and wants. People have a right to innovate and create technologies because they possess a more general right to take steps to improve their lot in life and the lives of others around them. When misguided or archaic government programs and policies blocked that potential during the pandemic, people began ignoring or evading them. That was both practically sensible and morally justifiable.

Innovation as the New Checks and Balances

By extension, the response to the pandemic has proven the second thesis set forth in my book: Evasive entrepreneurialism and technologically enabled civil disobedience can actually help us improve government by keeping public policies fresh, sensible, and in line with common sense and the consent of the governed. Evasiveness and technological disruption can act as a sort of relief valve or circuit breaker to counteract negative pressures in the system before things break down completely. By challenging legislators and regulators to reevaluate the wisdom of their policies, evasive entrepreneurs can help us break political logjams and force governments to become more adaptive and accountable.

The proof is in the pudding. As the crisis unfolded, agencies at the federal, state, and local levels were forced to suspend hundreds of regulations that were clearly undermining helpful responses. These “rule departures” would not have been necessary if governments had engaged in periodic spring cleanings earlier. When COVID-19 hit, it became essential to suspend or repeal hundreds of misguided old rules that clearly undermined public health. The only question now is whether those inefficient, counterproductive policies will be put back on the books to do harm again in the next crisis.

But even before the current crisis, rule departures by government actors were becoming more common because  even government officials could no longer understand their own rules. Just as private citizens have increasingly resorted to evasive techniques to get things done, many regulatory agencies have given up trying to “go by the book” themselves because endless regulatory accumulation has made it impossible to understand what the law means.

My book documents many cases of public officials essentially ignoring their own policies and making up governance solutions as they go along. This is another sign of profound institutional failure, yet it should also give us some hope that even policymakers themselves now realize that government cannot just grow forever without breaking down at some point. The need for comprehensive reform is now abundantly clear, and the pandemic has moved the so‐​called “Overton Window” (i.e., the acceptable range of possible policy reforms) on many fronts.

A New Approach to Governance

Policymakers need a new approach for technological governance that is more in line with modern realities. Flexibility and humility will be essential. Regulators do not need to throw out the old rulebooks altogether, though. Some precautionary rules still make sense, particularly in cases involving extreme risk. But why not embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of the citizenry and allow more experimental trials, flexible testing procedures, and perhaps even prizes for particularly innovative ideas?

When enforcing the rules that remain on the books, policymakers should also consider targeted waivers and ex post regulatory reviews as opposed to ex ante regulatory prohibitions on any and all evasive innovations. Liability rules can also be tweaked so innovators do not have to live in constant fear of getting sued for trying to make the world a better place. Finally, post‐​market monitoring and recall notices can also be used to ensure flexible experiments have some regulatory guardrails.

But shutting down creative solutions and unique thinking simply because they run counter to some crusty old rulebook is never the right response. We should view evasive entrepreneurialism as an important part of a broader discovery process that incorporates the profound importance of ongoing, decentralized, trial‐​and‐​error experimentation to the process of societal learning and improvement. Lawmakers should find a way to accommodate a little more outside‐​the‐​box thinking and innovating—and not just when our lives are on the line.

Additional Reading 

• read the opening chapter of the book
• watch the event launch video
• 10 Highlights from the Book
• 13 Key Terms from the Book
• 5 innovation policy scholars who inspired this book
• “Innovation & the Precautionary Principle” (AIER essay)
• “Congress as a Non-Actor in Tech Policy” (Medium essay)

Congress has become a less important player in the field of technology policy. Why did that happen, and what are the ramifications for technological governance efforts going forward?

I’ve spent almost 30 years covering technology policy. There was a time in my life when I spent almost all my time as a policy analyst preoccupied with developments in the federal legislative arena. I lived in the trenches of Capitol Hill and interacted with lawmakers and their staff morning, noon, and night.

In recent years, however, I have spent very little time focused on the Legislative Branch because it has effectively become a non-actor on technology policy. It is not that congressional lawmakers stopped caring about tech policy. Interest actually remains quite high—perhaps higher than ever before. Congress also continues to introduce lots of bills, host plenty of hearings, and issue mountains of press releases related to tech policy issues.

Nonetheless, all that interest and activity has not really translated into much important legislation. While it is hard to track tech-oriented legislative trends statistically because of the complication of defining “technology policy” over time, judged by substantive output, Congress has largely checked out of technological policymaking.

Think about digital privacy. How many years now have people been predicting a comprehensive “baseline” privacy bill would pass in each legislative session? It never happens. Perhaps it will this year, but if you would like to place a wager on it, I will take that bet.

Speaking of bets, for several years now, I have been wagering with friends that Congress will not pass federal legislation creating a national autonomous vehicles framework. Each session I win that bet. Keep in mind, a framework for driverless cars is far less controversial than privacy policy. Still, nothing substantive ever gets done in Congress.

Same goes for cybersecurity with lots of calls for big measures, but no final action. Folks are now also telling me to expect a big artificial intelligence bill one day soon. I sincerely doubt it. Again, I’ll bet on it if you’d like to lose some money!

Let me be clear, there may actually be some very good reasons why Congress should implement a national framework for privacy, driverless cars, and some AI policy issues. But all the wishful thinking in the world will not magically make it happen.

We need to entertain the possibility that Congress has largely checked out of the world of substantive tech policymaking and isn’t coming back. We may get a few big surprise measures here and there, as we did with clumsily-drafted FOSTA-SESTA. If anything, it is more likely that we instead see misguided legislative riders attached to non-germane measures during late night negotiations. But even haphazard efforts like those will be extremely rare. The days of Congress passing big bills like the Telecom Act of 1996 or the Cable Act of 1992 appear mostly over.

Why Congress Is No Longer the Major Player It Once Was

I think there are probably many obvious explanations for why Congress has checked out of tech policymaking, but let me try to boil it down to a couple of interrelated trends:

The “pacing problem” has intensified: The pacing problem refers to the inability of legal or regulatory regimes to keep adjust to the intensifying pace of technological change. There are just more emerging technologies than ever, and they are evolving faster than ever, too. “New technologies that used to have two-year cycle times now can become obsolete in six months, and the pace of change is not slowing,” says consulting firm Deloitte.

A growing multiplicity of technologies means more tech policy issues to cover. And those issues grow more complicated each year. As soon as lawmakers wrap their heads around one technology (if they do at all), another innovation pops up that complicates things further or crowds out their attention.

Technological convergence and blurring governance boundaries: Technology policymaking increasingly involves metaphysical questions about the underlying nature of things. For example, what is a “phone,” a “medical device,” or an “aerial vehicle”? These things used to be relatively easy to define and had well-understood meanings in federal statutes and regulations. But those concepts evolved rapidly in an age of widespread technological convergence and rapid-fire “combinatorial innovation,” with new technologies multiplying and building on top of one another in the symbiotic fashion. Basically, almost as soon as new tech laws or regulations are enacted, they are confronted with new marketplace realities and technological changes that call into question legal classifications or regulatory distinctions.

For example, today’s smartphones combine dozens of different functions that were previously quite distinct, including health tracking capabilities, mobile payment systems, and video distribution, all of which remain heavily regulated by an assortment of federal laws and agencies. But the convergence of all these capabilities in a single device that we can carry in our pockets creates massive governance challenges, not only for archaic legislative frameworks, but even for newer semantic distinctions that may seem current one moment only to be obliterated the next. These factors also make it harder to figure out who in Congress should be driving policy because technological convergence blurs previously distinct governance categories among legislative committees and the laws they have crafted.

Legislative dysfunctionalism: Policymaking processes move slowly by design. Constitutional constraints and other legal requirements demand it. But things move even slower today because of what Jonathan Rauch calls “demosclerosis,” or the “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt.” “[A]s layer is dropped upon layer,” he argued, “the accumulated mass becomes gradually less rational and less flexible.”

Inadequate resources are also part of the problem with Congress facing a complex, rapidly-evolving set of issues but devoting only limited resources to technical staff or studies to better understand these developments. This combined with the factors cited above has led to a never-ending “competency trap,” with lawmakers and their staffs seemingly always one step behind technological developments and societal demands or expectations.

Meanwhile, partisanship increases and the work load on many other fronts grows alongside it. There’s just a lot more on Congress’s plate than ever before. Plus, tech policy matters seemingly always take a back seat to tax, budget, entitlements, defense, and other issues.

Many people hope that boosting technology assessment efforts might help correct these problems. Perhaps better technical advice could help lawmakers ask less ignorant questions at tech-oriented congressional hearings, which have become showcases for the staggering lack of congressional understanding of modern technologies. But just adding new technology assessment capacity, such as in the form of a revived Office of Technology Assessment, won’t likely move the needle much in terms of actual legislative output. More serious structural reforms will be required.

Globalization: Many modern technologies “are truly global and call out for policy approaches that do not respect traditional national borders,” note former NITA officials Lawrence E. Strickling and Jonah Force Hill. Congress only has so much control over technologies that defy national boundaries, further complicating tech governance questions.

Yet, one would think that when America’s global competitive advantage was on the line, Congress would have greater reason to assert itself and craft frameworks to ensure US firms are not disadvantaged by a lack of policy clarity. That has not proven to be the case, however. Congressional lawmakers do plenty of huffing and puffing about the tech governance choices made by Europe, China, and other governments, but they then leave the field wide open to them (as well as lower levels of government) to craft policies that govern national markets throughout the United States.

Endless delegation: Speaking of passing the buck, Congress has been doing it for decades on tech policy by delegating massive and quite amorphous authority to technocratic administrative agencies. Over the past half century, scholars from various disciplines—economics, law, political science, history, and others—have explored the growth of what has been alternatively called the “interest group society,”  “receivership by regulation,”  “iron triangles,” and “client politics.” This literature identifies the way Congress has increasingly abdicated its constitutional role as lawmaker by shifting hard policy questions to regulatory agencies and then hoping that bureaucrats could figure out all the answers.

Delegation is even more common for the most technical policy matters, and that trend has only accelerated in recent years as the complexity increases and overwhelms lawmakers and their staff.

Ramifications for Tech Governance Going Forward

If Congress remains largely incapable of ever getting the ball over the goal line on important tech policy matters, what are some of the ramifications? There are many, but I will identify just a few of the most obvious ones:

• More tech-oriented legislative activity will shift to the states: In fact, it already has. For each of the tech policy issues I identified earlier (privacy, driverless cars, cybersecurity, and even some AI-related issues like facial recognition), states are—for better or worse—picking up the slack. We should expect that trend to accelerate. This will create an increasingly confusing patchwork of policies that will potentially raise serious barriers to entry and innovation. Nonetheless, I can’t see this trend reversing anytime soon. Perhaps Congress will finally act on privacy or driverless cars legislation if for no other reason than to preempt a crazy-quilt of contradictory policies. Of course, that’s what people have been predicting for years, and it never happens.
• “Soft law” becomes the dominate governance force for tech: Again, it already has. Soft law refers to informal, collaborative, and constantly evolving governance mechanisms that differ from hard law in that they lack the same degree of enforceability. Soft law can include things like multi-stakeholder processes, industry best practices and standards, agency workshops and guidance documents, and educational efforts. But that just scratches the surface of soft law mechanisms. For better or worse, soft law is becoming the dominant modus operandi for most modern technological governance. We can expect that trend to accelerate to fill the governance gap left by Congressional inaction. For example, we don’t have any formal “rules of the road” for driverless cars, but we do now have four iterations of Department of Transportation guidance on driverless cars. Version 4.0of the DoT guidance for automated vehicles was just released this month. Expect the “soft law-ization” of technological governance to expand considerably in coming years because it is really the only way for agencies to cope with the pacing problem and those metaphysical issues identified earlier. Because soft law is not boxed in by rigid preconceptions of what a particular technology or technological process is or entails, it is often better able to address new marketplace realities. Soft law can adapt as technologies do. With Congress out of the picture, it will have to.
• The congressional tech policy death spiral accelerates. Some may think (or at least hope) that the situation described here can’t get any worse. To the contrary, it can get radically worse. With our politics increasingly infected with bitter partisanship and rancor, what are the chances that lawmakers can work together to craft comprehensive tech policy measures? I’d say the odds are approaching zero. The Cable Act, the Telecom Act (and Sec. 230), and the Internet Tax Freedom Act all enjoyed broad, bipartisan support when they passed in the 1990s. People reached across the aisle to get things done. It didn’t always work, and sometimes it resulted in misguided policies (like the Communications Decency Act’s provisions trying to censor internet “indecency”). But bipartisan lawmaking scenarios like those seem almost unthinkable now. To the extent many lawmakers even show up at tech-oriented congressional hearings anymore, it is mostly to score points in front of the cameras for Team Red or Team Blue back home. Serious legislative oversight and policymaking is dead; it’s mostly just show-trials and media circuses at this point.

Should I Care about Congress Anymore?

If you believe this miserable thesis is correct but continue to focus on the Legislative Branch for a living, you may be asking yourself: Am I wasting all my time here? Not necessarily. Congress is still actively interested in tech policy matters. For those who hope to limit that damage Congress might do by hastily passing ham-handed, crisis-driven policy measures, your efforts in the trenches will continue to be important in curbing the worst instincts of some lawmakers. In many instances, preserving a perpetual stalemate may go down as a tremendous victory.

For example, as the debate over Section 230 intensifies—with politicians of all stripes looking to gut the most important of all Internet freedom policies—it is vital that smart people work with lawmakers and their staff to beat back misguided and destructive measures. Hopefully this becomes another instance of legislative gridlock winning out! And I think it will.

More realistically, your role will not be to stop Congress from doing insanely destructive things, it will be to just stop them from saying those things. In fact, that seems to be what a lot of people who work with Congress already do today. When I chat with various inside-the-Beltway policy advocates and industry reps today, they usually acknowledge that the prospects for actual legislation on any given issue are quite slim. They will, of course, continue to try to work with lawmakers, their committees, and their staff to either advance or stop legislative measures. Yet, they all seem to accept the utter futility of it all.

Why do they persist? Most obviously, they want to at least preserve the legislative stalemate and not cede the ground to their enemies who might succeed in getting lawmakers to do something if only one side was communicating with Congress.

But the other thing these policy advocates are hoping to achieve is better messaging. Regulatory advocates want lawmakers to use the power of the bully pulpit to put pressure on various people or groups to change behavior, even in the absence of any legislative action. By contrast, many in industry want to make sure that their technologies are understood and not endlessly demonized. Bad press isn’t good for business, even if all the congressional threats never result in final legislation. Also, those defending innovation more generally will want to make sure that even if lawmakers aren’t making any actual laws, they still better understand and appreciate the importance of new technological capabilities for improving human welfare.

Those are all good reasons not to give up your legislative advocacy. For some of us, however, the personal cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t add up. Our focus has shifted to where the real action is at: federal administrative agencies, statehouses and state administrative agencies, the courts, and the growing world of multi-stakeholder governance and other soft law efforts. Congress has checked out, but technological governance lives on in many other forms and venues.

[Originally published on the Mercatus Bridge blog on May 7, 2019.]

Cataracts can be extraordinarily debilitating. One day you can see the world clearly, the next you wake up struggling to see through a cloudy ocular soup. It is like looking through a piece of cellophane wrap or a continuously unfocused camera.

If you depend on your eyes to make a living as most of us do, then cataracts make it a daily struggle to get even basic things done. I spend most of my time reading and writing each workday. Once the cataracts hit, I had to purchase a half-dozen pair of strong reading glasses and spread them out all over the place: in my office, house, car, gym bag, and so on. Without them, I was helpless.

Reading is especially difficult in dimly lit environments, and even with strong glasses you can forget about reading the fine print on anything. Every pillbox becomes a frightening adventure. I invested in a powerful magnifying glass to make sure I didn’t end up ingesting the wrong things.

For those afflicted with particularly bad cataracts, it becomes extraordinarily risky to drive or operate machinery. More mundane things—watching TV, tossing a ball with your kid, reading a menu at many restaurants, looking at art in a gallery—also become frustrating.

Open Your Eyes to the Wonders of Innovation

In the past, there was very little that could be done about cataracts unless one was willing to undergo extremely dangerous procedures. The oldest type of cataract surgery (“couching”) involved the use of sharp instruments such as thorns and needles to rip the cloudy lens out of the eye. Unsurprisingly, blindness was a common result of this primitive practice. As medical techniques and instruments improved, doctors were able to perform more sophisticated and successful surgeries, albeit still with some risks because human hands were still doing much of the work.

Today, thanks to remarkable advances in medicine, all this is done in a few minutes with the assistance of laser technology. Better yet, patients get to choose exactly what sort of replacement lens they will have installed. I chose “multifocal intraocular” replacement lenses, which let me see near and far equally well.

When you have cataracts in both eyes, they usually perform the surgeries a few weeks apart to make sure one eye comes out alright before getting the other done. Both my outpatient procedures were quick, painless, and remarkably effective. Astonishingly, within 24 hours of having both surgeries, I tested at better than 20/15 vision, which is close to perfect. It was like regaining a lost superpower.

Am I a Cyborg?

My first-hand experience with the miracles of modern medical technology makes me feel even more strongly about what I do for a living. I have spent my life covering emerging technology policy and responding to tech critics, who have a litany of grievances about modern inventions. One common complaint is that today’s technologies are “dehumanizing,” or threaten to turn us all into some sort of cyborgs.

To be sure, my eye surgeries did indeed make me just a little bit less human. After all, I am walking around today with artificial lenses affixed to my eyeballs. Moreover, I previously had eye surgery to correct strabismus, which is basically a form of crossed eyes. Had I remained perfectly “human” or “natural,” I would still be trying to look at the world through two crossed eyes covered with cloudy lenses. No thanks, Mother Nature!

Incidentally, I also have a metal plate and six pins in my ankle from a nasty compound fracture I sustained in the late 1990s. So, my foot isn’t completely “natural” either. But without those implants, I would not likely have walked properly again. Also, due to a combination of bad genes and poor dietary habits, my mouth is full of so many replacement teeth and crowns that I can’t even count them all. Without them, I probably would have needed dentures by age 40, just as my poor grandmother did once her teeth failed her for similar reasons.

Meanwhile, my left knee and right hip have been acting up in recent years, making me wonder if replacements may be needed down the road. Finally, my hearing isn’t so great either after years of abusing my ears at concerts and with speakers played at unhealthy volumes. (Turn down those headphones, kids!) I suspect some sort of hearing supplement awaits me in the future so I can continue to hear properly.

Enhancing Our Humanity

Given the medical procedures I’ve had done or might do, it’s fair to say that the critics are correct: I really am becoming more of a cyborg—part biological, part technological. But what of it? Certainly, my life and the lives of countless other people have been improved thanks to “artificial” improvements to our bodies.

As Joel Garreau noted in his brilliant 2005 book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means to Be Human, the history of our species in one of constant improvements to our health and capabilities through technological means. We have augmented our senses and abilities through the use of spectacles, hearing aids, artificial limbs, implants, and various other specialized medicines and treatments. We are living longer, healthier, less painful lives because of it.

Some critics respond by saying that certain “basic” technological improvements to human health are fine, or perhaps should even be subsidized and available to all. One era’s “radical” enhancements become the next generation’s human rights! We have seen that story unfold in the realm of reproductive health, for example. As Jordan Reimschisel and I have documented, in vitro fertilization (IVF) was originally met with hostility in the 1970s, with various authorities objecting to the idea of being able to “play God.” Opposition subsided quickly, however, as public acceptance and demand grew. Today, IVF is often covered by insurance plans.

Still, critics of newer technological capabilities tend to frown upon more sophisticated technological enhancements that could radically enhance our capabilities in ways that supposedly “dehumanize” us. There are always risks associated with new technological capabilities, but through ongoing trial and error experimentation, we find new ways to counter adversity and ailments—and yes, even overcome some of our inherent human limitations. We are not destined to become mindless automatons just because technology enhances our humanity in these ways. Indeed, there is nothing more human than building new and better tools to improve the quality of the lives of people across the globe.

We Can Cope with Change

Critics are fond of falling back on worst-case “technopanic” scenarios ripped from sci-fi novels, movies, and shows to explain how, if we are not careful, we are all just one modification away from creating (or becoming) Frankenstein monsters. We should heed those warnings to some extent, but not to the extent those critics suggest.

There are legitimate ethical issues associated with certain medical treatments and human enhancements. Genetic editing, for example, holds both promise and peril for our species. By modifying our genetic code, we can counter or even defeat debilitating or deadly diseases or ailments before they hobble us or our children. Of course, genetic modification could also be used in unsettling ways by parents or governments to create “designer babies” that have no choice in how their genetic code is altered before birth.

Ethical guidelines, and even some public policies, will need to be crafted and continuously updated to keep pace with these challenges. But, we must not let worst-case thinking determine the future of  all forms of human modification such that the many possible best-case outcomes are discouraged in the process. That would represent a massive setback for the millions of humans, including the unborn ones, who might be threatened by debilitating ailments.

Just as technological innovation gave me (quite literally) a new outlook on the world, so too can it open up new possibilities for countless others. Each day brings inspiring news about how innovation is helping us overcome whatever ails us. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that, “[s]cientists have harnessed artificial intelligence to translate brain signals into speech, in a step toward brain implants that one day could let people with impaired abilities speak their minds.”

More modern miracles like that await us—so long as critics and regulators don’t hold back important innovations in medical technology. In the meantime, thanks to my new cyborg eyes, I have seven old pairs of reading glasses I no longer need, in case anyone wants them.

Over at the American Institute for Economic Research blog, I recently posted two new essays discussing increasing threats to innovation and discussing how to counter them. The first is on “The Radicalization of Modern Tech Criticism,” and the second discusses, “How To Defend a Culture of Innovation During the Technopanic.”

“Technology critics have always been with us, and they have sometimes helped temper society’s occasional irrational exuberance about certain innovations,” I note in the opening of the first essay. The problem is that the “technology critics sometimes go much too far and overlook the importance of finding new and better ways of satisfying both basic and complex human needs and wants.” I continue on to highlight the growing “technopanic” rhetoric we sometimes hear today, including various claims that “it’s OK to be a Luddite” and push for a “degrowth movement” that would slow the wheels of progress. That would be a disaster for humanity because, as I note in concluding that first essay:

Through ongoing trial-and-error tool building, we discover new and better ways of satisfying human needs and wants to better our lives and the lives of those around us. Human flourishing is dependent upon our collective willingness to embrace and defend the creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation that produces the wisdom and growth that propel us forward. By contrast, today’s neo-Luddite tech critics suggest that we should just be content with the tools of the past and slow down the pace of technological innovation to supposedly save us from any number of dystopian futures they predict. If they succeed, it will leave us in a true dystopia that will foreclose the entrepreneurialism and innovation opportunities that are paramount to raising the standard of living for billions of people across the world.

In the second essay, I make an attempt to sketch out a more robust vision and set of principles to counter the tech critics. Building on my last book, as well as a forthcoming one, I outline a sort of “rational-optimist creed.” This vision is inspired by the important work of Matt Ridley and his excellent book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Generally speaking, rational optimists:

• believe there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment, but also acknowledge the various challenges sometimes associated with technological change;
• look forward to a better future and reject overly nostalgic accounts of some supposed “good ‘ol days” or bygone better eras;
• base our optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling;
• support practical, bottom-up solutions to hard problems through ongoing trial-and-error experimentation, but are not wedded to any one process to get the job done;
• appreciate entrepreneurs for their willingness to take risks and try new things, but do not engage in hero worship of any particular individual, organization, or particular technology.

Going further, I build on the excellent work of Robert D. Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who in his 2005 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy, identified the way “a political divide is emerging between preservationists who want to hold onto the past and modernizers who recognize that new times require new means.” I tried to provide a breakdown for how this conflict of visions plays out in various ways:

I also highlight some of my favorite works by other rational optimists, including, Steven Pinker ( Enlightenment Now), Deirdre McCloskey (Bourgeois Equality), Calestous Juma (Innovation and Its Enemies), Samuel Florman (The Existential Pleasures of Engineering), and Virginia Postrel (The Future and Its Enemies), and Joel Mokyr, (The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress).

I encourage you to jump over to the AIER blog and read both essays in full.

It was my great pleasure to recently join Paul Matzko and Will Duffield on the Building Tomorrow podcast to discuss some of the themes in my last book and my forthcoming one. During our 50-minute conversation, which you can listen to here, we discussed:

• the “pacing problem” and how it complicates technological governance efforts;
• the steady rise of “innovation arbitrage” and medical tourism across the globe;
• the continued growth of “evasive entrepreneurialism” (i.e., efforts to evade traditional laws & regs while innovating);
• new forms of “technological civil disobedience;”
• the rapid expansion of “soft law” governance mechanism as a response to these challenges; and,
• craft beer bootlegging tips!  (Seriously, I move a lot of beer in the underground barter markets).

Bounce over to the Building Tomorrow site and give the show a listen. Fun chat.

Why should we really care about technological innovation? My Mercatus Center colleague James Broughel and I have just published a paper answering that question. In “Technological Innovation and Economic Growth: A Brief Report on the Evidence,” we summarize the extensive body of evidence that discusses the relationship between innovation, growth, and human prosperity. We note that while economists, political scientists, and historians don’t agree on much, there exists widespread consensus among them that there is a symbiotic relationship between the pace of innovation and the progress of civilization. Our 27-page paper documenting the academic evidence on this issue can be downloaded on SSRN or from the Mercatus website. Here’s the abstract:

Technological innovation is a fundamental driver of economic growth and human progress. Yet some critics want to deny the vast benefits that innovation has bestowed and continues to bestow on mankind. To inform policy discussions and address the technology critics’ concerns, this paper summarizes relevant literature documenting the impact of technological innovation on economic growth and, more broadly, on living standards and human well-being. The historical record is unambiguous regarding how ongoing innovation has improved the way we live; however, the short-term disruptive aspects of technological change are real and deserve attention as well. The paper concludes with an extended discussion about the relevance of these findings for shaping cultural attitudes toward technology and the role that public policy can play in fostering innovation, growth, and ongoing improvements in the quality of life of citizens.

After reading LM Sacasas’ recent piece on moral communities , I couldn’t help but wonder if the piece was written in the esoteric mode .

Let me explain by some meandering.

Now, I am surely going to butcher his argument, so take a read of it yourself, but there is a bit of an interesting call and response structure to the piece. He begins with commentary on “frequent deployment of the rhetorical we ,” in discussions over the morality of technology. Then, channeling Langdon Winner, he notes approvingly that “What matters here is that this lovely ‘we’ suggests the presence of a moral community that may not, in fact, exist at all, at least not in any coherent, self-conscious form.”

He is right, the use of the rhetorical we helps to construct a community, which he thens deploys later in the piece. To see this in action,   

…The idea that technical forms are merely neutral has proven hard to shake. For a very long time, it has been a cornerstone principle of our thinking about technology and society. Or, more to the point, we have taken it for granted and have consequently done very little thinking about technology with regards to society.

I’ll note in passing that the liberal democratic structures of modern political culture and the development of technology are deeply intertwined, and they have both depended upon the presumption of their ostensible neutrality. I tempted to think that our present crisis is a function of a growing realization that neither our political structures nor our technologies are, in fact, merely neutral instruments.

Before becoming a policy analyst, I went to graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago and studied communication, which at the time was transitioning away from the influence of former dean Stanley Fish and becoming a new media study program. The staff was and still is excellent, but at the time it was deeply heterodox, including both old school rhetoricians and literary scholars as well as communication historians, and communication sociologists.

All of this background is to say that Sacasas’ charge that “we have taken it for granted and have consequently done very little thinking about technology with regards to society,” depends a lot on the kind of community you call your own and how you understand community.

My former community, communication scholars, has a long history of exploring these questions. Indeed, one of my favorite classes was an introductory survey course on democracy and technology . But Sacasas all too well knows that community. I don’t think he was intending to suggest those kind of counterpublics when suggesting community. As he notes, “There is no moral community or public space in which technological issues are topics for deliberation, debate, and shared action.” Here, he means moral community as it comes to us from Durkheim. Just as a reminder, moral community in this tradition generally references “those beings that you need to think ‘but is this right’ before you do something that could affect them.” In other words, questions over the morality of technology are not attended by the kinds of questions that constitute a moral community. I want to come back to this point later.

Where does this leave us? He further explains,

We are, at present, stuck in an unhelpful tendency to imagine that our only options with regard to how we govern technology are, on the one hand, individual choices and, on the other, regulation by the state. What’s worse, we’ve also tended to oppose these to one another. But this way of conceptualizing our situation is both a symptom of the deepest consequences of modern technology and part of the reason why it is so difficult to make any progress.

Technology operates at different scales and effective mechanisms of governance need to correspond to the challenges that arise at each scale. Mechanism of governance that makes sense at one end of the spectrum will be ineffective at the other end and vice versa.

Our problem is basically this: technologies that operate at the macro-level cannot be effectively governed by micro-level mechanisms, which basically amount to individual choices. At the macro-level, however, governance is limited by the degree to which we can arrive at public consensus, and the available tools of governance at the macro-level cannot address all of the ways technologies impact individuals. What is required is a cocktail of strategies that address the consequences of technology as they manifest themselves across the spectrum of scale.

In other words, Sacasas sets up a governance gap problem . There are micro-level solutions and macro-level solutions, but nothing in the middle that might emanate from a moral community. But, again, the fundamental criticism of this entire argument hinges on accepting the rhetorical we and the notion of a community. Or, to say it another way, a community must first be constructed for a governance gap to exist. If we don’t agree to the rhetorical construction of community, if there is no we, then there is no gap to fill. This is no small feat. Even Durkheim’s original understanding of moral community was a subjective understanding of the ethics of an imagined community.

But even separate from the construction problem, it is not clear to me that there isn’t already “a cocktail of strategies that address the consequences of technology as they manifest themselves across the spectrum of scale.” For example, Facebook changed its policy on breastfeeding photos after a group of mothers organized and pushed the #FreeTheNipple campaign . I cannot help but wonder if that is the kind of community driven strategy that Sacasas would want to promote.

That notoriously nebulous concept of civil society is worth invoking here. Organizations like EFF and EPIC and FreePress sue platforms and local governments, and help enact change. And what about all of the reports from journalists in the last decade? They have impacted both Facebook and Google, forcing them to change. Same with Apple and AT&T and Verizon. All of this is to say, I’m not exactly convinced this vision of the world is the appropriate yardstick of critique.   

By Adam Thierer & Jennifer Huddleston Skees

“ He’s making a list and checking it twice. Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice .”

With the Christmas season approaching, apparently it’s not just Santa who is making a list. The Trump Administration has just asked whether a long list of emerging technologies are naughty or nice — as in whether they should be heavily regulated or allowed to be developed and traded freely.

If they land on the naughty list, these technologies could be subjected to complex export control regulations, which would limit research and development efforts in many emerging tech fields and inadvertently undermine U.S. innovation and competitiveness. Worse yet, it isn’t even clear there would be any national security benefit associated with such restrictions.  

From Light-Touch to a Long List

Generally speaking, the Trump Administration has adopted a “light-touch” approach to the regulation of emerging technology and relied on more flexible “soft law” approaches to high-tech policy matters. That’s what makes the move to impose restrictions on the trade and usage of these emerging technologies somewhat counter-intuitive. On November 19, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security launched a “ Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies .” The notice seeks public comment on “criteria for identifying emerging technologies that are essential to U.S. national security, for example because they have potential conventional weapons, intelligence collection, weapons of mass destruction, or terrorist applications or could provide the United States with a qualitative military or intelligence advantage.”

The Commerce Department has long sought to control the use of such technologies through a combination of methods, including formal export controls. The process for establishing such controls was clumsily cobbled together over time, so Congress passed the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (ECRA) to formalize these regulations. ECRA requires that the President formulate an interagency process to coordinate these rules with the goal of creating, “a regular and robust process to identify the emerging and other types of critical technologies of concern, as defined in United States foreign direct investment laws, and regulate their release to foreign persons as warranted regardless of the nature of the underlying transaction.” As part of this process, the Commerce Department is to create a list “of foreign persons and end-uses that are determined to be a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States . . .  and to whom exports, reexports, and transfers of items are controlled.”

Sweeping Breadth

That is what prompted the Trump Administration’s recent Emerging Technologies notice, which includes is a remarkably sweeping list of technologies that the Commerce Department is considering for the exports controls list. The list has 14 major categories:

(1) Biotechnology

(2) Artificial intelligence

(3) Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) technology

(4) Microprocessor technology

(5) Advanced computing technology

(6) Data analytics technology

(7) Quantum information and sensing technology

(8) Logistics technology

(9) Additive manufacturing / 3D printing

(10) Robotics

(11) Brain-computer interfaces

(12) Hypersonics

(13) Advanced materials

(14) Advanced surveillance technologies

The Department’s 14-category list also includes over 40 itemized examples of specific applications. For example, the “artificial intelligence” category alone includes a list of 11 applied types of AI, from AI cloud technologies and chipsets to neural networks to speech and audio processing.

The breadth of this list is remarkable in that it touches almost every emerging technology sector imaginable. It might have been easier for the Commerce Department to simply list those emerging technologies that will not be subject to review for potential export controls. It is an “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” approach to emerging technology policy oversight and regulation that could clearly have far reaching consequences beyond national security.

There are some obvious dangers with such an open-ended review and it is important to remember these technologies have many beneficial applications as well as any potential risks.

Threatening Beneficial Uses

First, the potential export regulations create the danger of negative spillover effects that could undermine beneficial uses of each technology listed . All of the technologies listed have already been used in many ways that benefit both consumers and businesses. Limitations on their export could limit their availability or prevent improvements due to concerns that such broad interpretations of restrictions could limit the market.

For example, the regulation of AI mentioned above would not only address concerns about how AI might be used in weapons, but could even undermine the export of technology that has become a part of our everyday lives such as Siri in iPhones and Amazon’s Alexa. While the department claims that it seeks to “avoid negatively impacting U.S. leadership in the science, technology, engineering, and manufacturing sectors,” it is unlikely that any but the most narrowly tailored rules could actually avoid having a negative impact on innovation in the named technologies .

The more general purpose a technology the more difficult it will be to control the potential impact on the beneficial uses of the technology as well as the negative impacts. In fact, in some cases such as AI and robotics it can even be difficult to define what the technology is, because it is typically the applications and not the technology more generally that is being discussed and regulated. In many cases, the anti-export regulations would or could at least signal to entrepreneurial innovators that their time is better spent on other technologies or that their work should be taken elsewhere and risks the U.S. falling behind other countries in these important innovative areas.  

Undermining International Competitiveness

Second, the inquiry could undermine U.S. competitiveness by encouraging more offshoring in a world of innovation arbitrage opportunities . With our increasingly connected global economy and specifically the more mobile nature of many emerging technologies, it is becoming easier for innovators who find themselves subjected to onerous regulations in one country to move their research and development efforts to another. This is sometimes referred to as “ innovation arbitrage .”

While the U.S. remains a leader in attracting innovators, this scenario has already played out several times. For example, Amazon moved its drone testing program to the UK rather than test in the US due in large part to FAA regulations regarding drones. Similarly, 23andme also initially took its direct-to-consumer genetic testing abroad after the FDA threatened to shut down their product.

Heavily regulating the export of general applications of these technologies could actually backfire and encourage innovators to take their research to countries like China where they do not face such regulations. R. David Edelman, the director of the Project on Technology, the Economy, and National Security at MIT, has noted that while the inquiry might be “intended to help US companies be more competitive,” the reality is that “it would almost certainly give Chinese companies that don’t face those same restrictions a sizable advantage in the playing field.”

Moreover, if export controls undermine domestic innovation and competitiveness in this fashion and benefit developers in other countries, it means the U.S. will have less of a say over the ethical development of many important technologies. Bloomberg contributor Noah Smith observes that , when it comes to the global race for hegemony in genetic sciences, China is poised to take the lead. “If the U.S. shies away from developing genetic-engineering technology, these riches will flow to China, or to whatever other countries seize the technological edge,” he notes. That would be problematic not just from a competitive perspective, but also from an ethical perspective, because America would have less of a say in guiding the development of these important but controversial technologies. “Dystopian outcomes are also less likely with the U.S. at the helm,” Smith believes.

Limiting or Ending Technologies Consumers Already Enjoy

Third, the inquiry could pose a threat to everyday consumer technologies that are already widely distributed . The most interesting thing about the technologies listed in the notice is that many of them have moved well beyond the “emerging” phrase of development. They are already out in the wild and being used by people every day.

For example, among the AI technologies listed in the notice are “speech and audio processing (e.g., speech recognition and production)” as well as, “natural language processing (e.g., machine translation).” We already enjoy a great many services such as those today, including Siri and Alexa. Meanwhile, there are technologies already on the market that help disabled and autistic children communicate and interact with their peers using AI and robotics.

For example, the KASPAR robot helps children with such disabilities learn social skills to interact with their peers and teach conversational skills. Similarly, technology that translates apparently nonverbal sounds and other methods of communication into speech via apps and other technology with various voices that others can understand could be subject to development ending regulations or be unable to help children in other countries if the proposed export restrictions are phrased too broadly. Not only might new restrictions limit the development of new technologies, it could even limit or eliminate those that we have already embraced and improved the lives of many.

Risk to Research & Open-Source Efforts

Fourth, the expansion of export controls for many of the technologies listed in the inquiry opens the door to widespread policing of open source coding and communications , but offers no explanation of how that would even work. A large number of the technologies on the Commerce Department list have both commercial and non-commercial applications. Innovation scholars use terms like “ free innovation ” and “social entrepreneurialism” to describe innovative efforts that are undertaken by individuals or groups of people to pursue a broader array of social goals or values beyond just profit-seeking.

A prominent example of social entrepreneurs engaging in free innovation involves the use of 3D printers and open source designs to voluntarily create prosthetics for children with limb deficiencies. What happens to collaborative, non-commercial innovations like that if export controls are suddenly imposed on additive manufacturing technologies by the Department of Commerce? If one participant is based outside the US, is that sufficient to subject such collaboration to export controls? What, exactly, would be subjected to controls? The 3D printers? The open source blueprints? The website hosting such information? It is difficult to imagine how such regulation would work in practice but it is easy to imagine the effect it would have if pursued: It would create a massive chilling effect on many beneficial forms of innovation and simultaneously threaten freedom of speech and academic research.

This same problem could play out in many other technology fields listed in the Commerce Department notice, including: robotics, speech recognition, biotechnology, and genetic engineering, among many others often engage in open and cross-border collaboration for open source development. Free innovation and social entrepreneurialism are expanding rapidly in these and other emerging technology arenas. Thus, export control regulation can no longer hinge on going after “deep-pocketed” corporations looking to sell physical systems. To be truly effective, regulations will need to cover bottom-up, “grassroots” innovation. But that move will have profound ramifications for the freedom to freely tinker with or even freely research important technologies and technological processes.

Dubious National Security Benefits

There’s a final danger associated with this effort: it might not help advance America’s national security objectives , and could even hinder them.

To the extent that ECRA and this new Department of Commerce effort lead to heightened scrutiny for the many dozens of technologies identified, it could undermine research and development efforts in many of those fields. It could do so directly (by formally limiting or forbidding domestic R&D efforts) or indirectly (by incentivizing many domestic emerging tech innovators to move their operations offshore, or discouraging foreign developers from setting up shop here). Not only would such actions risk the US losing its lead in innovation, it could actually result in such regulations backfiring from a national security perspective.  

At the end of the day, the problem here is that Congress is failing to clearly identify what is “essential to the national security of the United States.” ECRA just passes the buck on that thorny question to the Commerce Department for a laundry list of emerging technologies. By soliciting public input, the best hope here is that experts in these various emerging technology sectors will step forward and identify the trade-offs associated with inclusion of most of these technologies on the export controls list. Hopefully, the list would then be narrowed the much smaller class of applied technologies that have a very real, immediate, and clearly catastrophic potential for harm to the national security interests of the nation. That would have been the better way to begin this process, but Congress and the Administration have instead adopted the opposite approach here and now we must hope that they are willing to significantly pare back the list of technologies even being considered for inclusion.

Back to the Crypto Wars?

In a sense, this debate was foreshadowed by the debate in the late 1990s over export controls for encryption technologies. As encryption emerged , law enforcement and national security agencies were concerned about its potential use by bad actors to hide or destroy evidence or information by using encrypted devices or services and sought to require backdoors to be able to access encrypted data and to restrict the export of certain types of encryption and certain encrypted devices. Such requirements, as the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation’s Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn pointed out, would actually reduce the security of everyday Americans to cyber attacks, negatively impact U.S. businesses’ global competitiveness, and reduce the competitiveness and innovation of the technology sector not only in encryption but in related fields as well.

Luckily, many of these concerns were avoided and encryption restrictions have been narrowly tailored. Recent tensions between the FBI and tech companies like Apple illustrate that this debate is far from settled. Now it seems that the Commerce Department’s proposed restrictions could create the same vulnerabilities more broadly for a great number of emerging technologies.

“Soft Law” & Next Steps

In some ways this move to regulate technologies via export restrictions shows the dark side of the growing trend of “soft law.” Soft law, as we discuss in more detail in our forthcoming paper , includes regulatory actions such as guidance documents, working groups, sandboxing, and many other informal regulatory mechanisms. Such mechanisms are often used to regulate emerging technologies in the absence of formal actions or because the traditional policymaking apparatus cannot keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology. In many cases soft law has been used to accelerate technological development that otherwise might have been limited by traditional hard law.

But where soft law thrives in the vacuum left by a lack of formal delegation and regulation, this inaction also poses risks. Agencies like the Commerce Department could extend amorphous powers over emerging technologies without the expertise to fully understand the way such regulations might negatively affect beneficial technological developments, which are typically hard to predict in advance.

A smarter approach to export controls for emerging technologies begins with a rational assessment of:

1. a more robust evaluation of what really constitutes a tangible, immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic harm to the national security interests of the United States;
2. the practicality of proposed controls for any emerging technologies considered for inclusion on the list;
3. the wisdom of placing technologies on the list which already have been developed or marketed overseas (or appear poised to be); and,
4. the potential unintended consequences that any new export controls might have on the innovative potential of American creators and companies, the future of research in important sectors, the free flow of knowledge regarding peaceful applications, and the competitive standing of the United States relative to other countries.
5. whether catastrophic concerns about emerging technologies might be better addressed through multilateral accords or agreements aimed at achieving global consensus regarding inappropriate use and applications (as has been done in chemical weapon treaties and nuclear non-proliferation efforts).

Several specific technologies may still qualify for inclusion on the export controls list after such an evaluation, but it will start with a more limited approach and then expand as necessary. Such an approach assumes that in general purpose technology is not a threat until proven otherwise. By inverting the process in this fashion, the Administration wouldn’t be treating every emerging technology under the sun as guilty until proven innocent; innovations would be allowed to flourish naturally until the potential for harm is well-documented.

Unfortunately, the Commerce Department’s proposed approach does just the opposite and risks minimizing the benefits of these emerging technologies while doing little to advance national security interests in a meaningful way.

I’ve always been perplexed by tech critiques that seek to pit “humanist” values against technology or technological processes, or that even suggest a bright demarcation exists between these things. Properly understood, “technology” and technological innovation are simply extensions of our humanity and represent efforts to continuously improve the human condition. In that sense, humanism and technology are compliments, not opposites.

I started thinking about this again after reading a recent article by Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal , which introduced me to the term “techno-chauvinism.” Techno-chauvinism is a new term that some social critics are using to identify when technologies or innovators are apparently not behaving in a “humanist” fashion. Mims attributes the term techno-chauvinism to Meredith Broussard of New York University, who defines it as “the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution .” [Italics added.] Later on Twitter, Mims defined and critiqued techno-chauvinism as “the belief that the best solution to any problem is technology, not changing our culture, habits or mindset.”

Everything Old is New Again

There are other terms critics have used to describe the same notion, including: “ techno-fundamentalism ” (Siva Vaidhyanathan), “cyber-utopianism,” and “ technological solutionism ” (Evgeny Morozov). In a sense, all these terms are really just variants of what scholars in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have long referred to as “technological determinism.”

As I noted in a recent essay about determinism, the traditional “hard” variant of technological determinism refers to the notion that technology almost has a mind of its own and that it will plow forward without much resistance from society or governments. Critics argue that determinist thinking denies or ignores the importance of the human element in moving history forward, or what Broussard would refer to as “people-based solutions.”

The first problem with this thinking is there are no bright lines in these debates and many “softer” variants of determinism exist. The same problem is at work when we turn to discussions about both “humanism” and “technology.” Things get definitionally murky quite quickly, and everyone seemingly has a preferred conception of these terms to fit their own ideological dispositions. “Humanism is a rather vague and contested term with a convoluted history,” observes tech philosopher Michael Sacasas. And here’s an essay that I have updated many times over the years to catalog the dozens of different definitions of “technology” I have unearthed in my ongoing research.

Thus, when we hear “humanist” critiques of “technology,” I can’t help but think that many of them begin with an unclear explanation of what both those terms mean and how they are related. Here’s how I think about them.

“Technology” is not some magical force or shiny device that appeared out of thin air. All technology is the product of human design . The most straightforward definition of “technology” is simply the application of knowledge to a task. When critics claim that innovators or their defenders are “chauvinists” who think that technological solutions are “superior to the people-based solution,” they are creating a nonsensical dichotomy because technological solutions are the same thing as “people-based solution.” People create technologies to solve problems. We can imagine the first person who struck two stones together to make a spark and light a fire, or the first humans who fashioned knives or bows and arrows to hunt game. Were they not being “humanist” by pursuing a better way to feed themselves and others? Personally, I cannot think of anything more “humanist” than creating or using whatever tools one can to put the next meal on the table! Eventually, most tools and processes like these become so ordinary that we no longer even consider them “technology” at all. They just become part of the fabric of our lives and we come to take them for granted.

What some critics mean by “humanism” is also confusing for reasons that were nicely identified by Andrew McAfee in his 2015 Financial Times essay , “Who are the humanists, and why do they dislike technology so much?” McAfee pointed out that some “humanist” critiques of technological innovation are relatively banal to the extent they are simply reminding us that all people are important, or that all technological process involve trade-offs that we should be aware of.

Of course these things are true, McAfee noted. But it is also true that technological advancement solves far more problems than it creates by helping to reduce hunger and disease, travel further, communicate more widely, gain leisure time, and so on. Moreover, there are trade-offs associated with all human actions. Limiting ongoing innovations and improvements that could better the human condition gives rise to equally significant trade-offs. In any event, to the extent “humanism” can be reduced to UP WITH PEOPLE! and TRADE-OFFS MATTER!, I think all of us would consider ourselves to be “humanists.”

The Vision of the Anointed

But there’s a third conception of “humanism” McAfee identified that he regarded as far more problematic. I will label it the “ Vision of the Anointed ,” to borrow a phrase Thomas Sowell used in his book about the way some elites allow rhetorical flourishes and good intentions to trump actual real-world evidence and results. McAfee summarized this humanist version of the Vision of the Anointed as follows: “Because I am for the people I should be free from having to support my contentions with anything more than rhetoric.” Or, more simply: “You can trust what I say, because I am on the side of people instead of the cold, hard machines.”

That sort of vision is at work in a great deal of STS scholarship, and has been for a long, long time. Indeed, modern conceptions of “humanism” and critiques of “techno-chauvinism” or “solutionism” are just restatements of the lamentations of countless previous media critics or technology critics from the past, including Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Langdon Winner, Christopher Lasch, and many others. Much criticism of this sort ends up suggesting — either directly or implicitly — that technological innovation is anti-human or “de-humanizing” in some fashion and should, therefore, be rejected, reversed, or at least slowed down considerably.

For example, in Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven , the social critic lambasted what he called “progressive optimism” for its supposed “denial of the natural limits on human power and freedom.” Lasch desired a “populism for the twenty-first century” that “would find much of its moral inspiration in the popular radicalism of the past and most generally in the wide-ranging critique of progress, enlightenment, and unlimited ambition.”

This gets to the real irony associated with the Humanistic Vision of the Anointed: It doesn’t place a lot of faith in humans! In this highly pessimistic and often quite elitist worldview, the masses seemingly do not understand what is in their own best interests, and the material gains of modern civilization are, at once, both a fiction to be scoffed at and a reality to be scorned as counterproductive or “anti-human.” What is the alternative arrangement for society that is set forth by those subscribing to the Vision of the Anointed? As Lasch suggests, it comes down to acceptance of limits . In closing his book, Lasch called for the return of a humanistic “state of heart and mind” that “asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits.” In other words, we should be happy with what we’ve got because progress ain’t so great.

Pastoral Myths & the “Good ‘Ol Days”

This also explains the enduring power of “pastoral myths” in the work of such critics. If you spend enough time reading through works of technology and media criticism, you often find allusions made to some supposedly better time  — the proverbial “good ‘ol days” — when life was supposed simplier or better in some way. Other times, it is just implied that life in the present isn’t as good as it was in the past.

The problem is that those good ‘ol days weren’t so great. “Demonizing innovation is often associated with campaigns to romanticize past products and practices,” Calestous Juma noted in his 2016 book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies . “Opponents of innovation hark back to traditions as if traditions themselves were not inventions at some point in the past.” That was especially the case in battles over new farming methods and technologies, when opponents of change were frequently “championing a moral cause to preserve a way of life,” as Juma discusses in several chapters of his book. New products or methods of production were repeatedly but wrongly characterized as dangerous or anti-human simply because they were not supposedly “natural” or “traditional” enough in character.

Of course, if all farming and other work was to remain frozen in some past “natural” state, we’d all still be hunters and gathers struggling to find the next meal to put in our bellies. Or, if we were all still on the farms of the “good ‘ol days,” then we’d still be stuck using an ox and plow in the name of preserving the “traditional” ways of doing things.

Humanity has made amazing strides—including being able to feed more people more easily and cheaply than ever before—precisely because we broke with those old, “natural” traditions. Alas, many vested interests, and even quite a few academics, still employ these same pastoral appeals and myths to oppose new forms of technological change. The case studies in Juma’s book powerfully illustrate why that dynamic continues to be a driving force in innovation policy debates and how it delays the diffusion of many important new life-enriching goods and services.

Trial and Error

When the opponents of change rest their case on pastoral myths and nostalgic arguments about the good ‘ol days, we should remind them that those days were, in reality, eras of abject misery. Widespread poverty, mass hunger, poor hygiene, short lifespans, and so on were the norm. What lifted humanity up and improved our lot as a species is that we learned how to apply knowledge to tasks in a better way through incessant trial and error experimentation. In other words, we flourished by innovating . And the results of our innovative activities were called technologies .

In this sense, humanism and technology have gone hand in hand throughout history. Steven Pinker put it best in his new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress : “Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish. The goal of maximizing human flourishing–life, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experiences–may be called humanism.”

Our technologies are simply extensions of our knowledge and represent profoundly humanist efforts to improve our lives and the lives of others around us. “We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one,” Pinker notes. “But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing,” he rightly concludes.

The Right Balance

Of course, as Pinker hints, we can go too far sometimes or place too much faith in our tools. Pursuing perfection through technological betterment can end in folly, or worse. In my previous essay, “ Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream ,” I noted that over-exuberant tech boosters are sometimes guilty of the same rhetorical excesses and inflated claims that some humanist critics practice. Some tech evangelists go too far in suggesting that technological innovation can solve all the problems of the world. Other times, they ignore or ridicule the importance of other human values, traditions, or institutions to long-term human flourishing and over-value convenience or efficiency.

When innovation advocates go overboard, they should be called out for it. But that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a better future, and one in which technology is rightly viewed as the fundamental driver of human well-being. No matter what some critics say, technological solutions are people-based solutions. We craft tools to solve important problems and to better our lives and the lives of our loved ones. What could be more “humanist” than that?

Additional Reading :

• Adam Thierer, “ The Pacing Problem, the Collingridge Dilemma & Technological Determinism ,” Technology Liberation Front , August 16, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ Defining ‘Technology ’” Technology Liberation Front , originally published April 29, 2014, last updated July 2017.
• “ Evasive Entrepreneurs and Permissionless Innovation: An Interview with Adam Thierer ,” The Bridge , September 11, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream ?” Medium , September 7, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ Are “Permissionless Innovation” and “Responsible Innovation” Compatible ?” July 12, 2017.
• Adam Thierer, “ What Does It Mean to “Have a Conversation” about a New Technology ?,” Technology Liberation Front , May 23, 2013.
• Adam Thierer, “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” August 23, 2013.

Over at the Mercatus Center’s Bridge blog, Chad Reese interviewed me about my forthcoming book and continuing research on “evasive entrepreneurialism” and the freedom to innovate. I provide a quick summary of the issues and concepts that I am exploring with my colleagues currently. Those issues include:

• free innovation
• evasive entrepreneurialism & social entrepreneurialism
• technological civil disobedience
• the freedom to tinker / freedom to try / freedom to innovate
• the right to earn a living
• “moonshots” / deep technologies / disruptive innovation / transformative tech
• innovation culture
• global innovation arbitrage
• the pacing problem & the Collingridge dilemma
• “soft law” solutions for technological governance

You can read the entire Q&A over at The Bridge, or I have pasted it down below.

Your research and next book project are focused on “evasive entrepreneurialism” and the freedom to innovate. Tell us a bit more about this work.

Evasive entrepreneurs are innovators who don’t always conform to social or legal norms. Various scholars have documented how entrepreneurs are increasingly using new technological capabilities to circumvent traditional regulatory systems or put pressure on lawmakers or regulators to alter policy in some fashion. Evasive entrepreneurs rely on a strategy of “permissionless innovation” in both the business world and the political arena.

Some evasive behavior could even be considered “technological civil disobedience” in the sense that many innovators behave in this fashion because they find many rules to be offensive, confusing, time-consuming, expensive, or perhaps just annoying and irrelevant. In that sense, they could also be referred to as “regulatory entrepreneurs” who push back against what Tim Sandefur labels “The Permission Society.”

My book documents “evasive” behavior of this sort and explains why it is happening with increasing regularity. I also make the normative case for embracing the freedom to innovative more generally because of the many benefits society derives from technological innovations and especially “moonshots”—game-changing, transformative technologies.

You mentioned “permissionless innovation.” That was the topic of your last book. Could you explain what that means and how it relates to your new book?

The term “permissionless innovation” is of uncertain origin but generally refers to trying new things without asking for the prior blessing of various authorities. The phrase is sometimes attributed to Grace M. Hopper, a computer scientist who was a rear admiral in the United States Navy. “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission,” she once noted famously.

In my last book, I used the term more broadly to describe a governance philosophy for a variety of emerging technologies and contrasted it with its opposite—the “precautionary principle.” Permissionless innovation, I argued, refers to the notion that experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be permitted by default. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue and problems, if any develop, can be addressed later.

By contrast, the precautionary principle generally recommends disallowing or slowing innovations until their creators can prove that new products and services are “safe,” however that is defined. The problem with making precaution the basis of all technology policy is that it means a great deal of life-enriching (and even life-saving) innovation will never come about if we base policy on hypothetical worst-case scenarios.

The tension between these visions is on display in every major technology field today—drones, driverless cars, crypocurrency, genetics, mobile medicine, 3D printing, virtual reality, the sharing economy, and many others. That’s why we have made these sectors the focus of ongoing Mercatus research.

Could you give us a few examples of how entrepreneurs behave in an “evasive” fashion or how innovators engage in technological civil disobedience?

Many scholars and tech analysts have highlighted the ways in which sharing economy innovators like Uber and Airbnb engaged in regulatory entrepreneurialism, but that’s hardly the only example. Using 3D printers and open source designs, for example, many creative people are pushing up against legal norms when they fabricate prosthetic hands for children with limb deficiencies or create their own firearms for self-defense.

One of my favorite examples is the open source, do-it-yourself Nightscout Project, a non-profit founded by parents of diabetic children. These parents came together and shared knowledge and code to create better insulin remote monitoring and delivery devices for their kids. Their motto is “WeAreNotWaiting.” Specifically, these parents got tired of waiting for the development of new “professional” devices to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which can take many years to get through the regulatory process. Through voluntary collaboration, these parents have created reliable devices that are much less expensive than those FDA-approved devices, which can cost many thousands of dollars.

When average citizens engage in this sort of “biohacking” to create better and cheaper insulin pumps or 3D-printed prosthetic limbs but do not charge anything for it, their actions are of ambiguous legality. But even if they are breaking some laws or bending some rules, it isn’t stopping them from working together to make the world a better place. That’s technological civil disobedience in a nutshell.

So evasive entrepreneurialism can be both commercial and non-commercial in character?

Yes. Abroad range of “evasive” actors exist with large commercial players on one end of the spectrum and purely non-commercial “grassroots” or “household” innovators on the other. MIT economist Eric von Hippel calls the latter activity “free innovation,” which includes things like the 3D-printed creations I already mentioned.

Social entrepreneurialism is a closely related concept. Several of my Mercatus colleagues have documented how social entrepreneurs were instrumental in helping community recovery efforts following hurricanes and other disasters. Entrepreneurs aim to create social value through innovative acts that can assist their communities, while also potentially helping them create new business opportunities later down the road.

What’s interesting about “free innovation” and social entrepreneurialism is that much of this activity happens at the boundaries of what it technically legal. These innovators just want to help others. When laws stand in the way of that, they sometimes creatively evade them to get things done. That’s clearly the case with the open source DIY insulin pumps or 3D-printed prosthetic limbs.

Another example involves drone enthusiasts who often help out in search-and-rescue missions for missing people and pets even though they could be running afoul of various aviation regulations in the process. Even something as routine as children setting up free lemonade stands without local permits serves as an example of how people can behave in an evasive fashion to serve others.

The so-called “pacing problem” figures prominently in your work. Could you explain what it is and why it is important to the future of innovation policy?

As I noted in a recent Bridge essay, the pacing problem refers to the notion that technological change increasingly outpaces the ability of laws and regulations to keep up. The power of “combinatorial innovation,” which is driven by “Moore’s Law,” fuels a constant expansion of technological capabilities. Meanwhile, citizens quickly assimilate new tools into their daily lives and then expect that even more and better tools will be delivered tomorrow.

This makes it difficult for government officials and organizations to keep policy in line with fast-moving marketplace and social developments. That is especially true because of how increasingly dysfunctional and unable to adapt many government bodies and processes have become. This is why I argue that the pacing problem is becoming the great equalizer in debates over technological governance; policymakers are being forced to rethink their approach to the regulation of many sectors and technologies. This is especially the case because the pacing problem can be exploited by evasive entrepreneurs who are looking to do an end-run around slower regulatory processes.

Will “evasive” tactics work for entrepreneurs in every context? It seems like this would be more challenging in some regulatory contexts than others, right?

Evasive techniques are obviously more likely to succeed for technologies and sectors that are “born free” as opposed to “born captive.”  Technologies that are “born free” are not confronted with old laws and regulatory regimes that require permission before new products and services are offered. For example, there is no Federal Robotics Commission, 3D Printing Safety Act, or Virtual Reality Agency. It’s obviously easier to innovate as you wish in those fields, at least currently.

If, however, you want to put a driverless car on the road or a drone in the sky, preemptive approval is required, making evasive acts far riskier. Of course, it is exactly those sectors where evasive acts are potentially most needed! Too many old sectors are immune from new entry and consumer choice due to cronyism and industrial protectionism. As we saw with the ride-sharing services and now electric scooter sharing, sometimes evasive techniques can work for a time and then give innovators more leverage at the bargaining table.

In some cases, like space policy, supersonic transportation, or new FinTech offerings, evasive strategies are largely impossible because of the stifling morass of overlapping laws and regulations. Agencies will not tolerate much (if any) departure from regulatory norms in those instances. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and FDA are particularly notorious for stifling entrepreneurial efforts.

But I am sometimes surprised to find evasive efforts happening even in those sectors. While the FAA is quite heavy-handed about strictly regulating airspace, the agency isn’t doing much to enforce its current drone registration requirements. Countless Americans fly their drones every day without a care about what the feds say. And while 23andme got a cease-and-desist order from the FDA due to their evasive efforts with home genetic test kits, the creators of many mobile medical devices and 3D-printed medical objects are currently being allowed to push up against the boundaries of legality under traditional FDA rules. The agency has bent its rules to accommodate that activity. When agencies take a pass on enforcing their own regulations, that is called “rule departure,” and it seems to be happening with greater regularity, probably due to the combined influence of both the pacing problem and evasive entrepreneurialism.

What’s at stake if policymakers push back too aggressively against evasive innovators?

Technological innovation is the fundamental driver of human well-being. When we let people experiment with new and better ways of doing things, we not only allow for the constant expansion of new goods and services, but we grow opportunities, incomes, and knowledge. This is how countries raise their overall standard of living and achieve prosperity over the long haul.

Entrepreneurs are the key to this process because by taking risks and exploring new opportunities, they continuously replenish the well of important ideas and innovations. If, therefore, we punish creative people for seeking creative solutions to hard problems—even those sometimes behaving “evasively”—we will be denied the fruits of those creative efforts. We will also be denying them the right to earn a livingand enjoy the fruits of their labors. In this sense, the freedom to innovate is closely linked with individual autonomy and self-worth and deserves greater protection. It is about being free to pursue happiness however we each see fit.

Policymakers should, therefore, give innovators greater freedom to experiment, even when those efforts prove to be highly disruptive. Moonshots may not happen unless public policy supports a culture of experimentation and risk-taking. This is also crucial to the competitive advantage of nations. Scholars from many different fields have observed how a nation’s attitudes toward entrepreneurialism create a sort of “innovation culture,” which sends signals to individuals and investors about where they should spend their time and money. Unsurprisingly, where public policy frowns upon entrepreneurial effort, you get a lot less of it. Like a plant, innovation must be nurtured to help it and the economy grow.

In today’s highly integrated global economy, you either innovate or perish thanks to the increasing prevalence of “innovation arbitrage.” This refers to the fact that ideas and innovations will often flock to those jurisdictions that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity. We see it happening today with drones, driverless cars, and genetic testing to just name three prominent examples.

Don’t you think that policymakers will bring down the regulatory hammer on evasive entrepreneurs? Should they?

Humility, patience, and flexibility are the key virtues for policymakers in this regard. If policymakers can come to appreciate the ways in which evasive entrepreneurialism can help advance economic and social opportunities, then they should consider giving innovative acts a wide berth—even when entrepreneurs are not in strict compliance with all laws and regulations.

Evasive acts are not usually undertaken to completely defy the law. Instead, they often represent the beginning of a negotiation. Many innovators have grown frustrated with public policies that block new entry or just defy common sense. Evading anti-competitive or illogical restrictions is a way to gain some degree of leverage in political negotiations. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. But traditional reform avenues are often foreclosed because incumbents and other defenders of the regulatory status quo don’t like change.

Policymakers should see evasive entrepreneurialism as a signal that politics sometimes fails to serve the public when change is needed most. And once they sit down with innovators to discuss a better way of crafting policy, they need to be willing to adapt and devise more flexible governance frameworks, most of a “soft law” variety. As my colleagues and I explain in a recent law review article, soft lawrefers to a hodge-podge of informal governance tools for emerging tech, such as multistakeholder processes, industry best practices, agency guidance and consultation, and so on. Such informal governance mechanisms will need to fill the governance gap left by the gradual erosion of hard law thanks to the growth of the pacing problem and the expansion of evasive entrepreneurialism.

But what about the worst-case scenarios some fear, like the proverbial mad scientist who concocts a horrific virus in their basement? Even if they are still just hypothetical, aren’t some serious risk worth addressing preemptively?

Indeed, there are some extremely serious harms that are worth addressing preemptively, but that’s all the better reason to  not get obsessed with lesser concerns. Over-regulating entrepreneurial activity is foolish in a world where policymakers are both knowledge- and resource-constrained.

My Mercatus colleagues have documented the astonishing growth and cost of regulatory accumulation. But forget about the burden excessive regulation poses to entrepreneurs and the economy for a moment, and instead consider how all those enforcement activities divert the time and attention of regulators themselves away from bigger problems. When policymakers get lost in a convoluted compliance maze of their own making, they lose the ability to address big risks in a sensible, timely fashion. That’s why we need a new governance vision for the technological age that is more flexible and adaptive than the heavy-handed regulatory regimes of the Industrial Era.