29 blurbs
The Snail Darter. Source: wikipedia You may have heard about the effects of the Endangered Species Act on big construction projects — like the famous case of the tiny “snail darter” fish and its role in delaying the Tell…
“Abundance” as a movement has a set of diagnoses of what’s wrong with US public policy, and how to fix it, but it also has a historical narrative behind it, which goes something like this: the US used to be able to build…
Last week, I mentioned a big Congressional Budget Office report estimating the economic impact of federal spending on non-defense research and development efforts (think basic and applied science at the National Science …
Here at AGF, we tend to think investment in research and development, whether by governments through agencies like the National Institutes of Health or in private businesses and universities, is worth an awful lot. When …
Solar panels only generate power when the sun is shining, and everyone knows you can’t make the sun shine on demand. What the startup Reflect Orbital proposes is: maybe you can? Cofounded by a SpaceX veteran, the company…
Economists, sociologists, demographers, and other researchers need accurate, ideally individual-level data to understand what’s going on in the world. At the same time, most people don’t want information like their addre…
If you’re staying on top of AI news, you probably don’t need me to tell you to read Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s latest essay . That said … you should read Dario Amodei’s latest essay. It’s the most detailed look at the …
I just finished reading Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet , which has to be a top-ten abundance and growth book for its description of the Green Revolution’s effect on crop yields and recounting of the failed apo…
Joe Lonsdale’s recent Substack post, “What America Needs from a New FDA Commissioner,” is notable as much for who’s saying it as for what it says. Lonsdale is a Palantir cofounder turned venture capitalist who is closely…
The Jones Act, the American law that bans ships manufactured outside the US from traveling between US ports, has been an economic burden on the country for decades. The best study on its impact estimates the cost at 0.1 …
The US is richer than Europe. This is not especially controversial: residents of just about every European country, save for tax havens like Luxembourg and the petro-state of Norway, lag the US in median income . But is …
Loudoun County, Virginia is notable for a few things. It’s the richest county in America by median household income , significantly richer than runners-up in Silicon Valley; it houses Dulles Airport and is thus the exurb…
Dylan Matthews: The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty . My first obsession in public policy was the problem of poverty in the rich world: why, in a nation as wealthy as the United States, do…
There are a lot more loose vibes than specific predictions when it comes to AI’s economic impacts these days, which is why I was grateful to see Metaculus, Renaissance Philanthropy, and the Schultz Family Foundation coll…
Eroom’s Law (the reverse of “Moore’s Law”), for those of us who don’t spend all our days thinking about pharmaceutical innovation, is a term describing the historical trend that the R&D cost of developing a new drug seem…
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI lately , and how it relates to the kind of work our team does to try to chip away at bottlenecks to economic growth. One key question here is whether the economy of the 2030s and beyond …
When I’m arguing to more AI-pilled friends that the tech’s diffusion through the economy might be slower than they think, one of my go-to examples is “doctors still use fax machines.” But another good one, that I just le…
We at AGF don’t work as directly on AI issues as many of our peers at Coefficient Giving, but you can’t really think about the medium to long-run state of the US and world economies without thinking seriously about AI. I…
“You will be hard-pressed to find a true admirer of Excel,” writes David Oks (who I first noticed as one of the Gravel Teens and is now at a16z , truly an ideological evolution for our time). But Oks is, if not an admire…
It’s official: the Trump administration is suspending the Jones Act , which bans non-US flagged vessels from traveling between US ports, for sixty days in an attempt to keep gas prices low amid the Strait of Hormuz crisi…
This year has seen AI agents break through in a serious way among social scientists I respect . So it was only a matter of time until social scientists designed an AI benchmark to see how good agents really are. Meysam A…
If policymakers in the US can agree on anything, it’s that they want more semiconductor plants (“fabs”) built in the US. The bipartisan CHIPS & Science Act promised hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to…
How much do permitting burdens raise the price of housing? This is a big question in our housing work, and it can be hard to measure the exact contribution of zoning applications, historical preservation review, and othe…
The rise and fall of DOGE was an interesting state capacity story to me on a number of dimensions: DOGE cuts threatened to undermine state capacity in a number of ways; it was pitched as a way to bring in outside tech ex…
This week I’m reading a father-son team with competing explanations of why Europe lags behind the US in generating innovative companies. Luis Garicano (and coauthor Per Strömberg) look specifically at Sweden, which has b…
One of AGF’s goals for 2026 is to learn more about the landscape of abundance and growth politics in the European Union, and to think about how we can support European policymakers and activists who want to build more ho…
Here at AGF we care a lot about ensuring basic scientific research gets funded and conducted well, and this piece in Works in Progress by Aria Schrecker is a nice illustration of why that kind of work can matter in achie…
Most discussions of health care in the US focus on the consumer or demand side: how do we lower drug prices for patients? How do we help the 8 percent of Americans lacking health insurance? How do we make it easier for p…
The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 probably wins the prize for “most Kafkaesque US federal law.” Whatever else it does, the PRA dramatically increases the amount of paperwork federal workers have to do. In theory, this …