The kids are all right

One of my key takeaways from the Progress Conference echoed Jason Crawford’s closing remarks, and it was pretty simple: the kids are all right.

This was reinforced through a number of chance meetings I had. In one session, I chatted with some chapter leads for Abundance Corps who shared a number of activities their group was doing from internships with policymakers to policy hackathons. In another session, I sat next to two high schoolers who were part of the Progress in Medicine program and lightly pitched me on their biotech startup. I came away inspired by these and many other conversations.

I also came back with a much heavier suitcase, filled with free books, and a long list of things I want to read, including:

• Of Smallpox and Sewing Needles & Other essays, by various fellows at the Roots of Progress Institute

• The latest issue of WIP magazine; the managing editor claims this is the best one yet (Saloni says this is what they always say, but it looks pretty good to me upon first skim!)

• Nick Bagley’s latest book Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. Bagley basically argues that the legal safeguards reformers built up starting in the 1960s have become a “procedure fetish” and the government ends up prizing process and litigation over getting things done.

• David Broockman’s papers (here and here) with Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla on what actually drives opposition to housing. Surprisingly, it has less to do with property values than with how voters feel about developers and how new buildings look. More on this from Alex below!

• Peter Leyden’s The Great Progression; Peter compares our current era to the turn of the 19th century and the years preceding Teddy Roosevelt’s election. My curiosity is piqued!

• Inspired by Marc Canal’s talk, McKinsey Global Institute’s A Century of Plenty, which asks what it would take for every country to reach today’s Swiss standard of living by 2100.

• Generally revisiting some of the architecture school books on my shelf after Micah Springut’s talk on stone craft. Aesthetics aside, constructing buildings using robots and structural stone sounds fundamentally pretty modernist to me.