Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a recently-launched think tank dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future. Gus spoke with Alec Stapp about how he thinks about the goals of his his think tank and modern challenges in advancing scientific, tech, and industrial progress.
Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a recently-launched think tank dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future. Gus spoke with Alec Stapp about how he thinks about the goals of his his think tank and modern challenges in advancing scientific, tech, and industrial progress.
Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and has not been thoroughly reviewed for completeness or accuracy.
[00:00:00] Gus Herwitz: This is Tech Refactored. I'm your host, Gus Herwitz, the Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center at the University of Nebraska. Our subject today is in many ways our guest, Alex Stapp. Alec is the co-founder and co CEO of the Institute for Progress, a recently launched think tank dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity's future.
Now those are lofty-sounding goals, but by way of disclosure, I've previously actually worked with Alec on a range of policy issues at another think tank, and I believe that if anyone can live up to those goals, it's going to be Alec. So today [00:01:00] we're talking with Alec Stapp about Alec Stapp and how he thinks about accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding human's future.
Alec, welcome to Tech Refactor.
[00:01:12] Alec Stapp: Thanks for having me guys. That's too kind of an INS introduction. I hope I can only live up to it. Oh,
[00:01:16] Gus Herwitz: I, I hope you do, uh, too, Alec. But, uh, I, I always enjoy talking to you and always learn when I'm talking to you. And, uh, you have a remarkable way of thinking about the world and thinking about problems and, uh, that, that's why I'm hoping we can get into and explore a little bit, um, today.
I want to, uh, start with a little bit about the Institute for Progress and just start by asking, what is the Institute for Progress?
[00:01:44] Alec Stapp: Yeah, it's a a Washington DC based research and advocacy organization. We're a multi-issue think tank, meaning we do more than just one thing. We're starting out with three core areas.
We'll expand beyond those in the future to cover most major public policy issues. But [00:02:00] our three to start are meta science. Which we think of as like the science of science, you know, studying how our scientific funding institutions work and how to make them better to get more breakthrough research, more diversification, younger researchers, um, more experimental processes, things like that.
Um, our second category is immigration. Um, with a particular focus on high skill immigration, how can we use legislative and executive action to get more scientists, doctors, engineers into our country? And then lastly, biosecurity. So that's both pandemic preparation and prevention. Um, which is obviously relevant to all of us during Covid, but it also includes things like biotech.
Um, and how we picked the low hanging fruits in biology, it's likely we could have had mRNA vaccine technology maybe a decade earlier if there was urgency in the right public policy environment. Um, and so what other areas of biology are we similarly missing out on? Because we don't have the right institutions in place.
[00:02:52] Gus Herwitz: So you, you started by noting a DC based, uh, think tank advocacy and research and I, I just have [00:03:00] to ask. Why another think tank? And boy, oh boy, this sounds like it's another one. These dash darn gosh darn neoliberal think tanks. Uh, why another one? And is that what you are? Uh, are you different? What, uh, what are you doing differently?
[00:03:13] Alec Stapp: Yeah, Yeah. It's a, it's a fair question for sure. There, there are lots of think tanks out there. We are. Well one, in terms of like where we see ourselves in the political landscape is an important question. We're definitely, we're nonpartisan. We plan on working with politicians and staffers on both sides of the, of the aisle in DC and both Caleb and I, my co-founder Caleb Watney and I, we started this think tank together.
We have experience at both center right and center left organizations in DC and so we have connections on both sides and you know, in terms of political label, You can call us a lot of different things, but we really see ourselves as part of this emerging community of progress oriented thinkers. On the center left, that'd be people like Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Noah Smith, often called supply side liberalism, or supply side progressivism.
On the center right, it's more people like. Tyler [00:04:00] Cowen and, and others who are this, you like state capacity libertarianism. So yeah, recognize the importance of free markets, but the also that the government can do big things and is, has an important role to fill in our economy in society. And so that's kind of the, the ethos we come out of it.
I don't, I won't pick any label in particular, but that's kind of the community of people we, we associate. Um,
[00:04:21] Gus Herwitz: yeah, we're going to come back to that because I've got some questions exactly about supply side progressivism and state capacity libertarianism, and your thoughts on those labels and where you fit in there.
But you use this term, uh, Institute for Progress and you, you mentioned supply side, progressivism, uh, liberalism. What in your mind is progress and what is the difference between progress and innovation?
[00:04:47] Alec Stapp: That's a great question. I would say, well, progress can mean a lot of different things and we, and we mean it in a certain way, and mostly that's just due to our comparative advantage as an institution.
So progress can mean like we've, like in our, in our mission [00:05:00] statement, scientific, technological, industrial, or economic progress, but it can also mean moral progress. Some of these more like intangible values that are harder to measure, harder to. We think those are as important, if not more important than scientific and technological progress.
The reason they're not, they're not part of our mission is just because we. Think we have a, a, a distinct advantage in knowing how to improve those, what direction to push in. If we knew what direction we wanted to go in terms of improving moral, moral progress around the world, how do we even get there?
We don't, we don't have good answers to any of those questions. Um, the only thing I'll say is that those questions do matter. And for things like literacy, other, other basic values, education. Freedom, civil liberties, those are all really important. And one key interesting observation is that economic growth and economic progress is highly correlated with all those values.
And so if you do any kind of. Just two by two, you know, access and show correlation between GDP per capita, across countries, and all of those values. There's an extremely tight correlation. And so there are plausible reasons why [00:06:00] advancing scientific, technological, industrial progress could filter down to those other questions of progress, but really focusing on a subset of that question.
And then in terms of innovation, I would say innovation to me. I mean, based on the root etymology, you think about like it's new things. And I don't think progress necessarily. Newness per se. It can obviously, but progress also involves getting more from less total factor. Productivity does not involve necessarily a totally new invention, but it can be involve, you know, being more efficient, taking the same, uh, inputs and getting more output for them.
And so I think maybe progress is a bit broader than innovation, but we, we also like innovation at the institute Progress.
[00:06:35] Gus Herwitz: Innovation progress. Uh, you also throw in terms there like total factor production. These are frequently concepts that economists throw around and I ideas that economists, uh, think about a great deal, not solely economists, but that's actually my question.
How do you describe yourself if. I think about the work that you've done, and I'll, I'll come back to, uh, your, uh, incredible Twitter threads. Uh, [00:07:00] in another moment. You fit into a lot of discussions that take place in economics, dominated discourse, along with folks like, uh, you mentioned Tyler Cowen and, uh, Alex Rock, but also, uh, Smith who, uh, uh, is an economist, but now is a, a, a Bloomberg, uh, columnist and no longer an academic economist.
Uh, you mentioned as our client, I'll, I'll come back to him as well, not an economist. Question mark. Are you an economist? Is this a field of economics? What, what is, if, if I were advising students interested in the stuff that you're doing, what field? Should they be going into?
[00:07:39] Alec Stapp: Yeah, I would say I definitely, it's the field of public policy.
I definitely think like an economist, probably the people I read most often are economists. But I know that also there's like, I've never, I've never identified as an economist just because there's a certain. Norm in the economics community that if you don't have a PhD, you shouldn't identify as economist.
I think there's an exception if you've ever accepted a job that the job [00:08:00] title is economist. I have not had a job like that. I have a master's degree in economics from George Mason. I had a great experience there. Learned a lot from people like Tyler Callen and others, and it's a great community. But because I don't have the credentialing, I would feel weird for me to call myself an economist.
And so policy analyst is probably the closest thing though We, and we, I'm sure we're gonna talk about this more later, there's much more to DC policy influence than. Doing analysis, doing better analysis, and having the proper research in place. There's many more steps to actually implementing those, those ideal policies or making improvements for reforms.
But I would say I work in public policy.
[00:08:34] Gus Herwitz: So when I think about Alex step, I, uh, think about detailed data driven data intensive, including with just great graphs and charts and data summaries, Twitter threads. Frankly, th this might be a totally uncharitable, uh, way to characterize your early career. Um, and I, I note, uh, that, uh, I think that your Twitter discourse, the level, the volume of, uh, Twitter, uh, threading.
Coming [00:09:00] from you might have fallen off, uh, in, uh, recent months or the last year or so. I understand you've been working to start a, a new think tank. Um, I, I wonder both if you could reflect upon, uh, the role of your discourse on Twitter and Twitter as a platform to, uh, really launch your career and, uh, establish yourself.
And I, I have a couple of follow ups, uh, on
[00:09:23] Alec Stapp: that. I know that some people. Could hear that, or their takeaway might be like they associate Twitter with like shallow thinking, like, you know, tweets are very short. How much analysis or depth of thought could there be there? I don't think of it that way. I think of it as a form of communication.
A extremely powerful, and still to this day, mostly underutilized means of communication. And so Twitter can't be the only thing you do oftentimes, these long Twitter threads you're mentioning. There reports that I worked on, you know, internally at a previous thing tank with you guys, and we spent many hours preparing the deep research analysis.
But then in terms of communication, mass [00:10:00] audiences can't consume that level of detail, or they're, at least they're unwilling to. And so you need to meet people where they are and communicate, um, in the places and in the ways that they're open to or most receptive to, to receiving. And so I think Twitter is, it's for people outside the world.
Cause I think it's a interesting thing is, 90% of Americans are not on Twitter. Only 10% of Americans are like monthly active users of Twitter. And so, but it's who those 10% are That matter a lot. It's elites in media, all on the east coast, mostly in New York, and it's elites and policy making staffers and politicians in DC who are there on their all day every day.
And this is where the, it's the water cooler for elite policy making. And so, What people are talking about there and how they're framing issues and what matters really is important for making sure that you can influence that process. And so our think tank, we think of ourselves as an internet first.
Possibly Twitter first thing tank, because we think that that combination matters. And keeping your [00:11:00] ideas within the Overton window, making sure you have people like the names we've been mentioning earlier, the Ezra clients, the Tyler Towns of the world. If they're helping promote your ideas there, they're socializing them for people in the sense of, um, now an entry level staffer, a 23 year old on Capitol Hill, who's in charge of a surprisingly important p portfolio of issues.
They're looking for signals of like what matters or what's a good idea. And they're often looking on Twitter for them. And so, If you're working in public policy, you just simply can't ignore it. You have to have at least some kind of presence on that platform. Yeah,
[00:11:28] Gus Herwitz: and they're, they're. Has to be emphasis on this point that you made, that you, you have to come to your audience and, uh, I'm an academic and academics are possibly the worst in the world at influencing or affecting public policy because the, the point of the realm for us is still, uh, 30, 40, 5000 page articles and book length projects.
And as you say, we, you and I, uh, have worked together and I, I've seen the amount of effort. That goes into taking a 30 page policy [00:12:00] report or a legal brief or something like that and distilling it into five tweet. And that is an, it's an art and it's, uh, something that as, uh, an academic I think about a lot and I think we all need to be thinking a lot about how do we actually communicate our ideas there.
There's so much value in that beyond thinking about how you communicate. Ideas, though, I think that there's something remarkable about how you think about policy generally. So I, I'd like to, uh, just ask hypothetically, when you're doing a deep dive into some new issue, some there, there's some topic coming through the transom or you find something interesting in public policy that you don't know much about.
How, how do you, uh, approach thinking and learning about that?
[00:12:47] Alec Stapp: Yeah, that's a great question. I think my, my first thought goes of course to, to early covid. Cause this is a situation where, um, This, this one news event took over the world. It's all policy makers wanna talk about. It was obviously [00:13:00] the most important issue in the world this early 2020.
Um, and so as someone working in DC and mostly on antitrust, privacy, other tech, you know, traditional tech policy issues, I didn't really have an angle for my issues. And, and no one really wanted to give them attention at that time. And, and it felt weird to, to talk about other things. And so I thought, you know, how can I lend my expertise, or at least my experience to working on.
Whatever little small thing I can do to help mitigate the effects of covid or, or make this this bad situation less bad. And what I ended up doing was, um, we're collaborating. Caleb Botney, I was at the Policy Institute. He was at Arch Institute, and it's told a mix of learning new things and taking previous frameworks or world views in combining them and.
The new thing, it's spring 2020. There's a huge debate over masking. You know, how important are, they should be saving masks for medical workers. Our cloth masks sufficient. Um, we need like surgical masks or N 95 masks, this whole mask debate. [00:14:00] So Caleb and I said, one, we have this abundance mindset of.
Instead of rationing scarce masks, we should think about policy levers to make them abundant for everyone. Two, you can apply like simple logic of probably surgical masks better than a cloth mask, probably than 95 masks better than a surgical mask. And then beyond that, you really do get out of your depth as a non-expert to a new area, and you have to start learning and consuming masks amounts of information.
I'm consuming that on Twitter and elsewhere. But a key thing for us was, and this is small insight for your readers, if you work in public policy, the absolute gold mine is the Congressional Research Service CRS reports. They do amazing, like 20 to 50 or 60 page AEs of very esoteric topics that only people on Capitol Hill who work in this area care about.
And so Caleb and I thought like, okay, we have a. We want mass for all Americans. Universal mass. Our paper was called Mass For All and our, our framework, our world view was we don't trust the government to like actually produce the mass directly. We've had [00:15:00] tons of examples from history of government, direct provision just doesn't work as well as free markets.
But we also recognize that there are market failures and private companies don't know how long the pandemic will last. And so they're scared to make investments in new manufacturing capacity. Um, and there's just chaos in the market. So how come we combine the best of each? And that would be through targeted deregulation.
So letting different kinds of companies produce masks that were necessarily certified to do so previously. And also using the massive purchasing power of the federal government to guarantee future demand. So we, we advocated for advanced purchase guarantees for masking, and those kind of put together and then, and then you do a deep dive on a congressional research service report on like what does the Defense Production Act allow the government to do?
How does that, you know, how can that be leveraged to create more masks? And so it's like reading that whole report, write the paper, combined with the preexisting world view of what we think markets are good at, what we think the government is good at, and pulling that all together. Fortunately, we wrote the paper, we didn't get the exact policy outcome we [00:16:00] wanted, but we also weren't told by anybody we were wrong.
No one said like you made an error, which was, Comforting cause it was a totally new domain for both Caleb and I. And yeah, it was an interesting experience and in a totally novel domain.
[00:16:11] Gus Herwitz: So you mentioned two kind of disjunctive thoughts in that response. One, uh, you mentioned we, we don't trust the government to get this right.
Lots of history, uh, where it doesn't work. But then you also, uh, mentioned the Defense Production Act and how can. Leverage gover, uh, government buying power to try and get this done, which I, I think dovetails, uh, nicely with what I think of as your intellectual brand or the, the movement that you're kind of part of.
I'm going to ask what might be two side in too much of an inside baseball question. For folks who haven't listened to this podcast, which I assume Alec, that, uh, you have, you, you should be listening to, uh, as your client's, uh, podcast ha. Have, did you listen to as your. Discussion with Alex Tabak the other day.
[00:16:58] Alec Stapp: It's actually in my queue. Caleb [00:17:00] Brock listened to it and said it was amazing. It's, it's my next one up I'm listening to.
[00:17:03] Gus Herwitz: Okay. I'm going to just, uh, slightly preview it for you, Ezra client and Alex Tabak. Uh, Ezra is, uh, talking to Alex about public choice economics and learning a bit about public choice.
Uh, it's concerns and, uh, limitations. But one of the things that, uh, they, they do there is they talk about their, uh, uh, comparative worldview. On the policy side, and Alex talks about state capacity, libertarianism and Ezra talks about supply side liberalism or progressivism. And, and I wonder if you can just, uh, share your thoughts on both these two world views and, uh, your own, where you come from and where you fit into, uh, that discourse.
[00:17:45] Alec Stapp: Yeah, I think, I think they're both pushing in the same direction from different starting places, right? One from more of a free market. Right of center with state cast libertarianism, one from more of a big government. What can the state do? Center [00:18:00] left view with, with supply side progressivism in particular.
I like the label supply side liberalism more just because I think progressivism has its own. Baggage right now, or comes much more freighted with, with meaning a lot more things. But I think a key thing right now, and I think maybe this is just, we'll see how evergreen, this isn't an answer, but I we're talking at a time, in a very particular context in the US policy debate where we have 7% inflation year over year, which is the highest in, I think at least 40 years.
So really it feels like the 1970s. And from a macroeconomic perspective, um, we just are, we're coming out of a pandemic where a lot of, we've had a lot of supply chain disruptions. Due due to the pan, due to the covid, and people are wondering like, can we build things anymore? It seems like mega projects are more expensive than they ever have been.
They're often bogged down in environmental reviews that are, they're often not about substantive environmental concerns, but they're being weaponized by nmes who don't want building in their backyard. A lot of people on both center, left and center right. This is a problem and we want, if we wanna achieve big [00:19:00] things and make more progress, we need to have different solutions.
And I think the key probably is that on the state capacity, libertarian side, they would mostly just talk about what are the regulatory barriers stopping all this progress from happening? How are, you know, land use and zoning laws, um, regulations in the healthcare sector. There's just tons of regulations that if we just rolled those back, the market could take care of it.
And then I think in the. More progressive liberal side of things. They would agree with those, but they would put the emphasis more on, well there are all these market failures. If we just, you know, gave to the market free reign, they would pollute a lot more and the things they would build or emphasize wouldn't be socially beneficial.
We'd just get more like ad tech or something would probably be kind of concern they would have, I think. Not totally unfairly. And so I'm in the middle. I would probably say that aspirationally, I'm, I'm closer to Thera clients of the world, but maybe realistically I'm closer to the Alex have rocks of the world just because you can sense us.
An Ezra Kline when he talks the way he talks about. Hit a column recently about the, the Biden [00:20:00] administration's approach to supply side liberalism and say, Take was like there. The rhetoric is good, but the policy substance is totally just like mainstream democratic policy from the last 10 years. It does not recognize this new environment that we're in.
And so we actually aren't seeing change on the ground in terms of like what policies are being put forward. Like is there actual deregulation happening? No, like we're just talking about more subsidies, which is. Almost the worst possible answer to the, the problems we face at in this current
[00:20:26] Gus Herwitz: moment. Yeah.
So, uh, with some apologies to listeners, I, uh, should have, uh, done a little more legwork in explaining, uh, kind of what these worldviews are and kind of that the essence of them. And Alex, please, uh, uh, correct me or update or find this if, uh, you think helpful. The, the essence of both, uh, this supply side, progressivism and state capacity, uh, libertarianism is the, the.
Is not doing a great job. The government isn't doing a great job at a lot of stuff, but there are really big things that we need to do. So let's get the government [00:21:00] doing a couple of really big things really well. So state capacity, libertarianism, let's build up the state's capacity to do. Groundbreaking virus research.
Let's, and supply side progressivism, let's have progress on the supply side, the state should be doing really big things to drive progress. So they're, they're both tailored around this idea of the state doing a small number of really big things. But then there are challenges of how do we actually get the state to be doing those things, is that right?
[00:21:30] Alec Stapp: Yeah, I think that that's basically correct from my reading of both of those camps. Uh, and I would think in general it's just a dissatisfaction with. The cost sharing or subsidization approach to public problems. So in the, over the last few decades, it's been just like throwing money at problems from the demand side.
And it actually hasn't been, it's not been great, but it's been up in the worst because since the Great Recession, in my opinion, we've had Luke warm demand and feel like at inflation numbers, they've been mostly below target for like [00:22:00] the last two decades basically. And so it's not been great, but it's not been the worst.
But now we're in a totally new environment now. Economy's overheating and we have more demand than we know what to do with. And there are supply chain problems. Now we have focus on production. It's what can the economy produce and who's doing it. And so from the state classes, libertarian side, they would say like, mostly the economy just needs to be having restraints of government pulled off of it.
And then it will bounce back and be fine. And from the supply side, progressivism part of it, they would say that the government needs more of a guiding hand, but still recognizing like we need to increase the supply capacity.
[00:22:35] Gus Herwitz: Well, Alec, we are about to do a bit of an experiment with you. We are, uh, going to go to break, and when we come back, I would like to ask you to, uh, share and compare our top five lists of big policy initiatives or ideas.
So, uh, Alec, you've got a bit of an assignment during this break. Uh, jot down your top five. These are things that we [00:23:00] should try and do, and when we come back, uh, we will discuss and see whether you and I have similar or vastly divergent lists and listeners. Uh, we will be back talking with Alex step, uh, about the Institute for Progress in a moment.
[00:23:17] Narrator: Momentum. it's building at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. With game changing work in precision agriculture, nanoscience and digital humanities. We're unlocking mysteries in brain research, solving the impossible with remote surgery using robots, and we're creating bold futures with world leading research in early childhood education. We don't slow down and we are not letting up. We are Nebraska.
[00:23:44] Gus Herwitz: And we are back talking with Alec Stapp about the Institute for Progress and Progress generally and big ideas that, uh, possibly could have impact in the world. So before the break, I gave Alec [00:24:00] a assignment and uh, listen. You all implicitly have the assignment as well to come up with a top five list of policy ideas for progress.
And Alec, I have a list of my own. So let's just go, uh, one at a time, each of us sharing an item on our list. And I guess for my items, you can tell me why this is a good or a bad idea for progress. I, I'm a, a lawyer and a law professor, so I think about law stuff a whole lot. So, Top on my list is broad based decriminalization and ending really aggressive initiatives such as the war on drugs that tend to criminalize, uh, vast swaths of, uh, regular conduct and throw a lot of, uh, American citizens in jail, taking them outside out of the, the workforce, out of the education system, and, uh, diverting a lot of our resources towards the carceral state.
[00:24:58] Alec Stapp: I like it. I [00:25:00] endorse you say di decriminalization. I think that I'm a hundred percent in support of on this particular issue. I always want to be careful at the nuance between decriminalization and legalization. I also know like I've I my thinking this area's been inform lot by Mark Klemen for, I believe he is at UCLA researcher.
He passed away a few years ago, but his point was always, You want decriminalization because Yeah, the actual drug war itself accomplishes nothing, but you should be wary of full legalization because then a large commercial industry pops up. That lobbies for itself that it's a massive economies of scale, so all of a sudden, like pure cut drugs of every variety are available with like pennies and it just like creates weird social effects.
And so I, I'm, for those reasons, I'm, I'm still wary of full legalization. I'm all on board for the pro progress effects of, of decriminalization.
[00:25:52] Gus Herwitz: Okay. Uh, item one on
[00:25:54] Alec Stapp: your list. Item one on my list is, uh, I'd love to get your feedback on my list too. Um, make [00:26:00] zoning like Houston. So I think that we talked about, like, for this list of five, it's like they're pretty, My list is pretty ambitious, but I think it's like not impossible to at least wanna be able to point to.
A place where something like this exists. And so I, I would like to abolish all zoning if possible, but that's, I don't think that's realistic. So in, in Houston, they have a de facto policy where like there, I believe it's, there is no zoning in the whole city, but certain neighborhoods can opt out of it affirmatively with a super majority kind of vote.
And so a small minority of the city where they really care about having certain kind of zoning rules in place does have them. But for majority of the city here, it's mostly by right construction. So I think that is, Probably the right solution for most of the country is that like you want to buy off the nies who have the strongest preference by letting them.
Opt out in their little enclaves, but mostly trying to keep the majority of a city's footprint
[00:26:50] Gus Herwitz: by right construction. So the, the question and the, the challenge for zoning reform, of course, is, as you say, the, the nimby, the, the folks who [00:27:00] are opposed to it because, uh, they are, are concerned that's going to devalue their, uh, property for various reasons, reasons some legitimate, some not many, not.
The, the question, uh, then is how do you overcome, how, how, what's your solution to nimbyism?
[00:27:17] Alec Stapp: I actually, I think I actually have a couple, um, not my unique ideas, but they're fr borrowing from friends. So I think basically the problem with, with current land use regulation is it's happening at the wrong level of government.
It's mostly at like the municipal or even like neighborhood level. And you really need to go up the stack of government layers or down the stack. So if you go for the state level, state or national, but mostly likely, we're talking about state level. A governor and the state legislature can think about aggregate economic growth across the entire state.
Spillovers clusters they want to build in terms of new, uh, industries, and they really can internalize a lot of those costs and benefits and make better decision making with more trade offs. So they can afford to piss off smaller, smaller, uh, groups of voters. But at [00:28:00] the local level, it's virtually impossible.
And the most engaged active voters are senior citizens with most, with a lot of time on their hands. And they vote in every election, and they're very loud at meetings and like, that's not gonna happen at, at the local level. Alternatively, you can go down the stack to the actual city block level. And this is an idea for my, my friends in the uk, Ben Southwood and John Meyers, they call it street voting over there.
Um, and the basic. Game theory in a sense here is that if you allow an individual city block to vote on how they should be zoned, the first movers recognize that they will make a lot of money, um, from Upzoning before everyone else does. And so you create this situation where they will vote to upzone because they'll make money.
But in the long run, as more places upzone, the cost of of housing does go down because you're increasing supply in the long run. But it kind of breaks the equilibrium. Individual homeowners do stand to make a lot of money. If an individual block votes to up zone in a way that if there were a neighborhood or citywide change in zing laws would not [00:29:00] be true for an individual homeowner.
[00:29:01] Gus Herwitz: So there, there's something in there that, uh, dovetails with an item that I had on, uh, my list. So I'll, I'll jump to that. Uh, item it, it wasn't my number two, but. Incorporating a whole lot more education about institutions in and the design and operation of government, um, and political systems into primary and secondary education.
So teaching people about government processes, the structure and operation of the administrative. State and getting into mind for young people very early on. Not just what government is and what it does, but how it operates and what its limitations are. And you mentioned, uh, the idea of pushing decisions up or down the stack, that that is such.
An important thing for us to be thinking about, and it's completely absent in our political discourse and most voters calculus of voting because they, they don't think [00:30:00] in these terms. They don't think, Well, at what level of government should we be thinking about these issues? Should this be a, a state level issue?
Should this be a city block issue? Should this be a federal issue? We tend to think, I care about this issue. Government do something about it. E education reform. Arguably impossible . But as an ed, as an educator myself, I, I have to believe that there's stuff that we can, uh, uh, do there. And that this one of my favorite papers, Oh, this is terrible.
I'm blanking on the name of the Princeton author who, uh, coined the term, uh, clutch or cracy. Um, is it Steve Tellis? Yes. Steve Tell. Uh, the, the idea of, uh, cracy that, uh, our, our government is cobbled together from lots of different institutions, each of which has decision making rights and veto authorities, and they're all kind of last minute, We need someone to do this, so we're going to give you this.
Power and it turns into a, uh, thicket of decision makers [00:31:00] that we, we can't navigate through. That is, that's the result from, of a government designed on an head HOK basis, uh, by folks without, uh, sophisticated understanding, uh, which is most of us, of these issues. So, uh, your, your response to that brief rant, ,
[00:31:17] Alec Stapp: Uh, it's a good rant.
I'll, I'll just say that I'm a bit more pessimistic on education interventions in general whenever it involve. Yeah, if we just make you a better informed, we'll get better outcomes. But that's why you're in the academy and I'm not, Gus and I, I wish you all the best in, in the fight when those battles, and so I, I hope you're successful, but I'm, I'm a bit pessimistic, unfortunately.
[00:31:36] Gus Herwitz: Well, uh, on, on that, brushing aside my, uh, naive item on my list, what's the next on your
[00:31:41] Alec Stapp: list? next on my list. Mine aren't in rank order of importance. They're just, I think these are all good ideas. Cause this is kind of related to the first one. I would say repealing NPA at the federal level and se at the state level.
And so for listeners, NPA is the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires like environmental impact statements to be done. Prior to any major [00:32:00] product projects, uh, on federal land or that across interstate boundaries, et cetera. Um, and then Quas at the state level in California. But many other states had these kind of laws, California Environmental Quality Act, and again, it's similarly.
A very process oriented document heavily every potential impact your project might have on the environment or any species in the environment. And there's no substantive protections in these laws. It doesn't say, If we find this, you can't do X. What it just says is like, document it and then we'll have a discussion is community about what we do next, on the next steps.
And so because it's a process oriented, Law, they're often abused by people who don't care about the environment. They just like don't want a project being built, uh, in their neighborhood or community for a variety of reasons against, like we talked about earlier, some legitimate, some not, depending on your perspective.
And so there really have been, become abused or exploited to an extent that I think was not. Foreseen by the policy makers who implemented them. So at the very least he'd be updated and provide many more exemptions, if not entirely repealed. That's more, more [00:33:00] ambitious.
[00:33:00] Gus Herwitz: So this, this, uh, ties back in, as you said to your a previous idea and one of the things that we've seen in recent years is, NEPA cpa, these tools, which were really meant to be tools to help protect environmental causes by forcing disclosure and study of environmental impacts, um, they've come to be used to, uh, actually prevent large pro environment projects by groups that care about preserving the value of their land or their ability.
A nice vista looking out over the ocean. They don't want windmills for wind power built, uh, that are going to obstruct their view. So they use these processes to slow down the development of these really pro environment systems. And actually my next thing on my list is of a different sort, but relates to energy, massive, massive government investment into nuclear, both, uh, fusion and fusion research.
[00:33:57] Alec Stapp: Nice. I mean, this is, I'll let you [00:34:00] explain more if you want, but this is my, my third item was operation war speed for clean energy. So I can talk about that more too. But you wanna
[00:34:06] Gus Herwitz: more background? You go ahead.
[00:34:08] Alec Stapp: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think, so nuclear is a subset of this one for me, so I think we're on the same page here.
Operate speed. Again for your listeners. This is what we, this is what got us the code vaccines under the Trump administration. They identified six candidate manufacturers ahead of time, including Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Novas cetera, and they, they gave these companies both direct subsidies to stand up manufacturing facilities prior to FDA authorization so that when the FDA authorized the vaccines to Safe and Effecti, They already had doses that were being manufactured.
And then secondarily, maybe even more importantly, government committed to buying hundreds of millions of doses from these companies. If the drug, if the vaccine they they developed was found to be safe and effective by the fda. And so again, for similar to the mass conversation we talked about earlier, this provides certainty because private companies don't always know what the demand for these products will be in the [00:35:00] future.
How long will pandemic last? What demand will be there be for certain vaccines, et cetera. This really de-risks the process for the private sector, but then lets them figure out how to actually invent the vaccine and create it. I think this was an amazing success, a perfect story of. Collaboration done right between the private and public sectors.
And why aren't we using it? Way more things, including clean energy, nuclear, like you mentioned, geothermal, carbon capture and sequestration because part of our economy's never going to decarbonize or not need any near term time scale. Um, particularly heavy industry will likely need natural gas or some other kind of dispatchable energy source for a long time.
Uh, and so we need to think about how we get carbon capture and sequestration done right, battery technology, et cetera, and. We need massive government subsidies saying the government will be the buyer of first resort for X, you know, units of energy from any, any clean source. And really give the private sector a carrot to go out and chase.
And then just to your point out nuclear Gus, Cause I'm usually the guy just being like, Let's put a [00:36:00] more money at things and less on the. Deregulatory side relative to our friends in this community. But I think in nuclear in particular, there does seem to be quite a bit of appetite for private sector investment already.
So I dunno how much the, the subsidies matter for nuclear in particular. It's really more of a regulatory question in my opinion there. Like the more you read about the nuclear regulatory commission, the more you, it just realize like, this is a disaster where they're just. Because of their mission statement is only to prevent nuclear accidents and to maximize safety.
They have ignored the benefits of clean energy from nuclear sources for the last 50 years since they've, since they were started as an agency. And so I think. We have to get the regulatory environment right for nuclear, or it doesn't matter how much money we throw at it. Yeah.
[00:36:41] Gus Herwitz: You, you probably know this, I'm forgetting the details, but I, if I'm remembering right, uh, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they have a program in place to streamline the development of, uh, the approval of prototype modular reactors or something like that.
And they, they've had it for like [00:37:00] 20 or 30 years and they have never actually approved.
[00:37:04] Alec Stapp: Yeah, I think, I think we're still waiting for that. I think that's what you said. I think this true and also an even broader statement, which is mind blowing, is that since they were started, I believe 1973 or 1975, but since the early 1970s, not a single nuclear facility that submitted its operation license to the Nuclear regulatory Commission has reached production.
So we, we've had nuclear reactors go into production. Since 1975, but they had submitted their application to start to the previous agency before the nuclear commission started. So not a single company that submitted its license, cuz agency has reached operations. It's just mind blowing 50 years of just like nothing.
[00:37:42] Gus Herwitz: And I'm actually right now in my mind envisioning a, a, a chart that I'm sure if you were doing a Twitter thread on this, you would have. Uh, and this brings us back to the Institute for Progress and the idea of progress. If you look at GDP growth over the course of humanity, uh, up [00:38:00] until, uh, basically. Post Noble post Three Mile Island, 1970 1980s era, um, when we started dialing back on nuclear GDP really was directly correlated with energy consumption per human being.
So the amount of energy that you and I consume is directly correlated with and tied to arguably defines our wellbeing. And this is why we have, uh, the current environment crisis we are consuming. More and more energy per person. And with the, the, uh, wealth of the dramatic increase, uh, in wealth of the, the global south.
I mean, humanity is doing better than ever in terms of individual welfare, but that gets powered by something. And right now it gets powered
[00:38:48] Alec Stapp: by carbon. Exactly. And I think just one thing I'll add to that, that I agree with all of that. And for your listeners, I think it's called the Henry Adams Curve, at least the, the, the domain chart I've seen from, um, a book called, Where is My [00:39:00] Flying Car, that Stripe Press recently published.
It just show, It shows, yeah. Tight correlation up until the 1970s and then. Um, a decoupling of energy and GDP growth, but GDP growth being much slower than energy growth since 1970s. One we'll add there to your point about welfare improvements in low income countries is that this is why technological solutions of climate change matter so much, and a de growth, uh, mindset will never work is because, one, I don't think it's politically palatable in any democratic country to pursue de growth.
Voters will not vote for it, but two, even if you convinced the rich countries. Pursue de growth in in with the hope of decarbonization of the economy. It would be immoral to ask developing countries that didn't get a chance to burn coal in 1950s, sixties and seventies. You know, as they were developing and intensifying their own economies to have to stop now and imp further impoverish themselves for the sake of the globe and climate change.
And so what we need to be doing as rich countries is subsidizing and accelerating clean tech that we, that can then open source [00:40:00] or handover essentially to low income countries and then there'll be in their economic. To use the clean energy option because it's cheaper and more plentiful than the dirty, um, fossil fuel option.
So that's say, I think the actual viable path forward, and it's the morally right one.
[00:40:12] Gus Herwitz: Well, we are rapidly running out of time. I do have, uh, several speed round questions I want to throw at you. Uh, I, I will mention, uh, one of the last items on my, uh, list and let you mention one of the last items on your list.
Similar to massive investment in nuclear infusion, uh, uh, vision infusion on the biomedical side. Really surge spending to cure specific diseases. So instead of the, the current approach to medical research funding, uh, which is largely undirected by the federal government, and to the extent it does come from the federal government and the nih, it goes to a wide variety of areas.
Find specific diseases, and for the next three to five years, this is our funding [00:41:00] goal, or possibly even longer, we're going to cure this disease and develop a technology to do it, and we're going to cure this disease and develop technologies to do it. So that, that's, uh, uh, the last item I'll share on
[00:41:11] Alec Stapp: my list.
Well, I love it guys. I would not have predicted that I would pick more of the deregulatory ones and you pick more of the investment in spending ones, but I, I love all of your list as well. So I'll pick for the last one on mine, I'll just say that. I had a deregulatory biotech one, which is F I think the FDA should move away from binary approval for drugs.
So saying right now the current system is like either a drug is safe and effective, and basically all insurers, public and private are required to cover that drug because the FDA has approved it or a drug is not approved and therefore it's illegal to sell it in the United States. There are something small exceptions to both of these categories, but like in general, we have a binary system.
I think that leads. Terrible incentives. Just quickly, the example that comes to mind is the Alzheimer's drug that the FDA recently approved. Aju hem. It, I believe costs, I wanna say $60,000 for [00:42:00] an entire course of treatment. And its effects were not really proven. Uh, the effective part wasn't really clear.
And so then the Medicare had to make a terrible choice about like, does Medicare cover this? And that's still being adjudicated and decided, but like, it's a terrible system where like it should probably shouldn't be illegal for someone to buy with their own private money. This Alzheimer's drug, cuz maybe it'll work for some people and it's worth taking the risk if you have Alzheimer's.
But we also don't want to mandate that the government spend lots of taxpayer money on drugs that are likely not effective. So I think having a more graduated scale of approval, saying something safe but not effective like that could get us much better outcomes in biotech.
[00:42:36] Gus Herwitz: So turning to a, a couple of speed questions.
These are all going to be the, the same sort of question. Do we spend too much or too little on education? We,
[00:42:50] Alec Stapp: That's a great question. We spend too much on education. I am mostly, I think, I think in my head are like, Mark Zuckerberg [00:43:00] donated like a billion dollars to Newark Public Schools. And I, I think the verdict on that was that the money did not help.
Uh, these are not questions of money necessarily. It's questions of how we're teaching students, and I just think like an over emphasis on the importance of education relative to other life experiences. The moral of the story here is I'm, I'm somewhat persuaded by Brian Kaplan's, the case against education, especially for graduate level education.
It seems mostly an arms race where it's zero sum, that you have to get a PhD because every else has a master's. When in the past getting the master's would've separated you from enough people who only had bachelor's degrees, et cetera. And so I think we're probably spending too much on education. I'm open to persuasion.
[00:43:39] Gus Herwitz: A- a- a- credentialing, uh, Baumel's cost disease of a, a sort. Yeah. Um, do we spend too much or too little? And I, I will, uh, acknowledge, uh, in asking this question, uh, we are currently, uh, a couple of days into Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. Not to, uh, frame much of our discussion today about that, even though I expect, Alec, you [00:44:00] have a lot of very interesting thoughts about the top, the topic, but do we spend too much or too little on defense?
[00:44:09] Alec Stapp: It is a funny thing to say. You know, in, in the face of I, I assume the military will be getting whatever it wants for the foresee future of events like Ukraine. And they already did have lots of power in Washington DC but I would still say we spend too much just because. It seems like a lot of our spending on defense is mostly about to go back to Alex Tabak and Public Choice and how funding decisions are actually made.
Most of it's spent on projects that benefit a wide swath of congressional districts. Uh, so military bases are spread out across the country. Um, it's why certain military projects are done piecemeal so that different manufacturers and different political districts get a piece of the action. And so whatever we're spending currently is seeing 700 billion per year is probably being spent very inefficiently.
and you know, I, I do think that we should make sure that our allies are spending higher levels of, of their GDP for [00:45:00] natural security just as we are.
[00:45:02] Gus Herwitz: Last question of variation inform, does private industry misallocate its research and development spend, or is private industry doing a good job with, uh, its spending on progress?
[00:45:18] Alec Stapp: Yeah, I would say they're doing a good job on progress. Is Misallocated, just in the sense that this is, uh, a quote that I actually ended up telling as your client. That made into one of his articles that I think the government does a poor job if it's trying to control the means of production, but I think they have a better role as controlling the ends of production.
And so by that I mean it goes back to the operational speed question of like, I don't trust the government based on it record in us and in other context, foreign governments to directly figure out how to develop a vaccine. But I do trust the government to say probably vaccines, therapeutics, masks. These are things that have strong spillovers, uh, when, when [00:46:00] large numbers of people use them and it's probably under provided by the market.
And so, Directing massive government spending and investment at things that are market failures or have, you know, large externalities or spillovers, um, really can change the direction of what the private sector is producing in a socially beneficial way. And I think that we should recognize that that useful role of government.
[00:46:23] Gus Herwitz: Well, Alec, uh, this has been a, uh, great discussion. I could easily just keep peppering you with questions for an another hour or so, but sadly, the little hand tells me it's time to rock and roll this time. So it's time for us to, uh, uh, take our leave. Any
[00:46:40] Alec Stapp: final thoughts? Yeah, I guess it's been great. Thank you for all the, all the awesome questions.
Pleasure talking with you again, and yeah, thanks for having me. I'll just as a final statement, I'll say I wanna set my fifth one in there cause I think it's so important. My fifth idea was a green card cap extension for any educated immigrant around the world. High school immigration is incredibly [00:47:00] popular, has bipartisan support.
Majority Republicans, voters support high skilled immigration. It's for all immigration, but we should take our wins where we can get them. And having an untapped green card program for educated immigrants is a no brainer for me. Oh,
[00:47:14] Gus Herwitz: I, I was expecting that one from you. And my, my follow up question was going to be whether, uh, uh, US immigration policy induced brain drain from the rest of the world is on net, good or bad for global progress versus domestic progress.
But we will, uh, have to. Question for next time. Thank you. Uh, uh, Alec, we have been speaking with Alex Sta, co-founder, co CEO of the Institute for Progress, which I have to mention as well, has the best URL out there. progress.institute strongly suggest everyone, uh, check that out. And I'm sure that we will, uh, hear much more from you and your colleagues in the future.
So thank you, Alec, and thank you as. To our listeners, I've been your host, [00:48:00] Gus Herwitz. I'm glad that you joined us on this episode of Tech Refactored. If you want to learn more about what we're doing here at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, or submit an idea for a future episode, you can go to our website at ngtc.unl.edu, or you can follow us on Twitter at UNL underscore NGTC.
If you enjoyed this show, please don't forget to leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. Our show is produced by Elizabeth Magilton and Lysandra Marquez and Colin McCarthy created and recorded our theme music. This podcast is part of the Menard Governance and Technology Programming Series.
Until next time, wherever you're going, progress will help you get there.[00:49:00]