A progress policy agenda

by Jason Crawford · December 19, 2024 · 6 min read

Elon Musk says that soon, builders “will be free to build” in America. If that promise is to be fulfilled, we have work to do.

Here’s my wishlist of policy goals to advance scientific, technological, and economic progress. I’m far from a policy wonk, so I’m mostly going to be referencing folks I trust, such as the RPI fellows, the Institute for Progress (IFP), or Eli Dourado at the Abundance Institute. (I’m sympathetic to most of what is linked below, and consider all of it interesting and worthwhile, but don’t assume I agree with anything 100%.)

AI

AI has enormous potential to create prosperity and security for America and the world. It also introduces new risks and enhances old ones. However, I think it would be a mistake to create a new review-and-approval process for AI.

• Dean Ball outlines his preferred approach and priorities here. See also his warnings about “use-based” AI regulation and about the “onslaught of state bills” coming.
• Jack Clark and Gillian Hadfield propose “regulatory markets” for AI, worth considering.
• I think a crucial piece is getting liability right—good liability laws, plus an insurance requirement, would go a long way toward market-based safety. See this interview with Gabriel Weil.

Permitting reform

Reform NEPA and other permitting rules so we can build infrastructure again:

• Eli Dourado has written extensively on this, see his NYT editorial for an overview. He also wrote an excellent primer on NEPA and has suggested some reforms to scale it back.
• Michael Catanzaro says we need to distinguish between permitting and compliance: what matters is whether projects follow the law, not whether they promise to in advance. He outlines an alternative, “permit-by-rule,” in which permitting is simple, reviews are limited to 90 days, projects are approved by default if not reviewed in time, and the emphasis is on complying with substantive requirements rather than procedural ones. (Related, see IFP on substantive vs. procedural environmental regulation.)
• IFP has a major focus on infrastructure with many helpful reports. They advocate, for instance, putting a time limit on injunctive relief to end the “litigation doom loop.” They have a review of other NEPA reform proposals here.
• At the state level, the Foundation for American Innovation has recently published a State Permitting Playbook.
• At the intersection of infrastructure and AI, see also IFP’s series on how to build the next generation of compute infrastructure in America.
• For energy permitting in particular, RPI fellow Grant Dever has a recent white paper with recommendations.

YIMBY

Reform local zoning and permitting and generally fight NIMBYism so we can build housing again. The YIMBY movement is extensive, so I’ll only give a small and not necessarily representative sample:

• Organizations: CA YIMBY, YIMBY Action (where RPI fellow Jeff Fong is a board member), Metropolitan Abundance Project (MAP), Up for Growth
• MAP’s collection of model legislation
• Nolan Gray’s book Arbitrary Lines
• Single-stair reform, a cause promoted by the Center for Building North America
• RPI fellow Ryan Puzycki’s campaign to relax zoning requirements to allow some businesses (such as coffee shops) in residential areas—which he just got passed in Austin!

Jerusalem Demsas also does good reporting on these issues at The Atlantic—for a spicy take, see her piece “Community Input Is Bad, Actually.”

Nuclear

Energy is central to industrial progress, and nuclear power is an abundant, reliable, clean form of energy. For several decades, nuclear has been paralyzed by a regulatory regime that does not balance costs and benefits, and an NRC that doesn’t see the development of energy as its job.

• The book Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop has several concrete suggestions, which I summarized in my review.
• The Breakthrough Institute has a long series of articles and reports on nuclear; see for instance “How to Make Nuclear Cheap” and “How to Make Nuclear Innovative.”
• IFP’s Brian Potter also has a report on nuclear costs and potential solutions.

Supersonic

Supersonic passenger flight is banned outright over land in the US and many other countries:

• Eli Dourado and Sam Hammond wrote a report and proposal on this in 2016 recommending that the FAA rescind the ban.
• More recently, Eli has suggested that Congress needs to step in to legalize supersonic. See also his followup essay, “50 Years of Silence.”

FDA

To approve a new drug takes (order-of-magnitude) a decade and a billion dollars. This is too high a burden. Alex Tabarrok has written of the “invisible graveyard” this creates, and criticized the FDA’s performance during covid specifically. I also like Scott Alexander’s take, including his followups part 2 and part 3.

• A Mercatus paper suggests four models for FDA reform, including competing approval bodies, international reciprocity, and right-to-try.
• Tabarrok and Dan Klein wrote an earlier report for the Independent Institute with five recommendations that overlap with the above. This is their compromise solution; they also describe what they call “the sensible alternative,” which is a combination of voluntary practices and tort remedy.

Prediction markets

A new kind of financial market allows investors to trade futures on the outcome of events. The positive externality of these markets is that the price of a future reflects the market-weighted assessment of its probability, with strong incentives to get the answer right, and with a feedback loop that rewards the best predictors.

This kind of market is regulated by the CFTC, but the rules are onerous enough that so far only one prediction market, Kalshi, has been approved in the US. Others are not technically legal in the US, or they use a point system with no monetary value, which doesn’t bring the full power of a financial market to bear on making predictions. Even Kalshi has faced a legal battle to create election markets. Regulators should create a clear and sensible pathway to legal money-based prediction markets in the US.

Cryptocurrency

The SEC has brought dozens of enforcement actions against crypto projects. Crypto has, let us say, more than its share of scams and fraud, but many perceive that the SEC under Gensler is going beyond protecting investors to simply attacking all crypto.

Matt Levine, for instance, who is certainly no crypto booster, points out that the SEC is pursuing Coinbase for operating an illegal exchange, even though Coinbase is “pretty much the exact sort of crypto exchange that US regulators should want—a US-based, publicly listed, audited, compliance-focused, not-particularly-leveraged one.” He concludes that it looks as if “the SEC’s goal is not to protect crypto investors but to prevent crypto investment.”

There should be a regulatory pathway to operate legal crypto projects in the US.

• I don’t know of any proactive policy proposals for this, but Stand with Crypto rates candidates and bills for crypto-friendliness.

Immigration

Expand high-skilled immigration, such as the O-1 and H-1B. We need more entrepreneurs, more future Nobel laureates, more skilled workers to run chip fabs. Just a few example ideas here:

• IFP has a set of articles and reports on high-skilled immigration
• Noah Smith and Minn Kim say that skilled immigration is a national security priority
• The Economic Innovation Group has a proposal called Heartland Visas
• RPI fellow Connor O’Brien advocates an idea called Global EIR

(IMO there are other worthy immigration causes as well, but high-skilled immigration is the most clearly relevant to progress, the most agreed-on within the progress movement, and the most politically feasible in the near term, so I’m focusing on it here.)

Government efficiency

Prioritize competence, efficiency, and results in government. DOGE should check out:

• Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America. Also her recent essay on DOGE, in which she describes how even small reforms run into “a perplexing combination of legitimate and imagined reasons for caution, and review by a staggering array of stakeholders”
• Misha Chellam’s Abundance Network
• Dan Lips, Sam Hammond, and Thomas Hochman’s Efficiency Agenda whitepaper
• Philip Howard’s Common Good

Science funding

Our institutions of science funding are also in need of reform. I summarized the criticisms in the middle of this essay: The grant process is slow and high-overhead. It is also conservative, encouraging incremental results that can be published frequently, and making it hard to make bold bets on research that might not show legible progress right away. It increasingly gives funding to older researchers. Scientists are overly constrained by their funding, lacking the scientific freedom to guide their research as they best see fit. I have also written about the problems with the principal investigator model.

• IFP has a Metascience cause area with many recommendations
• Ben Reinhardt suggests a portfolio of independent research organizations
• Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriquez recommend a new model called Focused Research Organization (FRO) (Adam now funds FROs through his organization Convergent Research)

See more from the Good Science Project.

And there’s more

Causes suggested to me by others, but that I don’t have time/scope for here, include:

• Problems with energy transmission not covered by permitting reform or nuclear reform
• Improvements to public transit; see the work of RPI fellow Andrew Miller
• Federal restraints on reproductive/fertility treatment and research

There are probably many more, please leave comments with more ideas!

See also Casey Handmer’s take: “Why do we need a Department of Government Efficiency?”

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