Launch Essay. IFP's mission is to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity's future. In this essay we set out why we think the time is ripe for new (and renewed) institutions in the United States. We need to build new science-funding agencies, new pandemic prevention systems, and even new think tanks.
We’re very thankful to be joining a larger chorus of voices in this space. Prominent writers on the center-left like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are calling for “supply-side progressivism” and an “abundance agenda”. These plans explicitly reject what the Niskanen Center calls “cost disease socialism” and set our sights on increasing the productive capacity of the economy rather than just shifting costs around. On the center-right, researchers like Eli Dourado and Jim Pethokoukis are urging American policymakers to go faster and aim higher. And exciting new intellectual movements like progress studies and effective altruism are building out frameworks for thinking about the relationship between innovation, public policy, and well-being.
It will take a community of ambitious and creative minds to reverse recent trends and break us out of our rut. But there is a clear path to an abundant future — because progress is a policy choice.
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- United States of America
