Prophets and their warnings arise in times of peril, and the arrival of the doomer techno-optimist discourse is fortunate. Simply put, we needed the wake-up call. Yet, if the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, then the second step is actually doing something about it. To that end, what is needed from the next phase of contributions to this discussion are proposals to reboot science and generate breakthroughs, policies to create an environment in which transformative growth is possible, and new economic analyses that more accurately account for the role of technology in growth. In fact, doomer techno-optimists have an opportunity to take their unique blend of harsh reflection on the present and bold vision for a sci-fi future and fuse it with creative and actionable proposals to realize such ambitious dreams. What strategies could the doomer techno-optimists propose? Perhaps the most important approach would be to involve government as a “market maker”…

In this sense, tech today is less Jeffersonian than the first Californian Ideology suggested, celebrating the hacker, the dropout, and the lone builder, with the profound skepticism of centralized power entailed by these archetypes. It is arguably more Hamiltonian, focused on building state capacity at the national level. Whereas the old Californian Ideology captured the liberating power of technology, the new one affirms its constructive power. Tech’s social capital may be uneven, but its intellectual capital is growing. It is generating new ideas faster than most institutions can absorb them. Its ideological adolescence may still be bumpy, but the outlines of maturity are clearly visible, and only getting sharper as they are battle-tested in the political arena. Tech is well-positioned to usher in a new era of thinking and working. In tech’s model of the world, change is assumed to be a constant, and individuals are prized for their ability to invent and build us out of any crisis…

Following her defeat in the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton published a book titled What Happened. While that tome is not considered a classic work of political analysis, its implied titular question animates a good deal of writing about politics these days, including two books released over the past year: Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. Both books are attempts to grapple with the significance of the political energies of which Trump’s initial victory was both cause and effect. And each is in different ways trying to articulate a conceptual vocabulary to describe the associated movements for which terms like “conservative” and “right-wing” seem inexact or insufficient. Nonetheless, neither is entirely successful in their attempts, for the same political changes they seek to understand have a way of resisting the categories imposed on them…

The Democratic Party has lost its way. A party whose very purpose has been to fight for working families has forfeited their trust and confidence. The losses are most obvious among white working-class voters. The self-flattering story Democrats have told themselves is that rising white racism explains the defection of white working-class voters. But that simple story was always undercut by data showing white racism has declined, not increased, in recent decades. And the fable was further undermined in the 2024 election by the defection of many Hispanic, Asian, and black working-class voters as well. What went wrong for the Democrats, and what can be done about it? At a time when the life prospects of Americans are increasingly shaped by economic class, not skin color or gender, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction and time and time again prioritized racial and gender identity…

Today’s consumer capitalist societies present us with a paradox: We are told year in and year out that living standards are rising, but many people—especially younger people—can feel their quality of life decline as time goes on. This feeling is palpable and can be seen in the hardest of the quality of life indices, such as the suicide rate and the rates of drug addiction and overdose. Noneconomic measures show a large decline in quality of life in recent years, but economic metrics show it is increasing. The old Marx Brothers phrase comes to mind: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” It is time for economists to admit that their metrics are broken…