Fifty years after Intel launched the microprocessor (1971) and Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer published the recombinant-DNA mechanism (1973) at the heart of “Biotech 1.0,” the age of cheap computing, expensive biosimilar drugs, and genetically modified organ­isms is coming to a close. What new general-purpose technologies might replace these engines of growth? What kinds of social and political arrangements will support or impede the emergence and deployment of those new technologies? That we stand in the midst of a geoeconomic and geopolitical inflection point is increasingly clear, but as Walter Benjamin said, the angel of history always looks backwards. Not being angels, we lean on our asset management expertise to take the riskier path of looking forward and sketching some possible scenarios for the post-inflection future. Place your bets…

Financial losses for today’s start-ups are much more common than they were decades ago, and the losses are much bigger. VCs are making back less from their initial investments than at any point since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. According to a study by Jay Ritter, only 22 percent of start-ups were profitable in 2021, the year of peak IPOs, versus 80 percent in the early 1980s. And today’s start-ups are not…

Artillery shells are not particularly complicated munitions: an HF-1 steel casing containing IMX-104 or TNT explosive, a fuse, and a propellant charge. But after more than two years of attempting to scale up production to supply Ukraine’s defensive line, the world’s largest economy has come nowhere close to meeting the monthly requirement: 360,000 rounds…

Tracking the development of new hardware technology from inven­tion all the way to domestic production offers new insights into advanced manufacturing challenges in the United States. This approach provides details often missing from more abstract analysis, including the specific difficulties at each stage of production, such as the lack of avail­able financing for capital-intensive manufacturing. Such a case study can also offer systemic insights: the United States has a deeply frayed, if not broken, innovation chain, though little-known new policies from the Department of Defense are helping to plug some of the gaps. It is also worth contrasting this picture with China, where improving scale-up processes to support advanced manufacturing,…

Restoring large-scale, competent manufacturing in the United States will require a higher level of labor-management conflict than the country has seen since the early 1940s. Although it may be surprising to most readers, that’s actually a very good thing, so long as that conflict is about effort and reward in the context of higher productivity…

In the long run, it is talent that drives technological supremacy. Yet as we recognize the vulnerabilities in our strategic industries—where even substantial subsidies and stringent export controls are insufficient without leading-edge production capabilities—it becomes clear that the very bedrock of innovation, our human capital, needs fortification…

Liberalism, Judge explains, disavows the problem of distributive con­flict. When the postwar growth engine began to slow, finance—which appears to extend distributive shares without requiring taxation or redistribution—promised a way out of the resulting political impasse. Elected officials were not captured or co-opted: they willingly embraced financial solutions to their political problems. Finance, naturally, exacts a price, however: subjecting government to the financial imperative to produce monetary returns has precipitated the transformation of liberal­ism into what is now commonly known as “neoliberalism.” In essence, Judge reverses David Harvey’s dictum: instead of “Neoliberalism entails the financialization of everything,” he arrives at “financialization entails the neoliberalization of everything…

At the heart of the present predicament is an unraveling of the two primary forms of political legitimation familiar in the postwar world, “input” and “output” legitimacy: the first looks to the processes by which policies are made and takes something like “the consent of the governed” as the basis of legitimacy; the second looks to whether policies, however produced, generate desirable outcomes…

Casey Michel’s Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy around the World explores the growing problem of foreign funding of U.S. nonprofits in order to exert political influence. Addressing this issue might be the best initial opportunity for cross-ideological, bipartisan cooperation toward meaningful nonprofit-sector reform—perhaps leading to broad­er, bolder efforts against Big Philanthropy and its increasingly stretched definitions of charity…

Metaphors about turning back clocks, telling history to stop, going back in time, and so on tend to obscure the reality behind political ideology, which is that people tend to have reasons for their beliefs and actions, and avoiding genuine disagreement cannot make those reasons go away. The mere passage of time does not resolve political problems or coordinate divergent interests. Time, as the Smashing Pumpkins said, is never time at all…

Pocock’s point would be that democracy, while exceedingly worthy of esteem, is not a nation. It is a type of regime, not a political point of view. He would diagnose the breakdown of referential coherence within American political discourse—with democracy’s self-styled saviors per­ennially contesting electoral outcomes—not as a failure of civic educa­tion or basic political theory, but rather a cultural (or, per Bakhtin, chronotopic) collapse of the political “we”: of the desire to be collectively self-determining…

In elaborating this critique, Todd is among the few European intellectuals to echo a diagnosis of technological stagnation similar to those of Americans such as Robert Gordon, Peter Thiel, and Tyler Cowen. The extraordinary development of information technology should have sparked a Promethean sense of agency across society and among elites. Instead, both leaders and people have, each in their own ways, lost faith in the future, with definite optimism giving way to debilitating passivism. Todd suggests that no past technological break­through has induced such complacency as that which has confined technological progress to such a narrow cone as IT…

Nietzsche’s continued presence and resonance in America suggests that he never forgot his Emersonian inheritance. Although Nietzsche’s self-creating individuals and free spirits take their bearings from man’s deepest spiritual yearnings and conflicts—rather than the shallow self-interest of anglophone classical liberalism—his characters are immediately and perpetually recognizable to American democrats, pragmatists, and entrepreneurs. Nietzsche’s followers in America, therefore, always seem at once the country’s most vehement critics and quintessentially American types. Indeed, Nietzsche might well be understood as a temporarily embarrassed American…