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A key theme of this Substack column and my book series is Progress Studies. The goals of Progress Studies are to:
Promote an awareness and understanding of human material progress as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Study the history of material progress to identify the origins and causes of progress and how progress works in our daily lives. In particular, Progress Studies looks for common patterns across nations, eras, industries, technologies, institutions, and trends that enable us to identify causes of material progress.
Apply that knowledge to develop theories, policies, and practices that promote future progress (the focus of this series).
Build coalitions to implement those policies and practices in the real world.
This article provides a Table of Contents to all of my public policy proposals to promote increased material progress in wealthy Western nations. In particular, I focus on domains that closely related to the origins and causes of progress:
The Five Keys to Progress (necessary preconditions for what nations need to experience material progress)
How Progress Works (how societies create material progress in our daily lives if they maintain the Five Keys to Progress).
I also have separate series on:
Promoting increased material progress in Developing nations.
Promoting Upward Mobility for the working-class and poor in wealthy nations.
Table of Contents:
Energy and Fossil Fuels (the Fifth Key to Progress)
Affordable Housing (part of the Second Key to Progress: Trade-based cities)
Decentralization of Power (the Third Key to Progress)
Technological Innovation (part of How Progress Works)
Merit
Foreign trade
Education
Transportation
Other
If you enjoyed reading this series of articles, you might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
(I think there may be a couple broken links. The carbon tax and DEI pieces didn't work for me)
As you see, I agree (from cursory reading) on about 99,9%
#1 a-j I agree (except that One should not have any “emotion about one technology over another so no embracing or loving 😊
1K I already wrote you about
# 2 Agree that we need to think of cities as efficient amenity producing and growth promoting machines. [I doubt that replacing property taxes with land use taxed would have enough benefit to justify the task of re-estimating everyone’s tax bill.]
#3 a Good idea in principle but founders on the ease with which high consumption or income people could switch their tax residences to avoid progressive state consumption or income taxation. And there are some issues that cross state boundaries like air and water pollution and transportation regulation. And there are some scale economies of coordinating what are essentially state functions. [All states woul have ADA-thpe regulations. It's probably better if the standards are the same]
#3 b) No, it has not gone far enough in becoming actually a free trade area 😊
# c/d We need very different regulation, but “less” does not quite get us there If we really tried to regulate (what needs regulation) with cost-benefit based, it might “look like” MORE bureaucracy.
# 4/# 5 Agree
# 6 We can do lot better than that! America should lead a free trading block.
# 7 Agree
# 8 Probably. I’d need to see the NPV.
#9a Fail to aim one policy at one problem
#9b Agree
#9c even the very best tax reform VAT to pay fully for social insurance and a progressive personal consumption tax to raise the remaining revenue necessary to reduce defcits to the amount of public investment woud only raise growth rates. You only get booms when there are unemployed resources to be brought into use
9d We did not need a “stimulus” package at all. We just needed to apply the same expenditure rules as ought to apply at all times spend on activities with NPV =/> 0. [I assume that a VAT finance social insurance transfer of consumption to consumption has accost of 0] In recession with many prices > marginal costs, many NPVs become >0 that are <0 at full employment.