Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Ideally, America will come out of the COVID pandemic with a better understanding of how important innovation is. The more we support technological progress, the more prepared we’ll be for the next pandemic — or for other unexpected emergencies. However, it’s also possible that we’ll come out of this pandemic as a weaker, less dynamic country with a drawbridge-up mentality and less tolerance for technological change.
Today’s guest, Caleb Watney, is particularly concerned that COVID has placed America’s capacity for innovation under extreme stress. To this effect, he recently wrote an important article for The Atlantic: “America’s Innovation Engine Is Slowing.” Caleb is the director of innovation policy at PPI, where he focuses on how US policymakers can best promote innovation. He is also a former technology policy fellow at the R Street Institute.
The post Caleb Watney: America’s slowing innovation engine appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
Subscribe to Political Economy with James Pethokoukis in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
Increasing the number of patents is mentioned by the guest in this podcast as point in his favor for the arguments he is advancing to increase innovation. I’m confused. I thought (from listening to this podcast) that patents were bad (i.e. anti-competitive, and by implication would slow down innovation).
Ideally Americans will wake up and indict any and every one of the people doing the bidding of Bill Gates who set the stage for the collapse of the economy, the high suicide rate, the return to drugs and booze by people formerly sober, and destruction of mid-level and small businesses. And the destroyed businesses are including the very high end and innovative end of technology.
A friend who can only be described as an engineering/energy genius has lost 2/3rds of his clients since midApril. Many of these clients had carefully set up businesses that revolved around the concept of providing “free energy” to the public and major industry owners. This type of “free energy” is not so much free, but available energy that until recently had escaped a practical and profitable harnessing. This energy offers huge savings to industry leaders interested in the solutions. (The clients carefully set up businesses usually avoided any debt to banks, so since they were fully funded and profitable, they lost like crazy when the economy ground to a halt.)
Bill Gates has openly stated on news shows, especially of the “Good Morning” variety, that he fully intends for this “new normal” to reign over us for at least the next two to three years. He even let it slip that “this first pandemic” is only the tip of the iceberg he plans for the next decade, which he has with his usual over confidence deemed to be “the decade of vaccines.”
Any individuals – especially any technology innovators – who are not opposed to Gates are aboard the destruction of a free society into a dystopian nightmare. This nightmare makes what the Colonists faced under British rule appear as a picnic.