So much of our policy debates rely on
predictions, projections, and probabilities. What will the results of the
upcoming election be? How will this policy affect economic growth? How big of a
threat is climate change in the long term? What do the epidemiological models
say about handling the COVID pandemic? It’s important to answer these questions
as best as we can, but we should also recognize that some uncertainty is
inevitable. We can’t quantify our way through difficult, ambiguous problems. At
least, that’s the argument made by today’s guest, Mervyn King.

Mervyn is a professor of both economics and law at New York University, and he is a former governor of the Bank of England. He is also the co-author, along with John Kay, of “Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making beyond the Numbers.”

In the last eight years, geneticists have figured out how to edit humanity’s genetic code by harnessing a natural phenomenon known as CRISPR. This innovation has the potential to let us cure horrible genetic diseases, and perhaps augment humanity even further. But this also raises the ethical question: How far should genome editing go, if it’s permitted at all? On today’s episode, I speak with Kevin Davies about the new practical capabilities and ethical questions of this new era of genome editing.

Kevin is the executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and the founding editor of Nature Genetics. He is also the author of several books, including “Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing,” which will be out in the first week of October. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.

America has many problems to contend with over the next few decades, including consistently stagnant economic growth, the progression of climate change, and the rise of China as a rival power. Today’s guest, Matthew Yglesias, believes Americans can begin taking steps to tackle these problems by thinking bigger. Specifically, policymakers should expand immigration and enact more policies that support children and parents — all with the goal of rapidly growing America’s population to one billion people by 2100.

Matthew Yglesias is the co-founder of Vox.com, where he is currently a senior correspondent and the host of Vox’s “The Weeds” podcast. He is also the author of the newly released One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.

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.

Progress and innovation make society much better off in the long run, even though they can also be disruptive or alarming in the near term. So it’s important to study progress because we need to know how to promote more progress and reap its benefits faster, and we also need to explain why progress is important to those who are alarmed by it. On this episode, I discuss these questions, and much more, with Jason Crawford.

Jason is the author of the Roots of Progress blog, where he writes about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress. He is also the creator of Progress Studies for Young Scholars, an online program for high schoolers about the history of technology, and he was formerly a software engineering manager and tech startup founder. Jason, welcome to the podcast.

COVID-19 cases are surging in the US, even after a costly two-month lockdown. What does this resurgence mean for the economy, which is currently struggling to recover from a deep recession? How will schools operate this fall amid the uncertainty? And how far out are we from discovering, manufacturing, and distributing a vaccine? In this special episode of Political Economy, I explore these questions — and many more — in an online panel discussion conducted last week with Scott Gottlieb, Rick Hess, and Michael Strain.

Scott Gottlieb is a resident fellow at AEI, and he is also the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Rick Hess is a resident scholar and the director of Education Policy Studies at AEI, and he is the author of several books, including Letters to a Young Education Reformer and Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age: Using Learning Science to Reboot Schooling. And Michael Strain is the John G. Searle Scholar and director of economic policy studies at AEI. He is also the author of The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).

Why are innovation and economic growth so important to well-being? What can policymakers do to maximize the benefits of this innovative dynamism going forward? I discuss these questions and more with today’s guest, Arthur Diamond.

Arthur is a professor of economics at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and he’s a senior fellow for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of “Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism,” released last year.