What Do You Do With an Idea?

Then, Americans’ attitude towards risk shifted. I wrote about this in Riskophilia . For that post, I asked ChatGPT to make me a chart of America’s attitude towards risk by decade, and while certainly unscientific, there is a stark difference between the 1770s - 1960s trendline, and the 1960s to 2020s trendline. The timing lines up well with the slo

Now, two things are happening.

1. Technology is making old and new ideas cheaper and easier to build.




2. There’s a reemergence of “premium demand.”

Ideas Need Adoption to Make an Impact

Ideas alone are not enough. They need to be techno-economically viable, buildable for a low enough cost that the market is able to adopt them. There is no progress without

Figure out something you want to build that is technically and economically feasible, figure out what’s standing in the way, and then use all of the resources you can bring to bear to obliterate those obstacles.

premium demand is often critical to the development and diffusion of technologies. Certain buyers can support a technology when it’s more expensive than alternatives in the market, which provides an initial push down the cost curve. With experience, manufacturers can drive down costs to the point that they’re accessible to the broader market.

Then, starting in the late 1960s, both NASA and the DoD’s budgets fell off.

Here is the DoD budget as a percentage of GDP since 1960:

That is a major omission! If the slowdown in TFP growth can be explained by ideas getting harder to find, why did growth hit a brick wall in 1973 as opposed to slowly decaying as soon as ideas became harder to find?

Well, one question to ask might be “Which factors contributed to TFP growth in the last good decades, the 1950s and 1960s, and when wer

What Do You Do With an Idea?

One of the joys of parenthood is that you get to read a lot of books with your kids. One of my favorite books to read with Dev and Maya is Kobi Yamada’s What Do You Do With An Idea?

Illustration by Mae Bostrom

I don’t want to spoil it, but after feeling a little embarrassed by his idea, trying to hide it away and prote