Building Tomorrow

Coming soon, a brand new podcast from Libertarianism.org... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your home is full of technological miracles, devices that your ancestors would have regarded as near magic because of the life of relative ease they provide us with. However, something is changing. In the past, we got richer by owning more stuff; but in the future, we will have more by owning less. In this final episode of Building Tomorrow, Paul talks with Cory Doctorow, Michael Munger, Ruth Cowa...

If you're the kind of person who carefully sorts out your recyclables from your trash, cleans it, and puts it out in the blue bin for pickup, you probably don't realize that as much as 90% of that material either just ends up in a landfill or, worse, is dumped into the ocean. Indeed, much of the plastic litter in the Pacific Ocean is the result of our well-intentioned but misplaced efforts at recy...

People are afraid. Afraid that they are consuming too much, emitting too much, having too many kids, and running the planet into the ground. Eight billion people seems like too many. But a growing number of experts are sounding the alarm that a far worse problem is on the horizon, an underpopulation crisis. People are having fewer kids and countries are aging. For example, by the end of the centur...

What happens when a raw material that is valueless suddenly becomes valuable? If it's bird guano in the 19th century, you mine it and save the agricultural economy. If its data in the late 20th century, you collect it and create a new digital economy.  Music attributions can be found here: https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/building-tomorrow/guano . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

The Building Tomorrow podcast is back in a new format. This season we will be focusing on wanting more. The desire for more embraces a prosperity mindset, the belief that growth and wealth are not a zero-sum game. We will release one in depth episode per month for 6 months. We would love for you to listen along as we long for more immigrants, more data, more houses, more mammoths, and more. Happy...

We have a special announcement about the future of Building Tomorrow. Stay tuned. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If voting leaves you feeling tired and vaguely dissatisfied, you're not alone. Over 60% of voters aren't happy with the two party duopoly that dominates US politics; others hate the flood of negative campaign ads or feel that politics is too big or too distant to be able to effect via the voting process. But there is hope! This week, Paul talks to two political scientists, Lee Drutman and Daniel B...

There are some things that even a pandemic cannot stop. One of those things is political pressure to "do something" about Big Tech. Paul checks in with Matthew Feeney and Will Duffield to get an update on the state of the techlash. Furthermore, this year many of the major social media platforms have ramped up their fact-checking operations in an attempt to combat disinformation about the pandemic...

In the 18th century, something sparked a wave of technological innovation and economic growth that has transformed the world for the better. Economists have argued about what that something was ever since. Our guest today, Professor Joel Mokyr, argues that it was a change in western European cultural attitudes that provided that spark. Enlightenment curiosity fomented a belief that practical knowl...

Spend any time on social media and odds are that you've interacted with at least one bot account; given how advanced they've become, you might not even have noticed. Paul interviews bot programmer Max Sklar about why bots are a big part of the future of online interaction and why that's not necessarily a bad thing. They also discuss machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the deurbanization...

It's time to stop politely asking the State to give us our freedoms back. We can just...take them. New technologies like smart contracts, cryptocurrency, and anonymized identification systems are challenging the State's near monopoly on jurisprudence, currency, and trust provision. Two of the authors of The New Technologies of Freedom , economists Chris Berg and Darcy Allen, join the show to discu...

There's growing, bi-partisan support for government regulation of the internet. The Left wants to censor hate speech while the Right wants to prevent platforms from downvoting conservative speech. Both approaches are filled with free speech landmines. And even a cursory look at the history of government regulation of mass media shows just how even the most well-intended government action can easil...

Guess what's bad for innovation? Telling the brightest minds in the world that you don't want them to come work with you. As obvious as that should be, that's precisely what the Trump administration's policy towards high skilled immigrants has done, most recently by attempting to deny visas to foreign-born university students. Caleb Watney joins the show to discuss exactly how self-harming these p...

If you’re listening to this show, you’re likely an ardent supporter of the First Amendment. Yet at the same time, you probably wouldn’t want your social media feeds filled with pornography and hate speech; removing such content requires tech companies to engage in content moderation. Are those two values in tension? Can content moderation coexist with free speech? John Samples, who is on Facebook’...

New York City's population dropped by 5% in just two weeks because of COVID-19, a drop concentrated among white collar professionals and Wall Street workers. But it's not just a New York City story as companies across the country have experimented with telework on a massive scale because of the pandemic. The question is what comes next. Will workplace norms snap back into place with knowledge econ...

Have you wondered whether a particular public health intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic has actually been worth it? Perhaps you then felt a bit ghoulish for asking the question, given that lives are at stake. Well, you're in luck because this episode of Building Tomorrow asks about that price tag. After all, resources are finite and we all routinely trade risk for convenience; there are som...

A generation before the rise of talk radio and hosts like Rush Limbaugh, there was another wave of right-wing radio. But the reason why few remember them is that they were the target of a hugely successful government censorship campaign implemented by President John F. Kennedy using IRS audits and the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine.” But as our host, Paul Matzko—whose book on the subject comes out next...

While universities debate whether to re-open on schedule for the fall semester, it’s expected that hundreds of colleges that were in financial distress will shutter their doors. While that might seem like obvious evidence of decline in higher education, economist Bryan Caplan suggests otherwise. In his controversial book,  The Case Against Education , he argues that higher ed does relatively...

Because of the COVID-19 shutdown, tens of millions of American households have suddenly been forced to do school at home. Education policy expert and homeschooling aficionado Kerry McDonald joins the show to discuss why she believes this experience will lead many more families to consider educational alternatives even after the shutdowns ease. Additionally, Kerry and Paul discuss the incendiary&nb...

Complaints about the control that social media companies exercise over their platforms has risen over the past couple of years. Some users complain that platforms like Facebook and Twitter should remove more offensive content; others complain that they remove too much, resulting in censorship of politically unpopular views. There is an alternative to this kludgy, top-down model of content moderati...

Matt Ridley joins the show today to talk about his new book, How Innovation Works . He argues that innovation is the defining feature of the modern age, but it is still very hard for us as a society to wrap our heads around that fact. Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchan...

Technologist Alec Stapp joins the show to discuss why the US lagged weeks behind South Korea in testing for COVID-19. While the failures of the FDA and CDC have been grim, the show does find a silver lining in the crisis, that technology has greatly eased the transition into social distancing for many Americans. How is our internet surviving during this global pandemic? How has the private industr...

Stop me if you’ve ever heard some version of the following argument: government mandates and funding gave us the __________ [insert: space shuttle, internet, Silicon Valley], so the government should spend $ __ billions/trillions on stimulating innovation and shaping industrial policy today. But that argument is built upon a simplistic and sometimes flawed understanding of what actually happened i...

If you watched the 2018 blockbuster  Black Panther , then you’ve encountered a genre known as Afro-Futurism, in which predominately African-American authors use science fiction to explore black liberation in a technological advanced future. These are the kinds of stories that spark the creative energy of the next generation of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. For this episode, we int...