5 Comments
User's avatar
Rajeev Ram's avatar

Exciting. Good job, guys. Fun to see your ambitions coming to fruition.

Jeff Giesea's avatar

Thanks Rajeev 🙏

Nathan Smith's avatar

That might a bit meta for a sprint (hard to collect data), but I'd invest it with a bit more focus through these themes:

1. Free Markets: We must reject the recent trend toward protectionism and trust markets more. Comparative advantage improves productivity. Education, zoning, immigration, and healthcare are areas where more market reform is needed.

2. Virtue: Game theory (e.g., the prisoner’s dilemma) shows that selfishness breaks systems while virtue fixes them. We need a revival of the classical virtues—justice, courage, prudence, etc. Leaders should urge virtue, and institutions must be allowed to select for it and trust those who demonstrate it.

3. Technology: We need "permissionless innovation," curbing the veto power of regulators and NIMBYs. But beyond just markets, we need a culture committed to envisioning and pursuing the technological frontier, even when it requires prioritizing the common good over self-interest.

4. Leadership, Class and Hierarchy. Problem-solving requires teamwork, and teams need leadership. Democratic egalitarianism has a tendency to undermine the legitimacy of leaders and weaken their authority too much, and the myth of "equality of opportunity" muddles too many people's thinking. We need to re-embrace pragmatic, intelligent, technocratic leadership, and fight back against the "populist" impulse to gratuitously mistrust the kind of people-- the well-educated, tech-savvy "laptop class"-- that is poised to provide it.

Those would be the planks I'd advocate for inclusion in a platform of better American problem-solving.

Cole's avatar

Good luck guys, excited to see what else is coming

User's avatar
Comment removed
Dec 30
Comment removed
Jeff Giesea's avatar

I feel seen. Thank you.