Q1 Essay Contest Results

"How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?"

As we close out our sprint, we’re excited to announce the results of our most recent essay contest, where we asked: “How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?” Just like last time, we elected to award three top prizes and eight additional honorariums for a total of almost $7,000 in prize money this quarter alone.

Unlike our previous contest, we shifted this into an online salon-style format where we asked people to publish submissions on their own Substack pages. Frankly this was something we had mixed feelings on going in, but the result has been an absolute success. 34 people submitted to our essay contest in total, and these submissions reached ~30,000 subscribers, collected ~600 likes and ~350 comments, and total views were most likely in the high tens-of-thousands range. So we’re extremely pleased with the reach we had this time and plan on sticking to this model going forward.

This contest has also reaffirmed something for us: there is a large, latent pool of people who want to share their policy insights but who lack a platform to do so. By bringing together and highlighting the proposals of such individuals, our hope is to inject more heterodoxy and fresh thinking into a policy space dominated by settled dogma and partisanship. The question of how we achieve spectacular abundance is the one we’re devoted to solving — and we think it’s best done by bringing together “Let’s Fucking Go” Americans who are thinking about solutions rather than doom-scrolling or culture war-maxxing.

Before getting into the winners: if you have the capacity and you believe in our mission of reshaping the think tank frontier, please consider donating directly or signing up for a founding membership. We’re in the early stages of building this organization, so now is the best time to contribute and help shape our path. If you become a paid subscriber (or win the essay contest), you’ll effectively have a seat on our intellectual board.

With that, here are the winning essays along with a quick blurb on each. We recommend checking them all out and subscribing!

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First Place

Sol Hando — “Eight Months, Under Budget, In Complete Secrecy”

This essay uses the development of the Lockheed U-2 as a case study, arguing that America’s declining problem-solving capacity is a function of institutional structure, not necessarily public vs. private ownership. The key differentiator is organizational design: small, mission-driven teams with high autonomy, minimal oversight, and existential stakes outperform large bureaucracies encumbered by process and precedent.

We appreciated this line of thinking because the author rejected simplistic privatization narratives, instead identifying deeper pathologies like layered decision-making, risk aversion, and institutional inertia. Effective problem-solving organizations, whether public or private, share common traits: tight feedback loops, clear objectives, and insulation from political or procedural drag. The implication is to not replace government but reconstitute it embedding “skunkworks”-style structures within the state to restore accountability and creative capacity — and speed!

Second Place

J.K. Lundblad — “Scales Skewed”

This essay reframes America’s stagnation through the lens of risk: not regulatory overreach per se, but a legal system that systematically amplifies loss aversion. The author introduces the concept of a “social supercomputer” — the decentralized network of individuals and firms whose experimentation drives progress — and argues that the US legal environment is increasingly hostile to its operation.

Through mechanisms like contingency fees, asymmetric litigation costs, and the absence of “loser pays” rules, the system incentivizes excessive lawsuits while discouraging productive risk-taking. The result is a de facto “litigation tax,” suppressing entrepreneurship and distorting capital allocation. The essay proposes targeted reforms — expanded bench trials, mandatory mediation, and fee-shifting — to rebalance incentives. At its core, the argument is Hayekian: progress depends on distributed experimentation, and America’s legal architecture is quietly suffocating it.

Third Place

Brian Moore — “Fixer of Problems”

This essay locates America’s declining problem-solving capacity in a breakdown of incentive alignment between voters and policymakers, not in a failure to identify problems or solutions. The core dysfunction, he argues, is informational: politicians are not rewarded for solving problems because voters lack clear, credible signals linking policy decisions to outcomes.

Historically, this feedback loop was mediated by institutions like the press. Today, those channels are fragmented, distorted, or untrusted — leaving even obvious solutions politically inert. The author’s proposal is strikingly concrete: construct a publicly trusted “national dashboard” of key metrics, paired with prediction markets that translate policy decisions into measurable expectations.

By making outcomes legible (and politically salient) the system would re-anchor democratic accountability. The goal is not better leaders, but better signals: a world where doing the right thing is once again the winning political strategy.

Honorariums

Anton Frattaroli — “The Scale of Discovery”

This essay’s key distinction is between discovery and scale. Large institutions are not portrayed as stupid or malicious; they are structurally optimized for compliance, standardization, and stability, which makes them poor engines of open-ended discovery. Novel solutions instead emerge from small, cross-disciplinary teams under existential pressure. The essay’s concrete policy answer follows from that premise: lower the cost of experimentation by redirecting capital away from buybacks and toward early-stage payroll support for small employer firms.

Alan Schmidt — “Problem Solving the Problem Solving Problem”

Rather than asking how to solve more problems, this essay questions whether the modern problem/solution frame is itself distorting our priorities. Drawing on examples like meat-processing regulation, Ellul’s critique of “technique,” and MacIntyre’s account of practices and virtue, it argues that technocratic optimization often solves what is measurable while corroding local knowledge, craft, and moral purpose. Its deeper claim is that problem-solving capacity depends on recovering humane ends, not just more efficient means.

No Hot Takes — “The Insulation, Habituation, and Incentive Crisis”

This essay offers a three-part diagnosis: elites are insulated from the consequences of their decisions, the public has been habituated into passive spectatorship, and the range of politically thinkable solutions has been artificially narrowed. Its remedies are unusually operational: tie compensation and reelection to outcome scorecards, force structured civic exposure to break elite bubbles, and make performance legible through public local metrics and revived media visibility. It is less a plea for virtue than a design for enforced accountability.

Scott McWilliams — “Telos, Thymos, and the Work of Self-Government”

This essay places America’s weakness upstream of bureaucracy, in a civilizational malaise: the loss of a shared national telos, the weakening of spirited civic striving, and the erosion of local associational life. Its proposals therefore aim at moral and civic reconstruction — curricular reform, broader talent identification beyond elite metros, and grants and networks for local problem-solvers. The core wager is that societies solve problems better when citizens know what they are for.

Reid — “Elites Are Like Fissile Material”

This essay reframes “elite overproduction” as a mismatch between social elites and elite human capital. The problem is not simply that too many people wield influence, but that elite roles have expanded faster than the supply of genuinely high-capacity people fit to occupy them, producing nonlinear declines in group performance. Its remedies are deliberately radical: better matching, easier removal of high-status underperformers, AI-assisted education, and even biotech interventions to raise elite human capital itself.

Kitten — “Americans Can Have a Little Fascism, as a Treat”

Provocative and openly tongue-in-cheek, this essay nonetheless makes a real argument: accumulated law, judicial supremacy, and procedural clutter have made ordinary democratic problem-solving too weak to govern. Its proposed cure is to shift more discretionary authority to elected executives — through retroactive veto-like powers, harder-edged public-order authority, and ways of bypassing or removing obstructive judges. The essay’s provocation is that Americans may accept a measure of illiberalism when liberal procedure no longer delivers order.

John Hamilton — “A Practical and Ugly Way to Fix America”

This essay is less about technocratic reform than about political coalition. It argues that high-capacity “open-access” states are governed by coalitions that permit growth, while “closed-access” states are dominated by public-sector unions, proceduralists, and veto players who block it. From that premise follows the “ugly” answer: durable reform will not come from white papers or bipartisan workshops, but from defeating the governing coalition and rolling back the rules and staffing structures through which it governs.

DeepLeftAnalysis🔸 — “Human Capital Is The Solution”

This essay treats state incapacity as a talent-allocation problem. America’s public sector is “brain-drained” by the private sector, while geographic sorting and dysgenic fertility further thin the pool of capable people available to govern. Because conventional schooling has diminishing returns, the author looks instead to more controversial levers: high-skill immigration in the short run, paired with longer-run efforts to alter the underlying human capital distribution itself. It was the starkest human-stock argument in the field.

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Kudos to all the winners, and a massive “thank you” to everyone who submitted an essay. We’re very excited to share what the Boyd Institute has in the hopper for Q2 2026 in the coming days!