Institute for Progress

Based on your reporting, is the advantage typically on the side of the attacker or the defender here?

I spoke with Olivia Scharfman, who's a biotech fellow at the Institute for Progress, and her point was that the dynamics of biological warfare favor attackers over defenders because attackers have as long as they want to develop a weapon, but we don't have years to design a countermeasure.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Looking back at what happened during COVID, we saw how long that took.

We want to do something that matters for the world.

Will is, in some ways, hearkening back to a conversation we just had a few minutes ago where I was chatting with Will and some other folks here at the school about counterfactual policy impact, which is something we love to talk about ad nauseum at the Institute for Progress.

And it's true.

It's very easy to convince yourself, and all the pressures run towards convincing yourself that you are always breaking novel ground.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Again, we're just coming out of a conversation before we started recording about cases where useful pieces of evidence or new pieces of evidence have swung the tide in policymaking.

And in my time working at the Institute for Progress, there have been cases of this where it turns out you can tell policymakers, actually, we just learned this.

We did an analysis.

Meanwhile, in New York, Governor Hochul extended authority for cities to utilize land value capture to fund new transit stops, a tool that can be used for the new Interborough Expressway IBX subway expansion.

We're working with Niskanen Center, Center for Public Enterprise, and Institute for Progress to turn this idea into a real policy proposal.

Nor is interest in land value tax limited to the United States.

The UK just elected a new prime minister, Andy Burnham, who has long openly advocated for a land value tax, and South Korea did the same last year with the election of new president Lee Jae-myung.

2.

The Institute for Progress, EAFP, published a list of 23 low-regret policy recommendations that could help the US prepare for increasing AI R&D automation.

3.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Kayser introduced a bill that would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI.

Additionally, Casey, who's tasked with this huge mission space, is running on a budget of about $15 million a year with something like 10th of the staff of its UK counterpart.

And we think, and other colleagues in the space, such as the Institute for Progress, estimate that a properly equipped Casey would probably need closer to $84 million a year.

to accomplish its mission.

So on

I'm contributing editor and host of the Security Economics Podcast, Peter Harrell.

For today's episode, as part of our new Security Economics series, I sat down with Mike Schmidt, distinguished visitor at Princeton University's Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies, a non-resident senior fellow at the Institute for Progress, and for today's purposes, the former director of the CHIPS Program Office at the Department of Commerce.

Basically, the person who turned the twenty twenty-two CHIPS Act into a program that actually secured hundreds of billions of dollars of planned semiconductor factories for the United States.

China's manufacturing is a total powerhouse.