economic-growth
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Brink Lindsey
Brink Lindsey is a writer and policy thinker who spent decades inside Washington's free-market establishment - vice president for research at the Cato Institute, a leading free-trade voice - before publicly reinventing himself as a 'recovering libertarian.' Now senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, he argues that capable government and robust social insurance are not enemies of markets but their necessary complement. His writing, including The Captured Economy (with Steven Teles) and The Permanent Problem, wrestles with a single paradox: rich countries have never had more material plenty, and people have never felt less satisfied. He explores it weekly from a base in northeastern Thailand on his Substack, The Permanent Problem.
Eli Dourado
Eli Dourado is an economist and head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute, where he deploys capital to push frontier technologies in energy, aerospace, and other capital-intensive, heavily regulated sectors. He describes his work as a 'sacred quest to increase the pace of American economic growth,' which he argues has stagnated since around 1973. A former regulatory hacker at Boom Supersonic and director of the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center, he is known for influential essays on geothermal energy, supersonic flight, cargo airships, and ending the Great Stagnation.
Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison is the Irish-born CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the payments infrastructure company valued at over $90 billion. At 21, he and his brother John built Stripe from a prototype hacked together on holiday into one of the most influential fintech companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Patrick co-founded the Arc Institute for biomedical research, launched Fast Grants that distributed over $200 million for COVID research, and championed Progress Studies with Tyler Cowen. A former teenage programming prodigy who won Ireland's Young Scientist Exhibition at 16, he dropped out of MIT to pursue entrepreneurship and became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires at 28.
James Pethokoukis
James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.