Sam Bowman on What's Holding Back Progress (and How to Fix It)

Unlocking Economic Growth Potential

• 💡 Dramatic economic growth is achievable in developed countries by addressing fundamental issues in housing, transport, and energy.
• 🎯 The "Works in Progress" magazine focuses on high-leverage, underrated ideas across science, technology, and economics to improve the world.
• 🧠 The magazine format prioritizes in-depth long reads and acts as a trusted intermediary, focusing on genuinely important but less explored topics.

Beyond Technology: Key Bottlenecks

• 🚧 Housing constraints in prosperous cities, inadequate transport infrastructure, and energy supply are major bottlenecks to economic growth, even more so than science and technology in the short term.
• 🏙️ Restrictive housing policies prevent people from moving to high-opportunity cities, hindering productivity and both catch-up and frontier growth.
• ⚠️ The San Francisco Bay Area exemplifies these issues, with dysfunctional housing and transport, despite being a global tech hub.

Addressing Development Objections

• 📜 Zoning laws originated from a desire to preserve neighborhood character, sometimes legitimately (e.g., disease prevention) and sometimes illegitimately (e.g., racial exclusion).
• 🎨 Public opposition to new buildings often stems from concerns about aesthetics, noise, congestion, and perceived negative changes to their local area.
• 🏗️ Many people have a rational expectation that new developments will look worse or be less human-friendly, making design and beauty crucial for acceptance.

Strategies for Progress

• ✅ Solutions involve local decision-making and allowing neighborhoods to opt-in to upzoning, often incentivized by increased land values (e.g., Houston, Israel, South Korea, Japan).
• 📈 "Invisible" growth-priming policies that don't require significant political capital, such as smart housing reforms, can generate initial growth and foster optimism.
• 🤝 An elite consensus prioritizing growth above other issues (like climate change or regional inequality) is essential for tackling large-scale problems effectively.

A Vision for the Future

• 🚀 An optimistic scenario sees major cities like New York and San Francisco grow significantly (e.g., NYC to 40 million, SF Bay Area to 30 million), leading to massive economic expansion.
• 💡 This growth would foster increased innovation through greater human interaction and lead to more family formation as housing becomes more affordable and accessible.
• 🌍 Learning from successful, cost-effective infrastructure projects, like Madrid's metro expansion, provides a playbook for future development and cultural shifts towards a pro-growth mindset.