How to Build State Capacity

This week’s interview is a live recording of a panel I hosted three weeks ago at the Bottlenecks Conference in San Francisco, with Sam Hammond and Jen Pahlka. We discussed:

(00:00) Introduction

(00:39) Do the right and left disagree about state capacity?

(7:50) Will AI make the whole state capacity debate obsolete?

(11:05) What cues should today’s reformers take from the Progressive Era?

(14:19) Should Trump use Schedule F?

(20:18) Where is there bipartisan agreement on state capacity?

(25:29) Why didn't COVID create more governance changes?

Brief bios: Hammond is a Senior Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation where he focuses on AI policy. Pahlka is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists and the author of Recoding America. We’ve interviewed her before.