does the hook go before the thesis

Write an Attention-Grabbing Opening Sentence for an Essay

• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

You can think of the first sentence of your essay as you would a fishing hook. It grabs your reader and allows you reel the person into your essay and your train of thought. The hook for your essay can be an interesting sentence that captures a person's attention, it can be thought-provoking, or even, entertaining.

The hook for your essay often appears in the first sentence . The opening paragraph includes a thesis sentence . Some popular hook choices can include using an interesting quote, a little-known fact, famous last words, or a statistic .

A quote hook is best used when you are composing an essay based on an author, story, or book. It helps establish your authority on the topic and by using someone else's quote, you can strengthen your thesis if the quote supports it.

The following is an example of a quote hook: "A man's errors are his portals of discovery." In the next sentence or two, give a reason for this quote or current example. As for the last sentence (the thesis) : Students grow more confident and self-sufficient when parents allow them to make mistakes and experience failure.

General statement

By setting the tone in the opening sentence with a uniquely written general statement of your thesis, the beauty is that you get right to the point. Most readers appreciate that approach.

For example, you can start with the following statement: Many studies show that the biological sleep pattern for teens shifts a few hours, which means teens naturally stay up later and feel alert later in the morning. The next sentence, set up the body of your essay, perhaps by introducing the concept that school days should be adjusted so that they are more in sync with the teenager's natural sleep or wake cycle. As for the last sentence (the thesis) :  If every school day started at ten o'clock, many students would find it easier to stay focused.

By listing a proven fact or entertaining an interesting statistic that might even sound implausible to the reader, you can excite a reader to want to know more. 

Like this hook: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics , teens and young adults experience the highest rates of violent crime. Your next sentence can set up the argument that it's dangerous for teenagers to be on the streets at late hours. A fitting thesis statement might read: Parents are justified in implementing a strict curfew, regardless of a student's academic performance.

The Right Hook for Your Essay

The good news about finding a hook? You can find a quote, fact, or another type of hook after you determine your thesis. You can accomplish this with a simple online search about your topic after you've developed your essay .

You can nearly have the essay finished before you revisit the opening paragraph. Many writers polish up the first paragraph after the essay is completed.

Outlining the Steps for Writing Your Essay

Here's an example of the steps you can follow that help you outline your essay.

• First paragraph: Establish the thesis
• Body paragraphs: Supporting evidence
• Last paragraph: Conclusion with a restatement of the thesis
• Revisit the first paragraph: Find the best hook

Obviously, the first step is to determine your thesis. You need to research your topic and know what you plan to write about. Develop a starting statement. Leave this as your first paragraph for now.

The next paragraphs become the supporting evidence for your thesis. This is where you include the statistics, opinions of experts, and anecdotal information.

Compose a closing paragraph that is basically a reiteration of your thesis statement with new assertions or conclusive findings you find during with your research.

Lastly, go back to your introductory hook paragraph. Can you use a quote, shocking fact, or paint a picture of the thesis statement using an anecdote? This is how you sink your hooks into a reader.

The best part is if you are not loving what you come up with at first, then you can play around with the introduction. Find several facts or quotes that might work for you. Try out a few different starting sentences and determine which of your choices makes the most interesting beginning to your essay.

• Examples of Great Introductory Paragraphs
• 100 Persuasive Essay Topics
• How To Write an Essay
• How to Write a Great Essay for the TOEFL or TOEIC
• The Ultimate Guide to the 5-Paragraph Essay
• The Introductory Paragraph: Start Your Paper Off Right
• How to Write a Solid Thesis Statement
• How to Structure an Essay
• Definition and Examples of Analysis in Composition
• Tips on How to Write an Argumentative Essay
• What an Essay Is and How to Write One
• How to Write a Good Thesis Statement
• What Is Expository Writing?
• How to Start a Book Report
• Writing a Lead or Lede to an Article
• How to Write a Response Paper

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Guide to Writing Introductions and Conclusions

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First and last impressions are important in any part of life, especially in writing. This is why the introduction and conclusion of any paper – whether it be a simple essay or a long research paper – are essential. Introductions and conclusions are just as important as the body of your paper. The introduction is what makes the reader want to continue reading your paper. The conclusion is what makes your paper stick in the reader’s mind.

Introductions

Your introductory paragraph should include:

1) Hook:  Description, illustration, narration or dialogue that pulls the reader into your paper topic. This should be interesting and specific.

2) Transition: Sentence that connects the hook with the thesis.

3) Thesis: Sentence (or two) that summarizes the overall main point of the paper. The thesis should answer the prompt question.

The examples below show are several ways to write a good introduction or opening to your paper. One example shows you how to paraphrase in your introduction. This will help you understand the idea of writing sequences using a hook, transition, and thesis statement.

» Thesis Statement Opening

This is the traditional style of opening a paper. This is a “mini-summary” of your paper.

For example:

» Opening with a Story (Anecdote)

A good way of catching your reader’s attention is by sharing a story that sets up your paper. Sharing a story gives a paper a more personal feel and helps make your reader comfortable.

This example was borrowed from Jack Gannon’s The Week the World Heard Gallaudet (1989):

Astrid Goodstein, a Gallaudet faculty member, entered the beauty salon for her regular appointment, proudly wearing her DPN button. (“I was married to that button that week!” she later confided.) When Sandy, her regular hairdresser, saw the button, he spoke and gestured, “Never! Never! Never!” Offended, Astrid turned around and headed for the door but stopped short of leaving. She decided to keep her appointment, confessing later that at that moment, her sense of principles had lost out to her vanity. Later she realized that her hairdresser had thought she was pushing for a deaf U.S. President. Hook: a specific example or story that interests the reader and introduces the topic.

Transition: connects the hook to the thesis statement

Thesis: summarizes the overall claim of the paper

» Specific Detail Opening

Giving specific details about your subject appeals to your reader’s curiosity and helps establish a visual picture of what your paper is about.

» Open with a Quotation

Another method of writing an introduction is to open with a quotation. This method makes your introduction more interactive and more appealing to your reader.

» Open with an Interesting Statistic

Statistics that grab the reader help to make an effective introduction.

» Question Openings

Possibly the easiest opening is one that presents one or more questions to be answered in the paper. This is effective because questions are usually what the reader has in mind when he or she sees your topic.

Source : *Writing an Introduction for a More Formal Essay. (2012). Retrieved April 25, 2012, from http://flightline.highline.edu/wswyt/Writing91/handouts/hook_trans_thesis.htm

Conclusions

The conclusion to any paper is the final impression that can be made. It is the last opportunity to get your point across to the reader and leave the reader feeling as if they learned something. Leaving a paper “dangling” without a proper conclusion can seriously devalue what was said in the body itself. Here are a few effective ways to conclude or close your paper. » Summary Closing Many times conclusions are simple re-statements of the thesis. Many times these conclusions are much like their introductions (see Thesis Statement Opening).

» Close with a Logical Conclusion

This is a good closing for argumentative or opinion papers that present two or more sides of an issue. The conclusion drawn as a result of the research is presented here in the final paragraphs.

» Real or Rhetorical Question Closings

This method of concluding a paper is one step short of giving a logical conclusion. Rather than handing the conclusion over, you can leave the reader with a question that causes him or her to draw his own conclusions.

» Close with a Speculation or Opinion This is a good style for instances when the writer was unable to come up with an answer or a clear decision about whatever it was he or she was researching. For example:

» Close with a Recommendation

A good conclusion is when the writer suggests that the reader do something in the way of support for a cause or a plea for them to take action.

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• Writing Tips

How to Write the Ultimate Essay Hook

4-minute read

• 6th May 2023

Never underestimate the power of an essay hook . This opening statement is meant to grab the reader’s attention and convince them to keep reading. But how do you write one that’ll pack a punch? In this article, we’ll break this down.

What Is an Essay Hook?

An essay hook is the first thing your audience will read. If it doesn’t hook them right off the bat, they might decide not to keep reading. It’s important that your opening statement is impactful while not being too wordy or presumptuous.

It’s also crucial that it clearly relates to your topic. You don’t want to mislead your readers into thinking your essay is about something it’s not. So, what kind of essay hook should you write? Here are seven ideas to choose from:

1.   Story

Everyone likes a good story. If an interesting story or anecdote relates to your essay topic, the hook is a great place to include it. For example:

The key to a good story hook is keeping it short and sweet. You’re not writing a novel in addition to an essay!

2.   Fact

Another great essay hook idea is to lay out a compelling fact or statistic. For example:

There are a few things to keep in mind when doing this. Make sure it’s relevant to your topic, accurate, and something your audience will care about. And, of course, be sure to cite your sources properly.

3.   Metaphor or Simile

If you want to get a little more creative with your essay hook, try using a metaphor or simile . A metaphor states that something is something else in a figurative sense, while a simile states that something is like something else.

Metaphors and similes are effective because they provide a visual for your readers, making them think about a concept in a different way. However, be careful not to make them too far-fetched or overly exaggerated.

4.   Question

Asking your audience a question is a great way to hook them. Not only does it make them think, but they’ll also want to keep reading because you will have sparked their curiosity. For example:

Find this useful?

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Try to avoid using questions that start with something along the lines of “Have you ever wondered…?” Instead, try to think of a question they may never have wondered about. And be sure not to answer it right away, at least not fully. Use your essay to do that!

5.   Declaration

Making a bold statement or declaring a strong opinion can immediately catch people’s attention. For example:

Regardless of whether your reader agrees with you, they’ll probably want to keep reading to find out how you will back up your claim. Just make sure your declaration isn’t too controversial, or you might scare readers away!

6.   Common Misconception

Laying out a common misconception is another useful way to hook your reader. For example:

If your readers don’t know that a common belief is actually a misconception, they’ll likely be interested in learning more. And if they are already aware, it’s probably a topic they’re interested in, so they’ll want to read more.

7.   Description

You can put your descriptive powers into action with your essay hook. Creating interesting or compelling imagery places your reader into a scene, making the words come alive.

A description can be something beautiful and appealing or emotionally charged and provoking. Either way, descriptive writing is a powerful way to immerse your audience and keep them reading.

When writing an essay, don’t skimp on the essay hook! The opening statement has the potential to convince your audience to hear what you have to say or to let them walk away. We hope our ideas have given you some inspiration.

And once you finish writing your essay, make sure to send it to our editors. We’ll check it for grammar, spelling, word choice, references, and more. Try it out for free today with a 500-word sample !

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10 Writing the Introductory Paragraph

The introductory and concluding paragraphs are like the top and bottom buns of a hamburger. They contain basically the same information and are critical for holding the entire piece together.

Learning Objectives

After completing the exercises in this chapter, you will be able to

• identify the three main components of an introductory paragraph
• understand how to “hook” your reader
• identify what background information needs to be included to lead to your thesis

Essay Structure

You learned in the previous chapter that a body paragraph is structured like a hamburger. You can think of your essay as one big burger!

The top bun is the introduction.

The meat and vegetables in the middle are the supporting body paragraphs (several mini-burgers).

The bottom bun is the conclusion.

“ Burger ”  by wildgica   under license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 .

The top and bottom bun are both made of bread; they contain the same ingredients (or information) but look a little bit different. The “meat” of your argument is in the supporting body paragraphs.

Structure of the Introductory Paragraph

Your introductory paragraph has three main parts:

• background information

Start your introductory paragraph with an interesting comment or question that will get your reader interested in your topic.

• a famous or interesting quotation
• an anecdote
• a startling fact or shocking statistic
• a statement of contrast
• a prediction
• a rhetorical question
• the definition of a critical concept

The hook is the very first thing your audience encounters. A good hook should be just one or two sentences. The goal of your hook is to introduce your reader to your broad topic in an interesting way and make your reader excited to read more.

Even though your hook is at the very beginning of your essay, you should actually write your hook LAST!  It will be much easier for you to write an engaging introduction to your topic after you’ve done all of your research and after you’ve written your body paragraphs and conclusion.

Watch this video for tips on how to write a captivating and relevant hook [1] :

In part two of this video series, Mister Messinger gives some additional tips about writing hooks, explains some common mistakes that beginning writers make, and warns against using rhetorical questions: rhetorical questions, while fairly easy to write, are often poorly done and not engaging.

Your introductory paragraph should also include some background information. Don’t preview the ideas that you’ll introduce in your thesis – this is not the place to introduce your supporting points. Instead of giving your argument, explain the critical facts about your topic that an average reader needs to know in order to be prepared for your argument.

Examples of background information related to the broad topic that readers might need to know:

• brief historical timeline of critical events
• laws or regulations
• definitions
• current status

The information that you need to provide depends heavily on your topic:

• If you are arguing in favour of changing drinking and driving laws, your background information might explain what the current laws are.
• If you are arguing that stem cell research should be more heavily supported by the government, you should explain what the current status of stem cell research is.
• If you are arguing that culture is learned and not inherited, you might start by defining what “culture” is.

Remember that you are writing for a general audience. Don’t assume that your reader has specialized knowledge of your topic.

Remember that you are writing for a general audience, so you shouldn’t assume that your readers have any specific knowledge of your topic or that they know any specialized terminology.  The background information that you provide should give your readers the information they need to understand the argument in your thesis.  Be sure, though, that you don’t *preview* the thesis. Do not include your argument or any information related to your body paragraphs as background information.

Watch this video for more information about how to include relevant background information [2] :

As you know, the thesis is the most important sentence in your essay. It is placed last in the introductory paragraph. The hook and the background information should lead gracefully to the thesis. The thesis concisely states the answer to your research question by stating the specific topic, implying your stance on the topic, and listing the topics of the supporting body paragraphs.

Learning Check

Consider this short introductory paragraph and answer the questions that follow:

Sample Introductory Paragraph

Let’s look at this introductory paragraph that was created by a student for her essay on why the City of Thunder Bay should change its existing laws to allow residents to raise chickens.

The writer’s hook is in blue text. The writer is trying to engage the reader on the topic by providing a surprising contrast. What other hooks could the writer have used instead?

The background information is in orange text. The writer realized that her readers wouldn’t be able to understand her point of view if they didn’t know that the law currently forbids city residents from raising chickens on their property. Is this enough background information for you to understand the thesis? What additional information could the writer have provided?

The thesis is in purple text. The thesis statement is well-written and clearly states all necessary information:

• The specific topic (the ‘chicken bylaw’ in Thunder Bay)
• The writer’s stance (the bylaw should be changed to allow raising chickens within city limits)
• The reasons for the writer’s stance (the underlined clauses in the thesis)

When the writer drafts her body paragraphs, she needs to make sure that each underlined idea is the topic of a paragraph and that those paragraphs are organized in the same order as the ideas are presented in the thesis.

• Mister Messinger. (2020, July 7). Part 1: Discover how to start essay with an A+ hook: STRONG attention grabbing examples [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvrnVHd-oyM ↵
• Mister Messinger. (2020, August 6). How to start an essay: Add background information to write a strong introduction [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bd1t2u-HbE&t=223s ↵

According to Wikipedia: A paraphrase is a restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words.

According to Wikipedia: Mosaic Plagiarism – Or "patch writing," is when parts of other works are copied without using quotation marks. It can also be when a student keeps the same structure and meaning of an original passage and only uses synonyms

Writing the Introductory Paragraph Copyright © by Confederation College Communications Department and Paterson Library Commons. All Rights Reserved.

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How to Write a Hook: Start Off Your Essay Strong with This Guide

What is a Hook for an Essay: Importance and Purpose

Which section of your essay can make your readers dip their toes into your writing? Is it the body paragraphs where all the analysis is laid out? Or maybe the introduction, where you present your thesis statement and voice your perspective on the subject? Well, if you think it is the latter, then we must agree with your decision. However, let's get more specific; if we take the introductory paragraph to pieces, which piece gets the most recognition? You must have guessed from the article's title that we're talking about a hook. But first, let's define what is a hook for an essay before we walk you through the reasons why it deserves our pat on the back.

The hook is the initial sentence in a written work. Whether you're asking how to write a hook for a song, blog post, or term paper, know that the purpose of any effective hook is to seize the reader's attention. It can be one sentence long, often for shorter pieces, or composed of several lines - usually for larger pieces. Making the reader want to keep reading is what an essay hook accomplishes for your paper, just as an intriguing introduction does for any piece.

Our main emphasis in this guide is on creating a good hook for an essay. Nonetheless, these fundamental guidelines apply to nearly every format for communicating with your audience. Whether writing a personal statement, a speech, or a presentation, making a solid first impression is crucial to spur your readers into action.

How to Write a Hook for Different Kinds of Writing

Although it is a tough skill to master, understanding how to write a hook is crucial for academic writing success. By reviewing the most prevalent kinds of essay hooks, you can discover how to effectively captivate readers from the start and generate a hook that is ideal for your article. To do so, let's head over to the following sections prepared by our dissertation writers .

How to Write a Hook for a College Essay?

By mastering how to write a hook for a college essay, you have the opportunity to stand out from the hundreds of applicants with identical academic portfolios to yours in your college essay. It should shed light on who you are, represent your true nature, and show your individuality. But first, you need an attention-grabbing start if you want the admissions committee to read more of yours than theirs. For this, you'll require a strong hook.

Set the Scene

When wondering how to write a good hook for an essay, consider setting the scene. Open in the middle of a key moment, plunge in with vivid details and conversation to keep your essay flowing and attract the reader. Make the reader feel like they are seeing a moment from your life and have just tuned in.

Open with an Example

Starting with a specific example is also a great idea if you're explaining how you acquired a particular skill or unique accomplishment. Then, similar to how you established the scenario above, you may return to this point later and discuss its significance throughout the remaining sections.

Open with an Anecdote

Using an anecdotal hook doesn't necessarily mean that your essay should also be humorous. The joke should be short and well-aimed to achieve the best results. To assist the reader in visualizing the situation and understanding what you are up against when tackling a task or overcoming a challenge, you might also use a funny irony. And if this sounds too overwhelming to compose, buy an essay on our platform and let our expert writers convey your unmatched story!

How to Write a Hook for an Argumentative Essay?

If you write a strong hook, your instructor will be compelled to read your argument in the following paragraphs. So, put your creative thinking cap on while crafting the hook, and write in a way that entices readers to continue reading the essay.

Use Statistics

Statistics serve as a useful hook because they encourage research. When used in argumentative writing, statistics can introduce readers to previously undiscovered details and data. That can greatly increase their desire to read your article from start to finish. You can also consider this advice when unsure how to write a good hook for a research paper. Especially if you're conducting a quantitative study, a statistic hook can be a solid start.

Use a Common Misconception

Another answer to your 'how to write a hook for an argumentative essay' question is to use a common misconception. What could be a better way to construct an interesting hook, which should grab readers' attention, than to incorporate a widely held misconception? A widespread false belief is one that many people hold to be true. When you create a hook with a misinterpretation, you startle your readers and immediately capture their interest.

How to Write a Hook for a Persuasive Essay?

The finest hooks for a persuasive essay capture the reader's interest while leading them to almost unconsciously support your position even before they are aware of it. You can accomplish this by employing the following hook ideas for an essay:

Ask a Rhetorical Question

By posing a query at the outset of your essay, you may engage the reader's critical thinking and whet their appetite for the solution you won't provide until later. Try to formulate a question wide enough for them to not immediately know the answer and detailed enough to avoid becoming a generic hook.

Use an Emotional Appeal

This is a fantastic approach to arouse sympathy and draw the reader into your cause. By appealing to the reader's emotions, you may establish a bond that encourages them to read more and get invested in the subject you cover.

Using these strategies, you won't have to wonder how to write a hook for a persuasive essay anymore!

How to Write a Hook for a Literary Analysis Essay?

Finding strong essay openers might be particularly challenging when writing a literary analysis. Coming up with something very remarkable on your own while writing about someone else's work is no easy feat. But we have some expert solutions below:

Use Literary Quotes

Using a literary quote sounds like the best option when unsure how to write a hook for a literary analysis essay. Nonetheless, its use is not restricted to that and is mostly determined by the style and meaning of the quotes. Still, when employing literary quotes, it's crucial to show two things at once: first, how well you understand the textual information. And second, you know how to capture the reader's interest right away.

Employ Quotes from Famous People

This is another style of hook that is frequently employed in literary analysis. But if you wonder how to write a good essay hook without sounding boring, choose a historical person with notable accomplishments and keep your readers intrigued and inspired to read more.

How to Write a Hook for an Informative Essay?

In an informative essay, your ultimate goal is to not only educate your audience but also engage and keep them interested from the very beginning. For this, consider the following:

Start with a Fact or Definition

You might begin your essay with an interesting fact or by giving a definition related to your subject. The same standard applies here for most types mentioned above: it must be intriguing, surprising, and/or alarming.

Ask Questions that Relate to Your Topic

Another solution to 'How to write a hook for an informative essay?' is to introduce your essay with a relevant question. This hook lets you pique a reader's interest in your essay and urge them to keep reading as they ponder the answer.

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Expert-Approved Tips for Writing an Essay Hook

Are you still struggling with the ideal opening sentence for your essay? Check out some advice from our essay helper on how to write a hook sentence and make your opening stand out.

• Keep your essay type in mind . Remember to keep your hook relevant. An effective hook for an argumentative or descriptive essay format will differ greatly. Therefore, the relevancy of the hook might be even more important than the content it conveys.
• Decide on the purpose of your hook . When unsure how to write a hook for an essay, try asking the following questions: What result are you hoping to get from it? Would you like your readers to be curious? Or, even better, surprised? Perhaps even somewhat caught off guard? Determine the effect you wish to accomplish before selecting a hook.
• Choose a hook at the end of the writing process. Even though it should be the first sentence of your paper, it doesn't mean you should write your hook first. Writing an essay is a long and creative process. So, if you can't think of an effective hook at the beginning, just keep writing according to your plan, and it will eventually come into your head. If you were lucky enough to concoct your hook immediately, double-check your writing to see if it still fits into the whole text and its style once you've finished writing.
• Make it short . The shorter, the better – this rule works for essay hooks. Keeping your hook to a minimum size will ensure that readers will read it at the same moment they start looking at your essay. Even before thinking if they want or don't want to read it, their attention will be captured, and their curiosity will get the best of them. So, they will continue reading the entire text to discover as much as possible.

Now you know how to write a good hook and understand that a solid hook is the difference between someone delving further into your work or abandoning it immediately. With our hook examples for an essay, you can do more than just write a great paper. We do not doubt that you can even write a winning term paper example right away!

Try to become an even better writer with the help of our paper writing service . Give them the freedom to write superior hooks and full essays for you so you may learn from them!

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What Is A Good Hook For An Essay?

How to write a hook for an essay, what is a good hook for an argumentative essay.

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In an essay, which comes first: the hook or the thesis?

An eighth grader asked me for help writing a school-assigned essay.  Her teacher had given the class a fill-in-the-blanks organizer.  It was incredibly detailed.  In the introduction area was a blank with the word “hook,” and below it another blank with the word “thesis.”  For each of the two body paragraph areas were the words “citation, “explanation,” “citation,” and “explanation.”  At the end was the word “conclusion.”

“I don’t buy it,” I said.

I asked her what she had written first, the hook quotation or the thesis.  “The hook,” she said.

Of course.  This student was making three mistakes that I see over and over in student essays.

First, she did not write the thesis first.  In an essay, the most important sentence is the thesis.  That is the first sentence to write. Every other sentence needs to support the ideas in that thesis sentence.  If you don’t know what ideas are in the thesis, how can you write about them?

Second, she wrote the hook first, thinking (as her teachers may have told her) that the hook is where the essay begins.  The hook is where the reader begins reading an essay.  But it is not where the writer begins writing an essay. A good essay is thought though and written out of order.  The proper sequence in which to write an essay (after you have organized it) is

• Thesis, first;
• body paragraph topic sentences, second;
• detail sentences in the body paragraphs, third. These sentences back up the body paragraph topic sentences which in turn back up the thesis;
• introduction, fourth, including the hook if there is one; and
• conclusion, last.

The third mistake my student made was perhaps the most serious of all:  she didn’t recognize that her chosen hook did not introduce the ideas of her thesis.  She thought that her hook was so clever (and it was) that it didn’t matter if it was related to the ideas of her thesis.  It does matter.

Over and over, I work with students who focus on the structure of an essay rather than the substance of the essay.  Their essays are like Academy Award winning actresses in gorgeous gowns, sparkling jewelry, and splendid coifs whose speeches are either hollow or off-topic.

I asked my student to rewrite her hook.  She did because she wants a good grade, and I’m a teacher, so I probably know what I am advising her.  But I wonder if she understands that her original hook was irrelevant to the main idea of her essay.

Looking for a writing teacher for your child?  Contact me through this website.  I currently teach students in four states and one other country.

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Writing an introduction and thesis.

Starting the first paragraph can be one of the most daunting tasks of essay writing, but it does not need to be. Investing some time in planning can save much anxiety and frustration later.

An effective introductory paragraph will engage the reader with some reason to learn about your topic and will warm him or her up to your topic with important background information and ideas before stating your essay’s controlling idea (thesis.) It should include the following:

• Hook (also called a Lead-in, Opener, or Attention Grabber) that will arouse the interest of as many people possible in your target audience group.
• Identification and general discussion of the topic , including why the topic is important and worthy of analysis.
• Background info (e.g. history of the controversy, or summary of the literature/ articles.) This is any information necessary to lead down to your controlling idea on the subject, including the who , what , when , where , why , and how.
• Explanation that narrows your focus down to your thesis.
• Thesis (your controlling idea for the whole essay), possibly including , preceded by or followed by a brief indication of your subtopics. (This latter part is sometimes called a blueprint, roadmap of reasons, forecast of points, etc.).

It is essential that the first sentence “hooks” your intended reader with something that is both interesting at first glance and relevant to the focus of your essay.  Try one or a combination of the following hooks:

• Example: The number of emergency room visits associated with energy drinks has more than doubled in this country in the last five years, from about 10,000 to over 20,000.
• Example: There I was, stranded with no cell phone beside a remote Colorado road in mid-January. I had long since lost feeling in my feet, and, peeling back my socks, I saw to my horror that my toes were completely black with frostbite.
• Example: For a first-time parent, a child is a megaphone, proclaiming that he or she is not the center of the universe anymore.
• Example: An important purpose of fiction is to reveal truth.
• Example: Has anyone you know ever been the victim of identity theft?
• Example: Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables , once declared, “ He who opens a school door closes a prison.”

Options for that Middle Material

You might have a great idea for your hook and even a tentative thesis, but what about the sentences that are supposed to go between them? How are you going to meaningfully and smoothly bridge this gap? It might depend on what kind of essay you are writing. Here are some suggestions, though don’t feel locked into that one option just because it is labeled for your type of essay. Also , be aware that some of these options might naturally contain their own hooks.

• For a Position/Argument/Persuasive Essay : Be sure to establish that a real controversy exists before giving your position in the thesis. What is the issue? Why do people disagree about it? Are there more than just two sides? How long has this controversy existed? What are the ‘roots’ or brief history of the conflict? Lead down to your position (thesis), and then your body paragraphs will be the reasons for your position.
• For a Solution Essay : Highlight the problem or need. Get the reader to understand that one exists. What is it? Why is it a problem or need? How long has it been around? Who and/or what is affected? Then work down to the thesis, which in this case is your proposed solution. The body paragraphs will then be breaking down your solution into its reasons and/or steps.
• For a Compare/Contrast Essay : If the main point of your essay is to show how two things are significantly similar, consider first explaining that people often perceive them as completely different and unrelatable—why is that? If the main point of your essay is to show how two things are significantly different, consider first explaining that people often perceive them as essentially the same—explain why and then lead down to your thesis.
• For a Current Events or History Essay : Consider beginning at a different point in time than the one focused on in the body of your paper. For example, if your paper is to focus on a specific current event/situation between Israelis and Palestinians, you might lead in with a brief overview of the groups’ long-term history. Alternately, if the focus of the paper is on a historical event or period, you might begin with discussion about the present-day region or nation, or you could begin at a point even further in the past that led up to the period of focus.
• For an Illustrative/Descriptive Essay : If your task is to describe a person, place, thing, process, or concept, then you must begin by motivating the reader as to his/her/its appeal or importance (as with any introduction.) For more personal, informal essays, you can relate your own earliest experiences with that person, place, or thing, possibly explaining your first impressions. For more formal essays, highlight his/her/its significance to a larger group of people or to a larger purpose/function.
• For a Research/Expository Essay : Explain who is/has been affected, and how much or often. Also be sure to define any major terms that you will be using throughout the paper if they are not necessarily understood by your intended audience.
• For a Cause/Effect Essay : If your essay will be focusing on the causes of a particular event, condition, or situation, explain who or what is affected by it. How prevalent is it? If the focus of the essay is on the effects of something, you might provide background by discussing what leads/has led up to it (its causes).
• For an Analytical Essay (e.g. literature, philosophy, article response): Before diving into interpretation and analysis, use your introduction to announce the original work and author/theorist, giving background about either or both. Consider a brief summary of the story, concept, or major ideas of the piece, then narrow down to the specific ideas you will be working with in the essay.

A Quick Thesis Formula

Tips for your thesis.

A thesis should be as clear and specific as possible, yet still able to be developed in different ways through your body paragraphs.   Avoid overused, general terms and abstractions: “Communism collapsed due to societal discontent.” Communism where? What does “societal discontent” mean? Society can be discontent about anything! Here is an improvement: “Co mmunism collapsed in Eastern Europe because of the ruling elite’s inability to address the economic needs of the people .”

The Topic is relatively specific: communism in Eastern Europe. Also, the Main Point (italicized segment) is clear. Now in this example, the Details (how the body paragraphs will be broken down) are only hinted at, but that might be enough for some courses as long as you have strong, guiding topic sentences that connect back to these key words from the thesis.

In some courses though, especially ENGL 1010, you might need to absolutely spell out the breakdown of subtopics in your thesis (a forecasting thesis). So here is an example of one, and to make it even more ENGL 1010-friendly, it is an argumentative thesis. The Topic , Main Point , and Details are indicated:  “The public sale of fireworks in Pennsylvania should be prohibited because of fireworks’ danger to people , noise disturbance , and potential damage to property .”

Thesis Pitfalls

Check to make sure your thesis is not…

• Too broad or general: “Drugs have a negative effect on society.”
• Too big to be adequately covered within the assigned length of a paper: “Warfare in Europe has greatly evolved through the centuries with many different forms.”
• Too narrow a focus to sustain an essay of the required length: “All students should have an alarm clock to wake them up in the morning.”
• A question: “What will the United States do to curb gun violence?”
• An obvious idea: “Spending more money than you earn results in debt.”
• Combative, insulting, assuming, or confrontational: “Gun nuts need to understand that they don’t need to have so many guns because violence is evil.”
• A basic definition of a word: “Sexism is   prejudice or discrimination based on sex or gender .”
• Lacking any strong stand: “Legislation surrounding same-sex marriage is a hotly debated issue today.”
• Stating a fact, offering little room for expansion: “Sixty-seven percent o f pregnant women have claimed to have a higher level of smell sensitivity.”
• Containing more than one main idea: “Asbestos abatement is a complicated process, and it is also important to check one’s home for radon.” (A thesis can have more than one idea, but the hierarchy should be clear. That is, one should be easily identifiable as the main idea, while the others are clearly supporting it).”

Other Introduction Paragraph PItfalls

• Writing a very attention-grabbing hook, but failing to connect its meaning with the rest of the paragraph.
• Going too deep into your reasons or subtopics within your introduction, and so setting yourself up to be repetitive later in the essay.
• Opening with a cliché statement or a very obvious idea.
• Referring to your essay or referring to yourself as the writer of the essay (“In this essay I will tell you about…”)
• Relying immediately on a reference source to define your subject for you. (“According to Webster’s Dictionary…” or “Wikipedia states…”)

A Final Word

Remember, your introductory paragraph sets the tone for your essay and is your first impression, so it is worth taking your time on. But don’t worry if it does not come off sounding exactly right the first time. We are all learners as writers! It is natural and necessary to return to your introduction for revision after you have drafted the rest of your essay, just to make sure it is still consistent with what the paper has evolved into.

We at the Learning Commons are here to help at any stage of the writing process. Please come in anytime to go over what you have so far , even if you haven’t written anything down yet . We can help you find your direction. Also check out our handout s “Building Body Paragraphs” and “ Writing a Conclusion , ” among many others . We hope you take joy in your writing as you investigate a subject that interests you and that you also have the chance to express yourself well.

• Adaptations for format / ADA compliance. Authored by : Dann Coble. Provided by : Corning Community College. License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• Authored by : Keith Ward. Provided by : Corning Community College. License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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The Art of Narrative

Learn to write.

How to Write a Hook

How can you hook your reader from the very first line? Today we learn how to write a hook, talk about different types of hooks, and examples!

How do you write a hook? If you can’t answer this deceptively simple question, you might as well stop writing forever. Without a decent hook, the chance of anyone reading your work is statistically zero. With that said, let’s define hooks, discuss how to write a compelling hook, and look at some examples. 

What is a hook in writing?

A hook is a technique used in fiction and non-fiction writing. The term hook refers to the opening sentence or sentences of a work designed to stir interest in a reader and encourage them to continue reading to the end of the article or story. In other words, the hook catches a reader’s attention much like a hook on the end of a fishing line catches a fish with bait. 

Let’s continue this analogy of the fishing hook. You need to bait your hook with a tasty worm or a flashy lure to catch a fish. Writers bait their hooks using techniques as tempting to a reader’s interest as a fat worm is to bass or catfish. These hook techniques include posing an intriguing question or stating a frightening statistic. We’ll talk about all of these techniques later in the article. 

Definition of a Hook:

A hook in writing is a sentence or group of sentences that capture the reader’s attention and interest. It is generally the opening component of an essay, article, or story. It is meant to entice readers so that they will want to keep reading.

The 10 types of hooks

Rhetorical Questions 

A rhetorical question is a question that is asked to make a point rather than to get an answer. Rhetorical questions are often used in speeches and essays, where they are used to engage the audience or emphasize a point. For this reason, rhetorical questions can make an excellent hook. With a rhetorical question hook, a writer can: 

• elicit a particular response from the reader or listener 
• create an emotional reaction 
• emphasize a point 
• make an argument more persuasive 
• engage the reader or listener’s attention 
• generate interest in a topic 

For example, a speaker might ask, “How many of you have ever felt like you didn’t belong?” This is a rhetorical question. The speaker already knows the answer and is not looking for a response from the audience. 

Instead, the question is meant to make the audience stop and think about their own experience. In addition to being used for emphasis, rhetorical questions can create suspense or build tension. For instance, a writer might use a rhetorical question at the end of a chapter to leave readers wondering what will happen next. Whether they create emphasis or suspense, rhetorical questions can be a powerful tool for writers and speakers.

Startling Statistics

By sharing shocking or unexpected data, you can grab your audience’s attention and make them more likely to listen to what you have to say. Whether you’re talking about the scope of a problem or the success of a solution, statistics can help you generate interest and hold your audience’s attention. Here are a few examples of starling statistics from the website  bestlifeonline.com: 

• The average drunk driver drives under the influence more than 80 times before being arrested the first time.  Source:  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . 
• More than 36 million U.S. adults cannot read above a third-grade level.  Source: ProLiteracy. 
• And more than half a million people in America experience homelessness a night.   Source: U.S Department Of Housing and Urban Development . 

Just be sure that the statistics you use are reliable and from a reputable source. Otherwise, you risk losing credibility with your audience. Using false or unreliable statistics can cause your readers to become skeptical or even hostile. 

For example, a  recent Gallup poll found that only 36% of Americans trust the media . Using statistics from the media in a speech can alienate much of the audience. It’s essential to be careful when using statistics in writing, as they can easily make or break an argument.

Used effectively, however, statistics can be a powerful tool for making your case and getting people to pay attention.

Famous or Inspiring Quotes

The most challenging task for any writer is capturing a concept or idea with the perfect combination of words. Luckily, better writers have come before us; we can borrow their words when we find our own lacking. These quotes can provide both inspiration and comfort, and they can also help us to understand our own thoughts and feelings better. Using quotations in your hook can be an excellent way to connect with your audience and add depth to your work.

Here are a few resources where you can find the perfect quote for your next essay or speech: 

• BrainyQuote:  separates quotes into several functional categories. 
• QuotesonDesign:  generates random inspirational quotes with the click of your mouse. 
• Thinkexist:  a searchable database of quotes based on topic, author, or keyword. 
• Goodreads:  Goodreads is one of the best resources for quotes from famous authors. 
• QuoteLand:  another searchable database with the added benefit of live discussion boards. 
• Wikiquote:  a free online compendium of sourced quotes that links to Wikipedia for further information. 
• Quotery:  search for specific quotes or explore random quotes by topic.  

Paint a Picture 

Engage your readers’ imagination with this hook by painting a picture in their minds. This technique works well when you’re writing a personal narrative or other non-fiction narratives. Take the highest moment of tension in your story, the climax, and describe it by appealing to all five senses.

However, what you don’t want to do is explicitly tell your reader what’s happening or the outcome of the event. Instead, you use foreshadowing and a bit of  non-linear storytelling  to give your reader an enticing hint at what is coming in your text. 

To use this hook technique, take the highest point of tension in your text and describe it using as much sensory detail as possible. 

What does the climax of your story: 

• Smell like?
• Taste like?
• Sound like?

You may not want to use all five senses; in fact, it is better not to give your reader enough detail and let their imagination do the rest. 

Tell a Story 

A good story can hook readers in and keep them engaged from start to finish. A story can provide insight into the human experience, whether it be humorous, heartwarming, or even tragic. When used as a hook in writing, a story can help set the tone and give readers a glimpse into what is to come. 

Done poorly, however, a story can be dry and dull, quickly losing the interest of even the most dedicated reader. As such, it is crucial to strike the right balance when writing a story as a hook. Whether personal or fictional, choose a story that is interesting and engaging and will give readers a reason to stick around until the end.

Extreme Statements 

Extreme statements are one type of hook that can be used effectively to engage readers. By making a bold claim or assertion, writers can pique readers’ curiosity and prompt them to want to know more. For example, imagine reading the following opening sentence:

“By 2050, the world’s population will reach 9 billion, and we will not have enough food to feed half of this number.” 

This statement is shocking and provocative. It immediately raises questions in readers’ minds, like “How did the author come up with this number?” and “What consequences will this have for the planet?” By starting with an extreme statement, writers can set the stage for an informative and engaging piece.

Tell a Joke

Although the folly of many a Best Man, a good joke can be a great way to start a piece of writing. Not only does it grab the reader’s attention, but it also sets the tone for the rest of the article. When used effectively, a joke can help to establish a rapport with the reader and create a sense of intimacy. A joke, done poorly, can come across as forced or tacky.

The key is to choose a joke that is relevant to the topic at hand, and that will resonate with the audience. When in doubt, it is always best to err on the side of caution and avoid alienating your reader with an off-color joke. With a little effort, you can use humor to your advantage and hook your reader from the very first sentence.

Evoke a Feeling/Emotion 

One way to hook a reader is to evoke an emotion in your readers. Whether you are writing about a personal experience or trying to raise awareness about an important issue, if you can connect with your readers emotionally, you will be more likely to engage them in your writing. 

To do this, you must be clear about what emotion you want to evoke and how you plan to do it. Once you have a plan, try to be concise and transparent in your writing. Remember, the goal is not to overwhelm your readers with emotions but to give them a taste of what you are talking about so that they will want to continue reading.

Personal Stories

A personal story can be a powerful way to hook readers and keep them engaged. By sharing something from your own life, you can provide a relatable and authentic perspective that helps to connect with your audience. 

Whether you’re writing about your struggles or triumphs, sharing a personal story can help to create a strong emotional response in your readers. In addition, personal stories can also be used to illustrate more significant points or themes. 

By sharing a specific example, you can make abstract concepts more concrete and accessible for your readers. Whether you’re writing an essay, memoir, or blog post, incorporating a personal story can effectively engage your audience and communicate your message.

Use a Metaphor or Analogy

When writing, a metaphor can help explain an idea or concept. Using an analogy, you can give your reader a frame of reference that they can understand. For example, if you were trying to explain what it feels like to be in love, you could say it is like this:

 “A rose’s beauty draws you in, but be careful its thorns can prick.” 

Using this metaphor, you can give your reader a way to understand the experience of being in love: beautiful and painful. 

Analogies can also be used to make complex ideas more understandable. For instance, if you were trying to explain quantum mechanics, you could say it is:

“Like trying to see in the dark: we know something is there, but we can’t see it.” 

By providing this analogy, you can give your reader a way to visualize what quantum mechanics is and how it works. In both cases, using a metaphor or analogy can help make your writing more engaging and understandable.

How to write a hook sentence in six steps 

Step 1: Choose the correct technique for your hook.

First, you need to decide what kind of hook you will write. This choice has everything to do with the tone and genre of your writing. For instance, you probably want to avoid using a joke hook in a scholarly paper. On the flip side, a startling statistic wouldn’t make sense to open a wedding speech.

Step 2: Make sure it’s in the right place. 

A hook is meant to grab your readers’ attention and compel them to read the rest of your text. So, the hook should be at the beginning of your writing, with nothing else preceding it. 

Ok, the title will come before your hook. However, with the rise of clickbait, titles have become hooks in their own right. Start with your hook, no exceptions! 

Step 3: Write a hook that is the correct length. 

Hooks are proportional to the length of text you’re writing. So, a twenty-paragraph article for a magazine or newspaper may have a hook one or two paragraphs long. However, if you’re writing a four or five-paragraph essay for your high school theme paper, your hook will only last a sentence, maybe two. 

What you don’t want is a two-paragraph long hook in five paragraph essay. The best hook is a short one that is to the point. 

Step 4: Set the tone .

A good hook can also help set the tone for your writing. If you’re writing something lighthearted and funny, your hook should reflect that. On the other hand, if you’re writing something more serious, ensure your hook is also appropriately toned.

Step 5: Know your audience .

It’s important to know who you’re writing for when crafting your hook. What will resonate with your audience? What will grab their attention? Keep your audience in mind as you write so you can tailor your hook accordingly.

Step 6: Transition into the purpose of your writing.   

What comes after you hook? Your thesis! Once you’ve hooked your reader, it’s essential to tell them, in a short thesis statement, what the purpose of your text is. Refrain from making sure readers guess what the main idea of your essay is. Tell them what you’re going to tell them. A good thesis statement will focus your writing and keep your readers engaged. 

Hook examples:

Dr. Martin Luther King- I Have a Dream

Five score years ago,  a great American , in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the  Emancipation Proclamation . This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

In the opening lines of his famed speech, King alludes to another famous speech- Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. By referencing a speech made in the aftermath of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, King reminds his audience of the sacrifices made in the long struggle for equality and civil rights. 

Sojourner Truth- Ain’t I A Woman?

Well children … Well there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that betwixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North all talking about rights these white men going to be in a fix pretty soon.

Sojourner Truth famously improvised her speech, Ain’t I A Woman. She opens with a bit of humor and sets the tone for her straightforward yet powerful words. 

Carl Sagen- Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

Sagen reminds his readers of the startlingly insignificant reality of our world when contrasted to the vast universe. 

Amanda Gorman- The Hill We Climb

When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

With the opening lines of her poem, Gorman creates a beautiful metaphor comparing a transition during political and social upheaval to the dawn of a new day. 

Jamie Oliver- Teach Every Child About Food

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes… four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat.

This fact is shocking and focuses the audience’s attention on Oliver’s subject- the obesity epidemic in America. 

The bottom line on hooks- make it short, memorable, and if you can’t think of anything… use a quote. That’s all on hooks for now, but if you liked this article, and found it helpful, do us a favor and share it! 

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I don’t know if y’all were fans growing up of the show “The Jetsons,” but if you were and if you were super fan enough to take the internal math of the show seriously, George Jetson was supposed to have been born in 2022. He would be a toddler right now. And the world we live in, the world my toddlers are growing up in, it does not feel like it is a world on path to the future the Jetsons imagined, a future that a lot of people in the 1960s thought was totally plausible by the 2020s, 2030s, 2040s, 2050s.

So what happened that got us off of that track? Not just the real track, but the imaginary track? Another way of asking this question, a question that’s come up a lot in the book I’m writing about how liberalism changed and why it’s become so difficult to build is, what happened in the 1970s?

The ‘70s are this breakpoint between one era in our economy and our government and our society and our vision for the future and the next. The ‘70s are when economic inequality really begins rising, when the environmental movement takes off, when a huge amount of legislation is passed in response to the harms of all the building and growth that had happened since the New Deal.

But there’s this tendency to look at the places that legislation goes too far and to say, well, if we hadn’t made all these dumb mistakes, everything would be great. We’d be richer. We’d have our moon colonies and our flying cars and our nuclear energy. We would have made it to Jetsons land.

But then why did no other country take that path? To just wipe away the politics and the passions that led to the backlash against certain forms of growth and technology in a lot of different countries is to miss something important, something that anybody who cares about growth is going to need to understand, if we’re not just going to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Jim Pethokoukis is a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He’s the author of the technology-focused Substack, Faster, Please! and of the recent book, “The Conservative Futurist.” And one thing I’ve noticed is there are ways in which I feel like he and I are asking a lot of the same questions, but from very different ideological positions. So I wanted to see where our stories converge and where they differ and what happened to the world of the Jetsons. As always, my email, [email protected].

Jim Pethokoukis, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me on.

So I wanna begin this conversation in the early ‘70s. Things change in the U.S. economy on any number of charts. You begin to see something happen to the line. What are some of those changes?

The most obvious change, at least especially from an economics point of view, is that the sort of rapid productivity growth that we saw in the previous couple of decades that economists and other experts in the ‘60s thought was going to be a permanent state of affairs slowed down. And other than, really, the late ‘90s or early 2000s, it’s been in that sort of weaker state. And it’s one of the great, still, conundrums for economists.

I mean, economists still, less so now, would have debates about what caused the Great Depression. And to me, this downshift, what I call in my book, “the great downshift in productivity growth,” is as significant as that because of we’re not where we could be if it hadn’t.

So if it had kept growing since the ‘70s, as it did in the couple decades before, what would the US economy look like? What would the median household income look like?

Bigger, more, multiples more, and that was the expectation. So instead of having a $25 trillion economy, depending on how you want to slice the numbers, it could be twice as big, it could be three times as big. So I don’t know. I mean, I think conservatively, instead of the median family making $80,000 adjusted for inflation, maybe they make $150,000. I mean, it’s pretty significant.

What that economy would look like? Well, listen, to grow that fast, it would be driven by technological progress. And that’s what people expected in those immediate postwar decades. So all the sort of the kind of classic, retro, Jetsons kind of sci-fi things that people imagined back then, it wasn’t just sort of cartoons and films. Experts, technologists, CEOs, economists all expected that kind of stuff to actually happen.

So nuclear power and everything, nuclear reactors from coast to coast. We would probably have, colonies on the moon and Mars. Cures to diseases, which seem like chronic diseases, which we still battle, would be cured.

All of that together would be part of this grand future, driven by rapid, technological progress, which drives faster productivity growth, which drives faster economic growth. If there’s one lesson of the pandemic, is, people don’t like suffering and shortages, so we better figure out a different way. I see the only path forward is through growth and technology and making that work.

What is your theory, though, of what happened in the ‘70s? What do you see as the contributors to this slowdown?

I think, certainly, it was probably multi-causal. One reason I wrote the book, to be honest, is a paper, a paper by an economist named Ray Fair from Yale University who noticed something weird happened around the ‘70s. He wasn’t focused on productivity growth, but he looked at infrastructure spending as a share of total economic spending. And he looked at what was going on with the budget, where we started to begin to run smaller surpluses and run budget deficits around 1970.

And he asked the exact same question that you’re asking. So, like, what happened? Because from those two statistics, he began to wonder like, that, to me, seems like a society that’s less future oriented than it used to be. You tended to see it more in the United States than in other places.

So what are your theories?

Listen, I’m not going to create a brand new theory. Was it just that all of the great inventions, the internal combustion engine, electrification of factories, and all those great inventions of the second kind of phase, Industrial Revolution, we had kind of squeezed all the sort of productivity gains out of those, and they weren’t replaced by another wave of great inventions? I mean, that’s a theory.

I mean, another theory is just that as we’ve advanced in science technology, it’s just harder to climb that tree of knowledge and come up with more big ideas. And it requires more people and resources. All of that is probably true. But our decisions mattered. And there are things that we did, which hurt. And I hope we can reverse some of those things because that would help.

And I think the two, I think, screamingly obvious things that we stopped doing is we stopped spending on science, research, and development, the way we did in the 1960s, and we began to regulate our economy as if regulation would have no impact on innovation.

What’s your causal theory of why we did that?

I think a lot of that was because of NASA, and we won the space race. And there just wasn’t an interest in continuing that. OK, so that’s sort of the immediate short-term explanation.

So much of that was really just NASA? Because I think of the R&D surge as the Cold War.

And the Soviet Union was going strong in the ‘70s.

Right, Soviet Union was going strong. But we had clearly won that space race. And while we’ve continued to spend a lot of money on R&D as a share of the economy, it’s a lot less than what it used to be. That’s not surprising that perhaps there was a shift in priorities. People did begin worrying about budgets back then.

And the regulation part to me also sort of isn’t surprising. When countries become wealthier, they tend to care a lot more about the downsides of economic growth. There are books, like “Silent Spring,” and some events, like the Santa Barbara oil spill. We began learning more about the radiation from Hiroshima and worrying about nuclear. So that is not surprising that we started to pass environmental regulation.

What is surprising is that when it became clear that the economy was not re-accelerating the way they thought, that there was not more of a holistic effort to change that, to not give up on those expectations that people had in the 1960s.

So I’ve been, for my own book, thinking a lot about the ‘70s and looking a lot at the politics of the ‘70s. And from where we sit now, we think of environmentalism as a liberal thing, right? The environmentalists are greens, they’re Democrats. And I ran into this quote that Richard Nixon gives in his 1970 State of the Union that I think gives a good flavor of how different the politics had become. So I want to play that here.

The great question of the ‘70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans because they, more than we, will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.

Clean air, clean water, open spaces — these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be. We still think of air as free, but clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness, we incurred a debt to nature. And now that debt is being called.

What do you think when you hear that?

I think that’s exactly what I would expect to hear for a country that has gone through a period of industrialization and economic growth, where people had become rich enough that the immediate sort of material concerns could be balanced off with other kinds of concerns, such as the water they’re drinking, the air we’re breathing. Is it worth losing a little bit of growth — maybe — to deal with that? So, that doesn’t surprise me. And as you know, some of the key environmental legislation we still have happened under the Nixon administration.

A huge amount of it. I mean, I think you can make a very good case Nixon is the most consequential environmentalist president of the 20th century.

But did people back then assume that what they were doing, with that environmental legislation, was making it very difficult to build the kind of future they had imagined heading into the 1970s. I don’t think they did. I believe they thought that the economy was so strong and that technological progress, the momentum was so tremendous that we could have cleaner air and water and still have everything else.

The people who voted for, for instance, the National Environmental Policy Act, most people thought that was just kind of a good mom and pop and baseball and apple pie piece of legislation. Hey, who doesn’t want cleaner water? That’s all what we’re doing here. I don’t think anyone imagined that then it would make it hard to build a factory that makes wind turbines in the year 2024.

Well, what’s the evidence that that raft of environmental legislation, the National Environmental Policy Act you mentioned, the Endangered Species Act — we have Clean Air Acts, Clean Water Acts — a lot of them work really well. We really do clean up the air, the water. I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles, or outside Los Angeles. The smog is much better today than when I was growing up.

Sure. You can see the mountains sometimes.

You can see the mountains. What is the evidence that that is as causal in the slowdown of productivity as you’re putting it here?

After the space age, after Apollo. We didn’t follow it with anything, right? One thing we — Nixon thought about following it with was building nuclear reactors, 1,000 nuclear reactors from coast to coast. Would it have been possible to build 1,000 nuclear reactors from coast to coast with the emerging regulatory regime that was beginning to happen? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

And it became obvious, even in the early ‘70s, that there was a problem, that there was a problem that was becoming harder to build. That was the case with the Alaska pipeline. It became — again, you’re too young to remember this, but it was a running joke in the United States in the 1970s that they could not build a new dam in Tennessee because of a tiny little fish called the snail darter.

And that fish was preventing — that fish that no one — you could barely see it, and nobody knew about it. You couldn’t build that dam because that was the Endangered Species Act. I think the weight of those kind of incidents, the weight of the academic studies I cite in my book — have there been studies looking at how much it costs to build a highway?

And does NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, does it make it more expensive? Does it make it harder to build? Yes, and I think if you just look around right now, I don’t think it’s a tremendous leap of imagination to think that if it makes it very difficult to build a transmission line, a nuclear power plant — where are the nuclear power plants? I mean, it’s like the dog that didn’t bite. Where are they?

So let’s talk about nuclear here, because nuclear is interesting to me because I basically agree with you —

OK, do you not think that NEPA had a material impact?

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the totality of environmental and regulatory bills passed in the ‘70s slows growth, or a different way to put it is, makes it hard to build. I mean, it’s a big part of the work I’m doing right now. At the same time, when you’re trying to measure or try to understand what has happened to total factor productivity, I think this case is a little harder to make than people want it to be for a couple of reasons.

But I’ll give you one here. Let’s take nuclear. I am 100 percent on board with the idea that we’ve made it much too hard to build and iterate nuclear technology in this country. On the other hand, there is no country anywhere that is living in the nuclear topia that nuclear advocates are always telling me was possible. There are countries that use much more nuclear energy than we do, France being a great example, but France does not have energy too cheap to meter. They do not have a wild level of energy abundance.

There is something here where one of the ways this sounds — and it sounds this way to me when I read your book — is that there’s been this 20 or maybe 1,000 or maybe trillion or maybe multi-trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk, and you would expect some country to pick it up. But you go from the ‘70s forward — nobody today is ahead of America.

It sort of doesn’t surprise me that countries which I think have been, over these decades, far less innovative and pushing forward the technological frontier, might not be pushing forward the technology of nuclear power. So why doesn’t France have very cheap nuclear energy? Why doesn’t France already have these very small nuclear reactors? I’m not sure what the incentive was or whether they were capable of innovating to that degree. I don’t know.

But the incentive is exactly what you’re saying. Right? I mean, it’s sort of —

Kind of a state, but it’s not a market-based power system in France. These are all state subsidized reactors.

I mean, but take South Korea, take the U.A.E., take China. I mean, you can pick your country here. The kind of question I’m trying to raise about your thesis, because it’s also relevant, frankly, to my thesis, is, if the problem is that America makes a series of policy mistakes in the ‘70s, why, then, in the ensuing five decades, don’t a bunch of our competitor countries race past us. There are theories that they would. Japan, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, seemed like maybe they were, right? Japan was going to be the future. There were a million books written in the ‘90s about this. Germany at different times, right? But I don’t think you would look at anybody today, any rich country of significant size, and say, they really got it right, and we really got it wrong. So how do you understand that if the story is about mistakes we specifically made in the ‘70s?

Well, we can make mistakes that are very specific to us. And other countries may have made different mistakes, even though there was, as you say, this great enthusiasm in the ‘80s that Japan had it sort of figured out, that they could do economic growth and innovation in a brand new way, which turned out not to be the case. And then you mentioned Germany, and we seem to have this insatiable desire to find — at least some people do — to find some other model. I don’t think those models have turned out better than the American model.

If you were to try to make an argument about why things look not the same, but why nobody has achieved the Jim Pethokoukis world across Canada, across Western Europe, across Asia, right, all countries during this period that were rich enough to do much of what you’re talking about, do you have theories that unite the answer?

Yeah, I mean, listen, I don’t think it is wrong to do sort of a cross-country because this productivity slowdown didn’t just happen in the United States. Clearly, there was some sort of macro reasons. It’s just becoming harder and more expensive to do research. Those things affected everybody.

So once you’ve assumed, OK, there was sort of this umbrella effect that would make it difficult to do productivity and economic growth and faster tech progress everywhere. So that mattered. And then to what extent do our decisions matter? At first, we didn’t understand what happened. And then when we did, I think we’ve just underestimated the difficulty, at least certainly in the United States, of returning to fast growth.

And the ideas that we put forward, whether it was a little more spending on this program, a tax cut here, maybe those are individually great ideas, but given, I think, the headwinds from these macro factors, sort of the tailwinds need to be much, much stronger. And even now, when we’re talking about spending more money on R&D, I don’t think it’s enough.

Let me try some thesis on you that I think can work across countries. One is that as countries get richer, they become more risk averse. Some of the innovations you’re talking about, like colonies on the moon and flying cars, they require a high tolerance for risk. Maybe as societies get more affluent, people have enough. Their lives are good enough. They aren’t as motivated to take that risk. What do you think of that?

I think, inherently, people pull back from risk. To go back to the ‘70s, there are some conservative thinkers who thought that capitalism was doomed because the intellectuals who were separated from the actually working and producing wouldn’t appreciate how hard it is to do that. They wouldn’t appreciate how hard it is actually to grow an economy.

And these are the people who would be our bureaucrats and they’d be focused on risk aversion and creating more rules. So, yeah, I think that’s an obvious problem. Then, add in the fact that as countries get richer, they care more about the environment. You see it in China. As China’s gotten richer, they care more about smog. And for people to, I think, move beyond that inherent caution, they have to believe it is worth it. People need a realistic, plausible image of why it’s all worth it.

And we used to have people who would do that for us. We had public intellectuals, and we had Hollywood, who would say the future can be better, and it’s going to be awesome. And then that disappeared. So who paints a future? Listen, I spent a lot of time going on the Drudge Report. It used to be — it’s still operating. I don’t think it is what it used to be. And every article about technology and science and Silicon Valley was, these are crazy people who want a future, an inhuman future for you, where you’re going to all live in tubes, and you’re going to all have bugs — eat bugs for — no more steaks. We’re all going to have bug steaks. That’s just one small example. And I can point to pretty much every Hollywood film in the past 50 years. So what is our sort of collective imagination of why are we going to do this, that we don’t live in a world that’s destined to burn, that we don’t live in a world where if we should have all these wonderful inventions, only the people at the very rich will have it. They’ll be living above us on the space platforms, while everybody on Earth is groveling around. So we’ve had this inability to say like, why should you take a risk? And that has to change.

I think visions of the future, to a degree people don’t always appreciate, are built on what people see in the present. And something that has been striking to me, as I’ve done a lot of research into the politics of the ‘60s and ‘70s, is how much people ceased liking what they saw in the present. I’m going to play a speech that Lyndon Johnson gave in 1964, talking about what America looked like to him in terms that are not how I think of the great society.

The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded. Our seashores, overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing. A few years ago, we were greatly concerned about the ugly American. Today, we must act to prevent an ugly America.

So one thing that I think, or I’ve come to believe, is a bigger dimension here, is that beauty is part of politics, and wanting a beautiful world, believing that you’re going to get a beautiful world matters, right? This is part of post-materialist politics, which are very, very powerful and begin, I think, strongly in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. So how do you think about that dimension of it, the kind of pervasiveness of a fear that the modernity people were getting from rapid growth was an ugly, advertising soaked, concrete, gray, deforested modernity?

Was that the majority opinion? Do you think that people thought there was too much affluence? And beauty, again, that’s a preference. Some people love this notion of, like, solarpunk. We’re all going to live in these giant trees that are —

I like this notion.

— part tree, but yet — right. Even skyscrapers will be gardens. And that is a personal preference for a kind of world that I’m sure — I think we’re maybe taking our views now, and we’re kind of imposing on what people thought in the 1960s based on one speech.

No, so that, I can assure you, I’m not doing. I’m just not yet reading you chapter one and two of my forthcoming book on this show.

Oh, I’m sure those chapters are excellent. They’re excellent chapters.

They’re glittering, but this politics was pervasive. I mean, there were all kinds of books written about this. I mean, this is what the environmental movement comes out of. The environmental movement is not built on climate change. It’s built on conservation of green space.

Right, and —

“Silent Spring,” and there were disasters.

And I think that’s legitimate.

And I want to push you on this because the thing that I hear you doing is wiping this to the side. That’s a personal preference. But what we’re trying to do here, right, what I’m trying to do with you — there’s plenty of things you and I disagree on, right? You’re a conservative. I’m a progressive. But one thing that I don’t think we disagree on is that we’re not building enough and productivity is too low.

But what I want to try to understand is, well, then, why, and why is it happening in so many places? And one theory that I take very seriously now, having looked at the politics, right, ticky tacky. That’s a term that comes from a song recorded about what the homes look like in Daly City, in California.

(SINGING) Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes all the same

There’s a pink one and a green one

And a blue one and a yellow one

I can show you pieces from the San Francisco Chronicle where they talk about the people moving to California like locusts, right? Like they are going to just destroy the thing. And I agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But often, the politically powerful beholders are the ones who live in a place already.

So, for instance, one kind of curb on productivity that I believe is really important is the inability to build homes in highly productive places like cities. You bring this up in your book, too, but the people with power there, they like the way it looks now. They like the brownstones. They don’t want to see those knocked over for big apartment buildings.

So I agree with you, right? What you find beautiful, what I find beautiful, what another person finds beautiful, they might all be different. But one thing that I wonder is, do you just discount the power of people’s aesthetic preference in politics?

Is it a story of aesthetics, or is it a story of a generation sort of repulsed by their parents? I guarantee the parents in those ticky tacky houses probably thought those were pretty good houses, probably better houses than what they grew up in. I take my —

So why did they lose the political fight?

Well, because that generation was really, really big, and eventually that generation took control. But — OK, I’m gonna really get to your question. So what is this future going to look like? I could point to some possibilities. And I could maybe — I would love if sort of science fiction people and there are people in science fiction who think that as well, that they need to create images that aren’t utterly dystopian. Like, that’s an entire movement within that community.

But I wouldn’t say, like, that’s my image of the future. I want to give people the tools and make sure the economy is growing. And then we can all kind of create the future we want. But I don’t think it needs to be one particular preference. It needs to be like a solarpunk vision or some other kinds of vision.

Well, I’m not — I don’t want —

We have to have choice.

I’m not saying we should impose one aesthetic. But what I am saying is that I think there’s good reason to believe that this huge generation you’re bringing up, right — and I take that point that the boomer generation is large. They didn’t like what they saw, and that that happened in a lot of different places at once.

I mean, I have a million problems politically, as you might imagine, with Elon Musk. Just, like, a million problems. One reason that guy has been a very successful futurist is that he takes beauty very seriously.

You could go less controversial. You could say Steve Jobs, who took how things look, the elegance. I mean, he’s a boomer, and he wanted to create beautiful, elegant products. Now, how you translate that into a public policy that creates a beautiful, elegant future, but I think Elon Musk, to some degree, has that. I mean, who wants to go to Mars, really? It’s cold. There’s no air. There’s nobody there.

But SpaceX has created these marvelous little videos about what it would be like to get on a Starship spaceship. And you get to Mars, and it’s these beautiful kind of domes, and it’s green. And that’s an elegant, beautiful vision of the future for a place that’s none of those things.

One thing when I think about the sort of conservatism in your futurism that actually surprised me in your book was the confidence that if we pumped a bunch more money into the R&D structure, we would get a bunch more output.

I’m confident about that, at least on even days.

But one counterargument on this, I hear sometimes, right, as you mentioned, a lot of the R&D surge midcentury came from NASA. And when you think about the amount of money NASA has had to spend on R&D in recent decades, and the amount of money SpaceX had to spend on R&D — which, of course, SpaceX could only do that because of NASA contracts, but nevertheless, they had less money — and how fast SpaceX was actually able to advance rocket technology, I think it should make you wonder why NASA is not as able to make advances as it once was. Right?

I think you could say this across a lot of domains of federally funded, government funded R&D. So I think there is a question of how much money there is, and there’s also a question of whether the structures support that money turning into innovations, turning into products. How do you think about that?

Well, I mean, and certainly, I think the people at SpaceX would say that they stand on the shoulders of giants. So they did not have to start at a baseline at zero and figure out how to get something into space. So I think that’s important to note.

I would like the government spending more money on R&D. I think I would like a hard look at what they call the meta science, which is, how is that money actually spent? What is that process like? Are good ideas squashed? This is sort of an emerging area of public policy where they’re taking a hard look at that process. Are good controversial ideas, are they not getting funded? Like, those kinds of reforms I think would have to be part of anything.

And I’m not sure that spending more — I mean, great, I can point to studies, but until we actually do it, I don’t know. But I think we’re at sort of like a moment that we should try to use every plausible idea to make sure we don’t waste a moment that I think we had at the end of the ‘60s, that I think we had at the end of the ‘90s, to create a much faster growing economy.

We have this emerging cluster of technologies that lets support these technologies. And I think A.I. is a great example. And see if this is possible. Because I’ve lived through 50 years of what some people call the Great Stagnation, in the book, I call the Great Downshift. I don’t want that to be the next 50 years. Because what does our politics look like after the past decade of economic tumult and stagnation? I don’t want to look at our politics after another decade of that.

Let’s talk about a success story of innovation inside the government, which is Darpa. What makes Darpa work? And is that scalable?

Well, I mean, you have highly motivated people working on very specific projects. The managers of those programs are not there forever. They’re there to create new technologies that would have some sort of military application. So the easy answer is, we need Darpa for everything. We need to have this — can you scale that? Geez, I would like to try. I would like to try scaling that. I would like to try scaling a lot of things. I think it shows that despite skepticism that can’t accomplish anything, you can point to the successes of Darpa.

How do you think about tolerance for failure? Because one thing Darpa has is a tolerance for failure. I think part of that is that it’s understood and has been a sort of part of the national security state. And we allow the national security state to waste money. We’re cool with it. The fact that some things are not going to work out, we don’t get mad at them. On the other hand, when you have the Department of Energy give out a loan to something like Solyndra that doesn’t come through —

That’s a good example.

— there are hearings. There’s a scandal. People are furious. I mean, that same program also saved Tesla, which is something you hear less about. So what allows things in government to make counterintuitive bets? And what allows them to survive those bets failing?

When Solyndra happened, there was a sort of a deep skepticism that the era of — Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over. And now it seemed like the era of big government was back. And I think people were waiting to pounce on that. I mean, I looked at Solyndra, and my immediate thought was, this is back then. Like, this is government failing again.

So I don’t think I had that kind of tolerance for failure. I sort of do now. My personal tolerance is higher. I don’t think for most people on the right, right now, is yet particularly high, especially if you’re looking at it purely in a political standpoint. Listen, and I’m sure you’re aware of this, that in the past, when there have been these government science programs, there have been conservatives who have picked through them to try to find something that sounds like ridiculous or silly.

You’re correct.

Yes, ridiculous or silly. Like, why are we spending money to figure out, like, how hamsters survive in orbit or something like that. So we shouldn’t pretend not to have a toleration of basic science? Because it was the kinds of basic science that didn’t seem like it had any application. Like, I don’t know — the theory of relativity is why we have GPS’s.

But this seems like an important reformist project in your coalition. I mean, you worked at the American Enterprise Institute. That is the kind of place that has made this argument, right, year after year after year after year. And it particularly makes it against Democrats, right? I mean, Solyndra, I don’t think Solyndra was the issue there, was that you were in a kind of post-Bill Clinton turn against neo-liberalism. It was that you could make a Democratic president look really bad. Right?

And you can make the stimulus look bad. And, to me, when I think of why I am nervous as a liberal, that if I pump, we pump, a huge amount of money into government R&D, we’re not going to get the kind of fundamental advances that I’m hoping for. It’s that I think a lot of the major government research structures have now been built to emphasize a kind of conservatism — not a conservatism of the political sort, but conservatism of the, “we don’t want to spend money on anything that could make us look bad,” sort.

And so there’s a lot of peer review. There’s a lot of bureaucracy. There’s a lot of people checking your work. The grant operations are huge and the amount of time people spend checking grants. There’s a big “cover your ass” mentality. And the problem with that is, I think, actually, a bipartisan problem. Like on the one hand, I think liberals are too trusting of process. I think liberals have become just kind of process-obsessed institutional defenders.

But I think conservatives have, in some ways, created a bunch of that because they’ve created the conditions in which people in government, and particularly, civil servants, are terrified of being the ones to have done something that gets their agency embarrassed and their funding cut. And so I’m curious, when you think about this as a reformist project in your own coalition, how do you think about that?

So I was listening to the podcast you did fairly recently with Jerusalem Demsas, and thinking about some of these issues of zoning, housing restrictions, and why it’s hard to build anything. And housing actually is the perfect issue. Housing seems like we need more housing, and conservatives should like because that’s growth.

And conservatives are supposed to like economic growth and tumult and dynamism, and people can move to high productivity cities. But conservatives seem to be against housing reform, at least some conservatives. They don’t like the idea because they view it as a culture war issue, which eventually eats up everything because you’re destroying the suburbs. You’re going to bring the wrong kind of people to our neighborhood, and all that kind of thing.

So the people who are on the left who are looking at these issues and think we need maybe need to grow faster, and there’s things we need to build in this country, and regulations are a problem, and funding is a problem, there needs to be an ally on the right where you’re certainly not going to agree on everything, but there’s a common ground with people who have some sort of confidence that we can actually move forward on problems. But right now, I think, while there are some pockets of that, I think, on the right and in the Republican Party, it just seems to be sort of moribund at the moment.

The one of these that blows my mind is, I am not a person inclined to give Donald Trump huge amounts of credit. But Operation Warp Speed is one of the most successful government programs ever, full stop. It is just like a tremendous, astounding success. Is he running on 8 or 10 more Operation Warp Speeds? No. Is the Republican Party proposing a bunch more Operation Warp Speeds for other kinds of things? As far as I can tell, no.

By the way, the Democrats aren’t either. I’ve talked to them about why, and I kind of get the sense it has something to do with whether or not they want to give Donald Trump credit for things. But here, you have just an astonishing, like a truly astonishing policy success. We were able to pull forward a completely futuristic technology in a time frame nobody thought possible, and make it available for free to Americans, right?

It was equitable. It was technological. We worked with the private sector. The public sector got things out of their way. And it is an orphan. And the political economy of Warp Speed’s orphan status is, I think, one, an indictment of American politics, but two, also a bit of a genuine mystery, because here, Donald Trump could run on this. It was a success of his presidency. Nothing, crickets. Why?

My hope has been — and as you just suggested, it has yet to be realized — that the pandemic would accelerate this need, I would hope to accelerate technological progress and growth. This is the perfect example of a problem that many people knew was coming, right? I mean, there’s a gazillion white papers that we’re going to have a pandemic, but yet despite that fact, we didn’t have enough ventilators, and we didn’t have enough masks.

And what finally, despite all the white papers, all the thoughts about preparation, what finally really allowed our economy and our lives to go on was the fact that America is a really rich country, and we’re really technologically advanced, and we were able to solve a problem on the fly because of those two things. And that people will look at that example, and we no longer have to go back to Apollo to be excited about something where we all came together and solved the big problem, beating the Russians. This time, we all came together and solved the big problem.

And people have yet to look at that. Instead, it has sort of gotten lost. And I can blame Donald Trump for that, for not talking about that. He should be talking about that. And if he’s not going to talk about it, I would love for the Democrats to talk about it and use that as an example. But I hope that eventually, we’ll be able to look at the pandemic and Operation Warp Speed as sort of a proof of concept that all the things we’ve been talking about can work.

One of the things that has been surprising to me in post-pandemic politics and policy is, we have spent a lot of money since 2021. We spent money on stimulus for the economy, support for the economy. We spent money on certain kinds of pandemic preparedness.

The thing we have not really spent money on is vaccines. We have not put together a huge new project to try to create vaccines across an array of different diseases. There’s possibilities of pan coronavirus vaccines. There’s a lot we could maybe do.

And I reported on a bunch of this. And what I found was that there wasn’t really a constituency for it. There were people in the Biden administration trying to get vaccine money into different kinds of bills. On the one hand, they weren’t finding the votes, but on the other hand, the critique I would make of Joe Biden is that nor was he out there demanding it.

And it got me thinking about the way, outside maybe climate, we underrate technological solutions to political problems. One of the lines I have on this is that a liberal can typically tell you sort of five social insurance programs they would like to build or improve, right? Universal pre-K, single-payer health care — you can pick your set.

They typically can’t tell you the five technologies they want the government to pull forward into the present, right? The five technologies they really want to fund to try to make happen. Maybe right now, a little bit around energy, people can. But I think outside of that, it isn’t a way people think about things.

What is your answer to that? If the government was going to come out with its “these are the five technologies we are going to try to put money behind to clear bureaucratic roadblocks out of the way of making sure you can have the materials for,” what is your five technologies for social progress agenda?

I don’t want to create a China 2025 plan where we’re going to pick a bunch of technologies, and I do worry about being locked in a certain kind of technological path, which is why I do basic research, and I do like to see what the private sector is doing and try to support that, like with my example about — deep geothermal looks like it might be something, but they need more money for demonstration projects.

I think having some sort of imprimatur that this is actually going to work and is making progress, I think government has more of a role in that situation. But I’ll tell you, I don’t know if you recall, but last summer, for about a week, there was this notion — and I think it was Korean researchers had figured out superconductivity, that we could create these materials which would allow us to transmit electricity with no loss. And if that was possible, like everything was possible. Like 90 percent of what “Star Trek” is about was possible. We could build very fast, very cheap high-speed rails, brand new medical devices. And then it turned out that that’s not the case.

I’ll have to admit, I thought hard. Maybe we need a Manhattan Project for superconductors. Maybe that’s something. All these problems we’ve been talking about, that kind of breakthrough would utterly change our entire sort of political discussion. An A.I. that can be 80 percent as efficient as a human, we have a very different discussion.

All of a sudden, the economy can grow at a point and a half faster for an extended period of time. Our entitlement discussion, our politics is completely different. So yeah, technology driving progress, driving growth, it’s a different kind of politics, and one where we’re not fighting over a fixed pie, but how to grow the economy faster.

But I think — and maybe this is the liberal in me versus the conservative in you — I think this is a bit of a dodge because if you want to pump all this money into R&D, if you want to pump it all, even just into basic research, someone, somewhere, has to decide where this money is going.

I can imagine different ways you might do that. But first, somebody has to decide how we are allocating this money, how much to what kind of scientist. But —

To govern is to decide, Ezra Klein. To govern is decide. And people will have to make decisions. I’m not against making decisions. I am against someone making a decision saying, this is the kind of engine we need to have —

Well, i’m not saying that —

— for a hypersonic plane.

That’s why I’m asking about technologies, how we achieve the technologies, right? I’m quite agnostic on that myself. But the other thing the government has to do, which I do think people really underestimate, is, get difficulties out of the way. So I remember when I was reporting on the effort to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and I was talking to one lab that had a pretty promising candidate, and the genius vaccine expert leading that lab was spending so much of their time trying to source monkeys, they just couldn’t get the monkeys they needed to run trials.

And I remember just thinking, that should be somebody else’s job, right? This person who has gotten to this point in medical research that they’re leading this lab and getting this funding to create a vaccine that could save however many lives, at no point in their career was their expertise logistics sourcing. But functionally, everybody I talked to in this period was like, they’re working on grants. They’re trying to find these things.

And if you look at Warp Speed, a bunch of what Warp Speed did was figure out how to get the correct materials so you could transport these vaccines, and they wouldn’t break in transport, right? There’s a lot of just making the jobs of scientists easier. There’s a lot of the government acting as a kind of accelerator of innovation, but it does require the government to make decisions about where it’s going to focus its efforts. So then I’m going to go back to my question, which is, after you’ve written this book — I mean, you write a Substack about the future and about all these technologies — you don’t have in the back of your head the five things you’d like to see a Manhattan Project on, a Warp Speed on? Again, to govern is to choose. Like, what would you choose? What do you think would — if we really put our backs into it, it is possible for us to move forward into the present and would do the most good.

Yeah, listen, I think one technology that if we’re able to crack it, and there’s already money pouring into it, is nuclear fusion. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cabinet officer happier than when Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm was talking about the nuclear fusion breakthrough about a year and a half ago. Like, there’s more work that needs to be done on that technology. And I think government has a role.

I think a lot of these energy technologies — if you talk to these startups, I always ask them like, what do you want government to be doing? And of course, you guys will point to some regulation. And I’ll say, OK, that’s great. I’m not surprised that you said that. But what about is there some aspect of technology that needs more work? And they’ll point to it. It could be like, some sort of drill bit for geothermal.

But yeah, so I think, broadly, areas of, I think, energy — for now, I’m just gonna stop with energy because that just seems to be the linchpin. I mean, I’m very excited about artificial intelligence and what it can do. And it can be a general purpose technology that can help us do science better and come up with cures. But already, you have people saying, oh, great, maybe it’ll do all that, but we just can’t afford the amount of power. How are you going to power those data centers?

So if that’s like the thing, if that’s like a key constraint to artificial intelligence, yeah, then energy is pretty important. And we better be doing more work. Again, we’ve mentioned nuclear fusion, but it might not be. Maybe it’s not nuclear fusion. Maybe it is geothermal. And I’m glad we’re going to space. I’m glad we’re going to space because I love the space program, and I love the idea of us doing things in orbit.

But you know what? Someday we may be able to use the materials from Mars to build space solar panels to beam infinite amount of power to Earth. So, yeah, I think energy is certainly a sector that I would like to see more research done, and I think the federal government has a role.

How do you marry technology and sustainability? This is something that I think discussions of technology often miss, that there are values embedded in technologies, which technologies we pursue, which technologies we deploy, whether you leave everything to the market, whether you have a guiding hand of government, whether you’re pricing carbon or not pricing carbon. How do you approach the process by which we make those decisions?

You often hear now economists talking about A.I. and how it will automate jobs, and they’ll say, well, we need the kind of A.I. that will create new things, but less of the kind that will automate people out of jobs. So we need job creating kind of A.I., but not the job replacing kind of A.I., which is I think we probably need both. But I don’t know of any real public policy that can do that.

So to me, then, that’s sort of, there’s no remedy that’s realistic to that. So I’m not going to give that a lot of regard. What we need is both. And, say, like, well, I’m going to get a certain kind of outcome by tweaking the tax code in this way. It seems to me to be unrealistic. So I guess I’m skeptical about the guiding technology sort of path I think you’re suggesting.

But I don’t think that’s quite right. So let me give a very concrete example using A.I. as what we’re talking about. You could make it possible to make a huge amount of money using A.I. to manipulate or persuade people to buy things, right, to hook A.I. into advertising. You could also say, we are not going to allow you to hook A.I. into personalized data-based advertising, right? Those are both just choices a society can make. You could say, we’re going to allow you to do it, but not for anybody under 18, right? I mean, there’s a million things you could do here. And the path of A.I. development will be different depending on what kind of things you can do to make money with it.

If it turns out the government had a bunch of prizes out there where if you could use A.I. to achieve this or that scientific goal, you got $3 billion, and the answer went into the public domain, people would build more A.I.s in that direction. So there are a lot of ways to shape the pathway of technology.

I don’t know that we can say we’re going to have the good kind of A.I. and not the bad kind of A.I., but the decisions we make about how we regulate A.I. will certainly shape the pathway of A.I. itself.

Well, I mean, to use that example, I’m certainly aware there are people who don’t like, for instance, how tech companies make money. They don’t like the advertising and the targeted ads, and they feel like there’s privacy issues. I don’t really have a problem with that. I certainly know some people do. They call it surveillance capitalism. I don’t have a problem with it.

But isn’t it true that that revenue is what is sort of financing all the R&D, these companies that are now doing the A.I. and creating the kinds of models that might actually not just create better advertising, but create a cornucopia of scientific advancements? That’s an unexpected consequence.

And before we, I think, begin thinking hard about this emerging technology that none of us really heard of up until 18 months ago, before we started thinking about ways to shape this technology, we probably should have a little humility that we don’t know all the things that can be. We don’t know the paths it will take.

And there might be some unexpected consequences in a rush to begin shaping and guiding this technology. And even people who are really upset about digital platforms, I don’t think they’re saying, like, the internet was a bad idea, and we should be an analog society.

So is your view we should not regulate A.I. at all?

I would think very hard about very specific use cases. I would think very hard about existing sorts of laws on the books, things you cannot do.

I think my default position would be rather than try to glom on our sort of social media concerns, which I think a lot of policymakers, because they feel like they missed the boat on social media regulation, so now they’re taking those concerns and applying them to A.I., is to think a lot about the internet in the 1990s, in which we saw that it was an evolving technology, and we decided to let it evolve and see what happened.

That seems to be an example we’ve forgotten because we’ve been so overwhelmed by social media and sort of content and privacy issues. And so that would be my instinct.

You just mentioned that a lot of people want to rerun the social media experiment, but with A.I., this time, getting ahead of it, as opposed to behind it. I think that’s right. Something that I often say is that I think it’s very much the wrong metaphor. I think A.I. is more like the internet or more like a foundational technology than it is like social media.

But on the other hand, one of my theses on all of this is that in key places, we got the regulation wrong, which, then, over time, also leads to overregulation, as people correct aggressively and often too late. And this, to me, feels completely core to the broader story you’re telling, but not something you’re comfortable applying here, which is the sort of growth era of the early 20th century created genuine harms.

You have Richard Nixon talking about them. Ronald Reagan, as president, brags about signing the California Environmental Quality Act into law. And so then you have very aggressive regulation. A disagreement I have with the people who call themselves A.I. accelerationists, the people who are just like, let it rip, is, I think they’re the real decelerationists.

I think if you let the Mark Andreessens of the world and so on in charge of A.I., that is a perfect recipe to get very aggressive, very early regulation. Because, one, terrible things are going to happen, but two, people are not going to trust them, whereas, in fact, that Altman and Hassabis and Dario Amodei and a bunch of the others seem very cautious and seem very concerned about what could go wrong, is almost paradoxically leading to less regulation. And I somewhat know this from reporting on these meetings they’re having with members of Congress. Because the members of Congress trust that they’re going to be careful and that they’re sort of harm-aware. Now, whether or not that proves to be true, I don’t know. But I do think that there’s a much more complicated relationship between wise regulation and the social tolerance for innovation and innovative risk than people sometimes give credit for.

I just am not sure where your confidence comes from that we will come anywhere close, at this early stage, to getting it right. I mean, it did not take long after the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act for the problems to become obvious. And did we correct those problems? We did not.

So I guess I have low confidence that at this early stage, we will get the regulation right. Nor do I have confidence that if we figure out we’ve gotten the regulation wrong, that those fixes will be made. Because I think, as you know, once something is passed, it’s very difficult to undo it, which is why even though it’s been screamingly obvious for a long time that we have a regulation problem, sort of making it hard to build in this country, it has been very difficult to undo those rules.

But I guess, then, what I think —

So I want to know where your confidence comes from.

Well, I don’t have any confidence.

The humility.

That’s why I’m writing the book, and that’s why I have a job. But I think one of the questions that I have here is that I think I don’t — if you don’t understand my confidence, which I don’t have, I don’t understand your political economy, because you agree you believe that society is risk intolerant.

You agree, you believe, that its reaction to things going wrong is going to be to not just regulate, but to try to have a safety-first approach to regulation that could be very, very dangerous for innovation. The fear people had of nuclear going wrong and a couple of major events like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island led to a level of nuclear regulation that effectively choked off the entire industry.

What seems to me to emerge from that is you need some way of balancing the fears people both have and the fears that emerge without going way too far in the other direction. But you’re not going to get there, right? I mean, this seems to me to be the point of the history you are telling. You’re not going to get there telling people, hey, just don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about it. And so I think what I’m interested in here is, how do you think that you strike this balance?

Well, no. And again, I think inherently people are super risk averse. So why should we be confident? I think confidence comes from my core thesis, which is rapid growth. When the economy is growing, people become more confident. They become less risk averse.

And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that not only did we see light regulation of the internet in the 1990s, but other times where we’ve had fast economic growth, we’ve been able to take more risks with social policy, such as the Civil Rights Act. Like, good things happen when an economy is growing quickly. So I think that would be very helpful if we went through a period of rapid growth for us to have more confidence that like, you know what? Technology is going well. The economy is going well. Let’s go easy on A.I.

But doesn’t wealth and growth lead, I mean, in the model we’ve been talking about, to more regulation, to less risk tolerance? I mean, wasn’t the 70s coming on the tail end of a long period of wealth and growth?

Right, and at a certain point, people become more willing to have less growth. But I would hope that after the past half century of going through a period where that kind of risk aversion has turned out to be the riskiest possible thing. I mean, we’re in this populist moment. And one reason I think that you get populist moments is because people think the government is really incompetent, particularly on economics.

So we’ve had this period where we’ve had a war people didn’t think very well. We had a global financial crisis. We had a pandemic that people — maybe we responded well, as we mentioned earlier, but we didn’t seem to be particularly well, well prepared for. So, yes, I’m talking about learning from history.

I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

One book which greatly influenced my book was the book, “Why Information Grows,” which is by a physicist named César Hildalgo, who presents a very different way of thinking about economic growth. Rather than merely thinking about labor and capital and land, all sort of the foundational aspects you may have learned in a high school economics class, he thinks what matters is connection — people connecting with each other, companies and people and universities and even countries. So that sort of connection economics and economic openness is really sort of at the heart of the vision I tried to give in my book.

I would also recommend, since I write about sci-fi so much in my book, the “Expanse” series, which they turned into a TV series, which I view — I may be in the minority — that I view as a future optimist hard science series because it shows Earth a few 100 years from now that has sort of mastered the solar system. But it’s not a perfect world. Things have gone wrong. Like, climate change was bad, though we seem to have gotten a hold of that. And technology has meant there are people out of work and on basic income. So it’s not a perfect world. But nothing in my vision is about creating a utopia. It’s about solving problems. And maybe that solution will create another problem. But we keep moving forward. And that’s what I think the “Expanse” series does.

My final book is “The American Dream is Not Dead” by one of my A.E.I. colleagues, Michael Strain, which is sort of a no-nonsense look at issues like wage stagnation, income inequality, and the supposed gap between productivity — there’s productivity again — and worker pay. And I think it’s a bit of a myth, but a very cautious myth-busting book that what you may think about all those issues may not be true. So it’s a pretty great book.

Jim Pethokoukis, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

[MUSIC PLAYING] EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

The ’70s are this breakpoint between one era in our economy and our government and our society and our vision for the future and the next. The ’70s are when economic inequality really begins rising, when the environmental movement takes off, when a huge amount of legislation is passed in response to the harms of all the building and growth that had happened since the New Deal.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Thanks so much for having me on.

EZRA KLEIN: So I wanna begin this conversation in the early ’70s. Things change in the U.S. economy on any number of charts. You begin to see something happen to the line. What are some of those changes?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: The most obvious change, at least especially from an economics point of view, is that the sort of rapid productivity growth that we saw in the previous couple of decades that economists and other experts in the ’60s thought was going to be a permanent state of affairs slowed down. And other than, really, the late ’90s or early 2000s, it’s been in that sort of weaker state. And it’s one of the great, still, conundrums for economists.

EZRA KLEIN: So if it had kept growing since the ’70s, as it did in the couple decades before, what would the US economy look like? What would the median household income look like?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Bigger, more, multiples more, and that was the expectation. So instead of having a $25 trillion economy, depending on how you want to slice the numbers, it could be twice as big, it could be three times as big. So I don’t know. I mean, I think conservatively, instead of the median family making $80,000 adjusted for inflation, maybe they make $150,000. I mean, it’s pretty significant.

EZRA KLEIN: What is your theory, though, of what happened in the ’70s? What do you see as the contributors to this slowdown?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I think, certainly, it was probably multi-causal. One reason I wrote the book, to be honest, is a paper, a paper by an economist named Ray Fair from Yale University who noticed something weird happened around the ’70s. He wasn’t focused on productivity growth, but he looked at infrastructure spending as a share of total economic spending. And he looked at what was going on with the budget, where we started to begin to run smaller surpluses and run budget deficits around 1970.

EZRA KLEIN: So what are your theories?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Listen, I’m not going to create a brand new theory. Was it just that all of the great inventions, the internal combustion engine, electrification of factories, and all those great inventions of the second kind of phase, Industrial Revolution, we had kind of squeezed all the sort of productivity gains out of those, and they weren’t replaced by another wave of great inventions? I mean, that’s a theory.

EZRA KLEIN: What’s your causal theory of why we did that?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I think a lot of that was because of NASA, and we won the space race. And there just wasn’t an interest in continuing that. OK, so that’s sort of the immediate short-term explanation.

EZRA KLEIN: So much of that was really just NASA? Because I think of the R&D surge as the Cold War.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Right.

EZRA KLEIN: And the Soviet Union was going strong in the ’70s.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Right, Soviet Union was going strong. But we had clearly won that space race. And while we’ve continued to spend a lot of money on R&D as a share of the economy, it’s a lot less than what it used to be. That’s not surprising that perhaps there was a shift in priorities. People did begin worrying about budgets back then.

EZRA KLEIN: So I’ve been, for my own book, thinking a lot about the ’70s and looking a lot at the politics of the ’70s. And from where we sit now, we think of environmentalism as a liberal thing, right? The environmentalists are greens, they’re Democrats. And I ran into this quote that Richard Nixon gives in his 1970 State of the Union that I think gives a good flavor of how different the politics had become. So I want to play that here.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (RICHARD NIXON)^: The great question of the ’70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

[APPLAUSE]:

EZRA KLEIN: What do you think when you hear that?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I think that’s exactly what I would expect to hear for a country that has gone through a period of industrialization and economic growth, where people had become rich enough that the immediate sort of material concerns could be balanced off with other kinds of concerns, such as the water they’re drinking, the air we’re breathing. Is it worth losing a little bit of growth — maybe — to deal with that? So, that doesn’t surprise me. And as you know, some of the key environmental legislation we still have happened under the Nixon administration.

EZRA KLEIN: A huge amount of it. I mean, I think you can make a very good case Nixon is the most consequential environmentalist president of the 20th century.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: But did people back then assume that what they were doing, with that environmental legislation, was making it very difficult to build the kind of future they had imagined heading into the 1970s. I don’t think they did. I believe they thought that the economy was so strong and that technological progress, the momentum was so tremendous that we could have cleaner air and water and still have everything else.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, what’s the evidence that that raft of environmental legislation, the National Environmental Policy Act you mentioned, the Endangered Species Act — we have Clean Air Acts, Clean Water Acts — a lot of them work really well. We really do clean up the air, the water. I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles, or outside Los Angeles. The smog is much better today than when I was growing up.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Sure. You can see the mountains sometimes.

EZRA KLEIN: You can see the mountains. What is the evidence that that is as causal in the slowdown of productivity as you’re putting it here?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: After the space age, after Apollo. We didn’t follow it with anything, right? One thing we — Nixon thought about following it with was building nuclear reactors, 1,000 nuclear reactors from coast to coast. Would it have been possible to build 1,000 nuclear reactors from coast to coast with the emerging regulatory regime that was beginning to happen? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

And it became obvious, even in the early ’70s, that there was a problem, that there was a problem that was becoming harder to build. That was the case with the Alaska pipeline. It became — again, you’re too young to remember this, but it was a running joke in the United States in the 1970s that they could not build a new dam in Tennessee because of a tiny little fish called the snail darter.

EZRA KLEIN: So let’s talk about nuclear here, because nuclear is interesting to me because I basically agree with you —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: OK, do you not think that NEPA had a material impact?

EZRA KLEIN: I don’t think there’s any doubt that the totality of environmental and regulatory bills passed in the ’70s slows growth, or a different way to put it is, makes it hard to build. I mean, it’s a big part of the work I’m doing right now. At the same time, when you’re trying to measure or try to understand what has happened to total factor productivity, I think this case is a little harder to make than people want it to be for a couple of reasons.

There is something here where one of the ways this sounds — and it sounds this way to me when I read your book — is that there’s been this 20 or maybe 1,000 or maybe trillion or maybe multi-trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk, and you would expect some country to pick it up. But you go from the ’70s forward — nobody today is ahead of America.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: It sort of doesn’t surprise me that countries which I think have been, over these decades, far less innovative and pushing forward the technological frontier, might not be pushing forward the technology of nuclear power. So why doesn’t France have very cheap nuclear energy? Why doesn’t France already have these very small nuclear reactors? I’m not sure what the incentive was or whether they were capable of innovating to that degree. I don’t know.

EZRA KLEIN: But the incentive is exactly what you’re saying. Right? I mean, it’s sort of —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Kind of a state, but it’s not a market-based power system in France. These are all state subsidized reactors.

EZRA KLEIN: I mean, but take South Korea, take the U.A.E., take China. I mean, you can pick your country here. The kind of question I’m trying to raise about your thesis, because it’s also relevant, frankly, to my thesis, is, if the problem is that America makes a series of policy mistakes in the ’70s, why, then, in the ensuing five decades, don’t a bunch of our competitor countries race past us.

There are theories that they would. Japan, in the ’80s and ’90s, seemed like maybe they were, right? Japan was going to be the future. There were a million books written in the ’90s about this. Germany at different times, right? But I don’t think you would look at anybody today, any rich country of significant size, and say, they really got it right, and we really got it wrong. So how do you understand that if the story is about mistakes we specifically made in the ’70s?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Well, we can make mistakes that are very specific to us. And other countries may have made different mistakes, even though there was, as you say, this great enthusiasm in the ’80s that Japan had it sort of figured out, that they could do economic growth and innovation in a brand new way, which turned out not to be the case. And then you mentioned Germany, and we seem to have this insatiable desire to find — at least some people do — to find some other model. I don’t think those models have turned out better than the American model.

EZRA KLEIN: If you were to try to make an argument about why things look not the same, but why nobody has achieved the Jim Pethokoukis world across Canada, across Western Europe, across Asia, right, all countries during this period that were rich enough to do much of what you’re talking about, do you have theories that unite the answer?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Yeah, I mean, listen, I don’t think it is wrong to do sort of a cross-country because this productivity slowdown didn’t just happen in the United States. Clearly, there was some sort of macro reasons. It’s just becoming harder and more expensive to do research. Those things affected everybody.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me try some thesis on you that I think can work across countries. One is that as countries get richer, they become more risk averse. Some of the innovations you’re talking about, like colonies on the moon and flying cars, they require a high tolerance for risk. Maybe as societies get more affluent, people have enough. Their lives are good enough. They aren’t as motivated to take that risk. What do you think of that?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I think, inherently, people pull back from risk. To go back to the ’70s, there are some conservative thinkers who thought that capitalism was doomed because the intellectuals who were separated from the actually working and producing wouldn’t appreciate how hard it is to do that. They wouldn’t appreciate how hard it is actually to grow an economy.

And we used to have people who would do that for us. We had public intellectuals, and we had Hollywood, who would say the future can be better, and it’s going to be awesome. And then that disappeared. So who paints a future? Listen, I spent a lot of time going on the Drudge Report. It used to be — it’s still operating. I don’t think it is what it used to be.

And every article about technology and science and Silicon Valley was, these are crazy people who want a future, an inhuman future for you, where you’re going to all live in tubes, and you’re going to all have bugs — eat bugs for — no more steaks. We’re all going to have bug steaks. That’s just one small example. And I can point to pretty much every Hollywood film in the past 50 years.

So what is our sort of collective imagination of why are we going to do this, that we don’t live in a world that’s destined to burn, that we don’t live in a world where if we should have all these wonderful inventions, only the people at the very rich will have it. They’ll be living above us on the space platforms, while everybody on Earth is groveling around. So we’ve had this inability to say like, why should you take a risk? And that has to change.

EZRA KLEIN: I think visions of the future, to a degree people don’t always appreciate, are built on what people see in the present. And something that has been striking to me, as I’ve done a lot of research into the politics of the ’60s and ’70s, is how much people ceased liking what they saw in the present. I’m going to play a speech that Lyndon Johnson gave in 1964, talking about what America looked like to him in terms that are not how I think of the great society.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (LYNDON JOHNSON)^: The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded. Our seashores, overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing. A few years ago, we were greatly concerned about the ugly American. Today, we must act to prevent an ugly America.

EZRA KLEIN: So one thing that I think, or I’ve come to believe, is a bigger dimension here, is that beauty is part of politics, and wanting a beautiful world, believing that you’re going to get a beautiful world matters, right? This is part of post-materialist politics, which are very, very powerful and begin, I think, strongly in the ’60s and the ’70s. So how do you think about that dimension of it, the kind of pervasiveness of a fear that the modernity people were getting from rapid growth was an ugly, advertising soaked, concrete, gray, deforested modernity?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Was that the majority opinion? Do you think that people thought there was too much affluence? And beauty, again, that’s a preference. Some people love this notion of, like, solarpunk. We’re all going to live in these giant trees that are —

EZRA KLEIN: I like this notion.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: — part tree, but yet — right. Even skyscrapers will be gardens. And that is a personal preference for a kind of world that I’m sure — I think we’re maybe taking our views now, and we’re kind of imposing on what people thought in the 1960s based on one speech.

EZRA KLEIN: No, so that, I can assure you, I’m not doing. I’m just not yet reading you chapter one and two of my forthcoming book on this show.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Oh, I’m sure those chapters are excellent. They’re excellent chapters.

EZRA KLEIN: They’re glittering, but this politics was pervasive. I mean, there were all kinds of books written about this. I mean, this is what the environmental movement comes out of. The environmental movement is not built on climate change. It’s built on conservation of green space.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Right, and —

EZRA KLEIN: “Silent Spring,” and there were disasters.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: And I think that’s legitimate.

EZRA KLEIN: And I want to push you on this because the thing that I hear you doing is wiping this to the side. That’s a personal preference. But what we’re trying to do here, right, what I’m trying to do with you — there’s plenty of things you and I disagree on, right? You’re a conservative. I’m a progressive. But one thing that I don’t think we disagree on is that we’re not building enough and productivity is too low.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING (MALVINA REYNOLDS)^: (SINGING) Little boxes on the hillside

EZRA KLEIN: I can show you pieces from the San Francisco Chronicle where they talk about the people moving to California like locusts, right? Like they are going to just destroy the thing. And I agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But often, the politically powerful beholders are the ones who live in a place already.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Is it a story of aesthetics, or is it a story of a generation sort of repulsed by their parents? I guarantee the parents in those ticky tacky houses probably thought those were pretty good houses, probably better houses than what they grew up in. I take my —

EZRA KLEIN: So why did they lose the political fight?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Well, because that generation was really, really big, and eventually that generation took control. But — OK, I’m gonna really get to your question. So what is this future going to look like? I could point to some possibilities. And I could maybe — I would love if sort of science fiction people and there are people in science fiction who think that as well, that they need to create images that aren’t utterly dystopian. Like, that’s an entire movement within that community.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, I’m not — I don’t want —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: We have to have choice.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m not saying we should impose one aesthetic. But what I am saying is that I think there’s good reason to believe that this huge generation you’re bringing up, right — and I take that point that the boomer generation is large. They didn’t like what they saw, and that that happened in a lot of different places at once.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: You could go less controversial. You could say Steve Jobs, who took how things look, the elegance. I mean, he’s a boomer, and he wanted to create beautiful, elegant products. Now, how you translate that into a public policy that creates a beautiful, elegant future, but I think Elon Musk, to some degree, has that. I mean, who wants to go to Mars, really? It’s cold. There’s no air. There’s nobody there.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing when I think about the sort of conservatism in your futurism that actually surprised me in your book was the confidence that if we pumped a bunch more money into the R&D structure, we would get a bunch more output.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I hope.

EZRA KLEIN: [LAUGHS]:

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I’m confident about that, at least on even days.

EZRA KLEIN: But one counterargument on this, I hear sometimes, right, as you mentioned, a lot of the R&D surge midcentury came from NASA. And when you think about the amount of money NASA has had to spend on R&D in recent decades, and the amount of money SpaceX had to spend on R&D — which, of course, SpaceX could only do that because of NASA contracts, but nevertheless, they had less money — and how fast SpaceX was actually able to advance rocket technology, I think it should make you wonder why NASA is not as able to make advances as it once was. Right?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Well, I mean, and certainly, I think the people at SpaceX would say that they stand on the shoulders of giants. So they did not have to start at a baseline at zero and figure out how to get something into space. So I think that’s important to note.

And I’m not sure that spending more — I mean, great, I can point to studies, but until we actually do it, I don’t know. But I think we’re at sort of like a moment that we should try to use every plausible idea to make sure we don’t waste a moment that I think we had at the end of the ’60s, that I think we had at the end of the ’90s, to create a much faster growing economy.

EZRA KLEIN: Let’s talk about a success story of innovation inside the government, which is Darpa. What makes Darpa work? And is that scalable?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Well, I mean, you have highly motivated people working on very specific projects. The managers of those programs are not there forever. They’re there to create new technologies that would have some sort of military application. So the easy answer is, we need Darpa for everything. We need to have this — can you scale that? Geez, I would like to try. I would like to try scaling that. I would like to try scaling a lot of things. I think it shows that despite skepticism that can’t accomplish anything, you can point to the successes of Darpa.

EZRA KLEIN: How do you think about tolerance for failure? Because one thing Darpa has is a tolerance for failure. I think part of that is that it’s understood and has been a sort of part of the national security state. And we allow the national security state to waste money. We’re cool with it. The fact that some things are not going to work out, we don’t get mad at them. On the other hand, when you have the Department of Energy give out a loan to something like Solyndra that doesn’t come through —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: That’s a good example.

EZRA KLEIN: — there are hearings. There’s a scandal. People are furious. I mean, that same program also saved Tesla, which is something you hear less about. So what allows things in government to make counterintuitive bets? And what allows them to survive those bets failing?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: When Solyndra happened, there was a sort of a deep skepticism that the era of — Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over. And now it seemed like the era of big government was back. And I think people were waiting to pounce on that. I mean, I looked at Solyndra, and my immediate thought was, this is back then. Like, this is government failing again.

EZRA KLEIN: You’re correct.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Yes, ridiculous or silly. Like, why are we spending money to figure out, like, how hamsters survive in orbit or something like that. So we shouldn’t pretend not to have a toleration of basic science? Because it was the kinds of basic science that didn’t seem like it had any application. Like, I don’t know — the theory of relativity is why we have GPS’s.

EZRA KLEIN: But this seems like an important reformist project in your coalition. I mean, you worked at the American Enterprise Institute. That is the kind of place that has made this argument, right, year after year after year after year. And it particularly makes it against Democrats, right? I mean, Solyndra, I don’t think Solyndra was the issue there, was that you were in a kind of post-Bill Clinton turn against neo-liberalism. It was that you could make a Democratic president look really bad. Right?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Oh, yes.

EZRA KLEIN: And you can make the stimulus look bad. And, to me, when I think of why I am nervous as a liberal, that if I pump, we pump, a huge amount of money into government R&D, we’re not going to get the kind of fundamental advances that I’m hoping for. It’s that I think a lot of the major government research structures have now been built to emphasize a kind of conservatism — not a conservatism of the political sort, but conservatism of the, “we don’t want to spend money on anything that could make us look bad,” sort.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: So I was listening to the podcast you did fairly recently with Jerusalem Demsas, and thinking about some of these issues of zoning, housing restrictions, and why it’s hard to build anything. And housing actually is the perfect issue. Housing seems like we need more housing, and conservatives should like because that’s growth.

EZRA KLEIN: The one of these that blows my mind is, I am not a person inclined to give Donald Trump huge amounts of credit. But Operation Warp Speed is one of the most successful government programs ever, full stop. It is just like a tremendous, astounding success. Is he running on 8 or 10 more Operation Warp Speeds? No. Is the Republican Party proposing a bunch more Operation Warp Speeds for other kinds of things? As far as I can tell, no.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: My hope has been — and as you just suggested, it has yet to be realized — that the pandemic would accelerate this need, I would hope to accelerate technological progress and growth. This is the perfect example of a problem that many people knew was coming, right? I mean, there’s a gazillion white papers that we’re going to have a pandemic, but yet despite that fact, we didn’t have enough ventilators, and we didn’t have enough masks.

EZRA KLEIN: One of the things that has been surprising to me in post-pandemic politics and policy is, we have spent a lot of money since 2021. We spent money on stimulus for the economy, support for the economy. We spent money on certain kinds of pandemic preparedness.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I don’t want to create a China 2025 plan where we’re going to pick a bunch of technologies, and I do worry about being locked in a certain kind of technological path, which is why I do basic research, and I do like to see what the private sector is doing and try to support that, like with my example about — deep geothermal looks like it might be something, but they need more money for demonstration projects.

EZRA KLEIN: But I think — and maybe this is the liberal in me versus the conservative in you — I think this is a bit of a dodge because if you want to pump all this money into R&D, if you want to pump it all, even just into basic research, someone, somewhere, has to decide where this money is going.

EZRA KLEIN: I can imagine different ways you might do that. But first, somebody has to decide how we are allocating this money, how much to what kind of scientist. But —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: To govern is to decide, Ezra Klein. To govern is decide. And people will have to make decisions. I’m not against making decisions. I am against someone making a decision saying, this is the kind of engine we need to have —

EZRA KLEIN: Well, i’m not saying that —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: — for a hypersonic plane.

EZRA KLEIN: That’s why I’m asking about technologies, how we achieve the technologies, right? I’m quite agnostic on that myself. But the other thing the government has to do, which I do think people really underestimate, is, get difficulties out of the way. So I remember when I was reporting on the effort to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and I was talking to one lab that had a pretty promising candidate, and the genius vaccine expert leading that lab was spending so much of their time trying to source monkeys, they just couldn’t get the monkeys they needed to run trials.

And if you look at Warp Speed, a bunch of what Warp Speed did was figure out how to get the correct materials so you could transport these vaccines, and they wouldn’t break in transport, right? There’s a lot of just making the jobs of scientists easier. There’s a lot of the government acting as a kind of accelerator of innovation, but it does require the government to make decisions about where it’s going to focus its efforts.

So then I’m going to go back to my question, which is, after you’ve written this book — I mean, you write a Substack about the future and about all these technologies — you don’t have in the back of your head the five things you’d like to see a Manhattan Project on, a Warp Speed on? Again, to govern is to choose. Like, what would you choose? What do you think would — if we really put our backs into it, it is possible for us to move forward into the present and would do the most good.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Yeah, listen, I think one technology that if we’re able to crack it, and there’s already money pouring into it, is nuclear fusion. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cabinet officer happier than when Energy Department Secretary Jennifer Granholm was talking about the nuclear fusion breakthrough about a year and a half ago. Like, there’s more work that needs to be done on that technology. And I think government has a role.

EZRA KLEIN: How do you marry technology and sustainability? This is something that I think discussions of technology often miss, that there are values embedded in technologies, which technologies we pursue, which technologies we deploy, whether you leave everything to the market, whether you have a guiding hand of government, whether you’re pricing carbon or not pricing carbon. How do you approach the process by which we make those decisions?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: You often hear now economists talking about A.I. and how it will automate jobs, and they’ll say, well, we need the kind of A.I. that will create new things, but less of the kind that will automate people out of jobs. So we need job creating kind of A.I., but not the job replacing kind of A.I., which is I think we probably need both. But I don’t know of any real public policy that can do that.

EZRA KLEIN: But I don’t think that’s quite right. So let me give a very concrete example using A.I. as what we’re talking about. You could make it possible to make a huge amount of money using A.I. to manipulate or persuade people to buy things, right, to hook A.I. into advertising. You could also say, we are not going to allow you to hook A.I. into personalized data-based advertising, right?

Those are both just choices a society can make. You could say, we’re going to allow you to do it, but not for anybody under 18, right? I mean, there’s a million things you could do here. And the path of A.I. development will be different depending on what kind of things you can do to make money with it.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Well, I mean, to use that example, I’m certainly aware there are people who don’t like, for instance, how tech companies make money. They don’t like the advertising and the targeted ads, and they feel like there’s privacy issues. I don’t really have a problem with that. I certainly know some people do. They call it surveillance capitalism. I don’t have a problem with it.

EZRA KLEIN: So is your view we should not regulate A.I. at all?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I would think very hard about very specific use cases. I would think very hard about existing sorts of laws on the books, things you cannot do.

EZRA KLEIN: You just mentioned that a lot of people want to rerun the social media experiment, but with A.I., this time, getting ahead of it, as opposed to behind it. I think that’s right. Something that I often say is that I think it’s very much the wrong metaphor. I think A.I. is more like the internet or more like a foundational technology than it is like social media.

I think if you let the Mark Andreessens of the world and so on in charge of A.I., that is a perfect recipe to get very aggressive, very early regulation. Because, one, terrible things are going to happen, but two, people are not going to trust them, whereas, in fact, that Altman and Hassabis and Dario Amodei and a bunch of the others seem very cautious and seem very concerned about what could go wrong, is almost paradoxically leading to less regulation. And I somewhat know this from reporting on these meetings they’re having with members of Congress. Because the members of Congress trust that they’re going to be careful and that they’re sort of harm-aware.

Now, whether or not that proves to be true, I don’t know. But I do think that there’s a much more complicated relationship between wise regulation and the social tolerance for innovation and innovative risk than people sometimes give credit for.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: I just am not sure where your confidence comes from that we will come anywhere close, at this early stage, to getting it right. I mean, it did not take long after the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act for the problems to become obvious. And did we correct those problems? We did not.

EZRA KLEIN: But I guess, then, what I think —

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: So I want to know where your confidence comes from.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, I don’t have any confidence.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: The humility.

EZRA KLEIN: That’s why I’m writing the book, and that’s why I have a job. But I think one of the questions that I have here is that I think I don’t — if you don’t understand my confidence, which I don’t have, I don’t understand your political economy, because you agree you believe that society is risk intolerant.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Well, no. And again, I think inherently people are super risk averse. So why should we be confident? I think confidence comes from my core thesis, which is rapid growth. When the economy is growing, people become more confident. They become less risk averse.

EZRA KLEIN: But doesn’t wealth and growth lead, I mean, in the model we’ve been talking about, to more regulation, to less risk tolerance? I mean, wasn’t the 70s coming on the tail end of a long period of wealth and growth?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Right, and at a certain point, people become more willing to have less growth. But I would hope that after the past half century of going through a period where that kind of risk aversion has turned out to be the riskiest possible thing. I mean, we’re in this populist moment. And one reason I think that you get populist moments is because people think the government is really incompetent, particularly on economics.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: One book which greatly influenced my book was the book, “Why Information Grows,” which is by a physicist named César Hildalgo, who presents a very different way of thinking about economic growth. Rather than merely thinking about labor and capital and land, all sort of the foundational aspects you may have learned in a high school economics class, he thinks what matters is connection — people connecting with each other, companies and people and universities and even countries. So that sort of connection economics and economic openness is really sort of at the heart of the vision I tried to give in my book.

EZRA KLEIN: Jim Pethokoukis, thank you very much.

JIM PETHOKOUKIS: Thanks for having me.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

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