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Your home is full of technological miracles, devices that your ancestors would have regarded as near magic because of the life of relative ease they provide us with. However, something is changing. In the past, we got richer by owning more stuff; but in the future, we will have more by owning less.

In this final episode of Building Tomorrow, Paul talks with Cory Doctorow, Michael Munger, Ruth Cowan, and Chelsea Follett about the past, present, and future of material possession.

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If you're the kind of person who carefully sorts out your recyclables from your trash, cleans it, and puts it out in the blue bin for pickup, you probably don't realize that as much as 90% of that material either just ends up in a landfill or, worse, is dumped into the ocean. Indeed, much of the plastic litter in the Pacific Ocean is the result of our well-intentioned but misplaced efforts at recycling since the 1990s.

In this episode, we talk to an environmental economist, landfill scientist, and blockchain engineer about the future of our waste. We can efficiently sort and store our plastics in landfills for future mining operations, incentivizing good behavior via cryptocurrency rewards. We can incinerate our waste in hyper-efficient facilities that power cities and reduce our carbon footprint. Building Tomorrow means building more and better landfills.

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People are afraid. Afraid that they are consuming too much, emitting too much, having too many kids, and running the planet into the ground. Eight billion people seems like too many. But a growing number of experts are sounding the alarm that a far worse problem is on the horizon, an underpopulation crisis. People are having fewer kids and countries are aging. For example, by the end of the century Japan will halve its population. Those who remain will be older and poorer. We need more people, not fewer, if we want to find innovative solutions to climate change and resource crunches. 

For music attributions see: https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/building-tomorrow/underpopulation-crisis

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What happens when a raw material that is valueless suddenly becomes valuable? If it's bird guano in the 19th century, you mine it and save the agricultural economy. If its data in the late 20th century, you collect it and create a new digital economy. 

Music attributions can be found here: https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/building-tomorrow/guano.

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If voting leaves you feeling tired and vaguely dissatisfied, you're not alone. Over 60% of voters aren't happy with the two party duopoly that dominates US politics; others hate the flood of negative campaign ads or feel that politics is too big or too distant to be able to effect via the voting process.

But there is hope! This week, Paul talks to two political scientists, Lee Drutman and Daniel Bowen to talk about how ranked choice voting, multi-member legislative districts, and packing the House of Representatives could save our democracy from its dire situation.

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In the 18th century, something sparked a wave of technological innovation and economic growth that has transformed the world for the better. Economists have argued about what that something was ever since. Our guest today, Professor Joel Mokyr, argues that it was a change in western European cultural attitudes that provided that spark. Enlightenment curiosity fomented a belief that practical knowledge could improve the world in tangible and permanent ways.

Do we assume that progress will always happen? What threatens the concept of progress?

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Spend any time on social media and odds are that you've interacted with at least one bot account; given how advanced they've become, you might not even have noticed. Paul interviews bot programmer Max Sklar about why bots are a big part of the future of online interaction and why that's not necessarily a bad thing. They also discuss machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the deurbanization of New York City.

What is a geofence? Do we have an obligation to give data to apps for their user research? What is machine learning? Who or what is a marsbot??

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It's time to stop politely asking the State to give us our freedoms back. We can just...take them. New technologies like smart contracts, cryptocurrency, and anonymized identification systems are challenging the State's near monopoly on jurisprudence, currency, and trust provision. Two of the authors of The New Technologies of Freedom, economists Chris Berg and Darcy Allen, join the show to discuss the radical transformation that is already under way

What is adversarial liberty? Why do even libertarian think tanks get caught in a statist mindset? How do new blockchain based technologies work together to challenge State control?

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If you’re listening to this show, you’re likely an ardent supporter of the First Amendment. Yet at the same time, you probably wouldn’t want your social media feeds filled with pornography and hate speech; removing such content requires tech companies to engage in content moderation. Are those two values in tension? Can content moderation coexist with free speech? John Samples, who is on Facebook’s independent oversight board, joins us to discuss how he tries to balance his obligation to promoting free speech while giving users the moderation that most of them want.

How far should we protect free speech online?

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New York City's population dropped by 5% in just two weeks because of COVID-19, a drop concentrated among white collar professionals and Wall Street workers. But it's not just a New York City story as companies across the country have experimented with telework on a massive scale because of the pandemic.

The question is what comes next. Will workplace norms snap back into place with knowledge economy workers continuing to cluster in high cost of living urban areas? Or will the future of the workplace remain remote, with a growing number of white collar professionals working from home at least part of the week?

But cities rely heavily on high income taxpayers to fund government services and to propel growth; even a small number exiting cities could have vast ripple effects. Cato economist Peter Van Doren joins the show to discuss the possible de-urbanization of America and offer some thoughts on what those effects might be.

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Have you wondered whether a particular public health intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic has actually been worth it? Perhaps you then felt a bit ghoulish for asking the question, given that lives are at stake.

Well, you're in luck because this episode of Building Tomorrow asks about that price tag. After all, resources are finite and we all routinely trade risk for convenience; there are some interventions that would not be worth the opportunity cost. Answering the question of how much a human life is worth is the first step to figuring out whether the shutdown and other measures during the pandemic have been worthwhile. Cato economist Peter Van Doren joins the pod to help us think through the topic.

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A generation before the rise of talk radio and hosts like Rush Limbaugh, there was another wave of right-wing radio. But the reason why few remember them is that they were the target of a hugely successful government censorship campaign implemented by President John F. Kennedy using IRS audits and the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine.”

But as our host, Paul Matzko—whose book on the subject comes out next week—this isn’t just a question of history. Today, there is a growing, bi-partisan push for government regulation of the internet that resembles the way the State regulated radio in the 1960s and which could just as easily be hijacked in order to advance partisan interests.

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While universities debate whether to re-open on schedule for the fall semester, it’s expected that hundreds of colleges that were in financial distress will shutter their doors. While that might seem like obvious evidence of decline in higher education, economist Bryan Caplan suggests otherwise. In his controversial book, The Case Against Education, he argues that higher ed does relatively little, well, ‘ed.’ COVID-19 might just help expose the systemic failures of higher education in America.

Could COVID-19 help us rethink how we do higher-ed? What was wrong with higher education before the pandemic that we could fix now? how is higher education just a signaling mechanism to employers?

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