Some policy books have a singular idea, propounded faithfully over hundreds of pages. In The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis tackles many ideas through the lens of one overarching theme: Economic growth is essential.
There’s much to like about the book. For one thing, the core contention is right. Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, revisits the American sense of limitless technological possibilities after World War II, which stemmed from tremendous economic productivity. The United States produced approximately 60 percent of the world manufacturing output in 1950, he points out, and that era of growth created great optimism in American public life. But then came the Great Downshift, Pethokoukis’ term for the productivity slowdown of the 1970s, which lingers to this day. He ably traces the origins of present-day problems back to that downshift, and he investigates leading culprits, from the scarcity of low-hanging-fruit innovations, to a flurry of regulatory barriers, to a broader societal malaise shaping our minds and hearts.
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