Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal. Joining me on today, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Eli Dorado. He's a senior research fellow at Utah State University Center for Growth and Opportunity. Before joining Utah State, Eli worked to advance

supersonic flight at Boom. He directed technology policy at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, and he earned a

PhD in economics from George Mason studying under Tyler Cowan. In a feature for City Journal's

Spring issue called The New Productivity Revolution, he discusses a number of new technologies

that will have tremendous benefits for human flourishing,

if we can get out of our own way.

Eli, thanks very much for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me, Brian.

It's great to be on with you.

As you note in this essay, which is in our spring issue,

economic productivity has stalled in recent years, and a number of explanations for this

secular stagnation, as it's called, have been put forward.

The most famous one probably is the one advanced by economist Robert Gordon, who argues that we've basically

picked all the low-hanging fruit. We've invented all of the major technologies.

And so that what we're seeing these days is just diminishing returns from the digital revolution

and, you know, marginal improvements to digital technology aren't comparable to something

like the internal combustion engine. So you disagree with this argument, respectfully in the

essay, and identify a number of key technologies that you believe are on the cusp of being

the next big, huge, great inventions,

transformative inventions. So maybe we could just start there to detail what, you know,

...