Maximum Progress 2024 Review
The underrated, overrated, top, and bottom posts of the year
2024 was a big year for Maximum Progress. I started writing weekly on October of 2023 as part of the Roots of Progress blog building fellowship and since then, the blog has grown by nearly 5x from 1,100 subscribers to 5,200 today. I have hopes and plans to 5x again in 2025 but I could use your help. Tell your friends about Maximum Progress!
This post is a good place to send someone so that they can get a sense of what this blog is about. Here are a couple of rankings and highlights for Maximum Progress this year:
Most Underrated Post
This piece was published in the Foundation for Economic Education magazine and cross-posted on the blog. The first half is a redux and compression of the Where’s My Flying Car story: The flying car, or personal aviation more generally, was technologically and economically possible by the 1930s and was on a path towards improvement, mass production, and widespread adoption throughout the next decades. But in the late 1970s everything crashed and it never recovered. J. Storrs Hall believably places blame for this on the government, but I wanted to get more specific about how exactly this happened.
Here’s the central insight I came to:
The FAA has an incredibly long list of burdensome rules that do slow down the industry, but the list of burdensome regulations on cars is even longer! None of these regulations can explain a modern rate of production that’s 30 times lower than what it was in the ’70s.
Instead, it’s about the ordering of enforcement of these laws.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.
The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA’s signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA’s failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.
This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing.
Not only does pre-market approval add decades to development timelines, it also shifts blame onto the FAA. If a new design gets through with problems, it's the FAA's fault for not catching them in their review process.
Contrast that with cars, where the regulations are enforced post-market with recalls and fines. Here, the manufacturers are blamed for poor products and the DOT is rewarded for enforcing consumer protecting rules.
Most Overrated Post
This post is just a summary of four different randomized control trials which had come out recently and were topics of discussion on my X feed. I think it’s a good summary and it’s useful to see all of these results collected in one place, but I was surprised to see this post get as popular as it did. It ended up as the 7th most popular post on my blog this year.
Top 3 Most Popular
This was a super fun post to write so it’s gratifying and exciting that it is also the most popular post on my blog this year. I read and reviewed several theories for why the Roman Empire never industrialized and then synthesize those into my own. The short version is that all they needed was the printing press (and possibly also cheaper paper). The Romans were missing many other technologies, but the more rapid spread and iteration of knowledge through the printing press would have led to those other discoveries down the line.
This is a bit of a polemic against the publication process in academic economics motivated by my first experiences with it this year. The standards, replicability, and aesthetics of economics research could be so much better and everyone knows it, but we’re stuck with Latex PDFs with no end in sight.
This post was not particularly popular when it first came out, but it’s had a long life and still gets a couple of likes a week. This is one of my favorites I’ve ever written. The hook is already a bit outdated and may become more so if Javier Milei is forgotten, but the central idea of the post is timeless.
Here is the most common and easily defensible motte: Define “the idea of market failure” to be the claim that markets are not perfect; that there are > 0 market failures. This claim is true, and anyone who denies it plants themselves on the far left side of the mid-wit meme.
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But when market failure is taught in econ classes or wielded in policy, the idea reclaims the bailey: markets are not perfect, therefore governments are capable of consistently improving them using taxes, subsidies, rules and regulations. The concept of market failure is never taught without using it to study and justify government intervention in markets, implicitly or explicitly defining the government as a “social welfare maximizer.”
It is this idea, that the imperfection of markets is easily improved by government intervention, that Milei is imploring us not to endorse.
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In general, governments are not social welfare maximizers. They are personal welfare maximizers, just like the firms involved in market failures. More accurately, they are large collections of personal welfare maximizers who are loosely aligned and constrained by lots of internal and external forces.
Best AI Posts
These two posts are best read as a pair. I think they much more solid and less hyperventilating foundation for thinking about advanced AI than many of the rationalist introductions to the topic.
My response to Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness.
There is more I could highlight but I’ll end the post here. Thank you all for reading and happy new year!
My personal favorite of your is "Don't Endorse the Idea of Market Failure." An extremely important topic and the perspective you so well present should be promoted far and wide. Thanks for writing an excellent post that I can easily point people to.
This juxtaposition between the FAA and DOT is an interesting distinction and worthy of discussion as regulatory design and burden are likely to be a hot topic in the next 18 months.
There is a mountain of evidence that the expansion of the regulatory state after 1970 slowed economic growth, and what we call “progress,” more generally.
There is, however, less consensus as to how we best design regulations and cull those that do not function as intended.
The approach that I have suggested is that all laws and regulations should come with a mandatory sunset period after five years. This shifts the default state: from one of constantly piling on new regulations to one of deletion.
The state will have to take action to justify the continuation of a regulation or law, which is harder than simply allowing a poorly designed regulation to continue in perpetuity.