Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Caleb Watney,
who's the director of innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.
And he's recently written a piece of the Atlantic arguing that America's innovation engine is slowing.
So before we get into the weeds, Caleb,
do you want to describe the main reasons why you think America's innovation engine is slowing?
Sure.
Yeah, America's innovation engine is, of course, a very broad and multivariate, you know,
But I was trying to focus on three particular trends that I thought were troubling make a major impacts on America's ability to innovate and just briefly those are basically a high skill.
immigration, international talent flows.
Number two, our cutting edge university system that's really the best of the world.
And three, the industrial clusters,
the agglomerations that we have that are sort of the geographical regions where a lot of this innovation comes from.
And each of those, we're sort of seeing maybe negative trends before the pandemic,
but the pandemic might serve as kind of a breaking point in each of them.
Okay, so let's start with remote work first.
Or at least the agglomeration effects first.
Now,
what is so important about the physical agglomeration effects of being in these high productivity cities?
Why can't remote work make up for that?
Sure.