Contrary to the libertarian beliefs of many tech investors, rising living standards often depend in large part on a robust state role, explains venture capitalist and economist William Janeway. The public sector has been indispensible in advancing transformative innovations, and must remain so by making massive investments in science and technology, often sustained over decades, and using its power of procurement to create new markets for nascent products.

A surprising number of people seem to be freaking out about an imminent takeover by robots. It’s true that only at the fringe is anyone suggesting a Matrix-style dystopia where the machines rise up and enslave us. But the commonly-expressed conviction that technological innovation will immiserate broad segments of society is only somewhat less irrational.

The last decade was a lost one for the American middle class. It came on the heels of three decades of frozen wages. We have entered the Great Stagnation.

So goes the drumbeat. But when you look around, everyone seems richer. "If our obvious material affluence seems difficult to square with various narratives of economic decline," writes Brookings economist Scott Winship in a major new essay for Breakthrough Journal, "that's because it doesn't."

Nostalgia for the boom economic growth years of the 1950s and 1960s is misplaced. Americans of all classes have grown materially richer every decade since. The lower growth rates today are a function of the slower metabolism of large economies, not a sign that American capitalism is fundamentally broken. Higher rates of economic growth might be desirable, but whether or not they materialize, the stagnation discourse misrepresents the country's economic health. We will be better at solving unemployment and poverty by starting from the recognition that rising prosperity remains the norm of American economic life.

I wrote recently about the American Economics Association panel called "What do economists think about major public policy issues?" Actually, I only talked about one of the two papers presented there; the other was by Luigi Zingales, and was entitled "Comparing Beliefs of Economists and the Public."

Zingales either performed a survey or reviewed a survey (I can't remember which) that compared economists' and non-economists' positions on policy issues. The paper found quite a bit of disagreement, but here's the really interesting part: When normal people were told the position of the economists, they changed their positions in the opposite direction.

Conversations about innovation in the United States are rife with the adversarial language of exceptionalism. Take, for example, a recent article by Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, in Forbes. In his eyes, America’s success as an innovation powerhouse can be traced to a “can-do attitude” that “treats failure as a learning experience,” a free and democratic society that “rewards savvy risk takers,” and an educational system that pushes students to question, not memorize. In a move that would make Steve Jobs proud, never once is any involvement in innovation by the federal government mentioned – American successes come from these exceptional Americans. By contrast, “the Chinese have a long tradition of copying others, not… having a culture that even recognizes [intellectual property], and a bias towards conformism.”

What’s the latest threat to opportunity in America? Toll lanes. Or so Dan Sarewitz argues in a recent piece at The Breakthrough about new high occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes on the Washington DC Beltway. He claims, “market rationality imposed on roadways that all people depend on for their livelihoods and social lives means that poor people will be increasingly required to travel more slowly than those with more money.”