"How to Spend a Trillion Dollars"

My new essay - in a new magazine

Dear Readers,

Today, I want to share a new piece I’ve written for Arena Magazine, a new publication co-founded with my colleague Max Meyer. Arena is a magazine about America, with a focus on technology and capitalism. It covers the big innovations of our time, and how we can channel them to build a great future.

Unfortunately, much of the legacy tech media has fallen; journalists attack instead of being interested and excited about new possibilities. Publications take a pessimistic stance, instead of the informed optimism we once had in publications like Scientific American and Wired in the 1990s.

New media companies like Arena are critical for the future of our civilization, and I’m confident it’s possible to build higher-quality media that inspires us once again.

I wrote the headline essay for the second issue. It’s called “How to Spend a Trillion Dollars.” This is a long read for the weekend, exploring some bold and unorthodox ideas for public projects. It’s one of many essays in the second issue of Arena, which is published in print in early November.

Below, you can read the first section. And you can subscribe to the Arena newsletter for free. If you sign up for a paid subscription, you can read the article in print! For being a reader of this blog, you can get 30% off your first year of magazines by using the code “LONSDALE” at checkout. You can also get a discounted copy of the first issue, which came out in August.

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Arena Magazine: How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you got a dozen of the top entrepreneurs in the United States together in a room — people who lean to the left, right, and center, and who built the top American companies — and asked them to make a plan: how would they spend a trillion dollars? I’m not talking about buying artwork or planes, or the types of things lottery winners might spend a new fortune on. Rather, how would they spend public money to strengthen the future of American society? And suppose, further, that you could skip the red tape. How would it be different from the way we currently spend trillions?

I am fortunate to know dozens of the top entrepreneurs in the United States. And I can tell you this for sure: if they were involved, the difference wouldn’t just be in what we fund, but how we decide what to fund. Programs would have to compete against one another, a sort of policy gladiator competition. The people that can competently administer programs and achieve goals would get rewarded commensurate with their achievement. Those who cannot would get fired. Funding would be based on outcomes, not promises. 

There would still be huge differences in perspective among entrepreneurs, to be sure. But having spent my life in entrepreneurship and policy, it’s reasonable to say that it would be much more interesting and productive than the showmanship that happens between lawyers and career politicians in Washington. 

“But Joe — we’re 35 trillion in debt! We don’t have anything left to spend on this thought experiment.”

We agree. But the current drunken-sailor spending isn’t a thought experiment. It’s a reality. We spent $6 trillion on Afghanistan and Iraq. Pandemic spending totaled over $5 trillion. We allocate about $800 billion for the Pentagon every year, and much more than that for healthcare and entitlements. By the end of the decade, interest alone will cost our government over $1 trillion annually. Spending in 2023 totaled over $6 trillion — compared to just $4.45 trillion in 2019. And with cronyism abounding — hundreds of billions funneled to NGOs and other corrupt nonsense — imagine a world in which we spent just some of that money more competently. Instead of another $5 trillion, just $1 trillion (technically $0.9 trillion). 

Just to give you a sense of what might be possible with money that our government spends every few months: Elon Musk estimates that for $1 trillion, we could move enough mass to Mars over several decades to build a self-sustaining colony there — if Starship can achieve 1000x cost efficiency over the rockets of the twentieth century through reusability. SpaceX has spent under $10 billion developing Starship.

My spending bias is in favor of liberty; the ethical thing for governments to do is take as little as money as possible, and leave as much as possible to citizens to use as they see fit. It’s especially unethical for the government to use tax money in ways that are less competent than citizens freely spending it. Imagine the futile cries of control-freak bureaucrats screaming that this isn’t allowed — that they are the ones that decide how money is spent, now and forever. Imagine!

So, without further ado: How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, presented in nine parts.

Read the full piece: Arena Magazine: How to Spend a Trillion Dollars