America's gerontocracy shelters housing wealth and slows innovation

12 articles on state capacity, housing growth, Bidenomics industrial policy, innovation prizes, and more.

Highlights

🏛 State Capacity: America’s gerontocracy shelters housing wealth and slows innovation

🏡 Housing: Conservative areas build more housing overall, but liberal areas add more of it where people already live

🏭 Industrial Policy: Bidenomics created an American developmental state, not just derisked investment

🧪 Innovation: Innovation prizes work best when we can actually measure what they do

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🏛 State Capacity

• America’s gerontocracy shelters housing wealth and slows innovation
  Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It—Samuel Moyn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026)
  An economy built around sheltering housing and financial assets concentrates wealth among older Americans, while the gray lobby dominates the policy agendas that preserve that arrangement. The result is a country that was once oriented toward innovation and problem-solving but has reoriented around caretaking and asset protection—blocking generational renovation and the dynamism that comes with it. Proposals include age limits for officeholders, mandatory retirement, and reimagining old age as a time to step aside rather than hoard.

• IEP paperwork is a universal driver of special education teacher burnout
  Retention of Elementary Special Education Teachers: A Phenomenological Study of Retention Factors and Work-Life Balance in Brick-and-Mortar and Virtual Settings—Meredith Clark-Lewis (doctoral dissertation)
  The administrative burden of Individual Education Program paperwork emerged as a universal factor shaping both retention and work-life balance for elementary special education teachers, across both in-person and virtual school settings.

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🏡 Housing

• Conservative areas build more housing overall, but liberal areas add more of it where people already live
  The Paradox of Housing Supply Growth: Conservative Sprawl and Liberal Infill in the 21st-Century United States—Yonah Freemark (Housing Policy Debate)
  From 2000 to 2020, new housing disproportionately went to sparsely developed greenfield areas in higher-income, conservative Sunbelt locales with Republican-led state legislatures. But infill growth told the opposite story: liberal cities, counties, and metro areas outside the Sunbelt were more likely to add housing in already-developed places, and residents of liberal areas were more likely to live near new construction. The conventional narrative that liberal coastal cities simply block building misses the distinction between total supply and where that supply goes relative to existing residents.

• When LIHTC prices drop, cities eat the cost of federal tax decisions they didn’t make
  Cheap Credit: LIHTC Price Shocks and the Fiscal Cost on New York City—David Ni (Columbia University)
  City housing agencies function as shock absorbers for federal tax-policy decisions over which they have no authority. The federal government sets corporate tax rates, competing credits, and bond rules that determine what investors will pay for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits—but when those prices erode, cities bear the financing gap. Post-2016 corporate tax reform, expanding renewable energy credits, and bond-rule changes compressed equity bids to roughly $0.85 per credit dollar nationally by mid-2025, producing per-unit shortfalls of $14,000 to $27,000 and aggregate annual gaps of $42–$81 million for New York City alone.

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🏭 Industrial Policy

• Bidenomics created an American developmental state, not just derisked investment
  The Return of Industrial Policy and the No-Longer Hidden Developmental State in the United States—Erez Maggor (Politics & Society)
  CHIPS, the IRA, and the IIJA did more than subsidize private investment. They introduced directionality (targeting strategic sectors and regions), conditionality (tying aid to social objectives), and politicization (making industrial policy a visible site of contestation)—features absent from earlier hidden industrial policy.

• Government-guided funds cure SOE risk aversion by strengthening ties to the state, not just providing capital
  Do Government-Guided Funds Increase Corporate Risk-Taking? Evidence from China—Mingming Wen and Quan Chen (Finance Research Letters)
  State-owned enterprises in China take significantly more risk after receiving government-guided fund investment. Government-Guided Funds work by strengthening firms’ ties to government agencies, which gives SOE managers political cover for bolder strategic choices that bureaucratic constraints would otherwise inhibit. Private firms show no comparable effect, suggesting the intervention specifically counteracts the risk aversion built into state ownership structures.

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🧪 Innovation

• Innovation prizes work best when we can actually measure what they do
  Innovation Inducement Prizes: Connecting Research to Policy—Heidi Williams (working paper, MIT/NBER)
  The America COMPETES Act gave every federal agency authority to offer innovation prizes, but the evidence base for designing them well is thin. Prizes complement rather than replace patents, and their effectiveness hinges on credible empirical evaluation—something almost no prize program has done.

• The America Invents Act boosted patenting, but unevenly across firm sizes and sectors
  Essays on the Role of Economic Policy in Shaping Innovation—Marlo M. Vasquez Gonzalez (doctoral dissertation)
  Switching from first-to-invent to first-to-file under the 2011 America Invents Act increased overall patenting, but small firms and solo inventors responded most. Effects varied sharply by sector, with the strongest gains in software, computers, and electronics. Separately, Chinese EV adoption subsidies only spurred upstream battery innovation when paired with charging infrastructure investment.

• After Bayh-Dole, university inventors started hiding the ball in their own patents
  Patenting and Information Disclosure—Xizhao Wang (doctoral dissertation)
  Patents are supposed to disclose how an invention works in exchange for exclusivity. But after the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act and the rise of Technology Transfer Offices, university-affiliated inventors made the detailed technical descriptions in their patents significantly less readable—while leaving summary sections unchanged. The pattern suggests strategic obfuscation of core techniques rather than across-the-board complexity, limiting the knowledge spillovers that patents are designed to produce.

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⚡ Permitting

• EV charger permitting varies wildly and lacks basic clarity
  A Data-Driven Framework for Evaluating EV Charging Station Permitting Processes Using Large Language Models—Ranjit R. Desai et al. (preprint, National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
  Using large language models to scrape and standardize permitting requirements across jurisdictions, a scoring framework found that most local authorities provide low-detail, inconsistent project requirements—delaying EV infrastructure deployment and raising soft costs.

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🤖 Technology & Regulation

• AI could help immigrants prepare for legal proceedings without replacing lawyers
  AI for Good: Expanding Legal Services for Immigrants—Huyen Pham and Bryan Garcia (Rutgers University Law Review)
  Rather than replacing attorneys, client-facing AI tools could prepare immigrants for asylum interviews, deliver targeted know-your-rights information, and streamline intake—tasks that currently consume scarce legal aid resources. The essay envisions apps for interview preparation, naturalization guidance, and initial case organization, while acknowledging that legal determinations still require human judgment.

• Opposition to drone delivery is driven by bystander privacy, not user concerns
  Not in My Backyard? Bystanders’ Privacy Calculus and the Social Acceptance of Drone Delivery—Gianluca Maria Guazzo, Pierangelo Rosati, and Theo Lynn (AMCIS 2026)
  Drone delivery faces adoption barriers from people who aren’t even using the service. Bystanders exposed to drone surveillance without being part of the transaction weigh privacy costs differently from customers—a distinction current regulatory frameworks largely ignore.