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"America was once the world's dream factory. We turned imagination into reality, from curing polio to landing on the Moon to creating the internet. And we were confident that more wonders lay just over the horizon: clean and infinite energy, a cure for cancer, humanoid robots, radical life extension, and space colonies. (Also, of course, flying cars.) Science fiction would become fact. But as we moved into the late 20th century, we grew cautious, even cynical, about what the future held and our ability to shape it. America became a "Down Wing" society. Too many of us saw only the threats from rapid change. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Downshift in economic growth and technological progress, followed by decades of economic stagnation, downsized dreams, and a popular culture fixated on catastrophe: nuclear war, environmental collapse, plague and the zombie apocalypse. We are now at risk of another half-century of making the same Down Wing mistakes and pushing a pro-progress "Up Wing" future into the realm of impossibility. But American Enterprise Institute (AEI) economic policy expert and long-time CNBC contributor James Pethokoukis argues that there's still hope. We can absolutely turn things around-if we choose to dream and act. How dare we delay or fail to deliver for ourselves and our children. With groundbreaking ideas and sharp analysis, Pethokoukis provides a detailed roadmap to a fantastic future filled with incredible progress and prosperity that is both optimistic and realistic. The Conservative Futurist invites readers to invent the future they want to live in and fight for a better tomorrow. Through an exploration of culture, history, and economics, Pethokoukis tells the fascinating story of what went wrong in the past and what we need to do today to finally get it right. Using the latest economic research and policy analysis, as well as conversations with top economists, historians, and technologists, Pethokoukis reveals that the failed futuristic visions of the past were totally possible. And they still are. If America is to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and launch itself into a shining tomorrow, it must again become a fully risk-taking, future-oriented Up Wing society. It's time for America to embrace the future confidently, act boldly, and take that giant leap forward."

Whenever the US economy experiences a nasty shock or extended period of sluggish growth, economists start speculating that maybe the good times really are over for good. Irrational exuberance quickly shifts to unreasonable pessimism about the ability of a market economy like America's to continue broadly raising living standards as it has in the past. This habit of mind is so ingrained that even an economist of so towering an intellect and such supreme self-confidence as former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers could not resist its gravitational pull. Back in November 2011, at a debate in Toronto, Summers had little patience with the idea that America risked becoming Japan, a nation whose economy was beginning its third consecutive lost decade, a period of stagnation and deflation. He conceded that the US economy was recovering only glacially from the Great Recession and Financial Crisis. But better times were just around the corner. Adapted from the source document.

What if the president of the United States had not proposed an $800 billion stimulus plan back in 2009 but one twice as large? That is the question haunting the intellectual left, led by the economist and columnist Paul Krugman, especially since the economy is mired in what might charitably be considered the doldrums. It slowed to a near-total halt in the first quarter of 2011 with a growth rate of 0.4 percent before climbing to a comatose 1.3 percent rate in the second. The what-if debate is not merely an intellectual exercise. It will have some effect on American policy going forward. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was Barack Obama's signature achievement in dealing with the most worrisome set of economic conditions since the Great Depression. Economic analysis from the White House credits the Recovery Act with having saved or created between 2.4 million and 3.6 million jobs by the end of March, 2011. But Republicans have a competing argument. Instead of saving us from a Greater Depression, the Obama stimulus (together with his health-care plan and financial reforms) was a two-year waste of precious time and money that may actually have impeded economic growth. Adapted from the source document.

The Federal Reserve's dramatic new intervention into the U.S. economy, a $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds, has the potential to look to voters like Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus: yet another example of government intervention in the economy that proved a spectacular failure. Adapted from the source document.