 A lot of gloom and doom types say that we're living in dark times. I disagree. Take a breath. It's a great time to be alive. Sure, there are problems, but people have never been as healthy, as wealthy, or as happy as they are today. Just in the past few decades, more than a billion people have been lifted out of dire poverty. What's causing all this awesomeness? Look, for centuries, the dominant policy idea was mercantilism. It was a terrible idea. Its main tenet was to accumulate within your national borders as much money as possible. That's right, to accumulate money like a miser. Yet that was the best policy idea we had. Then suddenly, ideas started sparking all across Europe. One of those ideas created modern economics. And economics, in turn, fuels other changes. One of the best was the elimination of the corn laws in Great Britain. It took a reform movement in the mid-19th century to end those tariffs, which was starving many of the masses by unnecessarily raising the cost of their daily bread. Fortunately, tariffs continued to fall in the 20th century, allowing world trade to boom and living standards to keep rising. We learned economics in smaller ways as well. For example, we tried wage and price controls, but as economists predicted, they utterly failed. So we stopped that, mostly. Auctioning off the airwaves seemed like a crazy idea when it was first proposed. Until it was tried, it put billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury and now governments from around the world copy it. The explosion of the Internet would not have happened were it not for a policy framework developed in the 1990s that allowed for permissionless innovation. Look, the world has never been better than it is today. Yet we know that it can be better still. So what are the policy changes today that will lead to an even better tomorrow? Have we got some ideas for you?