And based on the internal math of the show, George Jetson, the dad, was born in 2022. There were a lot of future-trippers in the 1960s, and most of them would be pretty disappointed by how that future turned out. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying that decade in my work, trying to understand why America is so bad at building today. So Pethokoukis and I are asking similar questions and circling the same period, but from very different ideological vantages. “The two screamingly obvious things that we stopped doing is we stopped spending on science, research and development the way we did in the 1960s,” he tells me, “and we began to regulate our economy as if regulation would have no impact on innovation.”

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Persons: ”, George Jetson, He’d, I’ve, James Pethokoukis, “, Ezra Klein Organizations: Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, American Enterprise Institute, Conservative Locations: America