Eli Dourado is an economist and policy researcher focused on identifying and removing the barriers to technological progress. He is best known for his work on the regulatory bottlenecks—from NEPA to the FDA—that stall advancements in geothermal energy, supersonic aviation, and medical innovation. This profile outlines his specific arguments for how policy reform can unlock a dramatically more abundant future.

Visual summary of operating lessons from Eli Dourado.

Part 1: The Great Stagnation and Economic Growth

  1. On the reality of the stagnation: "Since the early 1970s, the US has experienced a sustained slowdown in total factor productivity, marking a shift from an era of rapid physical innovation to one confined mostly to software." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  2. On the nature of growth: "We are privileged to be witnesses to the most dynamic and explosive phase of Earth's history yet—the economic growth phase. From here, faster economic growth means we get to see more of the saga." — Source: [Cato Unbound]
  3. On the limits of the digital world: "The internet and software have masked a deep technological stagnation in the world of atoms, where transportation, energy, and construction have seen minimal fundamental improvement in decades." — Source: [City Journal]
  4. On energy consumption and GDP: "We cannot achieve an abundant future without dramatically increasing our total energy consumption; decoupling GDP from energy usage is often a symptom of stagnation, not progress." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  5. On supply-side solutions: "If we wanted to raise American productivity, we could simplify geothermal permitting, deregulate advanced meltdown-proof nuclear reactors, and allow more immigration." — Source: [City Journal]
  6. On Baumol's cost disease: "The rising relative costs in sectors like healthcare and education are a direct mathematical consequence of our failure to drive labor productivity growth in those specific physical industries." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  7. On the ethical imperative of growth: "A deep concern for maximizing sustainable economic growth, properly understood, should be an essential element of any system of ethics that purports to care about universal human well-being." — Source: [Cato Unbound]
  8. On the purpose of policy: "Throughout my career, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what stalls progress and what to do about it to catalyze a more abundant future." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  9. On the productivity slowdown: "The structural deceleration in physical innovation is a policy choice, driven by an accumulation of vetocracies and risk-averse institutions rather than a depletion of scientific ideas." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  10. On curiosity for the long term: "I don't know what the next phase is, but my curiosity is insatiable. I want to see what happens next in the epic story of the irradiated rock in the Goldilocks zone near Sol." — Source: [Cato Unbound]

Part 2: Advanced Geothermal and Energy Abundance

  1. On the scale of the resource: "There is 23,800 times as much geothermal energy in Earth's crust as there is chemical energy in fossil fuels everywhere on the planet." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  2. On geothermal versus fusion: "Fusion is the only energy resource that is bigger than geothermal. Geothermal is, in terms of the amount of energy in Earth's crust, about 40 times bigger than all the fissionable material on the planet." — Source: [TAE Technologies]
  3. On regulatory double standards: "To approve an oil and gas well on federal land takes two weeks; to approve the exact same kind of well for geothermal energy takes two years. These are all the results of policy decisions." — Source: [City Journal]
  4. On leveling the playing field: "Give geothermal the same permitting concessions, such as categorical exclusions under NEPA, that are currently granted to oil and gas on public lands." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  5. On retrofitting coal plants: "Piping steam from a geothermal production well straight into a coal plant turbine would allow the power plant to produce the same amount of electricity as it did under coal, except with no fuel costs and no carbon emissions." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  6. On next-generation drilling: "By adapting the advanced drilling techniques and subsurface engineering developed during the shale revolution, we can unlock geothermal energy anywhere, not just near natural hot springs." — Source: [PERC]
  7. On supercritical geothermal: "Reaching depths where water reaches a supercritical state could yield wells that produce ten times the power of conventional geothermal wells, fundamentally altering the economics of base-load power." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  8. On land footprint: "Geothermal energy is cheap, compact, safe, non-polluting, reliable, inexhaustible, and unconstrained by geography, requiring a fraction of the surface land area compared to solar and wind." — Source: [PERC]
  9. On near-term viability: "Next-generation geothermal has the right mix of policy support, technology readiness, and resource size to make a massive contribution to abundant clean energy in the near future." — Source: [Eli Dourado]

Part 3: Supersonic Aviation and the Need for Speed

  1. On the overland supersonic ban: "The FAA's blanket ban on civilian supersonic flight over land acts as an arbitrary speed limit on human transportation and fundamentally restricts the market for faster aircraft." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  2. On replacing bans with standards: "Instead of a blanket ban, regulators should implement sensible noise-based standards, allowing booms of 85–90 decibels during daytime hours to enable the industry to work up the supersonic learning curve." — Source: [Mercatus Center]
  3. On the stagnation of flight: "Modern aviation is the poster child for economic stagnation; while flying has become safer and cheaper, commercial flight speeds have not increased since the introduction of the jet age in the 1950s." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  4. On speed as a superpower: "Faster travel expands human potential; cutting flight times in half functionally shrinks the globe, enabling tighter economic integration and personal mobility." — Source: [City Journal]
  5. On technological readiness: "We now have the aerodynamics, materials, and engine designs to build quiet and efficient supersonic aircraft, but these technologies sit unused because the regulatory framework makes them illegal to operate overland." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  6. On point-to-point suborbital travel: "Looking beyond supersonic, suborbital rockets could eventually transport passengers between any two points on Earth in under an hour, provided we don't preemptively regulate the concept out of existence." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  7. On urban air mobility: "Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft could drastically reduce urban commute times, but scaling them requires overhauling airspace management and local zoning for vertiports." — Source: [City Journal]
  8. On the failure of the Concorde: "The Concorde failed not just because of its fuel inefficiency, but because the overland ban halved its addressable market, preventing the economies of scale needed to drive down ticket prices." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  9. On the psychological effect of distance: "When a 14-hour flight across the Pacific is reduced to 6 hours, it changes a grueling ordeal into a routine day trip, fundamentally altering how we conduct business and maintain relationships." — Source: [Works in Progress]

Part 4: Regulatory Bottlenecks and NEPA Reform

  1. On the origins of NEPA: "The National Environmental Policy Act was designed as an informational tool for the government, but it evolved through the courts into a weaponized procedural requirement that blocks physical construction." — Source: [City Journal]
  2. On the irony of environmental law: "Statutes created to protect the environment in the 1970s are now the primary legal tools used by NIMBYs to halt the construction of the clean energy infrastructure required to decarbonize." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  3. On the cost of delay: "In infrastructure, time is money. A five-year delay for an environmental impact statement destroys the financial viability of private projects and massively inflates the cost of public ones." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  4. On the burden of litigation: "The true cost of NEPA is not just the paperwork, but the endless vulnerability to litigation, where any local opposition group can sue over the inadequacy of the environmental review to run out a project's funding." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  5. On categorical exclusions: "The most effective short-term fix for NEPA is for Congress to aggressively expand categorical exclusions for technologies we know we want, such as geothermal wells, transmission lines, and solar farms." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  6. On federal lands: "Because so much of the best solar, wind, and geothermal resources reside on federal land in the West, federal permitting reform is the unavoidable bottleneck for the energy transition." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  7. On legislative fixes: "We need Congress to set hard, un-litigable deadlines for environmental reviews, shifting the presumption from 'do not build' to 'build unless severe harm is proven.'" — Source: [City Journal]
  8. On page limits and timelines: "Mandating page limits and strict timelines for environmental impact statements is a start, but courts must be barred from halting projects simply because an agency missed a minor procedural step." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  9. On the administrative state: "Agencies have become so fearful of judicial review that they create thousand-page, bulletproof documents for minor projects, paralyzing the very state capacity required to govern." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  10. On state-level equivalents: "States with their own environmental review acts, like CEQA in California, compound the federal problem, turning the act of building a simple apartment complex or transit line into a decade-long legal battle." — Source: [City Journal]

Part 5: The Space Economy and Falling Launch Costs

  1. On the drop in launch costs: "The transition from expendable rockets to reusable boosters has driven the cost of accessing low Earth orbit down by an order of magnitude, functioning as the foundational catalyst for the modern space economy." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  2. On Starship's payload capacity: "A fully reusable, super-heavy lift vehicle like Starship doesn't just make existing satellites cheaper to launch; it changes the engineering constraints, allowing us to build heavier, less fragile spacecraft." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  3. On space manufacturing: "Zero-gravity and high-vacuum environments offer unique manufacturing capabilities, from perfect fiber optics to 3D-printed organs, which only become economically viable when launch and return costs fall." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  4. On asteroid mining: "While currently a sci-fi concept, the presence of rare earth metals and platinum group elements in near-Earth asteroids could eventually end terrestrial resource scarcity, pending cheap enough transport." — Source: [City Journal]
  5. On space solar power: "Collecting solar power in orbit, where there is no night and no weather, and beaming it down via microwaves could provide unlimited baseload energy if launch costs drop below a few hundred dollars per kilogram." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  6. On regulatory frameworks for space: "We must ensure that the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is adequately funded and culturally aligned with speed, so that launch cadence is dictated by engineering, not permit approvals." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  7. On the commercialization of space: "The shift from cost-plus government contracts to commercial fixed-price services has forced aerospace companies to compete on execution and efficiency rather than political lobbying." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  8. On satellite mega-constellations: "Low Earth orbit satellite constellations are solving rural broadband connectivity globally, demonstrating the immediate consumer surplus generated by cheaper rockets." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  9. On property rights in space: "Establishing a clear, internationally recognized framework for resource extraction and property rights on the Moon and asteroids is a necessary precondition for heavy capital investment in space." — Source: [Mercatus Center]

Part 6: FDA Reform and Medical Innovation

  1. On the efficacy requirement: "The 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendment required the FDA to prove a drug is not only safe but efficacious; rolling this back would dramatically reduce the cost and time required to bring new therapeutics to market." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  2. On Phase III clinical trials: "The massive cost of Phase III trials ensures that pharmaceutical companies only pursue drugs for large, lucrative markets, leaving thousands of rare diseases permanently unaddressed." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  3. On the speed of COVID-19 vaccines: "The mRNA vaccines were designed in a weekend; the subsequent year of waiting was entirely a function of regulatory trial design, demonstrating that our biological capabilities now outpace our bureaucratic ones." — Source: [City Journal]
  4. On human challenge trials: "Allowing fully informed, consenting adults to participate in human challenge trials would accelerate vaccine development by months, saving countless lives during pandemics at minimal risk to volunteers." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  5. On the cost of drug development: "When the average cost to bring a new drug to market exceeds a billion dollars, we are mathematically capping the number of new treatments society can invent." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  6. On off-label prescription: "The fact that doctors routinely and legally prescribe approved drugs for unapproved uses proves that physicians can evaluate efficacy independently; the FDA should focus purely on safety." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  7. On the invisible graveyard: "When regulators delay a lifesaving drug by five years to ensure it is perfectly safe, they are responsible for the 'invisible graveyard' of patients who died waiting for it." — Source: [Mercatus Center]
  8. On rapid diagnostic testing: "During the pandemic, the FDA actively blocked the rollout of cheap, at-home rapid antigen tests because they held them to the standard of high-accuracy clinical PCR tests, fundamentally misunderstanding the public health use-case." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  9. On right-to-try laws: "Terminally ill patients have nothing to lose; blocking their access to experimental therapeutics under the guise of protecting their health is both logically incoherent and morally cruel." — Source: [City Journal]
  10. On the conservatism of regulators: "FDA bureaucrats face massive asymmetric incentives: they are publicly excoriated if an approved drug causes harm, but face zero consequences for the lives lost when a good drug is delayed." — Source: [Institute for Progress]

Part 7: State Capacity and Institutional Reform

  1. On the decline of state capacity: "The American government has lost the ability to execute quickly on physical projects, transitioning from a state that built the Pentagon in 16 months to one that spends a decade studying a single subway extension." — Source: [City Journal]
  2. On planning versus building: "We have replaced a culture of building with a culture of planning. We hire consultants to write reports on how to mitigate impacts instead of hiring engineers to pour concrete." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  3. On civil service reform: "You cannot build a dynamic, fast-moving state apparatus when it is nearly impossible to fire underperforming bureaucrats and highly difficult to hire top-tier engineering talent." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  4. On procurement and contracting: "The federal procurement process is designed to prevent graft at the expense of all efficiency, resulting in a system where only massive legacy contractors can navigate the compliance paperwork." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  5. On the culture of risk aversion: "Agency leadership is overwhelmingly comprised of lawyers optimizing for legal defensibility, rather than technologists optimizing for mission success." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  6. On kludgeocracy: "Our policy apparatus is a complex web of overlapping veto points; clearing away the kludge is a prerequisite for rapid economic growth." — Source: [City Journal]
  7. On shifting away from vetocracies: "To build the future, we must systematically dismantle the vetocracy that allows any single angry stakeholder to halt infrastructure projects of national importance." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  8. On the role of policy entrepreneurs: "Think tanks and researchers must move beyond writing white papers about market failures and focus on writing highly specific, actionable statutory language that Congress can actually pass." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  9. On talent in government: "If we want agencies like the FAA or the NRC to foster innovation rather than stifle it, they must be staffed by people who genuinely believe in the moral necessity of the technologies they regulate." — Source: [Eli Dourado]

Part 8: Progress Studies and the Philosophy of Abundance

  1. On the definition of progress: "Progress is not an automatic force of nature; it is a mechanical process driven by individuals solving specific bottlenecks in science, technology, and institutions." — Source: [Works in Progress]
  2. On the cultural mood: "We have allowed a pervasive cultural pessimism to convince us that the future will be worse than the past, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it infects our policy choices." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  3. On technological determinism: "Technology does not just happen to us. The trajectory of innovation is highly dependent on our regulatory choices, funding models, and societal tolerance for risk." — Source: [City Journal]
  4. On the abundance agenda: "The core of the abundance agenda is removing artificial scarcity in housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare to drastically raise the baseline standard of living for everyone." — Source: [The Atlantic]
  5. On demographics and innovation: "An aging, shrinking population is a massive headwind for innovation; maintaining economic dynamism requires an aggressive expansion of high-skill immigration." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  6. On science funding reform: "The NIH and NSF rely heavily on peer-review consensus, which systematically starves high-risk, high-reward research. We need alternative funding mechanisms that act more like venture capital for science." — Source: [Institute for Progress]
  7. On immigration and human capital: "The most obvious arbitrage in the global economy is moving a brilliant engineer from a poor country to the United States; the fact that we cap this via H-1B limits is a massive unforced error." — Source: [Center for Growth and Opportunity]
  8. On optimism as a strategy: "Optimism is not a naive belief that things will automatically get better, but a working hypothesis that our problems are solvable through human ingenuity and hard work." — Source: [Eli Dourado]
  9. On the ultimate goal: "The end goal of progress studies is not just more GDP on a spreadsheet, but a world where humanity has expanded its capabilities, cured its diseases, and unlocked the universe." — Source: [Cato Unbound]