John Lettieri
@LettieriDC
Followers
7K
Following
16K
Media
1K
Statuses
7K
Co-founder @InnovateEconomy
Washington, DC
Joined August 2013
The administration has identified the right problem with H-1B (random lottery) and the right goal (get visas to higher-wage workers). Now they need to embrace the right mechanism: an age-adjusted wage ranking, which would boost the typical awardee’s salary to at least *$140k*.
What if I told you the administration is changing the H-1B visa program to prioritize event planners, landscape architects, and marriage counselors over Intel engineers, AI researchers, and pediatric surgeons? Sounds too insane to be true, but it's happening! 1/
3
2
13
What if I told you the administration is changing the H-1B visa program to prioritize event planners, landscape architects, and marriage counselors over Intel engineers, AI researchers, and pediatric surgeons? Sounds too insane to be true, but it's happening! 1/
53
154
889
Honored to have Steve Swanson and Garrett Reisman join Interplanetary Life 2025. What does it actually take to achieve permanent human presence on the Moon, Mars and Beyond? Thanks Steve and Garrett for helping cover everything from Propulsion to Food Production!
2
9
48
The English-speaking world’s struggles with housing policy get more and more nightmarish.
The government's Renters' Rights Bill looks like it will be a catastrophe, inadvertently introducing rent controls and reducing the supply of housing even more. It is the clearest evidence that the whole British state that has brought it about is completely broken: • Written
1
0
4
This is one of the most important points about the decline in fertility, and one of the less well-known. Fewer young people, means less fluid intelligence, less disruptive innovation (the sort that completely changes the direction of future research).
Total factor productivity growth is slowing down, but we have more patents than ever. What gives? Aakash Kalyani argues that if you look at the actual text of the patents, they’re getting less creative — a change likely caused by falling population growth. 1/
49
412
2K
Today we're announcing a six-year bipartisan effort expand American capacity and competitiveness by transforming how our government operates. It's called the Recoding America Fund, and you can read more about it below.
11
54
333
These people mean well, and most of them probably don’t realize they are calling for the creation of a coercive global entity to develop/oversee/control superintelligence, nor have they considered why that might not be a great idea.
A stunningly broad coalition has come out against Skynet: AI researchers, faith leaders, business pioneers, policymakers, NatSec folks and actors stand together, from Bannon & Beck to Hinton, Wozniak & Prince Harry. We stand together because we want a human future.
1
0
4
your book entitled "the future of the factory" is a degrowth love letter. opinion discarded.
This utter bullshit by the CTO of Palantir, Shyam Sankar, needs to be called out. The US never offered China “peaceful coexistence.” The US wanted China subordinated. They wanted China’s cheap labour inserted into their supply chains and its cheap goods to flow into the US
42
45
680
I correlate Zillow price data by number of bedrooms at the MSA level. There's a very strong correlation between prices across home sizes. Evidence against strong housing market segmentation by number of bedrooms. New 1 BR units ease tight 3+ BR markets for families.
this is a religious statement, not an empirical one. there are in fact no studies showing that adding any number of studio apartments has any specific effect on SFH prices! it might be true, but Patrick does not actually know it to be true.
8
21
119
.@tonykeller1 is out with a new book tomorrow that tells an eerily similar story in Canada, where the Trudeau government's undermining of the country's points-based system helped destroy a longstanding, pro-immigration consensus. Canada has long had higher rates of immigration
There is a great retrospective in the WSJ today on how the UK's post-Brexit experiment with big increases in legal immigration went wrong. Their mistakes yield some important policy lessons for supporters *and* critics of skilled immigration. Let's dive in: (tl;dr: What was
1
6
13
Worth noting that RIFs today are designed to retain federal employees based overwhelmingly on seniority and tenure, not performance. Whatever your ideal civil service size, letting the young + high-performing go first in layoffs is dumb. Let's fix it. https://t.co/9ByOe9buVQ
city-journal.org
Congress should intervene so future restructurings prioritize top performers.
0
3
8
If human capital is the lifeblood of an economy, noncompetes are a clog in the arteries. Abolish them.
Noncompete agreements reduce citation weighted patenting not just for startups, but also for the incumbent firms most likely to use them to secure their market advantage. States with stricter noncompete enforcement see an 8.6% decrease in patenting by firms over 10 years old,
0
1
4
On the contrary, we should be celebrating that wages are significantly higher today than pre-COVID *across the full distribution* of American workers. Tremendous achievement!
Since COVID, American workers have seen corporate wages skyrocket while theirs stagnate And now they have to compete against not only foreign labor, but also AI We need a revival of the American worker - and we need updated labor laws to see it through
3
6
35
Since 2009: - New housing stock is increasingly apartments. - More of those apartments are studios and one-beds. - And the two- and three-beds we do build are optimized for roommates, not families. @bobbyfijan thinks he can change that. https://t.co/2OdmTGt2L2
statecraft.pub
"Why is the fridge in a studio the same size as in the three-bedrooms?"
3
23
87
Reminiscent of Pritzker vetoing a popular bipartisan repeal of Illinois’s nuclear ban Hard to take these climate-hawkish governors seriously with decisions like these
Wow. Newsom refuses to sign a bill creating a categorical exemption from CEQA for geothermal exploration. Just terrible. A great shame.
5
7
69
The most important thing you’ll read today ⬇️
I got a PhD so I could ask ChatGPT if a bear is fat. Like Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, the team at EIG pitted human reasoning against the machine. But our arena wasn’t a chessboard, it was the salmon-filled rivers of Alaska. I give you: Fat Bear Week and the Fate of the World! 🐻🤖
0
1
1
Let's say you're a policymaker worried that AI or automation might lead to net negative outcomes in the labor market. You would definitely *not* want to make human labor significantly and arbitrarily more expensive, right? Ah, well, nevertheless.
3
3
37
Environmentalist orgs remain a huge threat to the environment. Today’s example: the League of Conservation Voters opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture, opposes NEPA reform, wants to add even more layers to the environmental review process, and supports a union jobs mandate.
1
3
12
I'm very proud release a project I've been working on for 18months: the *first* rigorous study on floorplans & families. ~10K person survey & 40pg paper on: Do floorplans matter to families, or people who want a baby? Turns out, YES! And having an *extra* bedroom matters MOST
29
75
649