My name is William Rinehart, but you can call me Will. I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity (CGO) at Utah State University, but I'm based in Washington D.C. I specialize in the public policy of technology and innovation, which includes regulation of telecom, Big Tech, competition, content, and innovation. Fundamentally, I am interested in expanding human flourishing, learning, and reforming institutions.

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Site organization

The menu at the top of this page includes the four major sections of my website as well as a link to my Substack newsletter called Exformation. My personal blog can be found via my posts. On my publications' page, I've got a list of all my work, op-eds, etc. My research page is designed as a digital garden, a place for ideas to grow and be harvested. Last but not least, all of my media can be found here.

You can find more information about me here.

Useful resources

For my research fellows, I created a reading list of key texts. It is easy to make your way through college without having to think. These are the texts that make me think. I also created a public policy cheatsheet.

If you're interested in housing policy, I put together a housing and urbansim FAQ. For economists using ChatGPT, check out my prompts. For a full list of datasets, resources, technical manuals, and the like, check out my commonplace. I'm also constantly updating my working bibliographies on social media research, philosophy of technology, and theorems of cognition.

My recent work

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is back in the news. In previous work on this topic from a couple years back, I broke down why AI job loss predictions are faulty and explained the technical reasons why mandating AI fairness always comes with costs. I recently published a much longer look at these topics in my filing to the NTIA on privacy equity and civil rights. I have also written about the pacing problem, which is constantly discussed.

I've been thinking a lot about how to reverse economic stagnation. I'm convinced the answer isn’t degrowth, the answer is abundance. Excessive vetos and inaction slow down development, so one of the big projects of our generation will be the dismantling of our system of vetocracy.

I just finished an estimation of the real extent of broadband availability in the US using data from Georgia. It is driven by an economic model I developed and is a central piece of my recent work in broadband.

I also have an ongoing series on the economics of the attention economy. One strand of this work charts the deep relationship between privacy on social media platforms and the value of the company. Another stand of this research uses the Facebook and Instagram blackout in late 2021 to understand how competition works in reality. Relatedly, I did a deep dive into teen mental health and the impact of social media. You might be surprised by what the research says, I was.

Recent posts