Will Rinehart 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.Find me on
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My projects I feel like I'm just now hitting my stride at CGO. 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. Finally, 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 . My research page is designed as a digital garden, a place for ideas to grow and be harvested. I maintain a commonplace , a set of research resources including stats reviews, R libraries, etc. All of my website tags are here . Here is a complete list of datasets . I have strong confidence about these political, philosophic, and economic statements , and I'm drafting lit reviews on social media research , philosophy of technology , and theorems of cognition, technology, and the social . As always, thanks for taking a look! Recent posts