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, a broad portfolio that 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!
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