Stimulus Ideas

Vox Stimuli: Ideas from the Blogosphere

Just imagine. A half-trillion dollars (or maybe more) pops up in your bank account along with an assignment: Your job is to spend that money on the country's behalf, jump-starting the sick economy and creating jobs. Where do you begin?

Over the last seven weeks, we've been raising that question—the same one the Obama Administration and Congress are wrestling with as they craft a massive economic stimulus package. We reached out across social media—from Facebook and Twitter to our new blog, Vox Stimuli—for ideas and asked experts in science, technology, and medicine to pick a dream project or two.

Why all the brainstorming? Before this crisis, most of us trusted an economy run largely by market forces. Money flowed toward winning ideas. But now government officials are stepping in. With the new tools of social media, the officials can tap a marketplace brimming with smart suggestions. The Obama team is gathering thoughts on everything from green energy to barter on its Change.org Web site. Our experiment focuses on stimulus spending. The ideas have poured in, some with dazzling visions. Manned mission to Mars, anyone? But there's plenty of hard-nosed pragmatism, too.

The big divide centers on two goals—think of them as "Today" and "Tomorrow." Those focusing on Today look at the urgent need to pump money into the economy and create jobs. That spending flows to things we already know how to build—and have been building for decades: roads, bridges, schools.

Hold on, says the Tomorrow crowd (which is much more numerous in our sample). For these people, the current crisis presents a golden opportunity to invest in next-generation projects that promise to make us safer, smarter, cleaner, healthier, and more competitive. They push for digital medical records or research into solar power.

You'll see this tension between Today and Tomorrow in the comments that follow. They may well foreshadow the political debates of the coming months. To organize these insights, we've divided them into four groups: Smart Infrastructure, Simple Stuff, Urgent Needs, and Visions.

—By Stephen Baker and Deborah Stead

Smart Infrastructure: The Tech Is Already Here

"Overhaul our nation's electricity grid, enabling smart meters and home control to conserve energy. The tech's there, we're not." - Patrick Dixon

"Water organizations in the U.S. are incredibly fragmented—and so is the information they have to manage, whether it's about water usage, availability, quality, snow pack, levee status, or ecosystem health. My hunch is that some large proportion of anything we spend on water infrastructure will be wasted if we do not attend to the information systems." - Peter Williams

"Smart highways. New infrastructure investment needs to include not only the technologies of the 20th century—shovels, steel, and concrete—but also those that take us into the 21st century. To manage congestion and incidents, traffic engineers make use of lane control to close highway lanes as needed; however, only 6% of freeway miles have the technology to permit lane control.

"Modern technologies...are available now. They do not require shovels, for the most part, but rather computer chips, algorithms, communication networks, etc. They are also in many cases implemented widely already in other developed countries around the world." - Laura Wynter

"Create a cyberinfrastructure that would create transparency and accountability [among] federal, state, and local governments and the private sector. The objectives, cost, payoff, and risk of each element should be monitored and reported." - Brenda

FROM THE EXPERTS

"We need to emphasize smarter roads—sensors that detect 'nonrecurring' traffic disruptions (the cause of an estimated one-third of traffic delays), for instance, and intelligent traffic signals and speed limits that react to changing conditions." - Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic

"While the primary purpose of the economic recovery package will be to motivate job creation and the economy in a one- to two-year period, it is equally important to include measures that generate growth and prosperity for many years to come. A carefully constructed federal investment of $20 billion to $36 billion in education technology, in schools, can meet the short-term stimulus requirements and strengthen our economy for the long term." - Jim Goodnight, Founder, Analytics Software Developer SAS

"For 'shovel-ready' infrastructure projects, include features that will bring health. If we're building roads, add bike paths. For buildings, put in open stairwells to encourage people to move—and windows so they can enjoy the sunlight. For 'wire-ready' projects, build a seamless network between our health system and our citizens. People would have access to their records. Municipalities would have access to health information." - Julie Gerberding, Outgoing Director, Centers for Disease Control