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Ed Tarnowski is a senior contributor and was part of our most recent iteration of our Tech and Innovation Fellowship. Since his time in that fellowship, he has become a Tech and Innovation Fellow through the R Street Institute.
Ed Tarnowski’s Impact Interview:
You were in the most recent cohort of the Tech and Innovation Fellowship. How has your time in this fellowship and the Young Voices Contributor Program impacted your career?
The Young Voices Tech and Innovation Fellowship had a profound impact on my career. The opportunity to regularly meet with and ask questions of industry engineers and experts sharpened my knowledge and background on topics spanning the tech world.
You've written a lot in your career about education policy, but also recently you've dug more into tech and AI issues. How do you view the relationship between these two fields?
Education reform remains a passion of mine, and I’m proud of my contributions to advancing universal educational choice. In five years, America went from having no states with a truly universal private school choice program to 19 states offering one with universal eligibility and five achieving true universality.
The relationship between the two is strong, and the fundamentals of effective reform are the same. Trust in markets and decentralization over concentrating power and decisions in the hands of a few is the path forward for the ever-evolving environments that encapsulate both of these issue areas. At the end of the day, a free marketplace is simply the free and mutually beneficial exchange between parties and individuals, and naturally, this both encourages healthy competition and is inseparable from freedom itself. It is a better system for anticipating and adjusting to the unique wants and needs of individuals.
Further, as educational choice continues to grow more robust, emerging technologies will only continue playing a larger role. In a system of choice, where education funding is moving with students over arbitrary districts, teachers and entrepreneurs are encouraged and rewarded for developing different approaches to education. Those who develop the best ideas for educating kids will win out.
Oftentimes, this includes the integration of emerging technologies. AI, for example, is democratizing access to education and information in ways previously unimaginable. And history tells us running away from emerging technology only stands to leave those who do behind. Embracing new tech and ideas will help prepare the next generation for this rapidly changing world.
Which media placement that the Young Voices content team helped you place are you most proud of?
My piece, How LEO Satellite Internet Can Help Break Iran’s Blackout in The National Interest is my proudest. The piece draws on how a robust and free American private sector is not a liability to national security, but essential to it.
Starlink and now Amazon Leo, both primarily privately funded ventures, are upending the status quo for global internet freedom. Soon, there will be no place on Earth lacking access to fast and reliable broadband, and it will make it increasingly difficult for tyrants everywhere to weaponize internet censorship against freedom loving people.
In the case of Iran, the Islamic Republic was successfully able to keep its population largely in the dark with its 88-day internet blackout, and this regime has used this tactic against its population many times. The few who were able to stay online did so through varying tactics, with Starlink being one of the most prominent of the tools, and much of the limited free information that was able to get in and out of the country during the blackout wouldn’t have been able to move without Starlink.
LEO-satellite internet service is rapidly becoming more reliable and robust, and emerging direct-to-cell technology is especially poised to make it more difficult for authoritarian regimes to keep entire populations offline for long periods of time. And the now-competitive American LEO satellite internet industry will only accelerate the innovation advancing in this space.
This year, you accepted a new role as a Tech and Innovation Fellow at the R Street Institute. Could you talk about that a bit and tell us what you're most excited about in the job?
Two months into the role, I wake up every day excited to get to work. The last few years of technological innovation are setting up a future of once-unimaginable opportunities for human prosperity, and being at the forefront of advancing ideas that will enable this innovation to thrive is a privilege.
Still, with any emerging technology comes both with those who fear it and those seeking to exploit those fears to advance an agenda. AI is already advancing decisive medical breakthroughs, democratizing access to educational resources, and enabling entrepreneurs to offload tasks that empower them to put more energy into the things that most advance innovation.
Still, fears persist, and so do policy proposals that risk smothering this human advancement. Tiering and restricting access to American frontier AI models, for example, is gaining in popularity, despite evidence cutting against relevant fears and our adversaries pushing forward on their own development regardless of U.S. policy on who may access these models. The better bet to prepare for this evolving landscape is not to create a committee made up of bureaucrats and politicians to decide its future, but to entrust the many engineers building these models across firms and countless consumers choosing the best models across industries.
In short, what excites me most about being in this role is working to ensure this generation and the next can all enjoy the unprecedented prosperity this new age of tech is poised to offer should we allow it to do so by keeping it free and unleashed.
What advice would you give to young professionals hoping to maximize their public policy influence?
Being believers in free markets puts us against much of what is in vogue, particularly among much of Gen Z. Nevertheless, the evidence of what works is on the side of capitalism. It is our job to make this case in an approachable way.
I’ll use the housing crisis as an example. It is largely a problem not of greedy, comic-book like villains, but basic supply and demand. Government zoning and regulation has and is getting in the way of enabling developers to meet housing demand, and it’s making it difficult for young people to afford housing.
It is easy for the left to exploit this, and New York is one of the most recent and stark examples. On the campaign trail, Zohran Mamdani messaged heavily using policies like “freeze the rent,” as the state and city’s incumbent leaders failed to take enough action to address housing affordability. Freezing the rent, of course, will not fix housing affordability, and is on track to worsen it. Still, Mamdani was talking about one of the issues New York City voters cared about most, and on the surface, his misguided policies appeared to address this issue for many.
The antidote to this brand of politics is offering and messaging effective solutions. Cutting red tape and zoning reform would go a long way in addressing this issue, and as we’ve seen in the examples of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Austin, Texas, these reforms work. In both of those places, housing supply is up and rents are down. Decades of data tell us Mamdani’s won’t.
The secret weapon here is that the evidence is on the side of free markets. Breaking down the contrast between what works and what doesn’t (as I wrote in RealClearPolitics, the Socialist Hypothesis has been well tested and falsified from about a century of real-life data now) in a way that is accessible to the Average Joe, and then letting the results speak for themselves, is powerful. Be the adult in the room, have your bases covered on the data, and be cautious about overusing jargon.
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