For the previous few years, American politics have been organized round a easy, unnerving feeling: Life is getting too costly, and nobody appears to know what to do about it.
Hire and residential costs really feel out of attain. Little one care feels prefer it prices as a lot as a second mortgage. Groceries, utilities, and well being care have all climbed sooner than individuals’s paychecks. Politicians have reached for acquainted instruments — blaming company “greedflation,” flirting with worth controls and tariffs, promising to “tackle” whoever is handy in an election 12 months — however none of that will get to the deeper query: How will we make it genuinely simpler to construct, to work, and to reside properly in America?
For many of this nation’s historical past, we thought we knew the reply: progress. Which means a much bigger financial system, greater productiveness, cheaper and cleaner vitality, new know-how, and extra individuals in a position to take part in the entire above. Progress was the background assumption — not a panacea, however the factor that made each different downside slightly simpler to resolve.
Then, starting within the Seventies, that consensus began to interrupt. Financial progress slowed. Considerations about inequality, consumerism, and environmental injury mounted. A sure anti-growth mentality took root on each the left and the precise, and “extra” turned one thing to be eyed with suspicion moderately than embraced and steered.
There have been actual causes individuals had been cautious of a political challenge organized round “extra” — the environmental injury of fossil fuels, the expertise of being overlooked of previous booms, the sense that consumerism had stuffed our lives with stuff as a substitute of which means. However, in overcorrecting for the very actual errors of the previous, the US inadvertently locked itself right into a low-growth, high-friction establishment that has solely made our hardest issues tougher. That’s why we have to take sustainable progress severely once more, to maneuver from zero-sum fights over who will get what slice of a set pie to a world the place the pie is definitely greater. Not progress in any respect prices, however progress the sensible manner.
That’s the animating thought behind this challenge, The Case for Progress. Over the approaching weeks, in explainers, options, and podcast episodes, we’ll have a look at why our most efficient cities have been successfully locking out households and what it might take to open them up. We’ll think about what an period of unpolluted vitality abundance may unlock, from vertical farming to sci-fi local weather options. We’ll discover how advances in synthetic intelligence may lastly shake us out of a chronic productiveness droop and the way our habit to vehicles and meat is choking off extra sustainable progress. We’ll speak to consultants who make the case that progress can run facet by facet with insurance policies that forestall the worst of world warming.
In an period when a lot of our politics has been decreased to zero-sum arguments over who loses so another person can win, we need to reopen the potential of positive-sum progress — of constructing extra; inventing extra; and together with extra individuals in that story, whereas taking good care of the planet. Progress received’t resolve the whole lot, however with out it, nearly nothing will get solved at scale. The Case for Progress is our try and put that concept again into conservation as a part of a critical effort to make life extra reasonably priced, extra sustainable, and extra considerable within the US and much past.
This collection was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content material of this reporting.
