Abundance

A project needs to be quite profitable to make it through that gauntlet—and it needs to be acceptable to its wealthy neighbors—and that pushes developers toward luxury condos.

American policy has been focused on enacting what the historian Lizabeth Cohen calls “A Consumers’ Republic.”

In the 1930s, there were just 80,000 professors across all US universities;34 today there are more than 1.5 million.

Americans have long lionized the frontier. But our futures have largely been made in our cities.

“Each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies,” she writes. “The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on to.”

The high mark on the chart is in 1964, when 77 percent of the public believed that the government would do the right thing all or most of the time.

When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.

“We often forget that the country as a whole offered abundance in the form of fuel resources, mineral resources, bumper crops, industrial capacity, and the like, and provided the city as a locus for the transformation of this abundance into mobility,” Potter reminded his readers in People of Plenty. “More Americans have changed their status by movi

Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power.