“Drug development is highly regulated, so people don’t like to deviate from paths with which they have experience.”

In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk twenty feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality. San

democracy by lawsuit. The number of lawyers and cases soared in the 1970s and 1980s.

Housing is often spoken of as a safe investment, but it’s not. Homes rise in price when there are too few of them to go around.

liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than with outcomes,

In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.48

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.

We papered over the affordability crisis9 with low prices for consumer goods, soaring asset values that kept richer Americans happy, and mountains of debt: housing debt and student-loan debt and medical debt that kept the working class semi-afloat.

If crisis is the ultimate push-and-pull mechanism—both galvanizing action and rewarding success—we must remember that it is always up to us to decide what counts as a crisis.