Abundance

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

The abundance we envision is not indiscriminate. It is not an omnidirectional moreness.

In her essay “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” Jerusalem Demsas, who covers housing at the Atlantic, traces the politics of treating homes as assets. 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. The greater the gap between supply and demand, the higher the r

Trumpism. In their book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocrat

It is not just that the politics we have will affect the technologies we develop. The technologies we develop will shape the politics we come to have. A world where renewable energy is plentiful and cheap permits a politics that is different than a world where it is scarce and pricey. A world where modular construction has brought down the cost of

How different this era is from the opening decades of the twenty-first century, which unspooled a string of braided crises. A housing crisis. A financial crisis. A pandemic. A climate crisis. Political crises. For years, we accepted homelessness and poverty and untreated disease and declining life expectancy. For years, we knew what we needed to bu

The toxicity of growth

Other times, our crises reflect the overhang of the past into the present.

In 1985, the great technology critic Neil Postman wrote, “to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”17 The corollary is also true: to have no program t