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.

The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country.

To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built.

Too many see clearly the costs that dirty energy can impose on the environment but do not dare imagine the possibilities clean and abundant energy unlocks for

“To defeat the human need for face-to-face contact, our technological marvels would need to defeat millions of years of human evolution that has made us into machines for learning from the people next to us,” Glaeser writes.”21

But progress is more about implementation than it is about invention.

Los Angeles, fewer homes were built in the seventies than in the sixties, fewer in the eighties than in the seventies, and fewer in the nineties than in the eighties, even as the city’s overall population grew,”

Sometimes these blockages reflect differences of beliefs or interests.

The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.