For the past few years, American politics has been organized around a simple and disturbing sentiment: Life is getting too expensive, and no one seems to know what to do about it.
Rent and housing prices feel out of reach. It seems like child care costs as much as a second mortgage. Groceries, utilities and health care have increased faster than people’s salaries. Politicians have resorted to familiar tools (blaming corporate “inflationary greed,” flirting with price controls and tariffs, promising to “take on” whoever is convenient in an election year), but none of it gets to the deeper question: How do we do it? really easier Build, work and live well in the United States?
For most of this country’s history, we thought we knew the answer: growth. That means a bigger economy, higher productivity, cheaper and cleaner energy, new technology, and more people able to participate in all of the above. Growth was the underlying assumption: not a panacea, but what made all the other problems a little easier to solve.
Then, starting in the 1970s, that consensus began to break down. Economic growth slowed. Concerns about inequality, consumerism and environmental damage increased. A certain anti-growth mentality took hold on both the left and the right, and “more” became something to be looked at with suspicion rather than embraced and directed.
There were real reasons why people distrusted a political project organized around “more”: the environmental damage of fossil fuels, the experience of being left out of past booms, the sense that consumerism had filled our lives with stuff instead of meaning. But by overcorrecting for the very real mistakes of the past, America has inadvertently locked itself into a low-growth, high-friction status quo that has only made our toughest problems harder. That’s why we need to get serious about sustainable growth again, to move from zero-sum fights over who gets what slice of a fixed pie to a world where the pie is actually bigger. Not growth at all costs, but smart growth.
That is the driving idea behind this project, The Case for Growth. In the coming weeks, in explainers, articles, and podcast episodes, we’ll look at why our most productive cities have been shutting out families and what it would take to open them up. Imagine what an era of clean energy abundance could unlock, from vertical farming to sci-fi climate solutions. We’ll explore how advances in artificial intelligence could finally lift us out of a prolonged productivity slump and how our addiction to cars and meat is stifling more sustainable growth. We will speak with experts who argue that growth can be accompanied by policies that avoid the worst of global warming.
In an era when much of our politics has been reduced to zero-sum arguments about who loses so someone else can win, we want to reopen the possibility of positive-sum progress, or of building more; invent more; and include more people in that story, while we take care of the planet. Growth will not solve everything, but without it almost nothing is solved at scale. The Case for Growth is our attempt to bring that idea back to conservation as part of a serious effort to make life more affordable, more sustainable, and more abundant in the United States and far beyond.
This series was funded by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had complete discretion over the content of these reports..