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After World War II, an explosion of housing and infrastructure enriched the country. But without regulations for clean air and water, the era’s builders despoiled the environment. In response, the US passed a slew of environmental regulations. But these well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first.
Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.
Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have. Countless taxpayer dollars were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastructure without an equally energetic focus—sometimes without any focus at all—on what all that money was actually buying and building.
Between 1999 and 2023, the average premium for employer-based family health insurance rose from $5,791 to $23,968—an increase of more than 300 percent—and the worker contribution to that premium more than quadrupled.
An uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most. In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.
difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. When you grow an economy, you hasten a future that is different. The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past. We have settled on a metaphor for growth that erases its most important characteristic.
The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism.
Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.
Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! California has spent decades trying and failing to build high-speed rail. It has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living.21 As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.
Almost 30 percent of American adults are “house poor”—spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing.
Millions endure multi-hour commutes, or far worse jobs, in order to live in a far-flung city where they can afford a home. These choices are missed in raw estimates of affordability, but they are a drag on the economy and an anchor on people’s lives.
Texas has been the single largest beneficiary of California’s housing crisis. And that is, in part, because Texas is California’s mirror image on housing. The Austin metro area led the nation in housing permits in 2022, permitting 18 new homes for every 1,000 residents. Los Angeles’s and San Francisco’s metro areas permitted only 2.5 units per 1,000 residents.
But the American zoning experiment wasn’t finished—not even close. What came next is what really put the clamps on housing supply: zoning as a form of anti-growth regulation. It is this form of zoning that still governs cities and suburbs today.
the 1950s and 1960s, California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year.38 Since 2007, California has never once permitted more than 150,000 new homes.
development by halting expansions of public sewer systems. New York City’s first historic district was created in 1965; three decades later, more than fifteen thousand buildings were protected from redevelopment by its landmarks law.
“Failure to enforce basic standards of public behavior has made one of America’s great cities increasingly unlivable,” wrote Heather Mac Donald, of the Manhattan Institute.44 Mac Donald is mistaken. San Francisco is eminently livable, which is why the average apartment sells for more than a million dollars. If San Francisco were unlivable, and people ceased to want to live there, the price of homes would plummet, and so too would the ranks of the homeless.
Wouldnt the point that apartments sell for a million dollars enforce the lack of growth, building of homes, and not the fact of livability? The uthors just described fhe needles underfoot and the conditioms of skid row. Is it not an assumption tht people would live elsewhere if they couls find a tech job outside of california?
Homelessness is slightly less common in the states with the highest rates of mental illness, and vice versa.
This leads to a reality many prefer not to acknowledge. If homelessness is a housing problem, it is also a policy choice—or, more accurately, the result of many, many, many small policy choices. The writer Matthew Yglesias, who spent a decade trying to persuade liberals of where they’ve gone wrong on housing,48 illustrated this nicely in a 2021 essay.49
Then, in 1972, came a case called Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors of Mono County. A developer had proposed to build six buildings’ worth of condominiums and shops and restaurants near Mammoth Lakes, one of California’s beloved ski resort areas. Friends of Mammoth, a homeowners’ association, sued to stop the build, arguing that it would strain water and sewage resources. The novelty of their argument was that they sued under CEQA. The legislation, as passed, held that government entities in California needed to produce environmental impact reports before embarking on major new
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As a lobbyist for the Sierra Club put it, CEQA now covered “anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together.”71
only 2 or 3 percent of habitable land is taken up by cities. We do not primarily use land to live on. We primarily use land to feed ourselves. About half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, three-quarters is given over to raising livestock or growing feed for livestock.
There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food.
Insanity, making the nutritional decisionsof others.
fuel between January and September, according to a BBC analysis.7 In Sri Lanka—a country that Hickel holds out as a model for degrowth development—those protests led to the collapse of the ruling government.
The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity.
pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way.
The cost of solar energy fell by about 90 percent from 2010 to 2020. The cost of wind power fell by nearly 70 percent.
No mention of subsidies applied to these industries
Because these advantages are not universally known—and because new technologies are more expensive than mature ones—subsidies need to be generous, and advertising needs to be everywhere.
Or government can review costs imposed on business to make manufacturing costs more expensive reduce barriers of entry and increase competition.
Jenkins’s team has modeled that build-out in detail. A plausible path to decarbonization sees wind and solar installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers. That is roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.
We ruin nature by farming and animals create methane but 590k kilometers of solar panels and wind turbines wont negatively effect environments?
The Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act add up to about $450 billion in clean energy investments, subsidies, and loan guarantees. This is how the scale of such bills is normally described in Washington: by a price tag. The more money, the bigger the bill. That is an incomplete measure, at best.
Subsidy is tax payer dollars and as stated previously, government is inefficient at allocating these dollar for succesful public works projects.
These bills could spend trillions of dollars if we can build that infrastructure fast enough. They could spend far less than $450 billion if projects become too hard to permit. They could waste tens or hundreds of billions on projects that are never completed. What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.
What is spent matters because its our tax dollars, paid one way or the other by citizens.
folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land and then gives you some money and takes it from you. In reality, it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession, and two and a half years of legal wrangling, to get the land.
Confiscation of a sovereign citizens land is theft, so is imminent domain.
level of reporting that you have to send to the government, to the insurance companies, to the owner, to show you’re meeting all the requirements on the job site, all of that has increased. And so the number of people you need to produce that has increased.”58
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.
The answer, for liberals, is depressing: It used private money to avoid the pile of rules and regulations that taking government money triggers. But it could only do that because it had the support of city and state officials who streamlined zoning and cut deals to make it possible.
Because governmemt is inefficient. Governments greatest contribution would be to review and repeal these roadblocks and get out of the way.
To be honest, it did not seem laser-focused on any problem. Page 12 encouraged a pre-application that includes an environmental questionnaire “to assess the likely level of review under the National Environmental Policy Act.” Page 20 mandated that applicants prepare “an equity strategy, in concert with their partners, to create equitable work force pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals in their region,” which should include “building new pipelines for workers, including specific efforts to attract economically disadvantaged individuals and promote diversity, equity, inclusion,
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Invention—the act of solving problems by bringing new products, systems, and ideas into existence—is the basis of human progress.
often underrate the necessity of government policy in invention. “The government has outlawed technology,” the investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel said in a debate with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2014, echoing a popular view among techno-optimists and libertarians that government laws mostly block innovation.
Haven't the past chapters highlighted just this point? Hasnt the theme been, so far, that we are vastly overregulated?
Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II.18
Who is responsible for the other 75% ?
mRNA was failing to impress the scientific establishment, its reception in the private sector was a different story. In the US, Karikó and Weissman’s work caught the attention of a brash group of postdoctoral researchers, professors, and venture capitalists. They had started a company whose name smushed the words modified and RNA: Moderna.
Private company found value in research that government hadn't for years and made a immune therapy that saved tons of lives. Not sure this helps the expand government theme.
many projects get funding because they are probable,” said Evans, the University of Chicago sociologist. “But science moves forward one improbability at a time.”83
When they synthesized the hormone in a lab, they produced a medicine called a GLP-1 agonist, which was shown to reduce blood sugar levels in some people with diabetes.84 Today GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, seem to treat not only diabetes but also obesity and a dizzying range of maladies, including heart disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
One useful summary of this view came from a 2012 Economist essay, which claimed “governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online [and] turn them into products.”
The free market!
The federal government bought out the vaccines from pharmaceutical companies, which allowed them to sell the shots to the public for any price they wanted. They chose the price of $0.00. For much of 2021, the most cutting-edge biotechnology in America was also the cheapest therapy in the world.
Its not free, we paid with tax dollars or future momey that was printed.
