For the past few years, American politics have been organized around a simple, unnerving feeling: Life is getting too expensive, and no one seems to know what to do about it.
Politicians have reached for familiar tools — blaming corporate “greedflation,” flirting with price controls and tariffs, promising to “take on” whoever is convenient in an election year — but none of that gets to the deeper question: How do we make it genuinely easier to build, to work, and to live well in America?
For most of this country’s history, we thought we knew the answer: growth. That meant a bigger economy, higher productivity, cheaper and cleaner energy, new technology, and more people able to participate in all of the above. Then, beginning in the 1970s, that consensus started to break. Economic growth slowed. Concerns about inequality, consumerism, and environmental damage mounted. A certain anti-growth mentality took root on both the left and the right, and “more” became something to be eyed with suspicion rather than embraced and steered.
There were real reasons people were wary of a political project organized around “more,” but, in overcorrecting for the very real mistakes of the past, the United States inadvertently locked itself into a low-growth, high-friction status quo that has only made our hardest problems harder. That’s why we need to take sustainable growth seriously again. Not growth at all costs, but growth the smart way.
That is the animating idea behind this project, The Case for Growth. Over the past weeks, in explainers, features, and podcast episodes, we looked at why our most productive cities have been effectively locking out families and what it would take to open them up. We imagined what an era of clean energy abundance could unlock, from vertical farming to sci-fi climate solutions. We explored how advances in artificial intelligence might finally shake us out of a prolonged productivity slump and how our addiction to cars and meat is choking off more sustainable growth. We talked to experts who make the case that growth can run side by side with policies that prevent the worst of global warming.
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—Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director
