Unfortunately, they’re right. I’ve been confused as to why.

By all accounts, things are really good in my life! This year I got engaged, took a month-long sabbatical, and published my very first piece with The Bridgespan Group.

So, why am I so angry?

The secret beating heart of this blog – the thing I think about most – is institutions and leaders. This year I had an expectation. A second Trump victory powered by a working-class coalition, paired with decades of declining trust, would force conversations about what went wrong.

I believed we would see a reckoning emerging from the dense web of non-profits, capital holders, and organizations responsible for the public good.

This would mean entire institutions – academia, civil society, public health – honestly accounting for the missteps that lost them the public’s faith. It would mean leadership and rank-and-file alike admitting that some of the blame rests at their feet, not just with forces outside their control.

But that’s not really what I’ve seen at all.

For example, in academia, a whole host of essays and reports came out in 2026 which attempted to diagnose the institutions’ multi-decade decline in trust. To me, this was a great sign of impending change and, maybe, even emerging consensus.

Vanderbilt and Washington University put out Report on the State of Scholarship, which stated:

“Every field we have studied shows some signs of a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity”

Meanwhile, Yale published Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which said:

“In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people… Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust.”

Alongside these insider reflections, journalists and think tanks were sounding the same alarm, best represented by Tyler Austin Harper’s “Why I Quit the Tenure Track” (one of the best essays I’ve read this year). His overall view on the decline in academia can be summed up with this quote:

“Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting.”

These reports don’t always agree, but to me each engages in the one thing reckoning requires: honesty. I thought these pieces represented the hope that we could be at the point of a true pendulum swing.

But the reactions to each of these documents were, frankly, not at all what I expected. Rather than reckon with the diagnoses or offer solutions of their own, people denied the ideas outright.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found the various insider reflections to be “shocking” and called on universities to “rescind the report” while Yale’s professors rejected the decline in public trust, saying that it was a result of “self-censorship under President Donald Trump’s second term.”

Then in a true stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-go-‘la la la, I can’t hear you’ moment, the AAUP made their first-ever national political endorsement by endorsing Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary in Michigan.

Meanwhile, Tyler Austin Harper’s pleas for academia to reckon with the funding systems, structural incentives, and norms behind its decline were met with deflection. The responses fell into a few buckets (also, see tweets below):

1. Smear his politics: You’re just saying this now because you’re a right-wing grifter. (In fact, a self-described socialist)

2. Attack his motives: You’re just a bad professor who is mad because academia kicked you out. (he was a tenure-track professor who left to write for The Atlantic)

3. Skip any pretense: You suck and we don’t like you (sorry, no good snarky parenthetical response for this one)

Most of the reaction from academics fit into the bucket of “why are you saying this now, when the collapse in trust is a result of coordinated attacks from the right?” There is truth to this belief. Over the past two years, the Trump administration has frozen funds, sued universities for everything from antisemitism allegations to DEI programs, and threatened to pull research dollars for those who do not pay fines or make investments in national priorities. This reaction feels deeply human, and there is no denying the growing external pressures in academia.

But the argument also makes no sense. The permission structure for the administration’s offensive came from the decades-long decline in trust. And if the public thought attacks had gone too far, we’d expect to see trust in higher-ed bounce back. But it hasn’t. Trust in universities remains at an all-time low, and the only bounce-back in trust is among conservatives who think the Trump administration is starting to fix these campuses.

And this pattern – honest insider reflections, a flicker of hope for change, then a mix of apathy or rejection from most of the people inside each institution – is not exclusive to academia (see similar reflections here, here, and here).

This is why I feel so angry.

I had this naively hopeful mental model that we could finally and collectively admit what went wrong. I thought that the catharsis of the admission would enable our institutions to move in a new and better direction.

But instead of a pendulum swinging back, I am increasingly thinking we’re spiraling.

It feels like a small minority of insiders and leaders in these institutions see the problem and are interested in a new path forward. But an even larger and more vocal majority is too calcified, too unwilling to honestly diagnose what happened for fear of implicating themselves, and too incentivized to stay the same even while the ship sinks around them.

This feeling is the one I stewed on all summer. I struggled to write here because I couldn’t find the green shoots of optimism I want to be core to this blog.

Then, I had a moment of clarity.

From where? Well… from watching The Odyssey.

I’ll explain that in a bit. But here’s what it showed me:

• Our institutions are in a spiral. BUT that spiral is a function of human nature in all its beauty and complexity

• A spiral just means that institutions will fail on their own terms. It does not mean that nothing better will emerge. It means only that the old form will not move in a new direction by itself

• That process of something old becoming something new is already starting to happen in many of the spaces where the old form failed

None of this is really going to make sense without diving into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and his frequent muse, René Girard.

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The Dark Ages

At this point, our collective feeds have been inundated with Odyssey content, but the most interesting of it focuses on the changes Nolan made to the source text.

Nolan oriented the movie around the concept of “Zeus’s law”, turning the Mycenaean concept of xenia (guest hospitality) into a wider reaching Golden Rule-esque ethic of treating others the way you want to be treated. This setup transforms Odysseus from a prideful hero into a man racked with guilt. He believes the violence spreading across the Mediterranean is his fault because it was his idea to sack Troy through the false gift of the Trojan Horse. As Matthew Yglesias writes, Nolan subverts “the source text, suggesting the Greek attack on Troy sowed the seeds of Mycenean Greece’s downfall” through references to the Sea Peoples, raiders whose arrival marked the end of the Bronze Age.

The sum of all these changes transforms the Homeric epic into a reflection on roiling, contagious violence. Odysseus is the subject of the movie, yet he stands helpless to change its course even as he is the only one who can see the violence spreading. In this way, Nolan suggests the collapse of Bronze Age Greece is inevitable: a result of the nature of humanity.

This view of human nature is shared by the theorist and psychologist René Girard (I’d suggest listening to Jonathan Bi’s lecture series if you’re curious).

As both suggest, any group of people united by something looser than blood (a nation, community, or an institution) will eventually spiral towards collapse.

This is a big claim from them both. But the mechanisms they depict ring true to me.

The principal assumption sitting at the core of The Odyssey and René Girard’s belief is that humans are mimetic. This means outside of our desire to eat, sleep, and procreate, we learn everything else from others (speech, mannerisms, habits). But this goes deeper:

“[Girard’s] claim is that we do not only copy behavior but also desire itself. We model our desires on the desires of others, we want only what we perceive others to want. If we admire or are attracted to someone, it is because we have reason to believe others admire or are attracted to them too.”

Think about the Trojan War Nolan depicts. There are plenty of beautiful women across the Mediterranean^[1], but Paris wants Helen largely because she belongs to another king. And Nolan suggests Agamemnon would have gone to war no matter what, because what he actually covets is the trade routes Troy controls. In both cases, desire to have what a rival has is enough to start war.

That same force can drive us to break the invisible laws and norms that let a society function. As Odysseus tells his wife:

“What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? … What if… when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?”

Odysseus’s desire to come home to his family, save his men, and win the war for his nation eventually trumped the abstract covenant of Zeus’s law.

Mimetic desire is also functionally zero-sum, rivalrous, and infectious. Because we want things because others want them, the same wants spread through groups, and the group grows more homogenous. But that homogeneity breeds tension – we now compete for the same scant good – and the tension spreads mimetically too, eventually turning into violence. As Odysseus puts it:

“We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it. The breaking of Zeus’s law, spreading like plague.”

Or maybe most simply, see the below meme:

Finally, the only way for a society to defuse this tension is to scapegoat. This is why archaic societies sacrificed a single individual, thrusting the blame for the violence upon their lap. This unanimous declaration of guilt – which spreads mimetically too – would create the necessary catharsis to relieve the tension. As Nolan does in so many movies, the plot resolves only by scapegoating a main character who played a role in the violence but cannot be blamed for its full scope.

Nolan and Girard show that the spiraling of a society is a function of human desire itself. The same thing which leads us to love our child, protect our community, and help our friends will also lead us to an eventual degradation: Our desires come from others, those desires can trump our ideals, the resulting anti-social behaviors spread through society, and the only relief is collective blame of a scapegoat.

All of this theory is designed to make one very important point: places do not degrade because they are full of bad people. They degrade because they are full of people.

We can see this in institutions. Each holds an abstract mandate. Maybe to seek truth, to protect the health of the public, to achieve a social outcome. But in all cases, to contribute to the public good. Denizens of these institutions became increasingly motivated by what their peers desired – prestige, accolades, standing. That same motivation homogenized them, and as they became more similar, their desires became self-reinforcing. As this all occurred, the institution drifted from its mandate towards simply serving the mimetic desires of its inhabitants.

And when the tension of that drift builds, our institutions are worse at releasing it than the archaic societies of ancient Greece. They are modern and reasonable, so they cannot sacrifice a single individual. The rank-and-file can only agree on large, distant forces – “right-wing grifters,” “billionaires,” “capitalism” – as the source of the problem. But these forces are so large and so distant that no retribution can ever reach them. So the tension never releases, catharsis never comes, and the spiral never stops.

The Girardian lens would tell us the old versions of these institutions are doomed. Even if reflective leaders and dissident leaders name the spiral, there will be no reckoning.

So, now you may be wondering, what’s the optimistic part of this?

Think about the Mycenaean Greeks whose demise into the Dark Ages Nolan depicts.

Right after their Dark Ages came the Greek Golden Age. How could a society so wrecked by violence it literally forgot how to write come back stronger than before?

Greece didn’t come back because it had a reckoning. There was no accountability from the old kings and courtiers. Instead, its old kingdoms diffused into a smaller patchwork of communities, its abstract Homeric ethics of hospitality and duty became measurable written laws, and a new set of leaders built a society which combined democracy with a market economy.

Golden Age Greece broke its systems into parts and rebuilt them under new accountabilities all while holding to its core ethos. It unbundled and reintermediated.

Unbundling and Reintermediation

As Girard and Nolan have come to believe, human nature cannot be changed. But this does not mean it cannot be harnessed for more productive ends.

In the early 2000s, the software industry ran into a smaller version of this problem. Engineers faced systems which degraded as functions and layers piled up – each added for a real purpose, but each dragging the system further from its core purpose. Some tried to solve this by asking engineers to be more disciplined or managers to plan more carefully. What proved most effective was a concept called unbundling and reintermediation: break the system into its pieces, rebuild the pieces into new containers dedicated to a singular mission, and create a new layer of judgement that can tell you if each one is working.

Like Golden Age Greece, they found a way to get better outcomes by recognizing human nature, instead of hoping human nature would change.

Girard believed modernity found ways to do exactly this. As Jonathan Bi elaborates:

Markets: “What a miracle it is that people today who seek revenge, who seek glory, who seek to conquer, who seek to channel their conquering drives, who would have had to raise armies and engage in zero-sum wars just a few hundred years ago, today primarily satisfy these malicious drives by creating better products and services for others.”

Judiciaries: “There can be no true administering of justice — no judicial system, without a superior tribunal capable of arbitrating between even the most powerful groups… What really ends violence for our judicial system, and makes it so effective, is the threat of more violence.”

Girard does not believe these mechanisms are foolproof; in fact, he believes they will be subject to their own spiral. As Bi puts it, “Any form of critical utopianism is doomed to fail, because … given enough time, the perversions of human nature will infiltrate and corrupt any such structure.”

But, as Girard notes, some structures align human nature more closely with the positive outcomes we desire. These hold out far longer than others before degrading, and they recreate themselves with far shorter Dark Ages. The ones that do share two traits:

• Positive-sum competition: Complex tensions can be converted into competition, which, when operating in a positive-sum environment like a growing economy, can be channeled towards the public benefit

• External mediation: The internal members of an institution cannot be their own referees. An external intermediary which exists outside of the group with a monopoly on judgement lowers the potential of the mimetic spiral

I think this is as clear of a map as we will get. To fix a calcified institution incapable of achieving the public good, we must unbundle it into its functions and reintermediate it in two ways:

1. We must break it apart into new containers that compete on outcomes, so that rivalry gets channeled towards public benefit rather than peer approval

2. The new sources of accountability for each container must sit outside of the rank-and-file, so external intermediaries can hold the institution to account

Though these specific words are not used, it is curious how this approach is essentially the suggestion of multiple very different proposed reforms by very different people. For example:

• Earlier this year, Nan Ransohoff published a piece called “The Third Wave of American Philanthropy”. It drew a range of reaction and criticism, but the core of her message called for a new layer of intermediaries to build “A Silicon Valley for public goods”. Implicitly, Ransohoff suggests the field must move toward DARPA-like models where allocator institutions compete for funder capital based on whether they achieve specific, defined outcomes.

• On the other side of that coin exists the Trust for Civic Life, which applies that logic to a different problem. In rural communities that national philanthropy often overlooked, the Trust builds locally led institutions whose leaders answer to their own communities and to a national network intermediary. Each of these hubs is answerable to defined improvements in agency within their community as measured by the Trust.

• In academia and research, the Office of Science and Technology Policy published “Science, A New Golden Age”, which called for the federal government to reorganize America’s scientific enterprise to renew our ability to solve the most pressing problems. The document detailed a shift away from the “university-based, principal investigator-led research group” toward direct funding of individual scientists, independent research organizations, DARPA-like intermediaries, and national labs. This breaks the university into a patchwork of labs and researchers, judged on outcomes by governments and the broader public rather than their peers.

These are just a few examples, but each carries the same hope. If the new thing works, the old structure will wither or adapt. Either way, the public purpose that structure abdicated gets renewed.

This is my revision to my mental model of the pendulum swing.

This entire essay started with my anger.

In the individual sense, I’d fallen for the mimetic spiral. My anger was a craving for catharsis, for a society which recognized a group of institutions as at fault. But as is the case with all victims of scapegoating, even while they may make sense as logical targets, there is no world where only one group is responsible for the breakdown of the whole.

Girard believed there was one way to escape the mimetic spiral: a conversion. The kind that comes from the outside, like Nolan’s Odysseus subject to 20 years of horror at sea. Even if you want to escape the mimetic spiral, you cannot, because even that desire is fundamentally mimetic.

There is one final lesson in that.

Even if I got what I wanted and these institutions collectively diagnosed their problems and honestly brought them to the public, it would not make a difference. The better world will not come from inside the old institutions.

It will come from enough people deciding they want a better world and just building it.

A note to the audience: I’d love to hear your thoughts: Do you agree that their will be no collective reckoning? Is their any way to subvert the spiral? Am I even right that there is a spiral at all? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

Leave a comment

^[1] Note to the editor: though none are as beautiful as my fiancée

This is all mostly good and almost everyone agrees!

However, one particular provision has been the subject of a schism amongst policy-wonks on X (f.k.a Twitter). One component of the Senate ROAD to Housing Act includes a proposal to ban investors that own at least 350 single-family homes from buying more. It further requires developers of “build-to-rent” homes (i.e., homes built by developers with the intention of perpetually renting them rather than selling them to a local buyer) to sell after seven years.

This push against institutional investors is led by an alliance of Elizabeth Warren, the populist-left, and (believe it or not) Donald Trump. Together, they are pursuing action against corporate concentration in single-family homeownership.

So, why has this created a stink? Well, not everyone likes the idea of banning institutional investors from owning housing. As Nicholas Decker writes, the effects of institutional investors and “build-to-rent” models is fairly clear:

“Anyway, once we have the parameters, we can simulate what happens when three large institutional investors enter the [single family] market. Homeownership falls, because the investors convert to rental housing. Housing prices increase, while rents fall. The net impact is that the cost of housing fell.”

No one is really disputing the effect, but the schism reveals two interesting and increasingly influential factions: The Abundos (Abundance Bros) and the Slopulists (Slop Populists), as they each not so lovingly refer to one another.

On one hand, the Abundo looks at this effect and says this is good! Blackstone buying up single-family homes in the Sunbelt lowers the cost of housing by decreasing rents. The Slopulists are simply NIMBY freaks.

On the other hand, the Slopulist looks at this effect and says this is bad! Blackstone buying up single-family homes destroys the American Dream by increasing the cost of homeownership. The Abundos are just neoliberal market fundamentalists.

I think both of these views are at least slightly wrongheaded. The United States is a union of different places made up of very different people. It is not a singular nation that should uniformly prioritize the renter or the homeowner – who each benefit from very different policies – as each city’s residents want something totally different.

This reality – that each place needs something different – goes further than a small spat about institutional investors. There are 358 unique metroplexes, each balancing a different set of desires from its current and future population. The policy preferences of the Abundos and the Slopulists are only ever right for a subset at any given moment.

Today, I hope to introduce a way to look at affordability that can manage that complexity. Instead of using one view of the problem and then extrapolating it out nationally, I am going to pursue a more segmented understanding.

You will see a few things emerge when we take this approach. America is not suffering from a single challenge, but rather a combination of rising housing costs and wage stagnation that looks different in every metroplex. The challenge is also more accurately understood as a slow erosion of affordability that is observable over decades, rather than the product of pandemic era inflation. This means that each locality will need to pursue a slightly different set of solutions, each driven by local priorities.

You will notice there are few things I will not explore in depth. First is the issue of healthcare, which is certainly important, but would require its own essay. Additionally, I largely set aside deeper analysis of transportation, food, and energy costs as they are smaller line-items in a family’s budget, and childcare or education as they are not universal. These costs deserve ambitious solutions but will not be discussed meaningfully today.

Let’s begin!

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A Theory of Affordability

To enable a segmented analysis, I leveraged American Compass’s Cost of Thriving Index. At its simplest, COTI focuses on how the costs for a family of four differ from the typical salary for a single blue-collar breadwinner. Their analysis looks at different cities (to understand which are best based on cost weighed against income) and longer-term trends in affordability nationally.

What I have done is use that methodology to create a few good faith segmentations of cities and study the trajectory of those segmentations over time (see here for a footnote with additional detail on my approach).1

Affordability is not as simple as high costs

America has 358 metroplexes, with 202 million Americans, all of which balance different economic equations. The illustration below shows this complexity by sorting each metroplex by income and cost level (with “cost” referring to food, housing, healthcare, transportation, and education).

This chart demonstrates a few simple realities:

• Roughly half of the metropolitan population balance much higher incomes against much higher costs

• There is also a meaningful chunk of the country (33M people) who live in areas where things are probably working economically

• However, there is also another meaningful chunk of the country (30M people) where incomes are significantly lower than costs. Some of these are retirement towns (where incomes are quite low), but others appear to be suffering from some deeper malaise

You will see a few new patterns when looking at the data geographically (I have bucketed the nine tiles into three groups to make these trends clearer: areas where the income-to-cost tradeoff works, areas where costs are outsized to the rest of the country, and areas where wages are much lower than the rest of the country).

The Upper Midwest (where there is still significant legacy manufacturing) contains the strongest metros in-terms of pairing high incomes with lower costs. Unsurprisingly, you will see large concentrations of red across the East and West Coasts where cities have the highest costs in the country. What is interesting is what you see in the South and Appalachia: while there are a number of green dots (generally, growing Southeastern cities benefiting from strong economic growth), there are also a number of places where wages are still too low to enable residents to benefit from low costs. And in cities like Austin, Nashville, and Atlanta (red dots), costs are starting to grow to match significant income growth from the past decade.

Many of these insights will feel obvious. Okay, the coasts are expensive, the Southeast is growing and feeling growing pains, and (shocker!) the economies that work best are the ones which did not deindustrialize. We start to find a few much more interesting insights when we dig into why these results are what they are.

Affordability is a story of decades, not years

The data clearly shows Americans across the country are living different economic realities. We have high-cost mega-cities with weak middle classes, limited wage growth, and highly constrained housing supplies (New York, San Francisco). We also have newer cities with a strong middle-class showing the first signs of weakness due to rising housing costs, that are at an inflection point (Austin, Nashville). And then we have a whole range of cities in between, from legacy manufacturing towns to low-cost Southeast cities with stagnant wages.

There was once a time when the American city was viewed as a rising tide, lifting the boats of the middle class from coast to coast. These differences between cities indicate that this is no longer true. The chart below2 takes our nine categories and shows how housing costs as a share of income changed over time.

As the chart above shows, our nine segments of cities all started in a relatively similar income to housing ratio (with housing costs lying between ~34-39% of income). However, over the past 25 years, the trajectory of affordability diverged. This divergence is not all located in the past 5-years, where we might expect to see pandemic era inflation, but is instead a slow shift over decades. Where we see increases in housing cost as a share of income, it can only be driven by growth in housing or stagnation in income (or both).

The very dense chart below3 decomposes the housing-cost-to-income ratio into its two base variables (housing costs and income) and compares their relative growth rates over the past three decades.

As you can see, the cities which are affordable today (sweet spot, comfortable, affordable middle) generally delivered above-average income growth and below-average housing growth. Today’s high-cost mega-cities (pricey but paid and severely squeezed) saw such high housing cost growth that it overwhelmed any economic advantage they once had for the middle class. There is also a subset of cities which have below average housing cost growth, but whose wage growth still could not keep pace, leaving affordability worsened.

Putting together all of the data, as messy and complicated as it is, we can see three fairly clean insights:

• The country is not suffering from a singular affordability challenge. Every city looks to be in a slightly different place in terms of both costs and incomes

• Where there are affordability challenges, it is clear this is a slow erosion, rather than a product of pandemic-era inflationary spikes

• These challenges are also a product of very different problems. In some cases, it is the result of high housing cost growth. In others, it is the product of wage stagnation

This is what most affordability discourse misses. It is not as simple as a housing crisis. It is not as simple as runaway inflation. The best way to understand what happened at the national level is that we eroded the economic livelihoods of the middle class over 20-30 years in completely different ways in each city.

For us to even try and address this problem, we will need to define a vision for affordability which is honest about this complexity and difference which exists across America.

This is not so easy. Affordability is not really a single threshold. There are places which are very high cost, but wages compensate for that cost. There are also places which are low cost, with wages that surpass those costs, but Americans do not choose to live in those places. Can either of these fit a definition of “affordability”?

There is a somewhat natural experiment that can help us create nuance around “affordability”. Where Americans choose to go when they pick up and move cities.

Where Americans Move Can Teach Us About Affordability

Domestic migration can provide us with a few more nuances on affordability, because the previous views only captures the people who currently live in each metroplex. As Yoni Applebaum so clearly argues in his book Stuck, the story of the American City is about both its current dwellers and all its future dwellers.

For example, if affordability is simply fixing housing costs, we should expect to see Americans leaving high housing cost cities and moving to low housing cost cities. If affordability is actually a wage growth problem, we should expect to see Americans leaving low wage growth cities and moving to high wage growth cities.

Yet, when we look at the actual migration data, we see something more complicated.

There are clear, observable geographic trends. There is, of course, the often-discussed shift from the expensive coasts to the Southeast and Texas. Generally, we see this attributed to “high housing costs”. However, you can also see migration from the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes – regions with fairly controlled housing costs – to the Southeast and Mountain West.

If you zoom in even more, you will see specifically domestic migrants (including the working class) choosing cities like Nashville and Austin rather than the smaller, and much lower cost cities in the Southeast.

These dynamics are clarified by the literature on “pushes” and “pulls” for domestic migration:

• Workers do not move because of high housing costs, and can frequently move to areas where housing costs are considered high

• Workers do move because of housing overcrowding (more housing density than ideal) and an inability to secure their preferred housing stock (owning vs. renting)

• When workers move, they tend to select areas where they see signs of sustained wage growth (e.g., significant job growth, new anchor economic institutions)

This logic workers use when they move can point us toward a more specific, actionable definition of affordability. It is clear the cities workers desire to live in (a) provide the opportunity for sustained wage growth for the working class, while (b) producing the new housing stock that can sustain workers’ housing preferences.

We can even use this logic to find a synthesis to the Abundo / Slopulist debate.

Many of the most expensive mega-cities would benefit from institutional investors as they lower rents for their residents – who have less of a preference towards homeownership. However, hitting the “build button” exclusively on renter-friendly 2-bedrooms built vertically leads to the overcrowding that eventually drives people out of the city. This is where efforts, like the ones by The American Housing Corporation, to build lower-cost but still family-friendly single-family homes in the most desired neighborhoods are promising.

At the same time, in the growing cities of the Southeast, institutional investors hurt the ability of residents to buy homes. In these places, cities need to find ways to create access to owning the family-friendly apartments, and ideally, detached single-family homes that working families need (Unfortunately, this is also where institutional investors operate the most, and likely where the populist backlash originates).

But across the board, we need better answers for improving the job prospects and wages of Working America. To truly unlock affordability, we cannot have a country where the expectation for the working class is marginal-to-negligible wage improvement year-after-year.

We can put all of this together as an essential set of guiding visions for affordability: unlock supply in the high-cost mega-cities (San Francisco, New York), concentrate on single family homes for young families in the dynamic growing cities (Austin, Nashville), focus on wage growth and job quality for the middle class nationally.

These are not small or easy goals. These are also goals which will require action from both the Nation and the American City.

The Nation and the American City

This has been a long and meandering essay, and I am not sure I arrived at very clean action items. In my own attempts to diagnose why, I kept landing on a contradiction: the role of the American City (the local) and the role of the Nation (the federal).

When it comes to the American cities that characterized mid- and late-20^th century America – New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago – they have failed by any measure of affordability. Their arc resembles that of the once shining and seemingly invincible ascendent empire reduced to the dying embers of an empire falling to their own excesses. I do not want to understate what it will take to fix these places for working people.

Yet, these cities are not the only representation of the American City anymore. In the South, cities in the Carolinas, Texas, and Alabama are rising, attracting workers from all over, and, in many ways, demonstrating many of the foundational elements of the American Dream: a stable life, good prospects for your children, and the opportunity to aspire for more.

There is a self-balancing reality that represents the arc of the American City. As one power declines, people leave for the rising powers. These shifting populations force change in the declining powers and empower the growth of the ascendent ones.

But the American City still needs the Nation. The challenge of a declining power is that the forces with control in these places grow stronger as those who oppose them leave. These incumbents can be difficult to displace, slowing the potential for true renewal. Additionally, the challenge of affordability, while varied, shows up in so many different places, pointing to a need for some kind of national action.

The problem of affordability, due to this nature, does not really look like other economic problems I have written about – i.e., trade, reindustrialization, or overall economic dynamism. It clearly requires deliberation, the balancing of one locality’s needs against another, and a political will for larger national forces to deny the whim of powerful local interests (like NIMBYs, special interest groups) in service of a greater whole.

As scary as this sounds given their 30-year track record, I’m pretty sure what I’m describing is the Founders’ original case for Congress.

Only Congress can engage in the long-term deliberations needed to both (a) understand the varied nature of the problem and (b) bring the resources to bear at the scale of the problem.

If there is one reason to have hope on this topic, it is the fact that Congress is trying to do something about it. The ROAD to Housing Act is a really strong piece of legislation. Across the ideological spectrum, there is (mostly) agreement it includes a variety of necessary supply-side reforms.

But so much more will be needed. The American City and Congress need to partner closely on industrial policy that raises middle class wages alongside significant healthcare and education reforms that meaningfully reduce costs for families. Congress will also need to find ways to pre-empt the elite interests in coastal cities who have systematically eroded affordability.

All of this is possible and already in action in small ways in cities like Austin, Tulsa, and Huntsville. If it can move to greater ambition and scale, we might just have a brighter next chapter for the American City.

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A note to the audience: I’d love to hear your thoughts: Abundo or Slopulist? What could be done to make the New York’s and San Francisco’s of the world more affordable? How will cities need to change to create a stable life for the American middle class? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

In classic fashion, I am delivering my reflections on the year two weeks late.

Apologies.

How time flies. One full year of this Substack covering topics from loneliness and the case for religion to industrial policy in Texas and China. When I started, I had a pretty narrow goal: to take my penchant for stronger, more provocative views and, through the process of writing for an audience, use them to (a) learn how to write and (b) offer a set of views that readers find genuinely refreshing.

While I am still not certain I have achieved either A or B, I discovered something else – I love this process. I love defining a topic, forming a hypothesis, reading and researching as much as I physically can, and testing ideas with peers.

The biggest surprise, however, has been all of you. We are officially at 101 subscribers. That is a big deal for a little Substack like this one. More importantly, all the interactions from comments to book recommendations to (at times) strongly worded criticism have sparked some of the most interesting exchanges I’ve ever had.

They’ve also helped me solidify a set of views and principles which have moved beyond “cool ideas I toy with in my head” into genuine beliefs that will guide my work in life.

I truly believe that my goal, and our country’s goal, should be to create rootedness and stability for working people.

I truly believe that many liberals, progressives, conservatives, and populists are crafting extraordinary ways to do just that – ways that are often more aligned than you might expect.

I truly believe that a better world is emerging right before our eyes, if we are willing to see it.

And finally, I truly believe that to continue building a better world we will need to look past orthodoxy. The answers will not be in the existing establishment, nor are they obvious – but they may be familiar.

What follows is a long-form reflection on 2025. Emphasis on long. There is a reason behind this. I am going to try and achieve two things at once: reflect on all that has happened this year while also moving past the silos of politics, culture, and economics of previous essays to show how these themes are interacting with one another.

Before jumping in, a few notes of gratitude. Thank you to Usmaan and Sonia, the initial readers who helped refine the thinking behind this Substack (and also for arguing with me about many of these subjects, even when they really didn’t want to). Thank you to Kisara, John, and Ashwin — my frequent commenters who help me avoid the feeling that I am screaming into the void. Thank you to the colleagues and peers who take time to discuss big ideas with me and sharpen my thinking. (As a reminder, this Substack is not affiliated with my employer.) And finally, thank you to Celesia, my partner in life and the only reason I have any ideas worth their salt.

Let’s begin.

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Wildfire and Seeding Soil

When I think about 2025, I keep returning to wildfire and the ecological cycle it represents.

As forests begin to overgrow, dead vegetation accumulates, and sunlight stops penetrating the canopy, the wildfire comes to resets the land.

The fire is not very discerning, clearing what is alive and thriving even as it clears out decades of gradual decay. After the flames pass, the soil is exposed. Nature nurtures the soil, reseeding it, watering it to prevent erosion. If it survives this fragile early period – and it does not always survive – it turns into fresh earth that bears the fruit of a stronger forest.

2025 has felt like the year of the wildfire. Several institutions and norms that have been on a path of slow decline are burning. This much has been covered extensively.

But I think we miss something if we only see the wildfire. From my vantage point, this is also the year of seeding. Across cultural, economic, and political systems, reformers are planting the beginnings of something new – and hopefully something better.

Both stories are true, and both are incomplete on their own. To understand where we are going, we must start with a question: Why was 2025 the year of the wildfire?

Part I: The Cleansing Fire

This is not an easy question to answer. Over the past year, I’ve tried to identify what’s at the heart of our national malaise. The outcomes are easier to see than the diagnosis:

• An economy where ‘big number go up’, yet wages stagnate, stability erodes, and security feels further away each coming year

• Declining trust in every major elite institution – government, media, universities, corporations, and science

• An epidemic of loneliness, with fewer marriages, fewer children, and weaker ties between friends and neighbors

• A crisis of purpose, where work feels less meaningful and the old pathways into a good life no longer serve our youth

• A country that can no longer build the marvels of engineering (whether it is energy, industry, public transportation, or even housing) it once did

These patterns are tangled together in a way that makes diagnosis difficult. How did we end up with an “over lawed” and highly litigious bureaucracy and runaway corporate consolidation at the same time? How did an expert class that embraced egalitarian ideals oversee decades of stagnation for working people? How did so many of these outcomes emerge at the same time across the entire West?

Different camps across the left and right offer different answers – from an abandonment of national sovereignty (Oren Cass) to a sclerotic liberalism that forgot how to build (Ezra Klein) to corporate capture (Lina Khan). There are threads of truth in each of their diagnosis, but each feels incomplete.

When I really step back and look at the full pattern, I see something that synthesizes the full gamut of these ideological camps’ critiques. Two separate, reinforcing feedback loops.

First, a political culture that lost its balance, and tipped too far towards liberalism.

I increasingly see culture as a Yin-Yang balance between two questions:

1. What constraints should we remove so people can flourish? (Liberation)

2. What commitments should we maintain so communities can endure? (Responsibility)

Over the past fifty years, as Francis Fukuyama most famously claimed, liberation won. Even conservative parties’ ideological projects focused on liberating markets and capital while spreading liberalism across the globe. Reagan, Clinton, and Obama disagreed on details, but all shared a basic orientation towards removing constraints rather than building shared institutions, responsibilities, and values.

The challenge is that liberation, treated as an end in and of itself, eventually severs us from responsibility to anyone else. Freedom means freedom from – from obligation, from tradition, from place. This means freedom taken to its logical conclusion is unrestrained self-interest.

This is not to say self-interest is bad and we should live in a purely collectivist or conservative society. It is to say responsibility is a necessary anchor to self-interest and liberation. When you lose responsibility to your workers, your communities, and your elders many of the outcomes we saw over the past 30-50 years feel inevitable. It makes sense to tear down tradition and inherited institutions when they are bothersome or push you to make decisions in service of something other than yourself. It makes sense to extract from your communities to enrich yourself when you do not owe them anything. Worst of all, it makes sense to see the devastation those choices cause and offer nothing of meaning in its place.

Second, our elites separated from the nations they were supposed to lead.

As the economy shifted towards knowledge work, a new class rose to power. Ranging from consultants, financiers, and technologists to academics, educators, and journalists, what united this class was an influence over decisions and shared cultural position.

As this class grew, they quite literally separated from the rest of the country’s working people – sorting into similar universities, firms, and neighborhoods in a handful of cities. As they separated, they developed shared assumptions and allegiances to one another.

This separation had consequences. The leadership class in the West grew to identify with a set of similar cosmopolitan progressive values and their global class rather than their nation. A consultant in New York, after all, has more in common with a bureaucrat in Brussels than a manufacturing technician in Buffalo. This created a drift away from the values and dreams of working America – a drift mirrored by the institutions this class controlled: universities, media, bureaucracies.

The farther elites drifted from the people they were supposed to serve, the more they decided the people, not the drift, were the problem.

These two engines reinforced each other. A politics focused on liberation gave elites permission to dismantle constraints that protected working people. Elite separation meant there was no feedback mechanism to register the consequences of their actions.

Below is my attempt to connect these two engines to everything I’ve written about this year. What I learned from this exercise, and hope you too see, is that declining trust, weakening social capital, and the hollowing out of the heartland are not isolated problems. Instead, they are downstream of a system tilted too far towards liberalism and in which elites separated from working people and the nation.

These complex interrelations are why I believe incremental reform has stopped working. It is not because well-meaning reformers were foolish or bad actors. The reality is you cannot fix an interlocked system by adjusting one variable because the other variables pull it back into equilibrium.

I recognize this is a hard pill to swallow, and it is frankly one of my beliefs that draws the most reaction. The implications are uncomfortable, especially for people like me. It requires you to accept that you are an elite even if your financial situation or decision-making power does not make you feel like you are one. It also requires you to accept that a better system may require breaking the old system – one which worked for you.

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This is why I believe we have seen such dramatic political disruptions over the past decade. It is not just the Trump administration. The Biden administration broke with free-market orthodoxy on several fronts, new media and venture-capital increasingly criticize an old establishment, and several nations across the West are seeing similar deconstructive efforts from populist movements. Across different contexts, people are concluding that the system needs to be broken before it can be rebuilt.

I want to be direct about where I am landing. I do not think any administration we have seen to date, including the current one, is indicative of a positive end-state for the country. However, I am increasingly certain that significant disruption, even with its costs today, is important for building a better tomorrow.

This leaves us in a hard position as a country. Wildfire is not discerning. It clears what needs clearing and burns what didn’t need to burn. We are in that moment, where if positive changes do not take root, our nation can erode. But this may have been our only path to genuine renewal. It makes me angry for a lot of reasons, but I also think it’s true.

So, what’s actually burning?

With the Trump Administration, it is hard to separate material shifts from culture-war theater (like the frequent usage of “dismantling woke” or “ending DEI” as the pretense for actual durable changes). Here is what I see as the real structural shifts:

• The global political order: Multilateral institutions and diplomatic norms built over decades are being abandoned or renegotiated in an increasingly multi-polar world

• The global economic order: The post-1990s consensus on trade liberalization is functionally dead, replaced by bilateral deals and tariffs

• The administrative state: DOGE and the end of Chevron deference have moved power away from career civil servants toward political appointees and the executive

• Universities: The model of publicly funded but operationally independent universities is collapsing, especially at elite northeastern institutions

• Expert authority: From public health to economics, the assumption that credentialed experts should drive social decisions has shattered

These shifts each strike at the heart of the two feedback loops: liberalism out of balance and a globalized and separated elite. The institutions that entrenched both – multilateral bodies, elite universities, unchecked expert authority, and the administrative state – are being dismantled or fundamentally restructured.

On balance, I think this is good. These institutions proved resistant to reform from within. Breaking their hold on power is a precondition for something better.

But I want to be clear eyed: deconstruction is the easy part. The hard part is actually building something better.

Yet, I find myself hopeful. One of my favorite pieces to write this year was “We’ve been here before”. Deconstruction and the precarity that comes with it, is not unfamiliar to our country. We have reinvented ourselves time and time again, on a relatively similar 30–40-year cycle. This nature of our country is highly unusual and reflects the experiment lying at the heart of the nation – we are an overlapping set of states, cities, beliefs, races, ethnicities, industries, and movements. We are pluralistic.

What that means is we are a country of a great many different people, and when one system fails there are entirely new possibilities built by different people who hold different beliefs. I think we are starting to see that now. Across political coalitions, across sectors, across regions, a new generation of leaders is building the foundations of something new. Some of these efforts will fail. But enough of them will work (and are working), that there is reason to find hope.

Let me show you what I mean.

Part II: The Seeding of the Soil

In “The Politics of Love”, I laid out three, fairly high-level, directional changes which I believe would set a new equilibrium for our country:

• An economy that enables people to live decent and purposeful lives

• Leaders who embrace patriotism, service, and subsidiarity to the “commons”

• Institutions that cultivate our capacity to take responsibility for one another

This is not the full throated “integralist” vision which calls for some kind of moral-state fusion, but it is also not the soft-spoken progressivism that thinks if we just “bring Church back” and up redistribution, we can call it a day. It is instead a set of changes which recognizes that America is a country full of different people that all owe something to each other.

Importantly, there are already reformers, entrepreneurs, and leaders doing the delicate work of seeding ideas which fit into this framework. Contained below is a set of just a few of the efforts I have observed throughout the year:

An Economy That Enables People to Live Decent and Purposeful Lives

• Industrial policy is bipartisan and mainstream as both Biden administration and Trump administration launched industrial policy initiatives for vaccines, chips, and rare earths

• Cities and States from California to Minnesota to Texas have greenlit housing bills which reform housing bureaucracies, with cities like Austin seeing rents at pre-pandemic levels

• Trump Accounts refresh an intergenerational contract, creating a pathway for the federal government and philanthropy to invest in American children’s success

• Employee ownership continued to gain federal bipartisan momentum through the AORA Act, Employee Ownership Representation Act, and Retire Through Ownership Act

• Employee ownership investing jumped 70%+ just between 2024 and 2025, as several new employee ownership funds entered the marketplace

Leaders Who Embrace Patriotism, Service, and Subsidiarity to the “Commons”

• 13 public universities – for example UT Austin, University of Florida, and UNC Chapel Hill – created schools committed to national service, civics, and Western civilization

• Think tanks like American Compass, FAI, and Niskanen continue to live into realignment principles and are increasing in influence

• Silicon Valley visibly turned towards hard / deep / defense tech with major firms raising funds explicitly tied to national security and industrial-capacity

• Lina Khan and her anti-trust framework continue to maintain influence within the FTC and grows in influence in state and regional enforcement agencies

Institutions That Cultivate Our Capacity to Take Responsibility for One Another

• Gen Z now leads all generations in church attendance and Gen Z men, particularly, are driving a reversal towards increasing religiosity in the U.S.

• The work of researchers like Jonathan Haidt drove multiple U.S. States and Australia to implement increasing regulation on phone and social media usage amongst children

Almost all of these bullets above, 10 years ago, would have been laughed out of rooms.

You do not need to agree with my diagnosis, or my specific remedies, or even the view that these changes I have described above are good (many do not!). However, I hope you walk away with the takeaway that we are entering an era where anything is possible.

Towards 2026

I want to be honest about the nugget of worry I still hold.

The worst outcome is that we tear institutions down and fail to build anything better. That is still a possibility. The list I showed above is real, but it still represents a set of seeds more than it does a fully developed forest.

What gives me hope is that the people sowing the seeds sit across different political parties, industries, regions, and ideologies. They are bipartisan coalitions enacting ambitious policy, government officials rejecting free-market fundamentalism, city leaders who are “abundance-pilled”, young people rejecting cultural messaging, college leaders who believe in serving a higher purpose, and technologists who rejected decades of B2B SaaS as the pinnacle of innovation.

This dual reality of precarity and hope will be a major theme as this Substack enters its second year. With that in mind, I have a few shifts I hope to make.

1. I want to cowrite with friends and peers more often. If you have strongly held views, ideas on what is to come, or remedies you believe few are talking about, please reach out!

2. I want to bring more of my own data and insights to these posts. Many of my pieces this year relied on books and high-level frameworks. In 2026, I want to do more original analysis which brings very specific solutions to specific problems.

3. Finally, I want to build something. In 2025, I formed some truly deeply held convictions. In 2026, I want to move those convictions into action. While I do not know what shape it will take, I hope to bring you all along through the process of writing.

Once again, thank you for reading, commenting, arguing, and sharing. This Substack exists because of you.

Here is to another year of Throughlines, Takes, Thoughts, and the hope that we might be building something worth building.

Sincerely,

Atharva

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A note to the audience: I’d love to hear your thoughts: Do you agree that we need to tear it down and start over? What do you worry about? What are the seeds being planted that give you the most hope? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

Each year, I find myself in the same predicament: All the ideas I’ve dedicated my life to understanding, from politics to economics to culture… someone casually just says to me.

Whether it is, “We would all be happier if we just went to church” or “the people in charge don’t really care about me” or even “it feels like these big companies just make money from making us buy worse products and profiting off our pain” – everyday people intuitively grasp what is happening in this country, and importantly, why.

For them, it’s self-evident in their communities and in-line with the wisdom passed down through generations of oral tradition.

It is common sense.

“Common sense” is something I’ve always lacked. I like numbers. I like abstraction. I love to be a contrarian. None of these modes of cognition lend itself well to understanding what is self-evident.

So, for the final column of the year, I have two Thoughts and a few stocking stuffer bites. In theme, these will all explore the friction between the strong-held beliefs of elites and the wisdom of common sense.

• Jacob Savage’s viral essay “The Lost Generation”, lays out a narrative of DEI which asks the question: what did DEI actually do?

• Affordability is the new favorite pundit buzzword. The pundits also think affordability is mostly a vibes problem. I disagree!

Let’s begin.

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What were the actual effects of DEI?

“The Lost Generation”, an essay about the cost of DEI, struck a chord in thought leader social media. Center-left thinkers (like Matthew Yglesias), Leftists (like David Austin Walsh), normie republicans, and populists like Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance all found some resonance in the piece.

The power of the piece is its ability to cut through noise and complicated discourse around DEI by asking one pretty powerful question: What are the material effects of DEI in society? It focuses exclusively on rigorously reporting changes in hiring and culture in prestige institutions like journalism, academia, and Hollywood.

So, what did DEI actually do? While I would strong encourage you to read the article, I found Musa Al-Gharbi’s review of the essay a compelling summary:

• DEI included significant gains for younger non-white folks, queer folks, and women. These gains went almost entirely to the most advantaged members of these groups.

• These gains did come with a cost. Early-career straight, white men were often filtered out of hiring processes in statistically significant and observable ways.

• There were minimal costs on the older white men who were already inside of these institutions – many of whom often publicly championing DEI even while critical in private.

• The costs and gains of this arrangement were predominantly borne by elites, which meant the “winners” mostly gained status and the “losers” costs ranged from humiliation to dashed dreams.

To be clear, DEI emerged from legitimate problems in elite workplaces for people of color and women — conditions which certainly merited remedies. But what the data and reporting reveal is that the solutions encompassed by DEI resulted in two material changes: altered hiring pipelines in elite institutions, and a transformed ideological culture within those organizations. And the changes to the hiring pipeline were not small.

Bloomberg Data on New Hiring from Fortune 100 Companies from 2020-2023

This is the narrative I believe we need to have an honest conversation about, and a narrative which common sense grasped years ago1.

• Part I: elite institutions made intentional efforts to hire fewer white men in an era where hiring was stagnant.

• Part II: The same elites who made up these institutions embraced identitarian politics which advantaged one group at the expense of another (exactly the situation rhetoric on equity was designed to mitigate).

• Part III: These costs were not bore by the white leaders who designed these policies. Instead, they fell on younger white men – who were not responsible for the organizational cultures which drove demand for DEI – in the form of diminished status and opportunity.

This is what a zero-sum game looks like. Worse, this is as a zero-sum game which blamed the “losers” for creating the conditions, systems, and structures which justified their “loss” (even though none of them were born yet).

Once we acknowledge there is truth to this narrative — that DEI came with costs, and those costs were primarily borne by one class of people — we must ask a hard question. Are these costs worth it?

This is a question with no clean answers, so I will leave it to you, the reader.

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Affordability!

With just one weird trick, you too can win an election: just use the word “affordability”.

Covering everything from utility prices to healthcare subsidies, affordability is the new buzzword. So much so that Democratic and Republican politicians are gearing up to make it the centerpiece of the 2026 midterms.

The challenge right now is that people love talking about it and really no one knows what to actually do about it. This is largely because most of the economic establishment and pundit class reject that affordability is actually a real problem, viewing it as more of “vibecession”.

As Matthew Yglesias points out in his own deep dive on affordability, median wages are rising faster than prices and inflation is higher, but under control. Generally, these economic indicators, if applied to the past 30 years would tell you a story: the average American’s wage has outpaced the costs they face, and things have only gotten better.

How could this be the case? There are really only two options:

1. The American public is collectively wrong about their own economic reality; or

2. The economic and political establishment’s data and research no longer paint an actual portrait of that reality

An answer to this question eluded me until I read the book The Mismeasurement of America. In it, Gene Ludwig constructs a true cost of living metric designed to track the true realities for the average middle income earner. This metric contains a few critical deviations from more common measures of “affordability”, like the consumer price index – primarily in its accounting of housing, healthcare, transportation, and technology costs (detail in the footnote)2.

What Ludwig’s true living cost measure reveals is by making even slight tweaks to how you measure cost, you can observe that cost-adjusted wages have diminished over time.

American Compass, undertook a similar exercise via its Cost of Thriving Index, which focuses exclusively on nominal cost increases to five categories of American families most critical costs: food, housing, healthcare, transportation, and education.

It too has the same finding: “this is not the prosperity that was promised, or that economists try to claim has been delivered”. The common sense is right – a good life is more inaccessible than ever.

So then, if the data is wrong and the costs really are “too damn high”, what do we do about it? Here again, common sense would have a simple answer – we must bring the costs down.

The challenge to doing this is the mainstream economic establishment views it as a non-starter. The consensus goes that bringing costs down (or deflation) generally only occurs through a recession.

I’m not so sure. I think recent experiments in housing in cities like Austin, Denver, and Phoenix show that you can bring prices down if you are willing to sacrifice at least one of the interest groups attempting to hold prices up – whether it be homeowners seeking to make a tidy sum from a sale or communities hoping to maintain home values by artificially constraining supply.

This is not easy. It requires a willingness to prioritize amongst powerful interest groups in sectors like housing, healthcare, and education. It also requires a relentless focus on supply and an embrace of innovative structures of ownership which create both the pressure to lower prices and keep them down. More to come on this in future posts.

Here is where I will leave it: common sense knows costs are too high and that costs must come down. Politicians have certainly learned to campaign in ways which play to this view. The real question is whether any of them will actually govern on it.

Stocking Stuffers

What’s up with tariffs?

• Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong – Wall Street Journal

• How Trump’s Tariffs are Everywhere and Nowhere – Trumponomics Podcast

I have refrained from fully jumping into tariff discourse as we lack the data to definitively evaluate whether they are working. WSJ posted an interesting piece saying that both the advocates (who thought it would usher in a golden age of manufacturing) and the dissidents (who thought it would plunge us into stagflation) have been wrong. The Trumponomics Podcast explored a similar challenge, noting that prices have not gone up as much as expected (foreign countries and corporations are paying a significant portion of the costs) and the country appears to be paying it with economic growth (weakened demand). I think we still have a full year before we can understand the true set of tradeoffs inherent with a tariff regime.

Things that made me mad in December

• The Most Embarrassing Education Stories in America – The Argument Podcast

• DNC blocks release of its 2024 election autopsy – Politico

My gears were truly grinded in December.

First, the Argument completed a multi-month series on education policy which is one of the all-time validators of common sense. Turns out grade inflation is bad and teaching kids how to read is good (apparently neither of these were accepted views for the better part of two decades)!

Second, the Democratic Party has decided not to publicly release their autopsy of the 2024 election. I have so many words to say on this, but instead I will attempt to reign in my condescension to the barest minimum necessary and leave you with my favorite quote on what it means to be Democratic.

Take from it what you will.

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A note to the audience: I’d love to hear your thoughts: Do you agree with the emerging narrative on DEI’s costs? Do you think the tradeoffs were worth it? What do you think about the affordability discourse? Do you think there is a reasonable pathway to bringing the costs down? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

This was an untenable situation given my partner is (A) a generally outdoors person and (B) a generally not online person. As you can imagine, a few months in she had hit her limit.

“We should foster a dog.”

To paint the picture, I was a 20-year-old who had not figured out that washing sheets was a biweekly occurrence rather than a biannual one. The prospect of caring for another living creature was not a responsibility that even computed in my brain.

My partner, however, is persistent. By April, we found ourselves driving to the shelter. She had promised a small dog, fit for a student apartment. You can imagine my surprise when she walked out with a 90-pound Pitbull named Dasher.

I was terrified of this dog when I saw him. But the first time we were alone (my partner had run into a pet store and left me in the car with him) I looked into his eyes and saw something I couldn’t place.

Within days, I found myself attuned to him, and him to me. At any given moment, he seemed to know what I was feeling.

Over the months we fostered him, I felt something in me change. The regularity of feeding, walking, and caring was a consistency and structure to my life I had frankly avoided, if not outright feared. But these tasks became responsibilities I was willing to choose.

Responsibilities I wanted to choose.

I’ll get back to that later, I promise.

With a rise in the discourse on Nick Fuentes (including not just one, but two think pieces from the NYT), we have seen an uptick in conversation around “post-liberalism”.

As Ross Douthat observed, the term has become a catch-all for everything from the groypers Nick Fuentes represents to the illiberal forms of cultural progressivism (or “wokeness”) which enforce rigorous moral prescriptions.

I think that framing is more politically convenient than it is helpful. Instead, I would say the best way to understand post-liberalism is as a shared diagnosis that something is broken in liberalism.

To understand this diagnosis, we must first understand liberalism. At its core, liberalism is the idea that society should free individuals from unjust hierarchies, constraints on flourishing, and inherited status. Liberalism does not define a shared societal virtue or purpose, instead focusing on allowing each person to pursue their own conception of the good life.

As put by Douthat, the post-liberal believes that liberalism comes with fundamental tradeoffs:

“Like a complex genome, the liberal order always contains within itself certain destabilizing tendencies — toward hyper-individualism, demoralization, class conflict, alienation, anomie”

Post-liberals see economic devastation in the heartland, hyper-consumption, and increasing loneliness in our country as a feature, not a bug of liberalism.

I share in portions of their diagnosis. Without a shared, societal morality, a focus on liberation and freedom orients towards the pursuit of individual interests. This is particularly catastrophic when combined with a pseudo-meritocracy, which creates a class of “winners” whose pursuit of their own liberation enables them to trample on “losers”. Liberation, for its own sake, devolves into freedom from obligation towards anyone else, or broader society.

However, liberalism comes with virtues as well as vices. The march towards liberation gifted us pluralism and helped ended bondage. That same march endowed me with the freedom to speak my own mind on this Substack.

It was not until I read the politics of an unlikely post-liberal, that I saw a potential synthesis – one which recognized the duality of liberalism’s virtues and vices.

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The Post-Liberalism of Martin Luther King Jr.

In his later years, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. began to ask a question: now that we’ve achieved liberation, what is it for? MLK began to lay out his framework in his speech, “Where Do We Go From Here:”

“And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites- polar opposites- so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love... What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about, “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society… I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism… What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.”

MLK is articulating a politics of love. This politics sees liberation as a tool. Rather than painting freedom as the goal in and of itself, he offers a synthesis of liberation as a means to love. In this, he saw a society that was neither technocratic capitalism nor authoritarian communism.

This politics of love is fundamentally post-liberal.

MLK anchors society on the narrow ethic of love (rather than leaving conceptions of the good life purely to the individual). He also calls for a fundamental transformation of society – a regime change. Finally, he demands a remade economic system that balances individual pursuit with communal priorities. MLK is describing a version of post-liberalism similar to Patrick Deneen’s conception of “common-good conservatism”:

“A common good conservatism… combines… commitment to a more egalitarian and communal economic order with… support for social values that undergird strong and stable familial, communal, associational, and religious order… [Common good conservatism] focuses on securing the common good in all senses of the word ‘common’ – ordinary, shared, and especially needed by average people. It also seeks to secure the shared ‘good’ for every human being – not simply select elite.” – Regime Change, Patrick Deneen

However, he has one critical divergence from post-liberals like Patrick Deneen. Many post-liberals would not put value into liberation, instead viewing it as an excuse to sever yourself from any responsibilities. Post-liberals often view liberation primarily as a tool of hedonism.

Dr. King does not reject this premise. However, he adds one critical amendment: liberation may be a tool of hedonism, but it is also required to truly love.

My central realization from fostering Dasher was that love was not some complicated, abstract set of emotions requiring long soliloquies. Love is simple. Love is responsibility we choose.

And a politics of love is simply a politics of taking responsibility for our friends, families, neighbors, and countrymen. This is a politics that is fundamentally different from liberalism yet does not stand against its inherent virtues.

A Politics of Love

This is where it gets complicated. A politics of love is a guiding north star – one which would push us to orient society around the cultivation of service and relationality while recognizing that self-actualization is a necessary component of that cultivation.

A politics of love will require three things simultaneously:

• An economy that enables people to live decent and happy lives. We need an economy that minimizes the number of people in perpetual servitude. As Dr. Virgil Woods (a close collaborator of King) would describe it: a Beloved Economy.

• A set of institutions which cultivate the capacities of love. We need to ensure people view their liberation as a tool to be used in service of others, rather than themselves.

• A class of leaders which embrace classical conservative principles of subsidiarity, patriotism, and service. We need an elite which stewards the ethic of love, protects its institutions, and is responsive to the “commons”.

I’ve written about each of these individually: on the need for a new economy that builds distributed prosperity rather than gated prosperity, on new pathways for elites that keep them rooted in the communities they serve, and on the need to revitalize religion as the only time-tested institution capable of cultivating the capacity to love.

Michael Lind, another post-liberal, paints a compelling way to understand how all of these spheres relate in his piece “Democratic Pluralism for the 21^st Century”.

“… Conceive of society in terms of separate spheres—the family, religion, industry, philanthropy, government—each of which should be largely autonomous within its own realm. Within the civic realm, the territorial state can legitimately insist on equal and identical treatment of all citizens in the forum and all participants in public markets… [But] it is illegitimate for the territorial state to try to impose civic values outside of the civic realm… Do not view these controversies as clashes of one individual right against another individual right, as liberals might view them. Rather, these are clashes of institutional authority.”

A politics of love requires different institutions with different mandates. Industry should build distributed prosperity. Family, religion, and philanthropy should cultivate the capacities to love. And political leaders should create conditions that encourage love without seeking to impose their own morality on a pluralistic society.

Fostering Dasher was one of the central pivot points of my life.

Before him, it was easier to pursue things for my own ambition, my own desires, and my own empowerment. I was chasing liberation from what I saw as anchors: financial obligations, communitarian ties, and responsibilities I had not chosen.

This type of pursuit of liberation is both too easy and enormously monetizable. It was in those years I wanted to consume the most and chase money regardless of what I believed was right.

I was in the long valley of hedonism. The long stretch between a newly gained independence and choosing to serve.

Our current political economy is designed to keep us in that valley as long as possible. It is only repeated opportunities to love – through the encouragement of a partner, the quiet companionship of a dog, or the many relationships maintained through a chosen community – that turn selfish liberation into selfless love.

True flourishing was nowhere to be found in that valley. Ultimately, it was only filled with more, never better or happier.

In the words of Dr. King, “if you have not love, it means nothing.” Because liberation without love is not really liberation at all.

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A note to the audience: I’d love to hear your thoughts: Do you embrace any elements of the post-liberal critique? Do you agree that MLK is a post-liberal? What does a politics of love look like to you? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

To date, you have received the longer form Takes (my strongest convictions) and Throughlines (deep summaries of history, data, and analysis). Thoughts are designed to complement these with much more digestible and shorter form ideas paired with a few quick hit articles and podcasts.

Additionally, this marks a turning point in Seeds for a New Consensus. Over the past few months, I have had an immense amount of fun, have learned so much from many of you, and these posts have sparked some truly wonderful conversations. With this, I am now going to switch to two posts per month: one Thoughts column, and another longer-form (Take or Throughline) column.

As always, feedback is a gift. If you have any thoughts on how to improve these posts or this Substack, I would love to know.

Let’s dive in!

For the debut Thoughts column, I come with a few juicy tidbits:

1. We are officially in ‘post-mortem’ season for the Democrats. Please read this very real review of the Welcome Party’s Deciding to Win post-mortem report:

   

2. A recent episode of The Daily explored the transformation of love and marriage as a result of Ozempic. How does this connect to Seeds for a New Consensus? Guess you’ll have to keep reading to find out.

Additionally, a few quick thoughts on recent economic data from Bloomberg, a set of paths forward suggested for universities, and rare earth minerals.

Before we begin, a reminder: this is designed to be provocative. If you have your own thoughts, ideas, or reactions, please share them in the comments below – I try and respond to every single one.

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Thought #1: Is moderation the answer for Democrats?

As David A. Graham mentions in his piece “Are Democrats Overthinking This”, “Donald Trump’s re-election has prompted an especially frantic round of soul searching” for Democrats.

In this Substack, we have explored two specific diagnoses resulting from this soul searching. The Abundance Faction asserts that Democrats became the party of far-left cultural interests and procedural interests, rather than focusing on unlocking supply of clean energy, housing, scientific discovery, and business. The Left-wing Populist Faction asserts that Democrats over-rotated towards reflexive moderation and incremental, status quo institutions rather than the massive public works – childcare, healthcare, and industrial capacity – working people needed.

Earlier this month, the Welcome Party (an explicitly moderate and pragmatic Democratic movement building organization) added a third theory via their “Deciding to Win” report. They have a pretty simple assertion: Do popular things, convince voters we care about those things, and critique unpopular things.

Pretty difficult to argue with, no?

Using their own data on net-support and relative voter priority for progressive policies (graph below), we can understand the document’s most significant claims.

Progressive Policies Charted by Level of Support and Level of Priority

• Claim #1: Progressive policy is mostly unpopular.

• Claim #2: The priority issues for the highly-educated Democratic base (like climate change, democracy, polarization, and structural inequities) are quite low priority to the general electorate.

• Claim #3: Outside of healthcare, Democrats are below water on the issues which matter to the electorate – the economy, immigration, and crime.

All of this comes together for a central call: Run more heterodox, moderate candidates who support popular policies.

Based on my own read of the election, the era of culturally progressive, economically libertarian politicians wildly out-of-step with regular people is over in the near-term. In this, I agree with the authors of the report.

However, the current policies of moderation (like congressional stock trading bans, various social safety net expansions) do not feel ambitious enough to solve address the magnitude of the cultural and economic challenges we face.

This leaves me with the thought that moderation is a piece of the answer for Democrats, not the whole answer. The pieces appear to be on the board for the factional fight which will decide the future of the party – one pushing supply-side abundance, another channeling FDR to build tomorrow’s economy, and now a third group saying “maybe, just get in line with voters.”

Interestingly, these three factions share one truth: the old coalition is dead. The friction among these groups might then produce something entirely new, similar to how the right built a new and more electorally effective coalition in the Trump era. Just read this quote, from a prominent member of the Democratic Party:

“The real thing we’re talking about here is what might be called the professional political classes… The people in them are the same people who staff or drive the other parts of … politics… That professional community’s culture and attention are governed not by its values or goals but by the decisions of the corporations and oligarchs who own the social media platforms and design them to further their profits or their politics”

This sounds like a critique a populist like Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, or even Bernie Sanders might make. Yet, this is Ezra Klein (an explicit moderate and abundance liberal) on his most recent podcast. The new Democratic coalition may already be forming.

Thought #2: What is liberation for?

A recent episode of The Daily explored the changes in one women’s social life as a result of Ozempic. I would strongly encourage you to listen to the episode, but I will provide a simple summary below.

Jeanne had spent much of her life trying to please others — working hard, staying agreeable, doing what was expected — hoping it might make people like her more. She never felt fully comfortable in her body, and her efforts to make everyone happy often left her drained.

When she started taking Ozempic, the weight came off quickly, and with it, her old habits of saying yes. Her friends and her husband noticed her appetite for food, alcohol, late nights, and even sex faded.

But for Jeanne, what looked like withdrawal from her husband and her friends felt like the beginning of freedom. Including the ability to say no, and pursue her own hopes and desires.

Listening to Jeanne’s story, I could not stop thinking about liberation. A positive interpretation of liberation would see Jeanne’s story as the ultimate goal of a free society. The ability to choose, and an ability to see your own innate value.

However, liberation and its close cousin of liberalism have faced a fair bit of criticism in recent years. Patrick Deneen, in his book Regime Change (one of my favorite reads), notes that liberation for the sake of liberation is hollow. Simply, the pursuit of self-interest without fear of judgement. I’d imagine Deneen and other post-liberals may view Jeanne’s story as a tragedy in the sense that community and connection were traded for individual desire.

This is a bit of a tough nut to unwind. When I read Regime Change, it was hard to disagree with the reality that liberation in service of self-interest felt pointless and even harmful.

What may offer a nugget of hope out of this paradox is the concept of love. When I think about loving someone, I see a kind of chosen servitude. A form of liberation put in service of someone else’s interests. I have also found that true love emerges out of independence – the more self-interested version of liberation – as it requires the ability to choose.

What I think may be happening here, but I do not have the data to prove it, is that self-interest is a natural reaction to freedom from a form of servitude – whether it is to societal interests or internal baggage. However, the very nuanced challenge of modern liberalism, is the same traditions, customs, and practices that liberalism sees as ‘servitude’ (like religion or societal norms), are also the same tools which cultivate a mindset of love.

Additionally, from an economic perspective, we are at our most monetizable when we are “independent” – we pursue lucrative careers, partner and raise families less often, and consume more things.

My final thought is this may provide an initial framework for a new critique of liberalism, that comes from another flank than post-liberalism. I agree, we need virtues that orient around service and recognize that base pleasures are hollow, HOWEVER, that the only way to truly get there is to choose service.

Unfortunately, I have little to offer in terms of concrete economic or policy prescriptions here.

Yet.

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Quick bites and fun reading

The growing noveau riche

• Top 10% of Earners Drive a Growing Share of US Consumer Spending

• Zohran’s Park Slope Populists by John Carney

• Antoine Levy Pretty Much Debunks the Bloomberg 10% of Earners Statistic

A few weeks ago, Bloomberg posted a mindboggling chart showing the top 10% of earners now drive 50% of all U.S. Consumption. The best explanation I saw attributed it to (1) The top 10% income growth has outpaced median income growth, while the cost of high-end consumption generally outpaced regular consumption. At the same time, (2) the class of people who can afford high-end goods are becoming a larger share of the economy.

Not to make a bunch of logical leaps (but I am going to make a bunch of logical leaps), but might this be a driver of the growing phenomenon of ‘downwardly mobile elites’ responding to a version of ‘status shrinkflation’ and then adopting more left-populist views?

Or as Antoine Levy shows, maybe the Bloomberg data is, mostly, incorrect and demonstrating almost nothing as the top 10% save at significantly higher rates and pay more taxes.

Where do universities go next

• The Next Era of the American University by Aziz Huq

• City Journal’s Inaugural 2025 College Rankings

Two visions for the university of the future are taking shape. The Next Era of the American University calls on higher education to build “transnational infrastructures” that sidestep federal constraints in a move that mirrors multinational corporations.

Meanwhile, City Journal envisions a renaissance led by institutions resisting leftward drift and intellectual conformity, highlighting public school standouts like Florida, UT Austin, UNC, and Texas A&M.

New operation warp speed just dropped

• America Gave Away Rare Earths by Daniel Kishi

• How to Implement Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths by Institute for Progress

Rare earths are back in the spotlight after China wielded them in recent trade negotiations. As a huge fan of the initial Operation Warp Speed, I am incredibly excited by the emerging consensus on the left and the right for bold federal action in this arena. State capacity might just be back!

If any of these thoughts interested you – please let me know in the comments. Where do Democrats go next? Do the post-realignment coalitions of the left and right excite you more than the status quo? What is the purpose of liberation?

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For those of you who do not play saxophone, every saxophonist faces a fork in the road: a decision to either specialize in jazz or classical instrumentation.

Jazz, through all of its variations, is organized chaos. Watch a jazz trio or big band perform, and you’ll notice either there is no conductor at all, or one who functions more like an awkward ‘third wheel’, with the music emerging from the musicians listening to each other, responding in real-time. It’s messy, but it’s alive and ever changing.

Classical instrumentation operates on the opposite principle. Every eye tracks the conductor’s baton. The musicians, no matter how talented, serve as instruments of the conductor’s vision, their tempos and dynamics dictated by the individual on the podium. It’s precise, controlled, and consistent.

I’ve been thinking about this dichotomy, particularly because I have noticed it mirrors the central tension in America’s economic realignment.

I’ve talked about this realignment quite a bit, alongside the emerging ecosystem of actors which are driving it. Thus far, I’ve laid out both a problem and a vision.

• The problem: An economy which diverges from the interests of the average worker, hollows out our ability to build and make things, diverts innovation toward trivial improvements, and monetizes (and therefore harms) non-market goods like family, health, and human connection.

• The vision: an economy that builds as confidently as it designs, reaches everywhere instead of a few zip codes, and allows everyone to succeed regardless of their specific skillset.

Those driving this realignment – ideological post-neoliberals like left-wing populists, and right-of-center worker and family populists – tend to agree with some version of this problem and vision. However, they tend to disagree on questions of how this vision is achieved. To illustrate this, I’ve pulled two quotes from two different post-neoliberal camps:

“[Our vision of crafting markets involves investment] in a single institution with broad authority and discretion to accomplish a clear mission. That setup gives the marketcrafter the ability to build a team of experts… who are responsive to market feedback… This is a fundamentally Hamiltonian vision of a robust, empowered government” – Chris Hughes, Marketcrafters: The 100-year struggle to shape the American Economy

“The three components of the Trump economic agenda… are interlocking parts of an engine designed to drive… domestic manufacturing: Tax cuts and cost savings from deregulation raise real incomes for families and businesses; tariffs create an incentive for re-industrialization and fair trade; and deregulation complements tariffs by making it easier to invest in energy and manufacturing projects.” – Scott Bessent, current Treasury Secretary

Underneath each of these statements is a provocation. Should the economic realignment occur through technocrats acting as conductors – endowed with significant power, leveraging precision to drive change? Or should the realignment function closer to a jazz ensemble – with governments creating the enabling conditions so individual market participants can improvise their own path?

These are no longer abstract questions. The Biden administration embraced an institution-driven approach (e.g., “the conductor”) which simultaneously sparked domestic manufacturing growth and was unable to durably shift economic behavior. The Trump administration, thus far, has embraced a market-driven approach (e.g., “the jazz ensemble”) which is certainly changing behavior across huge swaths of the economy, but with unpredictable and sometimes destabilizing macroeconomic consequences.

While I am personally heartened by post-neoliberal thinking making its way into federal administrations, I believe the reason we are not yet reaping the economic rewards of this change is the false choice between market-driven and institution-driven approaches.

Today, I hope to lay out the case for the marriage of these two approaches, using two of the more infrequently compared stories of economic success: the economic transformation of China through hybrid state-capitalism, and Texas’s achievements in education and renewable energy through strategic market-shaping.

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The Hybrid State-Capitalism of China

Over the past 30 years, no economic model has seen a greater rise to prominence then the Chinese model.

When American policymakers debated normalizing trade with China in the 1990s, they saw a centrally planned socialist economy—the epitome of technocratic control. What they missed was that China had already begun shifting power away from central planners and toward markets in the economic realm, even as the Party maintained tight control in the political one.

Between 1970 and 2000, China loosened restrictions on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and federalized economic authority – pushing subsidy, debt, and investment decisions to provinces and municipalities to spark competition. By the time China entered normalized trade relations with the West, it had created something new: strategic state guidance married to market competition.

• At the local and municipal level, the country encouraged competition amongst all its domestic businesses, all fighting for market share in the world’s largest domestic marketplace

• At the national level, China selected a few strategic sectors (e.g., advanced manufacturing, robotics, ship-building, AI) where it cleared regulation and incentivized growth

• Across the entire marketplace, China employed significant protections to ensure international competitors did not displace those fledgling industries

• Once winners emerged from the competition (“national champions”), China channeled significant subsidy to enable those winners to compete globally

This approach has allowed Chinese companies to sharpen their capabilities in a vast domestic market before expanding globally. The results are visible in the chart below—China now dominates production of the technologies that will define the coming decades.

Source: Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Report: “China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries”

This domination is supported by strict, technocratic planning (like the “Made in China 2025 plan”), where government leaders establish a set of priority sectors and technologies, preventing the diffusion of resources across too many targets.

However, even as technocratic planning is central to their success, China employs several market-driven tools to achieving technocratically established goals. China clears regulatory barriers and lets companies compete fiercely – creating the enabling conditions for internationally competitive “national champions” to emerge. China also protects those champions in their early infancy and supports them with subsidy, enabling winners to eat up huge chunks of global market-share rapidly.

It is important to note, this growth has costs. Local governments – the engines of the Chinese subsidy model – are saddled with enormous debt; a predictable result of the vast amounts of capital the country channels towards subsidy. Intense domestic competition has triggered a “race to the bottom” where price wars drive economic stagnation. And as Dan Wang notes in Breakneck, the same capabilities that enable China’s successful “economic engineering” also drive its “social engineering”—from the One Child Policy to Zero-Covid lockdowns. These costs are important to consider, especially as experiments with China’s more technocratic elements in the U.S. – like our own COVID policies – have driven elite-backlash.

Yet despite these costs, China’s rise on the global stage stems directly from this economic model. It’s not the centrally planned socialist state American policymakers imagined. It’s a marriage of technocratic strategic planning with market-driven competition.

This marriage of institutions and markets works in the country context of China – where its populace values collectivism and safety over individualism and freedom. Can the work of institution building and market shaping work in an American context?

Yes, it works in Texas.

The ‘Texas Model’

Texas is profoundly misunderstood. The common perception (particularly on the coasts) revolves around loud conservatism, big trucks, and extreme heat.

As someone who calls Texas home, I’ll grant this: the state is certainly proudly conservative, the trucks are large, and the heat is brutal.

However, consider two facts that complicate this picture: Texas is top 10 in the nation across all metrics of demographically adjusted education performance – the only nationally comparable measure of student achievement. And Texas leads the nation in renewable energy generation for both wind and solar.

How does a state which visibly embraces the hallmarks of 1970’s conservatism – particularly a brand of conservatism known for its free-market fundamentalism – achieve results no pure free market has in the United States?

To answer that, let’s look at the history of both education and renewable energy in the state.

Education

In the mid-1800s, when Texas was best known for cattle and cowboys, the state made a remarkable choice: it established the world’s first sovereign wealth fund.

Texas designated half its public land to two funds – the Permanent School Fund (PSF) and the Permanent University Fund (PUF) – guaranteeing that all future wealth from that land would flow towards public education. When oil was discovered on those lands in the early 1900s, they exploded in value and became engines of top-down education subsidy in the state.

But the state didn’t stop with centralized funding. It surrounded these institutions with market-driven pressure: Robin Hood redistribution laws, property tax flows to education, and charter school competition—all designed to keep costs low while driving improvement through competition. It is these traits that brought my parents to the state, and these traits which allowed me to attend the University of Texas at Austin for the cost of roughly $10,000 per year.

This strategy, of mixing institution building with market shaping, the state repeated when it decided to take a more active hand to its energy sector.

Energy

There is a common narrative about Texas renewables which explains its success as primarily a result of abundant sun, strong wind, and lots of cheap land. However, it misses the hand Texas took to guiding its energy markets.

In the 1990s, Texas identified renewable energy as a priority. Rather than subsidizing production directly like California, the state took a market-driven approach which cleared regulatory barriers and streamlined permitting, hoping to spark private investment.

It worked to a degree, but the uptake remained slow due to a classic collective action problem: wind-energy projects and utility-grade solar needed expensive energy transmission infrastructure to connect to the grid, but no individual provider wanted to pay for it. In 2005, Texas created the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones initiative, a centralized institution that streamlined permitting and financed development through distributed fees across grid users.

Texas did not wait for markets to develop renewables – it made a conscious effort to actively shape markets. And when markets hit their limits, the state built institutions to do what markets wouldn’t.

In both cases, Texas embraced deregulation, streamlining, and market competition—the familiar tools of Reagan-era conservatism. But the state understood something critical, something China grasps as well. Markets are tools in service of the public good, not ends in themselves. Critically, the state recognizes they are imperfect tools, requiring institutions to address what markets can’t solve.

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Crafting a New Economy

Across both examples, there is a single insight: changing an economy requires markets and institutions working in concert.

Even as China leans towards institution driven approaches and Texas towards market driven ones, both share core principles:

1. Markets are powerful tools, which can drive scale unlike any other instrument

2. However, markets need to be pointed in the right direction to achieve public benefit

3. To do this, governments must build the infrastructure and enabling incentives that push markets in the direction of public benefit

4. Governments must also build institutions which can correct market failures and move with the speed implied by the problem it seeks to solve

It is in this where I have a central challenge with the current Trump administration economic policy. Tariffs, deregulation, and tax credits are powerful tools that can shift domestic incentives toward reindustrialization and frontier technology development. However, nine months into this experiment, the data is showing domestic manufacturing and investment is not surging.

Two explanations seem possible.

First, the Trump administration’s approach may simply need more time. It will take a few years to start seeing the indicators of reindustrialization, and perhaps we are too early to judge whether they will work. Proponents of tariffs like American Compass’s Oren Cass and Bloomberg’s Anna Wong have certainly made this case.

However, there is another possibility, that deindustrialization may be more of a market failure than market misalignment. The hollowing of the working class resulted from the market’s refusal to solve collective action problems – like the need for patient capital for decade-long industrial buildouts which cannot compete with faster returns in finance and tech, or the lack of a public workforce education pipeline for good-quality blue collar jobs.

I do not know which explanation is correct. But both would be addressed by marrying current the current market-driven approach with an institution-driven one. For example:

• If the issue is timing, a centralized institution could provide targeted subsidies to priority sectors during the transition, jumpstarting reindustrialization while market incentives take hold.

• If the issue is market failure, a centralized institution could address coordination problems by directing government investment toward shared infrastructure, de-risking private investment through advance purchase commitments, or providing low-cost capital that crowds in additional private investment.

This is why I strongly agree with Julius Krein’s call for a national sovereign wealth fund operating in service of domestic priorities. Such an institution wouldn’t replace markets—it would complement them, allowing markets to achieve public goals while channeling capital where markets fail.

When I faced the choice between jazz and classical saxophone, I just couldn’t choose.

Jazz taught me to listen, to improvise, to create something alive with others in real-time. Classical taught me the power of collective discipline, of submitting individual brilliance to a larger vision. The choice was false, because each made the other stronger.

America has always thrived in this intellectual duality – in this pluralism. We succeed not despite contradiction, not despite difference, but because of it.

Today’s moment demands the same pluralism. Not Texas or China, but Texas and China. Not deregulation or industrial policy, but both deployed strategically. Our new economy won’t come from picking between the conductor’s baton and the jazz ensemble’s creative chaos, but from embracing the beauty both can create.

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A note to the audience: I’d love to hear your thoughts: What will it take to achieve a vision of a new economy? What tools do you think we need to use? Why have previous administrations not succeeded? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

Twenty-two years later, mathematician Morris DeGroot gave us the proof for what those psychologists had stumbled upon. His paper, “Reaching a Consensus,” revealed that as networks become more connected, they converge on the average view of that network. Like a mathematical limit approaching a single point.

Later, social scientists refined this theory of convergence with a crucial insight: networks don’t converge on averages – they converge on weighted averages, with the “weight” being influence. The more connected a member of the network is, the more gravitational pull, or “weight”, they exert on the system. This means that networks are inherently tools for organizing diverse interests. While each interest each pulls in its own direction, the network moves towards toward a point of convergence shaped by the collective, weighted influence of all its members.

Which brings us to the American economy.

It can be easy for the economy to feel like an amorphous and invisible thing – because it is. But when you strip away the messiness, it's just another network: billions of people buying and selling, connected by rules, institutions, and relationships. It’s just another function hurtling toward its mathematical destiny, shaped by the weighted average of its participants' beliefs, actions, and power.

You cannot tease every variable out in this function, but you can observe its trajectory – and therefore its convergence point – by watching economic trends. In my first essay on the American economy, “Our Rotting Foundation,” I identified three trends pointing towards our economic destiny, including:

• Convergence on Financialization: The economy increasingly achieves its profit incentive by monetizing everything – including care, relationships, health, and human connection. As Oren Cass describes it, this Moral Arbitrage generates cash while destroying human flourishing.

• Convergence on Labor Arbitrage: In a globalized system, production flows relentlessly towards the cheapest labor and lowest costs, creating a system of perpetual wage suppression and eroding worker power in America.

• Convergence on Incumbency: Large actors bend rules around themselves, ensuring innovation stagnates while prices stay artificially high. The biggest players absorb the market and protect the remaining winners.

A simple summary of the three points above: our economy is converging toward a world where everything is monetized, good jobs no longer exist, and incumbent powers ensure this change cannot be reversed.

There was a time when this summary was controversial. Today, this point of convergence is increasingly recognized across the ideological spectrum.

The Biden and Trump administrations unleashed some of the most aggressive anti-monopoly enforcement in decades. Trump’s tariff regime aims to decouple America from the economies of China and others whose own industrial strategies led offshoring of America’s industrial capacity. And a strange bedfellows coalition – from the populist-right American Compass to progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren – publicly push for increased taxes on Wall Street’s financialization efforts.

Each represents an attempt to alter our economy's trajectory – however these efforts alone will not change the inevitable convergence point of our economy.

These attempts, while largely laudable, do not inherently change the interests of participants in the economy, nor does it change who has influence in a significant way (e.g., the “weighting”). Essentially, our destiny may be slowed, but the gravitational pull towards financialization, extraction, and incumbency remain the same.

To truly change our point of convergence, we need to change the most dominant variable in our economic equation – the force exerting the strongest gravitational pull.

What is this force? Owners.

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The Ownership Theory of Everything

Whether you envision them as shareholders, executives, or faceless financial institutions—the economy bends to those who own its underlying assets. Ownership is self-reinforcing, its own point of convergence. The fruits of financialization, labor arbitrage, and monopoly all flow upward into owners' hands.

Traditional critiques of capitalism, particularly Marxist ones, cast ownership itself as inherently evil—a mechanism that inevitably extracts value from workers and earth alike. This assumes that at scale, owners can only pursue profit.

This is certainly true of some owners. When a New York private equity firm owns a rural hospital, it has no incentive to maintain quality or services. When a multinational executive chooses between keeping a factory with 5,000 workers or offshoring, those workers are just numbers on a spreadsheet. The structure of ownership can create distance between its owners and their asset which tears the bonds that reinforce a duty of care.

This ownership without accountability is what religious traditions have always warned against. From Catholicism to Hinduism, the concept of exclusive possession—sole control without duty—belongs only to the divine. These traditions understand that humans are merely stewards of creation, holding temporary custody of assets while owing permanent duties to community and earth. Even John Locke, who developed the philosophical basis of private property, maintained two principles – only take as much as you can use and leave it “enough and as good” for others.

There are structures of ownership which create a very different set of incentives, ones which reflect the wisdom at the center of religious doctrine.

In Pullman, Washington, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) manufactures the microprocessor technology that powers America's electrical grids. As Brad Pearce reports, SEL stands out as one of the most worker-focused manufacturing companies in an “era otherwise defined by mergers, layoffs, and outsourcing that has persistently challenged the role of manufacturing in America's economy.” While every incentive pushed its competitors to offshore, fragment supply chains, and fight labor protections, SEL consistently moved in the opposite direction. The company offers industry-leading wages, comprehensive benefits, on-site daycare and medical care—all while maintaining market leadership and domestic production.

Why does SEL defy every rule of modern manufacturing? What leads this company to prioritize Pullman and create middle-class prosperity while its peers chase quarterly earnings? Employee ownership.

SEL is 100% employee owned. Its owners work the factory floor, live in Pullman, send their kids to local schools. They do not extract value for some distant shareholders – they create it for themselves and their neighbors. And as a result, SEL makes a very different set of decisions than the rest of its peers.

This forms the theory behind a very different critique from the Marxist variety – one that recognizes markets as powerful organizing mechanisms for incentives. Our current crisis is a direct result of the interests of the most influential node in the market – an ownership class whose bond and care for the nation have stretched and torn. Attempts to change this reality without creating a new class of owners with competing interests, will not work.

Plainly, if we want an economy that makes us envision thriving workers, stable families, and flourishing communities rather than distant shareholders and faceless financial institutions, then we need those same workers, families, and communities to own the economy's underlying assets.

We need an Ownership Economy.

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An Ownership Economy

The Ownership Economy envisions the average American as an owner in the assets they steward—businesses, homes, and communities—completing democracy's promise by extending autonomy and self-governance from the political realm to the economic. This is not some distant future but an emerging reality already reshaping American communities for the better.

For example, the Lafayette Square Institute overviewed the employee ownership landscape in the United States and found 5K+ companies owned by employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and nearly ~2M employee owners. Their evaluation, and study by organizations like the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership, consistently find employee-owners have higher retirement savings, superior benefits, and lower rates of offshoring.

The Center for Community Investment mapped community ownership – tools which allow local communities to invest in land, homes, and commercial real estate together – and found nearly 300 community ownership real estate developers in the United States. Evaluations of community ownership found participating communities are more cohesive, more likely to feel in control of their livelihoods, in addition to a whole host of potential economic benefits from affordability to wealth building.

These are only a few of a growing constellation of Ownership Economy tools rewriting our economic logic. Practitioners are developing new and novel pathways to addressing housing affordability, community wealth creation, industrial and worker power, and the preservation of services critical to national security through alternative ownership structures.

However, for us to truly shift our point of convergence it will take far more than a few million new owners – it will require a force that can counterbalance the powers of our existing economy.

This is a truly enormous ambition – yet not one that is unfamiliar to the United States. Between 1940 and 1980 a net new 90 million Americans became homeowners – not through market forces alone, but through what author Chris Hughes refers to as marketcraft. We achieved this through a variety of policy and market tools like the 30-year mortgage, VA loans, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. As Chris Hughes argues, America has always understood that markets are made, not given. We shape them to serve our purposes, or they shape us to serve theirs.

Creating the ownership economy, will require us to embrace marketcraft.

• Capital: Employee and community ownership face a critical financing gap. Patient, affordable capital that creates owners barely exists, while extractive tools of finance remain wildly profitable, crowding out everything else. We must build new channels to fund ownership and starve the more extractive financial practices.

• Culture: As I argued in “An Economy that Dreams,” we've built a culture that looks down non-college workers, dismisses the middle of the country, and privileges “designing” over “building”. We need an ownership culture which venerates the worker, creates pathways beyond college, and ensures ownership is distributed across class and zip code.

• Policy: Markets don't reform themselves. We need a muscular industrial policy that enables these dual goals of capital and culture. This means institutions in government which cement, preserve, and create ownership across the United States.

Shifting markets in ways that address these three challenges will be the challenge of a generation (and deserves its own piece on this Substack). It will require a whole-of-government approach that involves the combined efforts of business, civil society, and government. These seeds of consensus are already sprouting. Just earlier this year, a bipartisan introduced the American Ownership and Resilience Act – a federal plan to marketcraft the employee ownership ecosystem through the creation of an investment facility. In 2023, Marco Rubio and Dean Phillips introduced a similar bill, the Employee Equity Investment Act. Each of these are positive signals on the potential political energy to reorganize our economy around ownership.

The mathematics of our current economy may point to an inevitable convergence: consolidation, financialization, and extraction. However, trajectory is not destiny. The Ownership Economy is not just a set of wonky ideas—it is a force capable of literally bending the trajectory of our economy toward the interests of a new set of owners. A force which can only exist if we are willing to create it.

As Chris Griswold of American Compass notes in “Servants No Longer,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s goal when when he fought alongside the labor movement was the creation of this force:

“When you're sharing a society with others, you have to share not just in the burdens but the benefits of that common form of life.” — Philosopher Thomas Shelby summarizing the economic views of MLK Jr.

The promise of the Ownership Economy cannot be captured simply by measures of wealth or strengthened communities. It is best understood as the promise of civic friendship across classes: a world where one group is not servant to another, but partners in enterprise—sharing both fate and prosperity.

It is the promise of a new convergence point, if we are willing to shift our economic equation. A new economic destiny that completes the unfinished project at the heart of American democracy.

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A note to the reader: Takes are meant to provoke. In that spirit, I'd love to hear your thoughts: Would you restructure our economy? If yes, would it look like the Ownership Economy, or something else entirely? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

I began to understand [the geography of loneliness] when my husband, Shabbir, was hospitalized for leukemia treatment. Suddenly, the quiet architecture of our lives was exposed. What had once felt invisible — who is held and who is left alone — became unmistakably clear.

Our front porch, usually a place for mail and Amazon packages, became a landing point for care. Friends arrived with cake pops for our youngest son, a candle scented with olive leaf and oud, a prayer rug sized for a child. Each item felt like a pin dropped on a map of connection, a signal that we had not been forgotten. They were evidence that someone had been thinking of us.

But in the same hallway, I saw another kind of map taking shape. In the room next to my husband’s was a woman whose cries echoed through the corridor at all hours. They came in waves: sometimes words, sometimes something more primal. Her room had become an island in the truest sense. Surrounded by people, but untouched by them.

Uddin reveals something essential: loneliness is the absence of connection, and connection is invisible. It's a thread of knowing and being known, a covenant of sacrifice and care. Yes, connection requires an “outer world” of gathering spaces and social infrastructure. But it also demands an inner one — the values and traits that enable us to truly support others.

Thus, addressing loneliness requires change in the physical world and the moral world. This creates an enormous amount of complexity. Today, I am going to attempt to untangle this complexity, although I will admit, this is a topic with few clear answers. However, there are a few central insights that I found myself consistently coming back to:

1. We do not just need connections – we need deep, supportive connections. These connections are scalable, and humanity has long done this through community

2. These connections are increasingly rare. While this is certainly influenced by changes in the physical world, the strongest explanation is a decline in the moral one

3. However, just as humanity has long held an answer to scaling connection, we have also long held an answer to scaling morality: religious institutions

We’ll begin with the first point above: connection and community.

I. Scaling connection

For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has pursued a deceptively simple question: What is the good life? Testing everything from economics to genetics, they kept arriving at one conclusion: the presence of close, supportive relationships is the single greatest determinant of happiness. Not acquaintances or casual friends, but people you can count on when life gets hard.

It's tempting to believe these connections emerge from chance—a childhood best friend, a spouse from your first job, a family friend at a reunion. Sometimes they do. But look closer at these examples and you'll find a hidden scaling mechanism: shared spaces (schoolyards), the presence of people (co-workers), and invisible shared ties (family bonds) that create the conditions for connection.

Community is simply these three elements working together: spaces, people, and shared ties. But communities exist on a spectrum. Some are just people and spaces, individuals who happen to occupy the same location. Others are low support communities, venues for shared interests and pleasant interaction. And a rare few breed high support connections, offering those life-sustaining relationships the Harvard study identified.

There's a natural progression here. People and spaces can become low support communities. Low support communities can deepen into high support ones. Throughout this essay, I will rely on one central example: My Sunday soccer group.

Picture a turf field in a New York City park with a few people milling about. Initially, these are just individuals sharing a common space. Maybe they play a game or two together. Then, someone creates a group text, invites other friends to join the field, and begins organizing regular games. Something shifts. They form initial connections—what I call low support connections— that come to exist through proximity, repeated contact, and affinity1. For this to happen, the people milling about needed someone to activate them – they needed a connector.

This turf field is actually one near my apartment in Brooklyn, and the group text was created by close friends of mine (who very often serves as ‘connectors’). As our group met weekly, our connections grew. We learned each other’s names, developed inside jokes, created traditions. These were still ‘soccer friends’ for the most part—not yet the people who show up for each other when life falls apart. But these low support communities matter enormously. It is from this soil that deeper connections grow.

Over time, something deeper emerged from some in the group. Some of us started grabbing dinner separately. When someone moved away, others organized an impromptu tournament to celebrate what they meant to us. When someone went through a breakup, others invited them for drinks to laugh, cry, or talk about something else entirely. The transformation was gradual and took time, but eventually, these weren't just soccer friends anymore. They'd become high support connections, the kind of people who show up when you need them.

This progression reveals critical requirements at each stage. People and spaces need gathering spaces (e.g., social infrastructure), leisure time, proximity. Low support communities need connectors willing to organize and maintain regular contact. But as communities deepen it requires something different. The work shifts from the physical world to the moral world. It requires people willing to repeatedly meet with one another, even if it is inconvenient or when they are different. It demands empathy, warmth, reciprocity—the willingness to prioritize others even when inconvenient.

Yet something is breaking down in this progression. Americans have fewer high support connections than ever before. The explanations range from Jonathan Haidt's "it’s those damn phones" thesis to Robert Putnam's theory of individualism. To understand what's really happening, we need to shift from theory to data.

II. A crisis of connection

There is an enormous amount of data here. For those wanting the full picture, I would encourage reading Derek Thompson’s “The Anti-Social Century”, Kyla Scanlon’s “Attention Economy”, Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, Robert Putnam’s The Upswing & Bowling Alone, Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People, and, my personal favorite, Amber Lapp’s “America’s Missing Men”. But our crisis of connection can be captured in three seemingly contradictory line graphs.

Chart #1: Americans have fewer friends than ever before

Since the 1970s, fewer Americans report close friendships2. Those who do have them have fewer of them. And the cherry on top: we spend less time with the friends we have. Yes, smartphones and social media accelerated this multifaceted decline dramatically (see the gray bar)—Haidt is right about that. But the trend predates these technologies by decades. Two competing explanations emerge: either our physical spaces are failing us, or we lack time for friendship.

Chart #2: Yet, Americans live in closer proximity to one another than ever before

Klinenberg documents how urban social infrastructure (spaces) has deteriorated. But even declining city infrastructure generally outclasses3 that of suburban and rural alternatives. Yet as America urbanized since the 1950s, we've become lonelier. This doesn't invalidate Klinenberg's call for better social infrastructure. It suggests infrastructure isn't the root cause.

Chart #3: And, on average, Americans have more leisure time than ever before

On top of this, Americans generally have more free time – not less. This is not evenly distributed. Just-in-time scheduling and the decline of stable blue-collar work have squeezed leisure for some segments of the working class. But broadly, leisure time is up. This too, cannot be the root cause.

There is an uncomfortable conclusion here: Americans are choosing to have fewer friends and spend less time with them. As Thompson documents in "The Death of Partying," we're spending that time with our nuclear families, pets, Netflix, and on career advancement instead of with each other.

To me, this means the barriers of the “physical world” – declining infrastructure, time, or proximity – are not our primary challenges. What makes my Sunday soccer group unique is not the field or our schedule, but the connectors who keep choosing to bring us together. It is the members’ willingness to show up repeatedly, their reciprocity, their kindness. These are moral capacities. This is where I find myself agreeing most with Putnam’s theory – the challenge is our shift from “We” to “I”. Our crisis of connection isn’t a problem of the physical world, but of the invisible moral one.

Society wide moral challenges are some of the most difficult to address. However, just as society has long held an answer to loneliness in connection and community, we have also held an answer to moral decline. I am talking about the moral institution of religion.

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III. The case for the moral institution of religion

Emile Durkheim, the 19^th century French sociologist, wrote of a concept called anomie. Anomie was the social disintegration that emerges from periods of structural change, where norms and moral frameworks weaken, collective consciousness erodes, and the resultant state drives social instability. This instability occurred when society failed to replace traditional norms and values with new forms of moral regulation, leading to the kind of individualism which breaks down those invisible connections we hold with one another.

The strongest countervailing force against anomie is an institution which can cement morality, values, norms, and rituals in the face of enormous change. These institutions were typically churches, temples, and Houses of God – spaces both moral and religious in nature.

Their effectiveness at building moral values was profound. As someone who did not grow up religious, it took me years of journaling and countless conversations to internalize the importance of empathy and warmth. Religious institutions have taught these lessons systematically for millennia. Mercy, sacrifice, reciprocity, love, and accountability appear across the sacred texts of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Just as communities anchor us through hardship, moral institutions anchor society through change. Yet these institutions are in deep decline. Here's one final line graph—one that matches the timeline of our broader crisis of connection.

Chart #4: 60 years of religious decline in America

For the past 50 years, as religion declined, we attempted a "moral replacement": education, politics, and social media became pseudo-moral institutions filling the void.

I will be unequivocal here. I believe these pseudo-moral institutions fail as anchors for pro-social societies. To demonstrate this, I combined the results of several meta-analyses studying what values and traits (using Big Five Personality Traits and Schwartz Values) are needed for strong relationships. I primarily focused on overlaying the values cultivated by higher education and politics (social media’s negative effect is obvious and well documented – if you are interested in exploring this, I would recommend reading Anxious Generation) as compared to active religious participation.

I must caveat here; this is imperfect analysis and causation is almost impossible to demonstrate. Yet the patterns resonate with observable phenomena in these institutions. Higher education increasingly develops individualistic, careerist mentalities (see my take on this here). Political partisanship breeds neuroticism rather than tolerance of difference.

This moral replacement is my central hypothesis for our crisis of connection. As institutionalized religion declined, our moral capacities declined with it. Worse, the alternatives bred the very traits—neuroticism, hedonism—that poison relationships. Worst, it occurred in a period of enormous economic, social, political, and technological change, leading to anomie.

This isn't to say moral capacity requires religious practice. My soccer group includes many atheists and agnostics who embody duty, care, and sacrifice. But as someone who tried to develop these values without religion, I know the difficulty. It means building them from first principles against a sea of disincentives: work pushing you toward careerism, social media toward performative inauthenticity. This is why I refer to moral institutions as societal anchors. While individuals can develop moral capacities without religion, I doubt we can do so at scale—unless work, media, and education transform radically.

Consider how religious institutions function as complete community-building systems: gathering places that bring people and spaces together, organizational structures with connectors who sustain low support communities, and repeated sermons and prayers that develop the moral capacities necessary for high support connections. Academic research validates this (see my favorite study on this here)—religious service attendance improves psychological wellbeing, social integration, and social capital.

This is why what waits on the other side of loneliness isn't just better urban planning or social media regulation, although I applaud the growing consensus for both of these issues (see Utah’s age verification law, NY’s ban on smartphones in schools, and Philadelphia’s REBUILD program).

What waits is a spiritual awakening addressing our crisis of connection. I am certainly no expert on how this will occur, and it needn’t happen exclusively through religion. But I am encouraged by signs of this Awakening:

• Gen Z's spiritual hunger exceeds previous generations, stabilizing religious decline

• The Catholic Church's Synod on Synodality (2021-2024) allowed parishes to shape a reform agenda, pointing towards a pathway to adapting to modernity

• Nationally, churches are beginning to repurpose land for new forms of social infrastructure, with organizations like Good Acres in San Antonio, helping congregational leaders reimagine their engagement with community through community ownership

Asma Uddin wrote of connection as geography—each relationship a pin on a map lighting our way through darkness. But connection isn't simple. It requires connectors willing to start group chats, people sacrificing Sundays for strangers who might become friends. It demands showing up with warmth when you'd rather stay home.

This is why my Sunday soccer group has become, in its own (very strange) way, a moral institution. Not because we pray or preach, but because it teaches the same lessons: how to care for others, how to show up consistently, how to build the bonds that matter. If connections are pins on a map, moral institutions are the compass. And every Sunday, as the ball hits the back of the net and people cheer, I’m pointed towards that which ties us together.

A note for my readers: These long-forms are designed to provoke, and this is a particularly gnarly topic. What do you think could address our crisis of connection? Do you agree or disagree with my diagnosis? What thoughts did this spark?

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Some notes of gratitude: This would not be possible without the lovely connectors — Will and Kisara — who bring together my Sunday Soccer League. Additionally, a big thanks to Kyle and Gabe, who did an informal and ‘voluntold’ salon with me on the philosophical background of building connections. Finally, the biggest thanks to Celesia who edited this essay and all my others!

This scene played countless times in my childhood, and there was no aspect of it that felt wrong. But – stick with me for a second – this is inequality in action. One kid owns the ball. The rest do not. In the purest sense, there are “haves” (people who have privileges) and “have-nots” (people who don’t). The entire game, and the children’s fun, depends on one kids’ whim. Yet, this inequality feels… fine?

This analogy isn’t perfect, but the underlying question has nagged me for years. Inequality is at the heart of my thinking, yet there is a dissonance which remains: in nearly every complex society – agrarian, feudal, or capitalistic – we see hierarchies. Still, today’s inequality feels distinct from the playground imbalance. What if our problem isn't inequality itself, but the broken social contract between society's "haves" and "have-nots"?

What is our social contract? In many of our modern systems it revolves around three promises:

1. The system seeks to benefit everyone

2. The system grants privileges to a subset of people to achieve this goal

3. It selects those privileged few based on merit

Put simply, societies have always privileged some over others. The working assumption, however, was that the “haves” would use their advantages to lift up the “have-nots,” precisely because they had the capacity to do so.

This concept is a bit abstract but can be seen through a timely example – the elite university and its battle with the Trump administration.

• Since April, the administration has launched investigations, frozen grants, and threatened policy changes aimed squarely at elite campuses.

• In response, elite institutions banded together, mounting a concerted, defensive campaign with nearly 250 universities signing a letter criticizing the administration and calling its actions “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education”.

• Behind the scenes, many campus leaders concede that reform is overdue, citing shrinking academic freedom, bloated bureaucracy, and an unmistakable leftward tilt.

The mainstream narrative can be simply framed as missteps versus state overreach (with one side differentially emphasized based on your specific political leaning). However, in that letter, there were two lines which caught my eye:

“… American institutions of higher learning have in common the essential freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom.”

“American institutions of higher learning are essential to American prosperity and serve as productive partners with government in promoting the common good”

This is a social contract laid bare. Elite universities will promote the common good. In exchange they receive privileges: freedom from meaningful oversight and the power to choose who enters their gates and what ideas are taught.

This system is hardly an equal one, and that is not new. A century ago, elite universities’ share of enrollment from the bottom quintile sat at 5%, while 70% hailed from the top quintile. And today… those numbers remain exactly the same. This means over the past 100 years inequality has not changed within the elite university.

So, if inequality is not an explanatory variable, what then can explain why the administration now has the permission structure to defund and confront these schools? In my view, this story is deeper than false perception or unfair narratives around elite universities. Consider a piece from the NYT titled, “What do Students at Elite Colleges Really Want?”:

“Despite the popular image of this generation… as one driven by idealism… students at these schools appear to be strikingly corporate-minded. Even when they arrive at college wanting something very different, an increasing number of students at elite universities seek the imprimatur of employment by a powerful firm and “making a bag” (slang for a sack of money) as quickly as possible… some students have also become skeptical about traditional avenues of social change, like government and nonprofits, which have attracted fewer …students since the pandemic”

This is not a quote from Donald Trump or J.D. Vance. These are insights the New York Times arrived at from talking to students and administrators. For a moment, remember the unique freedoms and charters of these schools, often stated as an ability to cultivate citizens capable of answering humanity’s greatest questions. Their students arrive from extraordinary privilege and receive a truly world-renowned education.

And what do they do with these gifts? They “chase a bag”.

This is not a sign of an institution serving the common good. More importantly: the breakdown is not caused by inequality itself. The problem is in the social contract, where an elite class abandons its central goal of serving the common good in favor of pursuing self-interest with a thin veil of altruism.

Zooming out of the elite university, this abandonment of the social contract did not happen overnight. Many of our modern institutions drifted from Noblesse Oblige towards self-interest over generations. As this occurred, the elites which inhabited these institutions retreated from a shared American life and into worlds of their own design.

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The architecture of separation

Look around at our quintessential “elite communities”. You will see neighborhoods gated through wrought iron or sheer price. You will see seven-year-olds sorted into “gifted” tracks or private academies. You will see the architecture of separation, with walls built between the “haves” and the “have nots”.

This architecture does more than create a reinforcing cycle of self-interest. It simultaneously reinforces ineffectiveness.

Take the “expert” – the inevitable end point of an elite meritocracy. Experts bring extraordinary value to society. They can detect patterns, understand both abstractions and technical details, and recall a wealth of experiences. What the literature shows us about experts is their intuition is powerful in environments which are controlled and unaffected by complex, outside variables. However, when experts are asked to make decisions which forecast or predict future conditions in complex, multivariate environments (like economics, social change, and culture), they are no better than lay people (When Experts Fail – Grossman, Varnum, Hutcherson, and Mandel).

The single most accurate way to predict future outcomes in complex environments is the “wisdom of the crowds” (Studying the “Wisdom of Crowds” at Scale – Simoiu, Sumanth, Mysore, and Goel). Large groups consistently outperform any individual, expert or not. However, this effect can be dampened by informational asymmetry or herding. This means experts can be effective by as facilitators: operating between collective insight and their own wealth of experience. But when an expert is siloed from the lives of those they serve, their judgement is no better than a dart throw.

Thus, separation creates a tragedy – not just through enabling self-interest. The tragedy is that even when elites are truly committed to serving, of which there are many, they can’t. You cannot solve problems for people you do not know, in places you do not go, living lives you cannot imagine.

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What is an elite for?

I know this piece has meandered from playground inequality to broken contracts to elite separation. Here is the journey we have taken thus far:

• Inequality is not the disease. It is the symptom

• The disease is elites abandoning their purpose: serving the common good

• The damage is compounded by separation, creating a spiral of selfishness and ineffectiveness

With these pieces together, the road leads us to a single question: What is an elite for?

I believe the answer is less a brand-new blueprint, and more a revival of an ethos that is still alive. While we see institutional trust decreasing generally, there are still those that have bucked the trend: the small business, the military, and the police.

Even looking across time, these three institutions social contract has remained strong – all while universities, churches, schools, banks, and nearly all other institutions of life deteriorated.

Why is this the case? I do not think there is an empirical answer to this question – only beliefs. Here are three I hold:

• Localism: Being truly ingrained into a community. Your incentives are aligned to all those in it because your success is reliant on the whole community succeeding.

• Patriotism: Connection to our national identity and project. You are serving the national interests and your incentives are aligned in a similar, albeit contextually different, way to localism.

• Service: In service in terms of practice not virtue. This means you are legitimately taking on greater risk and lower upside to serve some higher mission.

Each institution embodies this trinity differently, but all three play a role to some degree in these institutions’ success. If we take these lessons, we can extrapolate a new relationship for our elites to society.

An elite should be ingrained in the community they serve. I do not mean being “from” a community, I mean “of” a community. As an example, rather than switching the financiers of Wall Street with a perfectly representative sample of America, I want a thousand local banks run by people who live where they lend. I want local leaders to be given the legitimate power to serve their communities.

However, not all functions can be distributed. There will always be a role for the “expert in the ivory tower”. Where that occurs, we must embrace patriotism (I explore this take more deeply here) while incentivizing it. This means we create a cultural expectation of service amongst our elite while backing that with financial and status incentives. This might look like civil service reform which rewards those that better the country over bureaucratic longevity.

Finally, to be handed extraordinary privilege we must require sacrifice. I am not talking about increased oversight. This is difficult to visualize, but imagine something akin to a year of compulsory national service for college graduates or civil service sabbaticals for business executives. Think of the WWII “Dollar-a-Year-Men” – business executives paid $1 a year in salary, who left their businesses to help run government commissions which were key parts of our war-time-mobilization.

Each of these imperfect proposals may feel far-fetched or utopian. However, I believe there is energy for change the likes of which we have not seen in decades. On one hand, amongst my peers – many of which would fall into the “haves” bucket – I sense a latent yearning for a deeper relationship with the society around them. On the other hand, we are seeing a teardown of elite institutions all around us. For elites, this is a time of uncertainty. However, I will encourage us to see this as more than just destruction – it is society demanding a new deal.

As the old contract is renegotiated, and we build a new relationship between elites and society, we would do good to remember the little kid with the basketball. He shared his basketball because, frankly, the game is more fun when everyone plays. His privilege – owning the ball – only mattered when it brought the community together.

That is what an elite is for. Not to escape the commons, but to lift it up.

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A note to the audience: Takes are meant to provoke. In that spirit, I'd love to hear your thoughts: Do you think the social contract is broken? If yes, what would a new relationship between elites and the rest of society look like to you? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

One set of stories we often ignore lies in Amber Lapp’s powerful essay, “America’s Missing Men”. I encourage everyone to read it, but will share a glimpse of the lives she chronicles—lives too often buried beneath the metrics:

• Dreams derailed. Factory shutdowns wipe out the possibility of a mortgage, children, and stability, splintering families when local wages can no longer sustain them.

• Ripple effects of loss. Injury, addiction, and early death strike not only the unemployed but entire neighborhoods that depend on one another for support.

• A new inheritance of doubt. Young men and women wrestle with the fear that their futures will be poorer—financially and emotionally—than the lives their parents built.

In Part 1 of this essay, I explored this rotting foundation: (1) the extraction of local wealth to redistribute towards investors, (2) unbalanced free trade that hollows out the middle-class, (3) our refusal to solve important problems, (4) and widening wealth inequality. These rots are not abstract trends; as authors like Amber Lapp, Mathew Desmond (author of Poverty, By America), and Farah Stockman (author of American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears), document. This rot breeds real deprivation, erodes purpose, and strips meaning from the communities exposed to it.

However, today I will shift from examining the rotting foundation to envisioning what a rebuilt home could look like. Across the country, other stories are being written—not of deprivation and devastation but of local economies that provide security, happiness, and opportunity. Our new question is simple: Where is the American Dream still alive, and what can those places teach us about what our new home should look like?

Visualizing the Dream

To understand what an economy that serves our country looks like, we must disentangle from the “big number go up” economy and define new, better goals. For our purposes today, I will propose a two-part goal (explored more deeply here):

• Primary goal – rootedness: Secure the ability for the average American to live a decent life and build a happy family

• Secondary goal – opportunity: Ensure the ability to go as far as your talents could take you, where it enables you and others to live a decent life

Starting with rootedness, we can boil these goals down to their base components. As the Institute for Family Studies research on housing shows, there are a few traits desired above all by American families: primarily, living in safe neighborhoods in detached single family homes and owning their homes. Stability, meanwhile, is a function of income, wealth, and social capital as Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights research on social capital and Federal Reserve research on wealth building shows.

It is important to note that there is class divergence on the definition of rootedness, especially around housing. More well-educated individuals tend to prefer dense, walkable neighborhoods (places like New York City and San Francisco), while working class individuals prefer the type of housing model described above. I will largely focus on the working-class preferences, as they make up a larger portion of Americans.

Opportunity is, at its core, economic mobility: the ability of children to out-earn their parents. Economist Raj Chetty measures this by comparing what parents earned at a given age with what their children earn at that same age (for instance, does a 30-year-old today make more than their parent did at 30?).

With this in mind, we can identify where the American Dream lives on. Such communities share six traits:

1. Life’s most important costs (e.g., housing) are relatively low as a percent of total income

2. Families can live in the kind of homes they desire

3. Families have wealth (e.g., assets which appreciate like homes or stocks)

4. Communities are safe

5. Communities are connected

6. Children are better off than their parents

Rather than jumping into the data immediately, let us try and visualize a utopia which might check off all these boxes:

Of course, there are so many considerations to a true utopia, but what I described is the type of community which embodies rootedness and opportunity. And the best part about this utopia? It’s not an imaginary one. What I described above is true of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Where is the dream still alive?

Using the components I described above, I drew on data from the U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Opportunity Insights, and other sources of city & county level data to develop an index. I have footnoted1 the full methodology, but the TLDR is as follows: this index is an aggregation of data which directly and indirectly proxies the components above (e.g., costs, housing, wealth, safety, connectedness, mobility) in each county and city in the United States. More simply, I made a quick-and-dirty metric to measure the American Dream. From there, we can tease out factors which either cause or enable this, like industry makeup, type of city or community, or geography. Here are the most relevant headlines:

Depending on your definition of the American Dream, you are more likely to achieve it in a suburban or rural community than a large city

As you can see this data shifts slightly depending on if your anchor is rootedness, opportunity, or both. Suburbs and rural towns’ ability to provide high-quality jobs and low-costs to the middle-class and lower-middle class, enabling widespread home ownership, lowered job precarity, and financial resilience. This is fairly difficult to find in large-cities, particularly mega-cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, where costs are high and middle-income jobs are fairly limited.

Cities can drive rootedness and opportunity; however, this tends to occur in low-cost, dynamic cities in the Sunbelt and the Heartland

The top-15 cities on the American Dream Index are dominated by the Heartland (the Midwest) and the Sunbelt (the American South). These cities appear to have a few clear advantages over other metros. Low regulation, big lots, and permissive zoning keeps housing costs low and accessible. Their smaller size enables more manageable urban scale (e.g., commutes tend to be less than 25 minutes), and low-costs ensure a teacher can live in the same neighborhood as a corporate middle-manager. Finally, these cities tend to have mixed economies which lean on multiple functions of an economy (e.g., corporate HQs, manufacturing sites, logistics centers), ensuring there are high-quality jobs regardless of background or experience.

“Design” based economies support primarily elite communities, but “Build” economies unlock the American Dream for the working class

Economic makeup seemed to be the most significant driver of class-based differences in the American Dream. “Design” jobs are best defined as creative or analytical based (e.g., finance, software engineering, information) while “Build” jobs are best described as spatial or manual (e.g., energy, construction, manufacturing). “Build” jobs hit a sweet spot of being “skill dense but credential light”, enabling much higher wages than other sectors. This dynamic unlocks the ability for the working class to experience prosperity.

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An Economy that Dreams is a Pluralistic Economy

The reason I’m sharing this data is to complicate our debate on the American economy. We are a pluralistic country. That means we are a country where multiple conditions, groups, and structures coexist. Yet for the past fifty years, our economy has moved in the opposite direction. We only want to be an economy that “designs”. We only want people to live in big, superstar cities. We only want you to go to college. This model rejects the value our nation was built on – the belief that multiple people with different backgrounds, intelligences, and desires can not only live together, but succeed together.

To achieve a truly pluralistic economy, there are a few changes we must make:

• We must be an economy that builds just as much as we design

• We must enable people to live in the way they want to live

• We must embrace different kinds of intelligence and value

An economy that builds

The desire for an economy which builds is not just a nostalgia for the past. To grasp why it is so important to embrace manufacturing, energy, and infrastructure, we need to understand jobs multiplier effects. Whenever one job gets created it has a backwards ripple (e.g., creates new jobs for suppliers or other inputs) and a forward ripple (e.g., spending of wages which creates jobs in other sectors). The industries which tend to have the largest multipliers are energy, manufacturing, real estate (e.g., construction), technology, and professional services.2

Even if I stopped the argument there, we would have a good reason to revitalize manufacturing, but the specific ripple effects of manufacturing are particularly transformative. Think of a manufacturing line. In an advanced manufacturing facility, there are a few hundred technicians operating incredibly complicated machines. Those machines each are using complicated component parts that must be built in other parts of the factory or other factories itself. When you build one manufacturing job, many of the induced jobs it creates are other high paying jobs in other parts of our economy, with that effect multiplying further when we build things which are big and complex.

This is why arguments, like the Cato Institute’s (below), against reshoring manufacturing are so maddening. Even if you assume the 25% of Americans who think they would be better off if they worked in a factory is a small amount (it’s not, only 10% of the U.S. is currently in manufacturing today), these are valuable, skilled jobs which create other valuable and skilled jobs for those who do not want to work in a factory.

To enable an economy that works for us all (even those who do not want to work in manufacturing), we must embrace building the biggest, most useful, and most complicated things.

An economy for everywhere

Our greatest stories of enabling the American Dream are not in New York, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Chicago. While traditional and legacy media focuses on these superstar cities as the hub of “rags-to-riches” (which makes sense, because nearly all traditional media is HQ’d in these places), it’s the stories of the suburbs, the low-cost city, and the small town where our greatest success lies. It is in these places where you can make a life for yourself, support your community, and ensure your children are better off then you are.

A pluralistic economy will embrace this preference rather than chide it. I think of the city of Austin— a city I used to call home. By all accounts it is a fantastic place to live for the well-educated, with a hub of tech, government, and finance jobs. But its economic brilliance is not in its city, but in its adjacent small towns and suburbs. Due to the focus on a few forms of advanced manufacturing, not only can the well-educated inner-city dwellers achieve an extraordinary life by working at the HQs of well-paying technology firms, but the working-class small towns and suburbs provide access to good jobs and cheap homes through foundries and fabricators. This is simply not possible in a constrained, dense, mega-city.

An embrace of the suburbs and small towns is not a rejection of the city. Where the dream is most alive, the Heartland and the Sunbelt, we see dynamic partnerships between dense-walkable cities which are hubs for “design” that enable outer suburbs and small-towns which “build”. So rather than an economy which pushes us all towards the mega-city, we must embrace a more decentralized economic landscape where the city, suburb, and small town secure their prosperity together.

An economy for everyone

Enabling the American Dream means moving past the one-size-fits-all education model. America’s schools and universities remain the envy of the world, yet we must admit that they no longer translate reliably into broad-based prosperity.

Nowadays, even college graduates face dimmer prospects. Derek Thompson’s recent essay shows that young college grads are now more likely to be unemployed then the rest of the population. And while the college-for-all model has hit a wall, life for those without college-degrees has fared even worse with their wages stagnating since the 1980s.

For us to achieve a healthier economy, we must create pathways for those whose intelligence or skills are overlooked and uncultivated by our current education system. There are a whole host of policy and market solutions to this – including apprenticeships, public career and technical education centers, alternative financing to non-college credentials – however, the deeper barrier is cultural.

The college-for-all mindset often rests on a quiet disdain for non-elites—a view that society is split into “winners” who earn degrees and “losers” who must be subsidized. This stratification and culture is a component of “adversary culture” – a subtle way elites gain status through delegitimizing the institutions, traditions, and values of the middle- and lower-class.

A pluralistic economy sees no permanent winners or losers; it needs many paths so the whole society can thrive. This means rather than a redistributive model of the economy, we need a “pre-distributive” model which seeks to ensure people are respected, valuable, and compensated.

Towards an Economy that Dreams

The first part of this essay dragged us into depths of our economic home – an outwardly beautiful, slowly crumbling mansion. One which had spent the past five decades allowing the foundation of the American Dream to rot away. It was a story of extraction from our local communities, hollowing out of the middle class, stalled innovation, and widespread wealth inequality.

However, today we focused on a very different story. One where communities build in a way which does not allow economic rot to slow down the American Dream. These are stories of resilience, rootedness, and opportunity even in the face of powerful incentives.

By using those communities as a blueprint, we can sketch out a new economic home: an economy that builds as confidently as it designs, stretches across everywhere instead of a few zip codes, and allows everyone to succeed regardless of their specific skillset.

Achieving these shifts will be an enormous undertaking. It means pivoting from extraction to production and one-size-fits-all to economic pluralism. It means cities, suburbs, and small towns interlocked in mutual prosperity; factories and labs working together to better lives; and apprenticeships and four-year-degrees hung up side-by-side in the study. It means writing a new story of our next 50 years that is not of how we allowed the country to rot away, but of how we rebuilt an economy that Dreams.

A note to the audience: I'd love to hear your thoughts: Did you find the data interesting or useful? How would you rebuild the American Economy? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

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But underneath this growing elite consensus lies a truth: our economy’s foundation is rotting. “The monetary / economic order is breaking down because there is too much existing debt, the rates of adding to it are too fast, and existing capital markets and economies are supported by this unsustainably large debt,” stated Ray Dalio when analyzing the origins of this economic re-ordering. Even The New York Times’ editorial board – the same group who happily ushered in the free-trade consensus – stated:

“We want to emphasize that Mr. Trump has a point about the pain caused by free trade. The decades in which the United States threw open its doors to imports from other countries left many Americans without jobs and decimated the nation’s industrial heartland.”

This rot is not a newly realized problem. It has been sharply in focus since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. When the foundation rots, you have three choices.

1. You can ignore it, and hope the next person deals with it. This was the hope of the economic establishment and major policy makers through the Obama presidency.

2. You can try and salvage it, with repairs and tweaks that allow you to keep it most of it. This was the path pursued by Trump in his first term and Biden, who pursued a limited tariff regime coupled with narrow industrial policy to bring back critical manufacturing.

3. You can tear it down to the studs and start over.

The Trump Administration is forcing us through door #3 – using the sledgehammer of tariffs to reset the global economic system. Whether or not this approach is the correct choice won’t become clear for months, or even years. At this point, debating its merit mostly serves the historical record, because once you demolish a house, there’s no turning back. And, more importantly, when doing a full gut renovation, the shortest, cheapest, and easiest step is the tear down. The difficult part lies in rebuilding a new home afterwards. While our discourse has certainly focused on the process of breaking down our economic order and the tool of tariffs, I hope to focus on a much more important set of questions:

• Why did we need a renovation in the first place?

• What should our new home look like?

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The “big number go up” economy

To understand this question, we need to start by re-evaluating what a good economy looks like. Nobody will reject that the American economy is a powerful engine. It ensures assets grow in value, GDP goes up, and the stock market keeps reaching new peaks. However, while this “big number go up” economy continues to grow, there are four core rots which mean “bigger number” does not always show a better economy. For example:

• Businesses and financial institutions find ways to profit by extracting from others rather than providing a useful service. This rot is called financialization.

• Economic functions are rapidly shifted over to other countries to lower costs, regardless of other considerations or consequences. This rot is called unbalanced free trade.

• Innovation shies away from solving the important problems, instead focusing on safe improvements that make the most money. This rot is called “B2B SAASification”.

• The gap grows between the bottom 50%, top 10%, and top 1% of wealth-holders, creating perverse economic incentives. This rot is called wealth inequality.

Over the next few paragraphs, I will walk through each one of these rots and show how they weaken our economy, harm our citizens, and yet, lead to more profit and growth. At the end of the day, the big number always go up.

Financialization

Starting with financialization, many are familiar with the extraction associated with private equity, but the much more pernicious effect is what it has done to our largest businesses. American Compass, in its report, “The Corporate Erosion of Capitalism”, shows a company can be categorized in a few ways:

• Sustainer: a firm which earns enough profit to invest into itself to grow while returning capital to investors.

• Grower: a firm which grows fast enough to need money from others to invest in itself.

Both represent generally healthy forms of growth. However, there is a rapidly growing third kind of firm which does not embrace healthy growth. Instead, it embraces growth, at the cost of everything else:

• Eroder: a firm which earns enough profit like a sustainer, but rather than investing in itself and returning capital to investors, it disinvests by borrowing money to return it back to shareholders.

As you can see from the chart above, eroders are now the largest segment of market capitalization. What this means in plain terms is more than 40% of U.S. firms take money out of their firm – either by extracting it from their employees, product quality, or financial stability – to return it to the investor class. This is but one of many forms of financialization, as it has driven a shift away from social benefit and towards profit in sectors like healthcare, education, childcare, and housing – leading to higher costs and reduced quality. “Big number go up” but our economy is left weakened and our quality-of-life decreases.

Unbalanced free trade

The story of free trade can be told through the two basic functions of an economy: to design useful things (like engineering, architecture, science) and to build useful things (like manufacturing, energy). In the 1990s and 2000s, American elites made the bet that we could become a country that primarily designs things and shipped our building function to cheaper places. In this bet, they hoped to turn the entire country into “designers”. The assumption was straightforward: Other countries can handle the manual stuff, and we’ll be a bastion of intellectual capital and creativity. Even setting aside the apparent disregard for working-class and blue-collar workers inherent in this argument, this approach encountered several major challenges:

• Design and manufacturing are interconnected: Building things makes you better at designing things. We lost our own advantage in design and technology (see graph below) to countries who we assumed would only be good at building.

• The wall of the “college-for-all” model: As we lost this advantage and design jobs grew all over the world, we ran into a wall. There are only so many good jobs available for engineers, or architects, or scientists, or financiers. The hollowing out of the manufacturing jobs and the replacement of it with… nothing?… led to rampant underemployment, a devastated heartland, and cities increasingly consisting of a comfortable upper class supported by a precarious underclass.

• False comparative advantage: The countries we shipped our ability to build things off to were not always superior craftsman or possessing of some inherent “building” culture. In many cases, they offered lower costs due to intentional wage suppression, government subsidies, and targeted industrial support. There was no pathway to American companies ever competing with them because they played by different rules.

While free trade has its ardent defenders, these consequences are now broadly accepted (see here, here, and here). Even as these consequences hollowed out our middle class, weakened our competitiveness, and increased our precarity we experienced higher GDP figures, lower costs, and increased consumption – for you see all is not lost, “the big number go up”.

B2B SAASification

This trend embraced by many of our country’s innovation advocates and its thesis is simple: we no longer solve important problems. The argument is best put by Nicholas Negroponte, in his “Big Idea Famine” essay, who stated:

“Start-ups today… focus on thoughtless ways to do our laundry, deliver food, or entertain ourselves with another app. Even new technologies, real discoveries, and inventions in science and engineering are often trivialized by the start-up process in order to meet the expectations of investors.”

This assessment is not unique to Negroponte, with Alexander Karp (the CEO of Palantir and author of the book The Technological Republic), Robert J. Gordon (an economist that studies productivity), and Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson (authors of the book Abundance) all making a similar argument.

This problem is not true only for the private sector. Our public sector used to be responsible for our greatest inventions – like atomics, the internet, and modern computing. Today public funding for science and research has stalled, and even when funding does go out the door, our government cares more about avoiding risk then fixing big problems.

Despite our growing inability to solve hard problems, America’s so-called “innovation sectors” continue to flourish – receiving record valuations for their latest attempt to speed up sales by 1% through a new CRM, suck your attention and emotional bandwidth through social media, or arbitrage the gig economy by ensuring workers receive low pay so more upper class Americans can cosplay as the super-wealthy via Uber (a chauffer), DoorDash (a private chef), and WashClub NYC (a maid). “Big number go up” while our ability to solve hard problems goes down.

Wealth Inequality

Wealth inequality is often portrayed as a symptom of broader economic issues, however, the separation between participants in our economy and non-participants can drive economic distress itself. We all know the stats around wealth inequality – the bottom 90% hold only ~33% of total wealth and the bottom hold 50% only hold 2.5% (chart above). However, what is often overlooked is the small amount the bottom 90% does own is not primarily in corporate equities, instead, it is primarily in the form of real estate, consumer goods, and, to a lesser degree, pensions.

This means when our economy improves, the bottom 90% does not really share in its gains, unless those gains show up locally. When the gains (as demonstrated by the trends of financialization and unbalanced free trade) are built on extracting locally – we see a negative feedback loop occur. Let me paint a narrow, but illustrative hypothetical: a factory leaves a small town to move the China – thereby producing cheaper goods that can be sold at a greater profit – the small amount of wealth in that community moves out as local real estate values decrease, consumer good prices decrease, incomes are lost, and wealth shifts into the pockets of those who own equities (or in other words the top 10%). “Big number go up” by shifting wealth from low-wealth households and local economies towards high-wealth ones.

The result of our rotting foundation

Ultimately, the source of our rot is in four critical economic micro-organisms:

1. We extract value from our local workers, companies, and communities to redistribute it to investors

2. We sell out our middle class in exchange for cheaper goods while ignoring the important connection between designing things and building things

3. We lose our ability to solve the world’s most important problems to pursue oh-so-exciting ventures like B2B SAAS

4. We lock the gains of our economy into high-wealth households at the expense of low-wealth households

An economy built around the goal of “big number go up” is not a good economy, even if its big numbers continue to go up. Returning to the analogy of our economy as a home, our home is certainly grander and more impressive than it was a few decades ago. Over the years it has expanded significantly. Yet beneath, in the deepest and most structurally important parts, lies a rot. With each new addition, the mansion grew larger, but increasingly unstable – because each extension was constructed cheaply with a blind eye turned to the rot. How could we question the foundation, if the house was so big and beautiful?

Today, the only inhabitable rooms are the new additions built atop this crumbling foundation—luxurious spaces designed exclusively for the elite, built on the bones of old rooms which used to happily house much of the working class. The result is an outwardly beautiful, slowly crumbling mansion. A mansion that if not fixed, will topple on not just on its elite inhabitants, but everyone around it.

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Next week, Part 2: An economy that dreams

Readers (Seeders? New Consensusites? I will Venmo $10 to whoever comes up with the best name for the audience), you will notice this article strikes less of a hopeful tone then I have promised. That is because, this is just the first half of my view on our economy. My belief is the best solutions come from a willingness to engage with the failures of the past. In that spirit, this piece answers the first question I posed at the top: Why did we need a renovation in the first place?

Next week, I will release the second half of this essay. In this piece, I will shift from the story of how we got here to the story of where we should be going, answering the second question I posed: What should our new home look like?

Through this data, hopefully, you will see what I see. Yes, the current iteration of our economy does not work and the transition away from it will be painful. However, all is not lost. There are meaningful swaths of our economy which are working in service of our American ideal. Local economies which secure the ability for the average American to live a decent life while enabling people to go as far as their talents take them. What it will require from us, is a willingness to rebuild once the old foundation is swept away. And critically, rebuild in a way which embraces our national ideals, rather than the rot of the past.

A note to the audience: I'd love to hear your thoughts: Do you agree that we needed to restructure our economy? Why or why not? If yes, what should it look like? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

So, what happened? Sitting in the bumper-to-bumper crawl of I-35 traffic just 45 minutes from home, my partner asked what seemed like a simple question: "How do you usually celebrate Independence Day?" I, in my infinite wisdom, casually replied, "I don't feel like I need to. Why would I?" Here's the crucial context I overlooked at the time: my partner hails from a Mexican American family deeply committed to civil service. Many of her relatives have proudly served in the military or dedicated their lives to public service roles. Today, many of them remain respected pillars of their McAllen, Texas community. My partner herself is dedicated to service—through her career, volunteerism, and the thoughtful care she extends to everyone she knows. As you might imagine, my casual dismissal was absolutely the wrong answer.

In the years since, I've found myself reflecting deeply on this moment. Why did I respond that way? What hidden assumptions led me to shrug off a question that, to her, held deep significance? When I asked myself enough times, I realized my response wasn't necessarily about celebrating Independence Day—it was connected to something deeper, tied directly to my ambiguous feelings about the identity of our country itself. If, at that moment, someone had asked me directly, “What is America?”, my only honest answer would have been, “I don’t know.”

Why didn’t I know? Throughout my formative educational years, particularly in college, it was common to contest or outright reject the notion of our country. Among my university peers and educators, it felt like there were powerful and compelling reasons to do so. We were deeply aware of America's darker chapters: racism, sexism, slavery, genocide, and colonization. The natural response was to dismantle the aspirational narrative of America – to view national identity as a relic of propaganda that would not work for our generation. I certainly embraced this thinking. At my core, I felt that identifying with America meant having to accept and be comfortable with its historic wrongdoings.

In recent years I’ve questioned this nihilism. If America is irredeemably dark, why do people who represent the best aspects of this country passionately embrace its identity? The practitioners who build better worlds for communities long left behind— those building wealth, healing frayed bonds, and bettering livelihoods– frequently speak of a very different connection to America. The way they spoke of our country and the people who inhabited it sounded nothing like my university peers and educators. Instead of condescension, they offered belief. In place of nihilism, they radiated faith. Where I saw darkness, they held to hope. Upon more and more reflection, I have come to understand the part of me that rejected the American Identity as misguided. My perspective wasn't rooted in an accurate assessment of our complicated history. Instead, it was based on disdain—not just for the country itself, but for people I disagreed with politically or culturally.

I see this disdain in many of the elite spaces I inhabit today. I see the rejection of American identity and, more critically, the replacement of it with nothing. I see the championing of grand notions like “equality,” “freedom,” and “tolerance,” yet these words feel less like shared values and more like the glittering towers on billionaire’s row—massive architectural feats, beautifully designed and loudly marketed, but ultimately empty. Equality except when genuine equality threatens our own privileges (NIMBYism, resistance to economic populism, and artificial quotas on high-end jobs and schools). Freedom and tolerance except when we disagree with your beliefs (cancel culture, main-stream media unwillingness to cover the COVID Lab Leak hypothesis – which is now considered the most likely theory by a plurality of global intelligence agencies, social media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story as “misinformation” – which the CEO of NPR now admits was a mistake). In pursuit of universal acceptance, we have erected beautiful facades of values, yet beneath them lies a selective moral architecture—inviting from afar, but ultimately exclusive, incomplete, and hollow.

In The Technological Republic, Alexander Karp puts a description to this phenomenon, articulating that, “an entire generation… that came of age in recent decades was essentially robbed of an opportunity to form actual views about the world. These cosmopolitan and technological elites in the developed world were citizens of no country; their wealth and capacity for innovation had, in their minds, set them free.” Ultimately, belief in empty notions is the same as belief in nothing. Abdicating the responsibility to have an American Identity means we allow ourselves to be dictated by that which can provide one – the market. And rather than avoiding the sins of our country’s past, we are left vulnerable, subject to the whims of market forces: consumerist and individualist ideologies instead of authentic, shared American beliefs.

I reject this emptiness. I reject the notion that America's past wrongs require rejection of America itself. I reject that we should organize our national identity around something as fickle as the market. Most of all, I reject what I used to believe: that we owe our nation nothing. I will say it again, I was wrong.

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If I was wrong, then what is right?

At its core, American Identity can be framed through shared values, shared stories, or shared ideals. While shared values and stories are important, I find they often mean different things to different people. They are most at risk of emptiness. However, ideals – The American Dream – provide us with a truly unifying vision, compelling us towards a deeper understanding of our national purpose. My journey toward this understanding began as profound realizations often do, with family.

On one side stands my partner’s family – large, rambunctious, and full of life. Their traditions center around holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. They share poop and pee stories at the dinner table, play dirty Taboo, and roast each other to no end. At the same time, I've watched them rally through unimaginable hardships, offering unwavering support, care, and love during even the darkest moments. Over two generations, they have built homes on the same block with a shared backyard where they regularly gather friends and extended family. They help each other secure jobs, sharing economic success as a communal achievement. The bond between them seems unbreakable—no matter the circumstance or struggle, there is always a seat at their table.

On the other side is my own family. Before settling in Dallas, we moved eight times, balancing the precariousness of H1B visa work with my parents' determination to provide my brother and me with quality education. As first-generation immigrants, they viewed America as a landscape of possibility, eventually leading them to Texas—a state they believed offered opportunities for all of us. Since I was a small child, they were entrepreneurs, starting businesses even while working and managing a family, in hope to break free of the bonds and precarity of the corporate ‘rat race’. Nearly three decades after arriving in this country, they now own a business that grants them freedom from bosses and the stability to support everyone they love.

Embedded within each family's journey lies a powerful tension central to the American Dream: the desire for rootedness—belonging, stability, and community—set against the drive for opportunity—ambition, prosperity, and the pursuit of something greater.

There is an inherent tension in these poles that comes out not only in the stories of our families, but also hidden in the factions of our nation. Look at the contrast between the following articulations of the American Dream, by Abundance-aligned progressives and worker and family-focused conservatives (see piece here for more details on the differences in these two factions).

The American Dream of Moving to Opportunity

Abundance Progressives

Source: The Atlantic March Cover Story: Yoni; Appelbaum’s “Stuck in Place,” on Why Americans Stopped Moving Houses — And Why That’s a Very Big Program

The American Dream of Supporting Your Family

Worker & Family Conservatives

Source: American Compass guide to Rebuilding American Capitalism

How do we reconcile this? American Compass asked this very question in a survey and found some interesting insights:

• 50% of the country defined the American Dream as the opportunity to go as far as your talents could take you and the other 50% saw it as the promise of building a decent life to support your family.

• A big driver of this appears to be class, with the lower class prioritizing a decent life (57%) and the upper-class prioritizing opportunity (60%).

• However, when asked about their ideal version of the American Dream (vs. what the American Dream is today), all classes leaned towards a county which prioritizes stability, rootedness, and productivity over opportunity, dynamism, and consumerism.

• Further, when asked “what would make you proud to be an American”, the most common response was a country which is a great place to raise a family, over ideals like providing liberty, building great things, and having a high standard of living.

To me, this data and my experiences paint a clear picture of the American Dream. We should be a nation that secures the ability for the Average American to live a decent life and build a happy family. Foremost, this is the mission of our nation and should be the mission of our economy, government, and our civil society.

Where does this leave opportunity? It is true that opportunity leads to innovation which creates the jobs, homes, and infrastructure which can support families and communities. However, opportunity is not a valiant goal on its own, and unfortunately, that is what it is today – a pursuit for the sake of itself. This is the cultural story behind the negative ramifications of globalization, financialization, and privatization. Unchecked pursuit of opportunity only benefits elites who hoard prosperity, while leaving ordinary Americans only more vulnerable. Once again, I find my family as a useful illustration of the true role of opportunity. On one side, my partner’s family’s stability was achieved by previous generations’ pursuit of opportunity – attending law school in places outside of McAllen, but then relocating back home. On the other side, my parents’ stability was built through moving to find opportunity and pursuing wealth through business formation. In both cases opportunity was pursued in service of a decent life, dignity, and long-term stability. Ultimately, this is the role I see for opportunity writ large, an engine in service of a decent life.

Let’s return to that moment on July 3rd, 2019 – a moment whose meaning continues to evolve for me. Originally, it was simply a day when I made a careless remark, and later, it became a catalyst for deep, existential questioning of my own beliefs. Today, it is neither. Instead, it is a cherished moment marking the beginning of my own intellectual awakening, sparked by a thoughtful question from my loving partner. Just as I experienced a personal evolution, I believe our nation has the same opportunity. America has made its share of profound mistakes, as all things of great importance inevitably do. But rather than succumbing to nihilism, we have the power to thoughtfully examine our country’s deepest beliefs and values to fuel a national awakening—one that cultivates an identity rooted in the dream of happy families and strong communities, propelled by an engine of opportunity in service of a decent life.

A note to the audience: Takes are meant to provoke. In that spirit, I'd love to hear your thoughts: Should we embrace a national identity? Why or why not? If yes, what should it look like? Let me know if you agree, disagree, or have a different perspective altogether!

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• “Budgets Slashed: Schools and Hospitals Face Cuts”

• “Populists Demand Reforms; Old Parties Scoff”

• “Protests Spread Across Campuses”

• “Urban Riots Erupt; Calls for Justice Grow Louder”

• “Inflation Surges, Families Feel the Pinch; Prices Climb at Record Paces”

• “Parties Deadlocked Over Tariffs”

• “The Scandal Deepens: Trust in Government Erodes”

There’s just one problem. None of the headlines[1] you just read were from today. All were collected from other moments of upheaval in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1970s. In the 1890s, post-Reconstruction America was roiled with violence and partisan strife as the Gilded Age revealed that the two political parties were incapable of solving emerging challenges. In the 1930s, laissez-faire economics led to the greatest economic depression in American history while the Axis Powers rose just one ocean away. In the 1960s and 70s, we endured the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights revolution, stagflation, and a shift toward individualistic American identity over the communitarian instincts of the post-WWII era. What we're experiencing today, even if it doesn’t feel like it, is certainly precedented.

Not only are these times precedented, they are patterned. Like clockwork, every 30-40 years, we go through an upheaval. In each of these eras, we experience a crisis and a grievance which leads to an “out-group” – a coalition left behind by the policy or culture of the previous era. As that “out-group” ascends and crises abound, we experience a long transition, where new and strange political, economic, and cultural ideas shakeup our nation. Finally, a reformer takes those ideas that and cements them into true structural change And then, the new paradigm stops feeling new or strange at all, and instead just feels normal.

Chart: Patterns of upheaval

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We can use this pattern to organize the past and look to the future. Let’s start with the previous three eras of American life: the Progressive era (1890s – 1920s), the long New Deal (1930s – 1960s), and the Neoliberal era (1970s – 2010s). This analysis relies on historical narratives and analysis from Robert Putnam (The Upswing), Lee Drutman (Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop), and Ruy Teixeira (Where Have All the Democrats Gone).

The Progressive era (1890s – 1920s)

Context: Rapid industrialization built the wealth of robber barons, labor conditions robbed Americans of dignity and safety, and the end of the Reconstruction led to incredibly high polarization and declining trust in institutions.

Crisis and Grievance: Urban middle class professionals, reformers, small farmers, and laborers consistently found themselves on the outside of a government which was powered by corrupt patronage systems and large business trusts. The Panic of 1893 caused severe economic depression while tensions between workers and capitalists defined the decade.

The Long Transition: Through the early 1900s, a group of “progressive” reformers pushed against Gilded Age inequalities, securing state victories in the 1890s and reaching national prominence with Teddy Roosevelt’s election. Roosevelt implemented anti-trust reform and sparked national conversations on insurance, progressive taxation, labor reform, and environmental regulation. Progressives built bottom-up solutions related to education, association (i.e., clubs), and gender inequality.

The New Paradigm: Building off post-WW1 solidarity, Woodrow Wilson implemented major structural reform, passing a federal income tax, direct democracy reforms, the Federal Reserve, and labor reform. Post Wilson, progressivism ingrained into major cultural institutions of America and both parties, leading to growth in academia, the federal government, and the managerial class. By the early 1920s, Warren Harding ran on "a return to normalcy."

The Long New Deal (1930s – 1960s)

Context: The failure of laisse faire progressivism led to the country’s greatest economic depression, alienating much of the same people progressivism was designed to serve.

Crisis and Grievance: While the progressive era led to greater prosperity for the working class and urban progressives, the Great Depression shattered faith in unregulated markets. Severe drought and dust storms devastated rural farming communities, compounding economic hardship.

Transition: In 1932, a coalition of labor and rural populists rallied behind FDR, giving him a sweeping electoral mandate (42 states won). FDR's brain trust comprised academics steeped in social welfare theory—a stark departure from Progressive Era laissez-faire economics. By 1933, emergency legislation addressed the banking crisis and unemployment, although many initiatives faced legal challenges.

The New Paradigm: In 1935, bolstered by victories in the 1934 congressional races, FDR enacted his Second New Deal—focusing on Social Security, worker protection, and direct job creation. This legislation shifted from recovery to reform and cemented organized labor in the New Deal coalition. Until the late 1960s, both Republican and Democratic presidents operated within a big-government bipartisan political consensus.

Neoliberalism (1970s – 2010s)

Context: A mixture of cultural conformism of post-WWII America and stagnating profits led to a new focus on liberation, individualism, and unrestrained markets.

Crisis and Grievance: Civil rights reform alienated Southern working-class members of FDR’s democratic coalition. Small business owners and the suburban middle-class grew disillusioned with high tax rates and increasingly felt they were “footing the bill for others”, while elite corporate interests felt worker-friendly policy stifled profits. The Vietnam War, stagflation, oil crises, and Watergate increased disillusionment with government institutions.

Transition: Thinkers like Milton Friedman and organizations like the Heritage Foundation gained prominence advocating for deregulation and free markets. Jimmy Carter adopted portions of these ideals but lost support from key constituencies. The 1970s was known as the "Me Decade," with new age spiritualism and self-help contrasting sharply with post-WWII communitarian ideals.

The New Paradigm: Ronald Reagan passed sweeping tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-union measures while completing a political realignment best embodied by his quote, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”. A ‘uni-party’ consensus formed around business interests, with Democrats creating the Democratic Leadership Council (an organization which embraced market-based solutions and adopted a business-friendly image) to further integrate neoliberal thinking into their own policy. However, cultural polarization only increases.

Today, we find ourselves in a new era— a post-neoliberal one – in which we are in the late stages of the long transition phase. The history outlined above offers three key insights:

• Each of these shifts occurred alongside an out-group driven coalitional realignment. To understand which ideological projects might drive a paradigm shift – there are often multiple in competition – we should understand the motivations of the out-group.

• While realignment coalitions ultimately drive change, new ideological projects are typically developed by elites—think tanks, academics, and thought leaders. To understand what might constitute a post-neoliberal paradigm, we must identify insurgent thinkers responding to the grievances of today's “out-groups”.

• Transitions were some of America’s most volatile times. But in these noisy years, seeds of consensus form. Bipartisanship drove the build-out of colleges during the progressive era, established the social safety net in the New Deal era, and enabled widespread deregulation during the neoliberal era. If you want to know what comes next, start with consensus.

So… where are we going?

While we are in the long transition, we can apply the lessons from our past to see the future. We have enough data to understand the motivations of the out-group coalition, the insurgent thinkers responding to the out-group’s grievance, and the signs of consensus which will inform the post-neoliberal era. Together, these three concepts can contextualize the new paradigm. Let’s start with the out-group.

The out-group coalition

I will start with an assertion: the out-group coalition is the working class, a group which has been “left behind” by neoliberalism. I won’t dive to deep into this group (if you want more detail see my previous post here), but often people will try and assert facts about this group using simple “left-right” categorizations. You will see discourse like Democrats are “too progressive” to appeal to the working class or that Republicans appeal to the working class through their “conservative” sensibilities. There are parts of these statements which do represent a truth, but they miss large portions of our current reality.

Rather than using a simple left-right dichotomy, I will use three questions developed by Lee Drutman and Patrick Ruffini, which capture a truer sense of American political identity:

"Who are we?" Addresses national identity and values. While past divisions centered more on race and religion, today's tension exists primarily between cosmopolitan and traditional values. Cosmopolitans embrace individualism and personal liberation, tend to be less rooted to specific places, and advocate for universal beliefs such as ‘diversity as a strength’ and ‘immigration as a right’. Traditionalists, in contrast, value duty and responsibility over self-expression. They typically remain rooted to one place, actively participate in their communities, practice religion, and maintain skepticism toward outsiders with different values.

"Who gets what?" Examines economic values. This spectrum ranges from an interventionist egalitarian perspective that seeks to rebalance inequality to a noninterventionist market-oriented approach that favors unleashed markets with minimal government involvement.

"Who do we trust?" Reflects attitudes toward institutions and experts. This newer dimension in political polling distinguishes between establishment and anti-establishment values. Those with establishment values tend to trust experts, have faith in institutions, and believe in politicians. Those with anti-establishment values generally prefer the wisdom of ordinary people over experts, distrust institutions, and remain skeptical of politicians' motives and effectiveness.

Using these questions, we can tease out a simplified understanding of the American voting electorate broadly, alongside the out-group (chart below). Right now, the country leans conservative, egalitarian, and anti-establishment. Meanwhile, American elites (wealthy asset holders and the managerial class) primarily align with libertarian values or the more libertarian aspects of progressivism. In the “out-group” of the working class, there are two groups to pay attention to: White non-college educated voters and non-white non-college educated voters. White non-college educated voters lean slightly traditionalist and slightly egalitarian. Meanwhile, non-white college educated voters lean slightly cosmopolitan and significantly egalitarian. Both would classify as culturally moderate, while generally egalitarian.

Chart: The American Electorate

The Insurgent Thinkers

These same questions can be used to understand insurgent thinkers’ ideological projects. Below, you will see bubbles (on the left) representing the high-level ideological boundaries of neoliberalism, and (on the right) representing the new ideologies (darker colors) which will compete for post-neoliberal dominance.

Chart: Ideological Projects, Old vs. New

Before I dive into each of these “insurgent thinkers” and new ideologies, there are some grounding dynamics I want to highlight. First, both parties shifted toward cosmopolitan values during the neoliberal era while moving away from egalitarian economic policies, creating a significant political opening—especially for populists. Second, the Republican Party now faces the challenge of balancing its traditionalist and market-oriented base with its growing working-class coalition that favors more egalitarian policies. Third, the Democratic Party must reconcile the conflicting interests of their base (which supports egalitarian policies) and their donor class (which doesn't). This tension has led to a focus on cosmopolitan cultural values with vague economic platforms, but winning elections require appealing to more traditionalist and egalitarian voters.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the insurgent thinkers and ideologies.

Trumpism: More Than "Owning the Libs"

Trumpism isn't just a random mix of immigration restrictions, tariffs, and cultural grievances. At its core, it's a nationalist ideology that borrows from free-market conservatism through tax cuts and deregulation while incorporating conservative populist elements like reshoring and tariffs. This hybrid approach makes Trumpism a transitional ideology—a bridge helping Republicans navigate their party's renewal while maintaining their base—and is why it is not on the chart. It provides enough continuity with traditional conservatism to keep established Republicans on board while adding populist elements that resonate with a broader constituency.

Family & Worker Conservatism: The GOP's Future?

The next evolution of conservative thought centers on workers and families and sees stable cultural identity as vital to well-being. Championed by J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and organizations like American Compass, this ideology aims to reimagine capitalism to better serve families. Its proponents advocate for labor renewal, substantial investment in non-college career pathways, rebuilding the American industrial base, and family-oriented redistributive policies like the Child Tax Credit. While aligned with Trump's base, this approach often clashes with traditional free-market conservatives on issues like antitrust enforcement, corporate power limitations, and taxation policy. This tension represents a fundamental shift in how conservatives view the relationship between government, markets, and family welfare.

Left-Wing Populism: The Democratic Dilemma

Biden's version of left populism featured industrial policy to restore domestic jobs, worker protections, and redistributive programs like student loan forgiveness. Fundamentally, left-wing populism distrusts big corporation and the financial sector, which creates a significant divide with the Democratic donor class (a reason you see swaths of Silicon Valley realigning today). It maintains a cosmopolitan cultural identity, which stresses solidarity and diversity. The ideology faces a structural challenge: its ideal base—working-class Americans—tends to be more traditionalist than the Democratic party's educated professional core and their cosmopolitan values. Despite these setbacks, this ideology remains influential through the Roosevelt Institute, reform-minded philanthropies, and politicians like Chris Murphy and Ro Khanna.

Abundance: Reformed Neoliberalism

This emerging ideology, championed by people like Ezra Klein and the Niskanen Center, essentially reimagines neoliberalism with a focus on "supply-side" solutions. Proponents advocate for maximizing the supply of critical goods (housing, energy, healthcare) by removing barriers to innovation and investment. Though primarily elite-driven, this approach has potential to unite business interests, progressive funders, and free-market conservatives in a coalition that represents a significant portion of those in power. Its techno-optimist cultural orientation makes it appealing to policy experts and business leaders, though it may struggle to build broad popular support.

The Legacy Players

Three established ideological groups are still forces to be reckoned with. The Christian Right, though relatively small in numbers, remains well-organized and will continue aligning with those willing to implement their cultural priorities. Managing their demands alongside newer populist elements presents an ongoing challenge for Republican coalition-building. Free-Market Conservatives, once the dominant force in conservatism, are now fragmenting. This coalition of business interests and suburbanites still maintains significant institutional power through organizations like the Club for Growth and various think tanks, but their influence is waning as the party evolves. Technocratic Progressives find themselves caught between revamped progressivism and populism, creating a core tension within the Democratic coalition. Their influence appears to be declining, as many blame Harris's 2024 loss on their approach.

In summary, there are four insurgent ideological projects to watch: Abundance, Left Populism, Family & Workers’ Conservatism, and Trumpism. While each is responding to the same failure, each still feels quite different. To me this begs a big question – where do they agree?

Signs of consensus

Shifting sands in ideological projects means new bipartisan alliances. We already see some signs, with bipartisan embrace of tariffs, domestic reshoring, anti-trust action, and multi-polar foreign policy. While identifying further areas of potential consensus remains speculative, it can offer a window into what major changes and investments might shape our future.

By examining policy documents from American Compass (Rebuilding American Capitalism), Niskanen Center (Faster Growth, Fairer Growth), and Roosevelt Institute (New Rules for the 21^st Century) — leading think tanks driving new ideological projects — several potential consensus areas emerge:

Renewing American Dynamism: We've stopped building useful things. Significant portions of our economy now generate no value or even negative value. Our obsession with maximizing KPIs like GDP or rate of return has created a distortion where extraction, destruction, rent-seeking, and obfuscation are economically rewarded. All these ideologies recognize the need to rebuild an America that creates useful things while reducing value-destroying economic activities.

Revitalizing the American Middle Class: As we begin building more useful things, we need to ensure prosperity reaches the middle class. Neoliberalism's legacy includes a hollowed-out American dream—combining rising costs for essentials (housing, healthcare, family formation), stagnant wage growth, and limited wealth creation. A healthy country requires improving economic prospects for everyday households.

Strengthening American Culture: While these ideologies disagree on the root causes of our cultural challenges, all acknowledge our growing disconnection from one another. Local communities should be our foundation for belonging, yet we lack healthy social fabric—the institutions and "commons" that unite us. This increasing isolation isn't inevitable, even in a technology-centered world. We need to craft an American culture that balances advancing technology with meaningful connections to family, friends, and community.

Note for readers: each of these deserves its own post (hint hint!)

How does this all come together?

1. An out-group of the working class, which leans traditionalist and egalitarian.

2. Four ascendant ideological projects, all responding to the failure of neoliberalism.

3. Emerging consensus, predominantly focused on a revitalization of the American worker, family, and culture.

These three sentences together represent an enormous shift in our country. Yet, these ideological projects are still in a stage of adolescence. That means they are still influenceable—fundamentally open to new views, perspectives, and data. However, once an idea is old enough, it has a way of running away and taking on its own life. This means we are in a narrow window to influence those creating the theories that will become the practice of the next 30-40 years – connecting them to the ideas, places, and people that can drive not just a new paradigm, but a better one.

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[1] I took some editorial liberties here by removing any era-defining characteristics like “Watergate”, “Vietnam War”, “New Deal”. All headlines were sourced and verified using ChatGPT and while I sought to independently verify each one, some headlines required paywall archives.

In 2024, we saw the culmination of several long-term voting trends related to race, class, and education. More than a few magazines, thought leaders, and take artists have offered analysis already on short-term drivers like immigration & inflation or campaign related issues like “Should Harris have gone on Joe Rogan?”, or “Were the Democrats too ‘woke’?”. This work is different. It will stick to more encompassing, observable long-term trends.

To understand the major shifts that occurred in 2024, it’s helpful to consider the key class structures that underpin these changes.

The working class has been a huge subject of debate this past election, but the term tends to be bandied about with a variety of meanings. I find it most useful to define the working class as those employed in skilled trades, blue-collar labor, “service,” or “care.” This broad category covers about 70% of the labor force, a proportion expected to remain stable over the coming decades.[1]

On the other side is the knowledge class, a group which floats under a few different names (e.g., “the creative class”, “symbolic elites”). I find Musa Al-Gharbi’s definition in We Have Never Been Woke particularly sharp: those whose wealth and status stem from producing and manipulating symbols, rhetoric, images, narratives, data, and analysis. This class ranges from academics, lawyers, bankers, consultants at the top of the income spectrum to teachers, nonprofit administrators, and designers closer to the bottom. Additionally (though not shown in the bar graph), there is an asset-holding class comprising individuals with more than $500 million in assets. These individuals, while only representing roughly between one thousand and five thousand people today, have significant influence on state and national politics.

With the above class structures in mind, the trends below take us one step closer to understanding their relative importance to American electoral politics.

Trend #1: The working class completed a decades long shift away from the Democratic Party towards the Republican Party. [2] There are several factors which explain this transformation, many of which highlight complex interplays between decisions made by Democrats and Republicans, including:

• Neoliberalism drives declining conditions for the working class: A bipartisan consensus amongst Republicans and Democrats around deregulation, unrestricted immigration, and free trade drove job losses and stagnant wages for the working class. As the working class increasingly found their prosperity limited, skepticism grew of the “establishment” and “establishment values” like globalization and institutionalism

• Democrats’ priorities are increasingly set by “the Groups”: As labor unions weakened (driven by neoliberalism) and local party machines played a smaller role in national politics, Democratic priorities were increasingly influenced by social justice, environmental, and identity-based organizations. These organization’s priorities were further away from working class beliefs, creating a cultural rift and alienation of the more conservative working-class.

• Republican messages break through and deliver wins: Republicans increasingly focus on working-class discontent, emphasizing economic policies that puts money into the hands of the working class (like tax cuts), shrink an increasingly distrusted government, and embody cultural values of patriotism, family values, and “universalism”. The perception of the Republican Party starts to evolve away “country club and financiers” to “common sense”, while Democrats move from “Party of the People” to “Party of the marginalized”.

• Trump supercharges this appeal by identifying a common enemy: Donald Trump augments traditional Republican messaging with a focus on a political elites and institutions as a common enemy of his coalition. While his antics were considered rough and antagonistic, they offered a stark contrast to Democratic messaging, which felt increasingly anathema to the working class. Trump’s willingness to consider solutions which broke with establishment neoliberal views – like railing against immigration, globalization, and free trade agreements – positioned him and his administration as the sole voice which recognized the declining conditions of the working class across all races and identities.

Trend #2: The knowledge class grows into a legitimate and forceful coalition, primarily aligned with Democrats, spurred by the factors below:

• The knowledge class expands: During the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), a greater emphasis on education, science, and reason led to large-scale investments in universities and knowledge infrastructure. The growth of white-collar jobs, and the relative prosperity & stability of these jobs leads a knowledge class which was once a small group of “elites” to transform into a viable political coalition partner by the 1970s & 80s.

• “Prosperity segregation” cleaves apart class alignment: As the class increases in size, knowledge workers, who once lived in communities with the working class, begin to live in towns, cities, and neighborhoods made up exclusively of their class. As this happens, cultural and economic alignment between the knowledge class and the working class begins to drift, eventually leading to today, where the knowledge class is much closer to billionaires and asset-holders than the working class in political and economic values.

• The interests of the knowledge class take hold, primarily in the Democratic Party: As knowledge workers become increasingly different from the working class, the role of “manager” becomes increasingly widespread in federal government, nonprofits, and importantly, the Democratic Party. This leads to knowledge workers involved in and often leading the functions of all legs of power in the United States. Alongside wealthy asset-holders, knowledge workers experience the neoliberal era as a time of broad prosperity and increased human flourishing. For the knowledge class, real wages rose, racial and gender disparities decreased, and quality of life improved. As a result, knowledge workers developed a set of “post-material” priorities as their “material” concerns (e.g., economic security, safety, societal role) were largely satisfied. These priorities include ensuring the “losers” of neoliberalism are compensated through redistribution, promoting DEI initiatives to mitigate bigotry as a barrier to success and to create new “winners”, and advocating for issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

The sum of working class and college-educated shifts, lead to the single largest realignment and political consensus shift since Reagan’s coalition – with a working-class Republican Party and a knowledge-class Democratic Party. There are those that still do not believe this realignment will last, but there are a few clear indicators this shift will last in the medium-term (the next 4-8 years). Growth in bachelor’s degree holders has stalled and is projected to stay at a similar rate for the next decade, indicating there is no pathway for the knowledge class to transform into an electorally viable coalition on its own. Finally, non-class structures like race have played a smaller role in voting patterns, which is consistent with the “depolarization” experienced by Irish & Italian immigrants in the 1900s. The U.S. will become more racially diverse, but old racial voting patterns where people-of-color vote for Democrats writ large is ending, meaning class interests are the strongest indicator of voting behavior.

What does this mean for the future?

While these trends are well documented, there has been relatively less of a focus on how this will shift political and social sector priorities in the long-term. One thing is clear: this realignment and ideological shift is not complete, but we are officially in the post-neoliberal era.

With that, both Republicans and Democrats are going to orient around a single goal: solidifying a multi-racial, multi-ethnic working-class coalition. The slowdown in college degree attainment, white collar job growth, and working class job-growth projections indicate the single highest priority coalition to consistent electoral success at the national level is the working class (who are increasingly voting on class interests over identity-based concerns). Solidifying this base will require delivering real wins, real power, and strong messaging with the possibility of it leading to an entrenched majority, like the multi-decade domination of New-Deal Democrats post-FDR.

Many, particularly in working-class-focused intellectual circles on both the left and right, have been outlining what achieving this goal might look like.

• Working class “policies”: This theory states that broad-based policy wins for working class people, including reshoring manufacturing jobs, creating non-college pathways to prosperity, and rebuilding the power of American labor will lead to an enduring working-class majority. The challenge with this as an exclusive pathway to success was demonstrated by the Biden administration – policies which may be beneficial to the working class can be stymied by other political objectives (e.g., IRA and CHIPs act was not paired with reimagination on environmental / diversity related regulation which ultimately led to slowed creation of middle-class jobs & infrastructure spending)

• Working class “politics”: This theory, takes working class policies, and pairs it with much deeper political and operational alignment. As an analogy, think of how neoliberalism shifted from a set of theories related to taxes, deregulation, and immigration introduced by a few economists to a politics. Neoliberal ideals of individualism and free markets pervaded the public sphere through sophisticated narrative strategies, a coalition of businesses came together to invest in influencing politics broadly, and neoliberal politicians & administrations prioritized unleashing markets above nearly all interests. Politics are all encompassing, and require significant commitment, most notably, requiring the shedding of other interests in favor of a central goal. A working-class brand of “politics” would set aside donor and activist interests, in favor of a framework which prioritizes working class interests first. This is the pathway endorsed by thinkers like Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Ruffini, and Oren Cass on the right and Ruy Texiera & John B. Judis on the left.

While the theory of building out working class politics, is promising, there is a central challenge those building it out will face. Constructing a politics which represents a group as wide in interests, cultural & racial backgrounds, and geographic upbringing is enormously difficult. Averages of the working class demonstrate a few traits: a desire for pre-distribution [3] over redistribution, a fondness for cultural conservatism (e.g., families, patriotism, religiosity, national security, and public order), and a sympathy towards universal, direct, and concise messages [4]. These averages are generally true but ignore a fact of American life – we are a mosaic of cultures, values, and beliefs. The idea of the “average” person is mythical [5], and most individuals are a unique mix of values across the ideological spectrum. I always think of the suburb where I grew up: evangelical Christians, restaurant servers, blue-collar Latino families, Asian Americans in low-quality corporate jobs, and many, many more. While you could certainly identify the mathematical “average” person, they would hardly be representative of the whole.

The party that cements a working-class majority, will not be the one which just has the most “pro-working class” policies and narratives, but the one which figures out how to create a governing process around a mosaic of the working class. Consider the challenge I named in its totality: we have two parties looking to deliver for a class [6] which is uniquely ideologically, culturally, and economically diverse. However, our governing process is not built on this reality today. Look at the primary players:

• Politicians who are elected by popular mandate, but often influenced and sorted by elite-driven party apparatuses

• Ideologically driven non-profits, think tanks, and organizations made up of thought leaders and experts who exert influence on agendas and governing processes (and have their own incentives skewed through their donors)

• Staffs and bureaucrats that tend to be college-educated and raised in enclaves which are primarily made up of the knowledge class

• Donors and their lobbyists who exert more influence than anyone would like on all three branches of our government

As you look through these players, notice the exclusive pathway for the working class to influence politics from within the governing process is voting. There are several ways to criticize this view, including the presence of working class “input” through pollsters and focus groups, working class politicians, and working-class oriented elites and thought leaders. Sure, it is possible that a group of experts and elites operating with a benevolent goal in mind can construct a politics which perfectly represents the working class, but there is a much more realistic pathway. Building the infrastructure for working people to influence politics themselves, rather than expecting experts to be right about a life experience they could never relate to.

What will it take to build a politics that reflects the working-class Mosaic?

What is a mosaic? It is a set of pieces, beautiful and unique on their own, organized together as one collective piece of art. In the 1940s, we had a tool like the mosaic – the labor union & the local party machine. At its core, these were pockets of interests organized within individual institutions or places (the pieces) and then brought together in networks (the mosaic) to influence governing systems. I would be remiss to not note that labor unions and local party machines were not perfect and were significantly flawed in their ability to truly represent the working class, but there are lessons we can learn from them. Chief amongst them, a decentralized but organized force of the working class can influence national politics, even amongst a landscape which includes powerful interests.

The pieces of what this force could be are already forming on the right and the left, however, they are not at the scale needed to be a meaningful tool of working-class influence. Going back to the example of the American Union, the unionized workforce peaked in 1983 at ~20% (and likely reached between 30-40% in the 1950s, but BLS data does not chart data that far back). An effective working-class mosaic will require significant growth from the most promising of these experiments – who likely cover less than <1% of the population today, collectively. Importantly, as these experiments grow, they will need to be stitched together (e.g., networked) and integrated into the political process to have meaningful influence. These next-generation experiments include:

• Citizens assemblies & deliberative democracy: new forms of decision-making structures within local and state governments which move citizens from passive recipients of political decisions made by “officials or experts” to actively involved in decision making. These experiments are exciting, but will require more scale (e.g., more citizens assemblies and participatory budgeting) and more networked intermediaries (e.g., national organizations which represent priorities bubbled up from several local citizens assemblies / deliberative democracy structures) to reach national influence

• Shared prosperity and shared ownership: Community Land Trusts, employee ownership, and community wealth building initiatives which organize working class communities or businesses to own assets together. While these are increasing in popularity, public incentives and field infrastructure must exist which accelerates the prevalence of these models in American life.

• Sectoral bargaining and worker-employer committees: Potential evolutions to historical unionization efforts which still organize and network labor interests at significant scale. These are quite rare or nonexistent in the U.S. but are picking up traction across both sides of the aisle and have seen success in global contexts.

• Platform cooperativism: Alternative structures to digital platforms (like ridesharing, delivery services, or social media) which are owned by workers, users, or both rather than venture-backed corporations. These have several challenges in scaling as they directly compete with the traditional tech marketplace, which has a robust investment and talent base to draw upon. However, platform co-ops have shown signs of delivering stronger benefits for workers and lower costs for users as it cuts out a need to return dividends to shareholders.

In summary, we have a new game – to cement working class majorities. The technocratic instinct is to identify and implement the right combo of “working class policies” and “messages”, whether it is from a lens of “pro-family” conservatism or “pro-worker” progressivism. This will not work unless it is paired with the teeth of working-class governance, and one which recognizes the complexity of the working class. One which curbs its base instincts to simplify into a pretty picture anyone can understand, but instead embraces the organized chaos of a mosaic.

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[1] There are two other definitions for the working class: those without a bachelor’s degree and those which make <$100K. College education is a great proxy for understanding trends for the working class, but misses “underemployed” bachelors degree holders (which is a growing portion of the population). Defining the working class as those who earn <$100K puts 1^st year consultants at Deloitte, teachers, and fast-food employees in the same bucket, which heavily obscures class interests.

[2] This is explored significantly through the authorship of Patrick Ruffini (Republican Pollster and Strategist who authored Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial, Populist Coalition of the GOP) and Ruy Tuxeira (political scientist who authored Where Have All the Democrats Gone).

[3] A belief that the rules of the economic system should prevent income inequality as compared to redistribution which is the belief that “winners” and “losers” are okay if the winners redistribute towards the losers. This can be practically understood as high wages, robust labor protection, and economic opportunity vs. strong safety nets and high taxes.

[4] We Have Never Been Woke, authored by Musa Al-Gharbi

[5] As in their primary existence is in the sweet dreams of a political consultant

[6] The “knowledge class” and asset-owning class tend to be more homogeneous in cultural and economic values as charted by Musa Al-Gharbi in We Have Never Been Woke

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My name is Atharva Sinha, and I am an elite.

My path mirrors that of many in my circle. Raised by an immigrant family in the suburbs, I attended a great university with a broadly progressive education, before joining a well-paying consultancy in the “social impact” sector. Along the way, I was socialized into the culture and set of assumptions which underlies the thinking of so many in my class. Here are just a few beliefs that I, and many others around me, held:

• I earned it. We live in a meritocracy that rewarded my hard work and talents. The only barriers remaining are bigotry and discrimination, but class is no longer the rigid blocker of success.

• My perspectives are facts. My progressive ideals and politics are grounded in indisputable historical analysis and empirical evidence. Others who disagree are misinformed or bad actors who seek to detract from progress.

• Our society should be run by people like me. I, like those around me, am on the pathway to being an expert or executive or thought leader. Our country’s culture, economy, and democracy require expert or professional judgement to succeed.

Along the way, I developed a strong belief in this country’s ability to create prosperity. As a child, I moved all over the country as my parents navigated the immigration system. I watched them move from the crushing corporate life of H1-B visa holders to American citizens who owned a small business together. As a Southerner and Texan, I bore witness to the dynamism of the immigrant and Latino communities of Memphis, Dallas, Austin, and McAllen. When I attended college, I and others around me founded startups, received lucrative job offers, or joined the offices of successful politicians. The promises of my ideology seemed evident in the various enclaves I inhabited. As I graduated, I looked for a place to work which embodied my progressive values and allowed me to pursue the work of bringing prosperity to everyone, especially those who bigotry or discrimination still posed a barrier.

However, I found myself disillusioned with the orthodoxy and assumptions which underpin it. As I pursued a career in ‘social justice,’ my own prosperity and that of those like me grew—yet the structures of 'the good life' seemed to be deteriorating. Inequality in our country is increasing, the democratic voice of citizens is diminishing, and our culture seems to be more polarized and segregated than ever before. This truth was impossible to ignore and was much discussed among those in my class – with fingers pointed in all directions. Most liberals and progressives attributed this shift to racism, bigotry, and a working class too susceptible to the pull of right-wing misinformation. Leftists and populists pointed to the '1%' and shadowy billionaires, whose growing control over our country concentrated wealth and power in their hands. While each of these theories seemed to hold water, they seemed to ignore one fundamental and inconvenient question: if these theories are true, why does it not explain how people like me have only seen their lives improve? I started noticing the pull and power of those in professions like my own. What if the lack of deteriorating conditions for the average American was not the result of racism or bigotry, but rather the result of class and institutional structures working exactly as intended? What if it was not the “1%” who ran our country, but rather the “10-20%” that I belonged to, whose role as ‘expert’, ‘bureaucrat’, and ‘professional’ offered unparalleled control of a world moving away from the physical and towards the intangible? Most critically, what if I was not a case study on how our American system can work, but rather a natural winner in a system rigged to help people like me at the expense of others?

As my thinking evolved, I saw the undercurrents of change in our systems and institutions. As I asked more of these inconvenient questions, my media ecosystem evolved to give new answers. I began listening to new media, alternative media, and right-of-center sources who answered questions mainstream media was unwilling to give credence. As I expanded my ecosystem, the story started to become clear. The way our world has worked is on the cusp of significant change. Since the new-deal era, the predominant ideologies which drove our nation were those of progressivism (e.g., the belief that humanity could achieve human flourishing by allowing meritocratic technocracy to leverage science and reason) and neoliberalism (e.g., the ideology of unlocking prosperity through pursuing corporate profit at all costs in the economic, cultural, and political realms). Both cross-ideological consensuses did not lead to the utopia they promised. Rather than flourishing, we saw power consolidate in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, corporate managers, thought leaders in the social sector, and billionaires across all institutions. Rather than unprecedented economic prosperity, we received a once large middle class left in tatters while opportunity shrank for all those except the most well educated. These realities are now clear, and even the most ardent defenders of institutions feel the winds of change on their backs.

As our country changes, I seek to offer hope. While I have become disillusioned with our current orthodoxy, I am not a cynic. Rather I seek to be a critical optimist – willing to deconstruct what doesn’t work in pursuit of understanding what could. There are people, organizations, and ideas who offer something new, who are seeding a better world. Seeds of a new shared prosperity for communities where wealth is not the norm. Seeds of a new power and influence for those who have historically lacked it. Seeds of a national culture, which breaks down our barriers rather than splitting us apart. What I hope to do is write about these new seeds of change and tie them to a new consensus which is already starting to form on the right and the left. Through all of this, I pose one central question to you: Our world is changing. What are you going to do about it?