America’s affordability crisis is really a growth problem

In recent years, American politics has been organized around a simple, troubling sentiment: Life is becoming too expensiveand no one seems to know what to do about it.

Rent and real estate prices seem unattainable. Childcare feels like that costs as much as a second mortgage. Food, utilities and healthcare have all increased faster than people's paychecks. Politicians have resorted to familiar means and blamed companies.Greedflation“, flirting with price controls and tariffs and promising to “take” whoever suits them in an election year – but none of this addresses the deeper question: How do we do it? really easier build, work and live well in America?

For most of this country's history, we thought we knew the answer: growth. That means a bigger economy, higher productivity, cheaper and cleaner energy, new technologies and more people to share in it all. Growth was the underlying assumption – not a panacea, but what made every other problem a little easier to solve.

Then, starting in the 1970s, this consensus began to break down. Economic growth slowed. Concerns about inequality, consumerism and environmental damage increased. A certain one Anti-growth mentality A trend took hold on both the left and the right, and “more” became something to be viewed with suspicion rather than embraced and managed.

There were real reasons why people were wary of a political project that was about “more” — the environmental damage of fossil fuels, the experience of being excluded from previous booms, the sense that consumerism had filled our lives with things rather than meaning. But by overcorrecting the very real mistakes of the past, the U.S. has inadvertently locked itself into a low-growth, high-friction status quo that has only made our most difficult problems more difficult. That's why we have to take sustainable growth seriously again and move away from it Zero-sum struggles about who gets what piece of a fixed pie, into a world where the pie is actually bigger. Not growth at any cost, but growth the intelligent way.

That is the animating idea behind this project, The Case for Growth. In the coming weeks, we'll explore why our most productive cities have effectively locked out families in explainers, features, and podcast episodes what it would take to open it. We imagine what an era of clean energy abundance could achieve, from vertical farming to sci-fi climate solutions. We'll examine how advances in artificial intelligence could finally pull us out of a prolonged productivity slump, and how our addiction to cars and meat is stifling more sustainable growth. We talk to experts who support this Growth can occur side by side with measures to prevent the worst of global warming.

At a time when much of our politics has been reduced to zero-sum arguments about who loses so someone else can win, we want to reopen the possibility of positive-sum progress – building more; invent more; and include more people in this story while taking care of the planet. Growth won't solve everything, but without growth, almost nothing can be solved at scale. “The Case for Growth” is our attempt to reintegrate this idea into conservation as part of a serious effort to make life more affordable, sustainable, and abundant in the United States and far beyond.

This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.