For the previous few years, American politics have been organized round a easy, unnerving feeling: Life is getting too expensive, and nobody appears to know what to do about it.

Hire and residential costs really feel out of attain. Baby care feels prefer it costs as much as a second mortgage. Groceries, utilities, and well being care have all climbed sooner than folks’s paychecks. Politicians have reached for acquainted instruments — blaming company “greedflation,” flirting with worth controls and tariffs, promising to “tackle” whoever is handy in an election 12 months — however none of that will get to the deeper query: How can we make it genuinely simpler to construct, to work, and to stay nicely in America?

For many of this nation’s historical past, we thought we knew the reply: development. Meaning an even bigger economic system, greater productiveness, cheaper and cleaner power, new expertise, and extra folks in a position to take part in the entire above. Development was the background assumption — not a panacea, however the factor that made each different downside a little bit simpler to resolve.

Then, starting within the Nineteen Seventies, that consensus began to interrupt. Financial development slowed. Issues about inequality, consumerism, and environmental harm mounted. A sure anti-growth mentality took root on each the left and the best, and “extra” turned one thing to be eyed with suspicion somewhat than embraced and steered.

There have been actual causes folks have been cautious of a political mission organized round “extra” — the environmental harm of fossil fuels, the expertise of being disregarded of previous booms, the sense that consumerism had crammed our lives with stuff as a substitute of which means. However, in overcorrecting for the very actual errors of the previous, the US inadvertently locked itself right into a low-growth, high-friction establishment that has solely made our hardest issues more durable. That’s why we have to take sustainable development significantly once more, to maneuver from zero-sum fights over who will get what slice of a set pie to a world the place the pie is definitely larger. Not development in any respect prices, however development the good manner.

That’s the animating thought behind this mission, The Case for Development. Over the approaching weeks, in explainers, options, and podcast episodes, we’ll have a look at why our most efficient cities have been successfully locking out households and what it would take to open them up. We’ll think about what an period of fresh power abundance may unlock, from vertical farming to sci-fi local weather options. We’ll discover how advances in synthetic intelligence may lastly shake us out of a chronic productiveness stoop and the way our dependancy to vehicles and meat is choking off extra sustainable development. We’ll speak to specialists who make the case that growth can run side by side with insurance policies that forestall the worst of world warming.

In an period when a lot of our politics has been diminished to zero-sum arguments over who loses so another person can win, we wish to reopen the opportunity of positive-sum progress — of constructing extra; inventing extra; and together with extra folks in that story, whereas caring for the planet. Development gained’t resolve every thing, however with out it, nearly nothing will get solved at scale. The Case for Development is our try to put that concept again into conservation as a part of a critical effort to make life extra inexpensive, extra sustainable, and extra plentiful within the US and much past.

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