Last April, as grocery stores in the United States struggled to keep toilet paper on the shelves and hospitals’ supply of protective equipment ran low, an essay from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen popped into the Twitter feeds of the quarantined chattering classes. “IT’S TIME TO BUILD,” read the all-caps headline. It was less an op-ed than an indictment of the “monumental failure of institutional effectiveness” that had caught the United States’s healthcare, financial, and industrial supply-chain systems flat-footed in the face of COVID-19. More than that, it was a call to “separate the imperative to build … from ideology and politics.”
Andreessen’s essay appealed to a long-standing sense of national decline, heightened by the sudden economic fallout of the global pandemic. Americans, especially those in policy circles, had exceled at accepting the status quo of infrastructural gridlock in Washington, state capitals, and city halls, even while lamenting the comparatively state-of-the-art airports in places like Singapore. We’ve become frozen, instead, by “racial panic, ecopessimism, and paranoia about the loss of parking spaces,” as Matthew Yglesias puts it in his new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.
One Billion Americans is one of two books released in 2020 to take different paths to the same broad conclusion as Andreessen: Americans cannot afford to accept economic and demographic decline as an inevitable feature of a globalized world. In The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America’s Middle Class, New York Times economics reporter Jim Tankersley argues that the decline of the American middle class has squandered human potential and created a downward spiral of zero-sum thinking and identitarian conflict. Where Tankersley looks to the diversity of the post-World War II era and its civil rights and labor advances as a blueprint for racially inclusive economic growth, Yglesias calls on the frontier spirit of 19th-century westward expansion while urging a tripling of the U.S. population, a move he contends would enable the country to maintain its place as a world leader.
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