I’m going to discuss three interrelated books, each of which deals with the American Dream, although none of them focus on the term. First, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, which is generating plenty of buzz. Second, Yoni Applebaum’s Stuck, and third, Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class, which is a few years older than the other two but concerned with similar topics. All three books, in their own ways, ask similar questions: Why do things feel so stagnant in America? Why is it so hard to build new homes, roads, rail lines, and more? Where did the American dream, of picking up and moving, taking on a new job and a new life, go?
Klein and Thompson’s vision of abundance concerns the question of how to build things in America. More specifically, they focus on the fact that Democratic-run states, like California and New York, have built up so many veto points that these liberal states can’t build the very things they want, like affordable housing and public transportation. This is a pretty damning point.
As they correctly note, big cities like New York and San Francisco are not the drug-infested, crime-ridden hellholes that conservatives claim. They are much more the opposite—highly desirable places to live that have priced out all but the superrich. But far from a minor flaw, this should be seen instead as an absolutely devastating failure on the part of blue-city and blue-state governance.
Consider this example—Tyler Cowen, in The Complacent Class, cites the median rent for a two bedroom apartment in San Francisco at $5,000 a month, and his book was published in 2017! All three books dwell on the fact that middle-class life feels increasingly unaffordable and that we no longer seem to build things in America, especially new housing.
Applebaum powerfully captures this dynamic, specifically the loss of control experienced by many Americans in a less mobile America. “When people can choose where to move, they can also choose not to move. But either way, it is their choice. Today, too many Americans no longer feel as if they can make that choice for themselves. They live where they are able, not where they want; they experience their lives less as the result of their own decisions than as the consequences of vast and impersonal forces. And with that decline in agency has come a deep embitterment.” (19).
Does this mean that regulations alone are the source of these problems? Can we simply deregulate our way out of the affordability crisis? Harold Meyerson notes in a review of Abundance that market factors are also a big part of the story—for instance, many people in the building trades (carpenters, electricians, plumbers), lost their jobs during the great recession or moved into different industries, making it hard to build houses post-recession. Similarly, small, high-demand neighborhoods in Manhattan will likely not return to affordability with the creation of more skyscrapers—they will also require publicly-administered affordable housing. There is a difference between the claim that continued construction will keep Houston affordable and the claim that expanded construction will return New York to affordability.
Applebaum, concerned with the same general themes, draws our attention to the fact that Americans used to move more. Put simply, most Americans used to rent rather than own and many of them moved regularly, at much higher rates than we do now. Moving was so common that many cities had ultra-busy moving days where huge numbers of tenants would vacate their apartments on the same day. “Moving day embodied the very American expectation that change would be the constant of their lives and that it would bring expansive opportunities.” (77).
What about the worry that constant moving would undermine community ties? As Applebaum points out, the period when we moved regularly was a period of thriving civic associations. “Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Americans formed and participated in a remarkable array of groups, clubs, and associations. Religious life thrived. Local businesses prospered. Democracy expanded. Communities flourished.” (77). This relates to the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited America, particularly regarding our propensity to join and form civic organizations. On this point, Robert Putnam famously sounded the alarm bell around the turn of this century with his Bowling Alone, which demonstrated in painstaking detail how Americans were no longer joining voluntary organizations like we used to.
Now we move less, so we are in the same place longer, and yet we also join fewer groups. This feels counter-intuitive but appears to be true. And it is likely one among many factors contributing to our current political, social, and economic disfunction. Americans need to spend more time in person and less time online.
A key concern of all three books is the impact of NIMBY, the not-in-my-backyard efforts of residents in rich neighborhoods to prevent change and keep out newcomers. In Applebaum’s words, “progressive communities like Cambridge and Shepherd Park, which pride themselves on their openness and tolerance and diversity and commitment to social justice, are the worst offenders.” (22).
Why? Because “progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish. How could that happen?” (23).
It is a difficult question to answer, although all three books offer some insights. In part, people settle into an area that they like and then oppose further changes. As Applebaum points out, the urban activist Jane Jacobs moved into a Manhattan neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century, was awed by its dynamism and vibrancy, and subsequently joined up with others to prevent any further changes, a decision sure to kill off the very lifeblood of the neighborhood and erode its most likable traits.
Specifically, nimbyism among the wealthy is a serious and hypocritical problem. Environmental reviews, for instance, may be used to slow or stop the building of new multifamily housing in California cities. But of course the best way to serve Californian ecosystems is for large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles to build up, not out. Nimby zoning regulations, however, have the opposite effect, leading to the ever-sprawling suburbs of single-family homes, which are far worse for the environment!
In Applebaum’s words, “far from preventing sprawl…the empowerment of local communities accelerated it by making the production of new housing in dense urban areas incredibly difficult and forcing construction out to the exurban periphery.” (218).
This was strikingly apparent on a recent southern California visit, where I observed the $1-2 million price for small, suburban homes that aren’t even very close to Los Angeles or San Diego. Reflecting this trend, the median home price in the state was $900,000 in 2023. This is not only the product of nimby efforts to oppose development. But that is clearly part of the reason why we can’t build things anymore.
On this point a piece in National Affairs has the following to say, “But whether it's Gretchen Whitmer running for governor of Michigan on a platform of "Fix the Damn Roads" or Josh Shapiro trumpeting his eagerness to cut through bureaucratic hurdles to fix I-95 in Pennsylvania, Democratic officials have sensed that infrastructure dysfunction is a thorn in the side of blue-state governance.” (The piece is called “Minoritarianism is Everywhere,” by Steven M. Teles).
What is so damning is that this disfunction is basically imposed by a tiny, rich, unrepresentative minority. As Applebaum notes, “when state legislatures delegated the power to regulate land use to local governments, they were putting decision-making authority in the hands of a group of voters who are remarkably unrepresentative of the broader public (221). Specifically, very wealthy, vocal homeowners who are opposed to change near them while also being liberal on national political issues. It is a potent brew that does not help the cause of liberal and left politics.
To repeat, all three books discuss how America has become stuck. Consider now how Cowen characterizes it: “For all the revolutionary changes in information technology as of late, big parts of our lives are staying the same. These days Americans are less likely to switch jobs, less likely to move around the country, and, on a given day, less likely to go outside the house at all.” (6).
Later, echoing Klein and Thompson, he notes the loss of imagination: “what has been lost is the ability to imagine an entirely different world and physical setting altogether, and the broader opportunities for social and economic advancement that would entail.” (7). I discussed this point in an earlier blog post titled “In Defense of Dreaming.”
In addition, America is becoming more segmented into two separate classes, one higher and one lower. “There is more assortative mating of high earners and high achievers” (15). Cowen, for instance, gives the example of two investment bankers marrying each other rather than a neighbor or high school sweetheart. Maybe this makes people happier. It definitely makes high income houses even richer, since they often now have two high earners, and low income houses struggle because they, at best, pool together two low income workers.
What are some of the impacts we can expect from these developments? In a prescient passage, Cowen lists some disruptive changes that are likely to bubble up in the coming years. For instance, “impossibly expensive apartment rentals in the most attractive cities; the legacy of inadequate mobility and residential segregation; a rebellion of many less-skilled men; a resurgence of crime…” (22).
Whereas Applebaum focuses more on housing, Cowen focuses more on jobs. We are moving less, in part, because we are changing jobs at a much lower rate than we used to. In addition, as regional variation has shrunk, there is less incentive to pack up and move. In Cowen’s example, the suburbs of Cincinnati and Denver have pretty similar jobs, so why move?
“The American economy is evolving into a tiered system of high-pay, high-productivity companies on one hand and lower pay, lower-productivity jobs on the other.” (34). Have you seen how hard it is to get a good job? This helps explain why so many people don’t change jobs—if you manage to get a good one you stick with it. And this explanation is coming from a very free market economist!
As a consequence, the well-off may fight all the more, at least at the local level, to preserve what they have, leading into nimby politics. Cowen recognizes one implication of this inequality, which “is that the affluent and well educated in America may be especially out of touch, no matter how ostensibly progressive their politics.” (57). Indeed.
Cowen also looks at median wage stagnation/decline post great recession, lower productivity growth, less innovation, or fact that median male wage peaked between 1969-1973. Is it any surprise voters rebelled in both primaries in 2016? Or consider how the US has less class mobility than it used to and less than many similar European countries. We actually have more mobility for immigrants than much of Europe but less mobility for native born workers. Relevant to understanding our current times? Yes!
I will close with two Cowen quotes on change. Referring to Trump and Sanders in 2016, the fallout from the Great Recession, the influence of the Tea Party and Occupy, burgeoning black lives matter protests, Cowen suggests that “maybe these incidents are just the beginnings of deeper fissures in American life, fissures that will in due time rip open our sense of calm and tranquility.” (180).
Finally, “the mood of the times really matters, and those moods can, if enough pressure builds up, flip fairly suddenly and set off new dynamics and unfavorable and unseemly trends.” (188).
These three books offer different insights into how we are stuck, with a focus on the cost of living crisis. None of this means that markets alone will resolve these problems. But it should be clear by now that the combination of restrictive zoning, organized and well-off nimby advocates in nice neighborhoods, and a massive shortage of housing, is not working. Blue states and blue cities are the worst culprits here and they need to engage in considerable policy changes, including the creation of affordable public housing as well as removing barriers to construction, to address the affordability crisis. For that is what it is. A crisis.