i think the outlook will depend upon our capacity to organize ourselves well enough to think beyond simple scalar measures of growth. 1/

cars and suburbanization are great for gdp precisely because they are so expensive! we get a lot of real miles and real homes for all that money, but the g in gdp really bites, this is spending on rapidly depreciating, expensive to maintain assets (homes, cars, physical and social infrastructure) 2/

economists’ first presumption is that if something is expensive but people buy it anyway, that means it adds just that much value, is a revealed preference that contributes commensurately to welfare. 3/

but that’s too simple, as individually we don’t really get to choose between a far-flung and pedestrian lifestyle, these things come in bundles which we have to take all or none. 4/

we need government to observe this fact, and make judgments about costs and benefits that individuals cannot effectively make and aggregate through consumer choice in markets. 5/

in general, we need government to observe facts like this — there are many — and act well. but no data can tell us what “well” would be. if you poll people you’ll get garbage, the polled don’t have adequate information about what plausible alternatives to the status quo would look like. 6/

if you leave it to some class of technocrats, you’ll get their biases, whatever those are. 7/

there is no alternative to building a democracy capable of acting with reason and foresight, institutions which people trust to act consequentially because they believe their values and interests are taken into account in ways deeper than flawed polling. 8/

that is the difficult project our kids’ outlooks depends upon. sometimes it seems like an impossibly steep climb. but we’ve had trusted, reasonably effective government before, and though times have changed, we have more tools, we could potentially do it even better. /fin