Is America stuck?
Our crumbling highways and public housing projects date back to the days of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert Moses. We need millions more affordable homes, where people want to live, but many parts of the country still have trouble approving the construction of a single backyard granny flat.
The fact that in present-day America big and meaningful public projects seem impossible to build is about the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on these days. The New York Times just published a series of examples of the problem across the country: New York’s six-decade-long failure to fix the rat hole that is Penn Station; its Russian-roulette approach toward a collapsing expressway. Inertia plagues efforts to manufacture computer chips in Phoenix and erect mixed-income apartment buildings in Beverly Hills.
The inertia series joins a stack of new books by mostly self-identifying progressive authors, among them Yoni Applebaum’s “Stuck,” Dan Wang’s “Breakneck,” “Abundance” by the Times Opinion columnist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and Marc Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works,” all of which, in one way or another, locate inertia’s roots in an uncompromising bureaucracy and byzantine legal system that has metastasized since the 1970s.
These ideas have gravitated into the political sphere. The so-called abundance agenda — Klein and Thompson’s book has proved the most influential of the bunch — has coalesced into an anti-inertia platform for a moderate wing of the Democratic Party, its advocates arguing that America should increase the supply of housing and upgrade its infrastructure through targeted deregulation.
The culprit: layers of regulations and competing interests, litigated in an overloaded court system. Otherwise known as red tape. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 allocated some $370 billion to fight climate change, promising thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles across the country, yet only a few dozen have been built. During this last half-century or so, an Everest of rules and regulations — ostensibly devised to protect the environment, preserve heritage and empower ordinary citizens — have ended up slow-walking or killing countless developments, big and small, good and bad, turning the once-proud and nimble nation that erected the Empire State Building in a year and built the Hoover Dam in five, into a NIMBYish, lumbering vetocracy.
Conservatives have been railing against red tape and government bloat for decades. More recently, they have taken aim at the administrative state itself. The Trump administration, in the form of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, undertook its own radical project to reshape the federal government.
The outlines of a Republican infrastructure agenda are visible: The party talks about the need to resuscitate American manufacturing, and the Trump administration is carving out tariff exemptions for artificial intelligence data centers considered critical for the next wave of innovation, even as they strain the country’s power grid and raise utility bills for ordinary Americans. To help power Microsoft’s centers, the president also wants to restart Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant that suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, and he ran for office promising to resurrect the coal industry while deregulating years-old health and safety requirements that protect miners.
Both parties’ visions of progress seem rooted in nostalgia. A period of unprecedented change and productivity from the 1870s through the 1960s continues to frame 21st-century expectations, on both sides of the political aisle.
What, realistically, should progress look like in 2025?
I traveled to Evanston, Ill., to ask that question of an economist who has sometimes been referred to as the “prophet of pessimism.” Recently retired, Robert Gordon was for many years a professor at Northwestern University. He invited me one morning into the rambling, pineapple yellow, late-19th-century Shingle-style house he owns near Lake Michigan and brewed us a pot of coffee in the kitchen.
His 2016 New York Times best seller, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” tracks a developmental S-curve of national productivity since the mid-1800s. America experienced a century of stupendous growth precipitated by the inventions of electricity and the internal combustion engine.
By 1970, the country had morphed from horse-drawn carts on bumpy dirt roads to interstates and airplanes; from oil lamps and outhouses to endless electricity and indoor plumbing; from folk remedies to antibiotics and chemotherapy. We still live today in the wake of that era of change.
But since 1970 the pace of progress has declined significantly. Today most automobiles burn unleaded fuels and some even boast electric engines; but they function pretty much as they did 75 years ago. Commercial air travel, once a luxury, is commonplace now, but planes go no faster, jumbo jets are a long way off from relying on electric power, and flying has only become more miserable for all but the rich.
The last quarter-century has produced the iPhone and A.I., ushering in a fourth industrial revolution, as the digital and cyber age is sometimes called. Silicon Valley is banking trillions on the prospect that A.I. will have an impact on the world every bit as civilizational as electricity has had but whose contours are still hard to discern.
So far, most of what shapes our daily physical existence — food, clothing, the built environment of our homes, streets, cities and transportation networks — has undergone nothing remotely as transformational as the changes America experienced before 1970.
Gordon gestured toward the microwave in his house, the only significant appliance, as he pointed out, to alter America’s domestic kitchen since the middle of the last century. “The lesson is that it takes time to figure out the implications of a monumental invention like electricity,” he said, “and there are diminishing returns,” which creates a perception of decline.
During the mid-1960s an American economist named William Baumol described another source of pessimism. Prices for certain services rise while productivity remains stagnant or low. The phenomenon is known as Baumol’s Cost Disease. Baumol’s favorite example was the string quartet: Musicians in 2025 spend the same amount of time performing Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” that musicians spent in 1824, but all the costs surrounding the concert have soared to keep up with the rest of the economy.
The analogy today is housing. The computer age hasn’t meaningfully changed the way crews install I-beams, and the United States hasn’t figured out large-scale modular construction. At the same time, costs for materials, land and labor — not to mention battling lawsuits — have all gone through the roof. Regulations now make building an affordable apartment often far more expensive than building a market-rate one. We haven’t lost our technical, physical capacity to erect the Empire State Building in a year. But the housing industry is suffering from a severe case of Baumol’s cost disease.
The perception of American stagnation is exacerbated by frequent comparison to China. Americans are understandably obsessed with China’s productivity. The country sped from 1840 to 2020 in a couple of decades, turning a sleepy fishing village called Shenzhen into a global megalopolis of 18 million people. China has installed 30,000 miles of high-speed rail when America has managed to complete exactly zero miles.
The difference is the heart of Wang’s book, “Breakneck.” It unpacks not just how China zoomed past America, but also at what societal cost. Authoritarian China is a nation now run by engineers, he points out; democratic America has become a nation of lawyers, litigating development and delaying or derailing big heaves like California’s high-speed train.
High-speed rail could have economic benefits in parts of the United States, Gordon said, most obviously the Boston-Washington corridor. But trying to draw comparisons with China is tricky: “The urgency that we had to build the interstate highway system after the war was to get rid of traffic lights going all the way across the country and to be able to go 60 miles an hour instead of 30 miles an hour, especially for trucks,” he said. “That was a tremendous boost to productivity. Now we have highways and airports. The country is already built up in many places people want to be. We’re talking today about an era of repairs and upgrades.”
Like salvaging a New York expressway, building more affordable housing in Beverly Hills or improving Penn Station.
These are overdue projects, not epic ones like the Hoover Dam or a new national power grid. Repairing and restoring our deteriorating infrastructure is a crucial, noble but unsexy goal, which, against the backdrop of America’s leaping ambition a century ago, can sound a little defeatist — a tad, well, French.
In truth, the French have completed some 1,700 miles of spectacular high-speed rail. Britain recently opened the Elizabeth Line, the largest infrastructure project in Europe, which has already more than earned back its construction costs, transforming the transit system around London. When it comes to big projects, we’re not behind only China.
Why has Europe succeeded where America has stalled? Europe is struggling with low productivity growth and other crises. But when it comes to public investment in transportation and other infrastructure, European voters and the governments they elect, despite the growing fissures, remain committed to a notion of the public good. The United States since the 1970s has largely turned over housing and even much public infrastructure to the private sector.
At the same time, political divisions that set in and calcified during the 1960s made governing increasingly a matter of grinding down the other side’s will. Parties divided and weaponized a newly unyielding filibuster. Federal stasis led to local paralysis; without national momentum to fuel ambitious plans or long-term thinking, states and cities became increasingly parochial and incapable of dealing with structural problems corroding their livability.
As Dunkelman observes in “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back,” historically a pendulum of governance has swung over the course of American history. During the Depression and after World War II, as a bulwark against future disorder, it swung toward a kind of Hamiltonian centralization of authority: Americans empowered a professional class of technocrats, endorsing top-down systems that secured public health, improved the environment and innovated large-scale development projects.
“The individual has to yield,” as Moses argued at the time, “to the advantages and needs of the majority of people.” Nothing meaningful can get built otherwise, he warned. Paternalism was the price of progress, Dunkelman argues, and it paid obvious dividends.
He cites the example of a Tennessee Valley Authority employee flying over Western Kentucky and noticing wetlands and forests created by a new dam. The employee landed in Washington and suggested to his bosses in the Kennedy administration that the area be designated a national park. And without lengthy public hearings or environmental reviews, the greensward became the Land Between the Lakes, which today attracts more than a million visitors a year.
But in the wake of Watergate, the Vietnam War and Moses’s excesses, among other crises, Americans began to question the politicians, technocrats and experts in charge during the 1960s and ’70s. The environmentalist Rachel Carson was arguing that nuclear scientists weren’t also experts at marine biology, and Jane Jacobs was insisting that urban planners weren’t better at designing city neighborhoods than residents already living in them.
Challengers to the status quo demanded more seats for more viewpoints at decision-making tables. They endorsed pluralism, pushing for more laws, regulations and stopgaps to check top-down, centralized authority.
Pretty soon, the cost of a mile of interstate skyrocketed, a quarter of that rise because of litigation. Environmental reviews became mandatory and were soon weaponized by NIMBYs and politicians. President Obama’s Recovery Act of 2009 triggered more than 190,000 environmental reviews.
This is at the same time that China began to surpass America in productivity. Its autocratic government required citizens to meet goals and make sacrifices for material gains. Lately the Chinese people have begun to question the trade-off more loudly. An economic slowdown, The Times recently reported, is fueling a crisis of confidence.
For their part, Americans are unhappy about inertia. But it’s not clear whether we are hungry and frustrated enough for the pain and sacrifice, the relinquishment of participatory power, that would be required to complete massive public projects. Constructing millions of new homes to redress America’s affordability crisis in dense, job-rich hubs would demand curbing many of those regulatory, zoning and other legal roadblocks that Americans once considered crucial.
We forget that the interstate highway system displaced more than one million Americans in the process of remapping the country during the midcentury. Deregulation leads to more top-down authority. Progressives now advocating the abundance agenda argue that Democrats can redefine themselves as the anti-inertia party and reclaim power. But who exactly would be in charge?
Top-down authority, as The Times inertia series noted, is the Trump administration’s strategy to fix Penn Station: asserting federal control over a federally owned building to cut through conflicting interests that, for generations, have prevented progress at the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere. That may well be the answer.
But it is also what President Trump exercised when he unilaterally ordered the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a gilded ballroom. Polls make clear that Americans aren’t pleased.
And yet.
All the challenges to progress aside, it is possible to argue that our present frustration with inertia is itself a sign the pendulum may be about to swing again.
We may be coming unstuck.
The evidence is not yet in A.I., or in any single, epochal project equivalent to the Golden Gate Bridge, much less in an invention to revolutionize the built world on the level of the internal combustion engine. It is in myriad steps and indicators, like the recent trimming of environmental regulations that have, for years, stalled housing growth in California. Or in the rollback of single-family zoning laws in various cities and states, red and blue, from California to Montana to Maine.
It is in projects that can sound measly — that may themselves seem like proof we can’t do big things if this is the best we can celebrate — but that include novel new subsidized housing developments and flood-protection measures for cities and neighborhoods. Abundance doesn’t only have to look like high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Sometimes it can look like the redesign of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a better, safer, more dignified and efficient Penn Station. It can be an incremental accumulation that reframes expectations and reboots systems.
Proof of concept is critical to any new pendulum swing. Americans need to see progress to trust it is possible. Planning and building millions more affordable homes would take time, initially reinforcing a negative feedback loop. The Brooklyn Bridge cost three times more than its original budget and took three times longer to complete than its genius builders had estimated. Its construction was plagued by scandal and death.
New Yorkers considered the project a boondoggle while it was being constructed — then the bridge was completed in 1883. Overnight, it became the shining emblem of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, artistry and promise. The celebration of its opening was said to surpass even the ticker tape parade that New York staged in 1969 for the first astronauts to land on the moon, according to a woman who lived across that exceptional century to see both events.
The bridge took 14 years to build and cost $15 million, the equivalent of $481 million today. Now, 14 years and $481 million to complete the Brooklyn Bridge would be considered not a scandal but a miracle.
When the pendulum swung back during the 1970s, Americans didn’t realize it at first. The country was still riven by violence, its cities in free-fall and flames. It was the end of a century of spectacular growth. It took many years to manifest tangible change.
But, looking back, this was the dawn of the environmental movement, a turning point, which would help clean the country’s air and waterways and bring material benefits that were the ripple effects of that unparalleled century of growth.
Those benefits have now diminished. Pessimism is rampant. We are at another precipice.
Are we prepared to leap?
Video illustration by Nico Krijno. Videos by Erin Schaff/The New York Times, Prelinger Archives, via Getty Images, Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times, Loren Elliott/The New York Times.
Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic.
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