(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 581: In Good Faith

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re joined by Ryan Avent to discuss his new book In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. We discuss human evolution and the impact of collective knowledge and culture and the need to create a new story about the future of society. We also discuss grass is greener thinking on infrastructure, the nature of belief without the need for evidence, and the fact that there is no perfect past.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

You can find all episodes in our archive including the Mondays Show

Below is a full unedited AI generated and cleaned transcript of the show:

But I’ve continued to write and have a new book out called In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies, which we get to talk about today. Uh, it’s second book. My last one was sort of about robots taking the jobs. It was 10 years ago. It was a little before its time. I kinda wish that one was coming out now.

But, um, yeah, I’m, uh, very interested in urban topics and economics and what makes societies grow and good and enjoy progress. And yeah, very happy to be here to talk with you.

But yeah, that one really sort of found its audience.

You know, have found maps fascinating, and I grew up in a sort of a small southern suburban town, and whenever we went to, like, a proper city that was big and had this impressive infrastructure and tall buildings, I was just sort of amazed to see it and kind of wondered how it all worked. But I guess my interest sort of became deeper when I went to grad school, and I started studying trade economics, which, you know, is a field in which geography really matters, and you start thinking about the relations of different places to each other.

And then I wrote a master’s thesis on the history of the area where I grew up, which is the Research Triangle in North Carolina, which when I was born there, had under a half a million people and now is close to three million. Just an incredible growth story. And the work that I did for that, that really got me interested in the question of, you know, why aren’t cities necessarily behaving the way we want them to?

Why aren’t the cities that are most economically successful growing? You know, why are housing prices shooting through the roof? And, uh, so I, I wrote for DCist for a little while in Washington, covering urban issues, and I had my own blog at Bellows, where I wrote a lot about cities and growth, and, and that turned into The Gated City, and it’s just still very much an area of interest.

Uh, I think it’s just fascinating. It tells us all sorts of things about how human societies work, really, when you start pulling apart the workings of a city.

You know, we got into the pandemic, and I sort of hit the prime age for a midlife crisis and was, um, feeling down about a lot of things and kind of wondering how the world– we’d ever get to a, a better place. And sort of working through that was part of developing the ideas, uh, at the heart of the book and getting to the conclusion that I got to, which is that we can be optimistic about the future if we sort of come to a better understanding of how progress has worked in the past and what we need to do to try to realize that going forward.

That we’re not this crazy departure from everything that’s come before, that, you know, what makes us special has grown out of these physical processes that have happened before. And the way they’ve unfolded allows us to understand how we might achieve significant progress in the future by discovering new ways of processing information and understanding what’s around us.

I also think, like, you really get a better sense of what society is doing if you understand it in this evolutionary way, that there are sort of echoes of sort of the development of the physical universe in biological evolution and in subsequent cultural evolution. And if you sort of follow those threads, it tells you a little bit more about, I think, in my view, the, the sort of underlying mechanics of, of society, which is that, you know, as much as we think we’re in control here, and certainly as individuals, we have control over our own actions.

But as much as we think we’re in control over society, there’s this underlying evolutionary process at work that we should recognize, and that to some extent we are at the mercy of. And then I guess also, I just felt like I wanted readers to be kind of struck with, with grandeur a little bit. You know, like we’re– You know, the book really tries to be incredibly optimistic and hopeful about the future, and I, I think part of what I was trying to do by tying it all together with our l- very, very long run human history is just, hey, let’s, let’s realize what we’re a part of here and not let this, you know, go off the rails.

That was like, that was a really important part of it, because this slow process is building upon itself and all of the, you know, cell creation and whatever was happening to apes led to civilization as it is now. And that process was really interesting ’cause usually we think about civilization as like a point that we started building cities, and then we went from there.

But actually it goes back even further to this idea of care and caring. And so I, I found that really fascinating as well.

And we do this all the time. We do it with agriculture and the first cities and states and with the Industrial Revolution. And, uh, yeah, I think it’s important to realize that… Well, I guess a couple things. One, that these big moments come together slowly out of a lot of accumulating changes in the past, and we can only understand them in that way, right?

There’s no, uh, as much as it might seem like there are specific individuals or societies or civilizations that figure something out that no one ever figured out before, the change is generally evolutionary. But I think the other side of that is that- You know, there is this process of cultural adaptation that’s going on throughout our whole history, right?

And we have to learn to develop the ideas and the stories that allow us to kind of, you know, exploit particular niches, right? So, you know, agriculture, when we first became dependent on it, it was awful, right? It was, like, way worse than hunting and gathering. People did back-breaking labor all the time and were, were malnourished and, and it sucked.

And for this to be sustainable, there had to be the emergence of ideas and ways of understanding our place in the world that made sense to people, and that somehow made it okay for them to keep doing this, this really arduous work. And I think the, you know, same thing is true of early settlements. Like, we weren’t born ready to inhabit an urban environment as a species.

We had to, you know, come up with the modes of thinking that allowed that to work. And so, you know, you have this process of trial and error where early settlements don’t last very long. They kind of flash in and out of existence. And it’s only over time that we come to figure out how to be urban by coming up with the ideas and the sort of cultural touchstones that allow us to adapt to that existence.

And the book sort of follows this line of thought Throughout our history and sort of that, that’s kind of how we should think about how we got to modern economic growth. And, and I think if we wanna enjoy future prosperity that’s greater than what we enjoy now, we might have to do some similar sort of adapting in terms of our ideas about what we’re doing here.

I’m wondering if you could kind of explain that a little bit in more detail, ’cause I find that’s, like, a really important part, especially until we get to the point where, you know, Christianity and religion kind of creates this larger cultural experience throughout Europe and, you know, the Mediterranean.

But I think actually, if you kind of look back at our history, the thing that’s really allowed us to become such technologically capable animals is this capacity to support culture. And you know what that is, is, as you say, right, we’ve got a genetic inheritance. We have– There’s a lot of information that’s useful to us that gets passed to us through our genes, and that’s driven our long-run biological evolution.

But the thing that really sort of marked us off as different as we split off from our ape ancestors and headed down our own path was this emerging capacity to use, uh, a collective knowledge and collective information processing, uh, in the form of culture. And culture, in a nutshell, uh, is a, a body of information that is passed down over time socially rather than genetically, and that just sort of lives in the heads of all the people who are helping this process along.

And it, you know, it includes instructions for all sorts of things. You know, th- I think when humans occupy an ecosystem, the thing that allows us to adapt and really exploit that ecosystem effectively is not, as with many animals, these biological tricks. It’s these cultural tricks that allow us to figure out how to, you know, when to hunt and gather and what things to take out of the ecosystem and how to prepare them and how to survive the hardships associated with that ecosystem.

But cultural knowledge also in- includes other things beyond sort of these kind of, you know, practical moment-to-moment things. And it’s what’s really allowed us to scale up and become the amazing creatures that we are, is the way that our social technologies evolve over time. And we’ve found ways to operate, to cooperate, I guess, in larger numbers to better purposes.

We’ve found ways to generate and preserve knowledge at enormous scale, and I think that’s kind of the fascinating part of our history, and it’s not something that individuals that’s authored sort of using their own brains is something that kind of we stumbled on and that’s led us here, and, and now we’ve sort of forgotten that that was kind of our special trick, even though it’s still holding our societies together today.

Um, but the specific, like, way that that cultural kind of exchange permeated, like, the whole region, and that was kind of mind-blowing for me as somebody who is not religious in a, in any way necessarily. But just thinking about cultural exchange and things like that, it makes a ton of sense that that would be something that organized people in a way that they could create these, you know, advanced economies and industrialization and those types of things because they had a shared kind of understanding, like you said i- in the book.

I mean, shared understanding of what’s going on.

It’s hard to see how that could be, you know, adaptive, but what it allows us to do is sort of preserve a lot of knowledge, even though we haven’t ourselves gone and, and done the work to figure out what that knowledge is. And so that drove our evolution as cultural creatures forward, and it’s, it’s really, I think, the foundation of, of everything that came later.

And there are important milestones at which faith has done important work. And I think as we move from these small clan-based hunter-gatherer societies to larger tribes, it was the emergence of religion which really helped us do that, allowed more people to come together to cooperate and share knowledge about the world.

And so it’s a critical part of human evolution. And I think when we start to consider the really big questions of, you know, how did certain parts of the world end up on this journey that led to rapid technological progress, to, uh, our ability to escape hunger and life at the edge of s-subsistence and end up in this crazy place we are now, just totally different.

It’s been totally different over the past hundred and fifty years or so from everything that came before. I think to find the roots of that, you have to look at a shift in our underlying understanding of how we should treat each other. And in the book, I argue that, you know, Christianity basically accomplished this in, in Christendom.

It didn’t sort of, again, appear out of nowhere. It, it emerged over centuries or more really, and, and incorporated lots of different ideas from lots of different philosophical traditions, religious traditions. But where it led us to this place where, you know, we can set aside our old entanglements, our old kin relationships, and really just work together as individuals to create this better future where we’re all equal.

It’s really kind of a radical message when you think about it. And as that set of ideas rolled around Christendom over the course of two millennia, uh, I think it led us to a place where we had a much more culturally flexible society. We could support lots of different universities and guilds and places that develop knowledge in different ways, and ultimately, that unlocked our ability to turn knowledge into economic growth and greater prosperity for more people.

It doesn’t mean that Christianity was the only way to get there. It doesn’t mean that the world has to stay Christian in the sort of sense that I think people think about it now to stay rich. But I think we have to sort of grapple with that as a key component of what led to where we are now.

It’s the thing that, that really holds all our institutions together, and I don’t think we all recognize how much faith does that as we go about our daily lives, that we sort of count on people doing what they’re supposed to do, and that’s kind of what prevents everything from falling apart. But there’s also a capital F Faith, which is this shared understanding of the world, this shared story that kind of helps us understand what our place is in the universe and why we should behave in a certain way and what good things happen when we do that.

And a capital F Faith can be small. You know, it can be something like, uh, you know, the professionalism of the medical profession, right? That we’re gonna abide by these rules, this is the right thing to do, and it leads to these good outcomes. But it also can be these big civilization-defining ideas. And so I think when we think about the big questions we confront today, whether that’s sort of what’s the fate of democracy going to be, or how should we think about technological change, or, you know, what should we really be doing with all the material prosperity we’ve achieved for ourselves?

We’re going to need a good story that allows us to cooperate to achieve good ends, and I think we don’t recognize that that’s a gap that needs filling.

Like, what sh- what should our outcome be? And also, you know, you mentioned the modern faith, which is typically capitalism, uh, the way that it’s structured, uh, society as it is now. But if that’s not quite where we’re supposed to be, how do we decide, you know, what is good moving forward?

And, um, it’s not one I tried to answer in the book- Right … even though we, we, like, definitely need to answer it. The book argues that society is as faith-based now as it’s ever been. And it specifically points to kind of this place we ended up in the 20th century where, you know, we sort of believed deeply that if places had free markets and capitalism and democracy, you know, that was the winning recipe, and those systems were doing the work for us, and then all we had to do was sit back and be, like, consumers who cared about making more money and spending it on things we want.

And that faith grew out of Enlightenment thinking, rationalism. It grew out of economics and other threads of thinking, but it led us to a, I think, a really unhelpful place where we had sort of all given our… we have sort of all given ourselves permission to not feel a sense of personal responsibility for the upkeep of society, that there’s no obligation that we have to keeping the machinery working.

And so I think we need to recognize that there’s a void there that needs to be filled. I think we need to recognize that cooperation a- across society and which is absolutely necessary to sustain the levels of income we enjoy, the levels of prosperity and, and wellbeing that we enjoy, is gonna falter if we don’t come up with a, a satisfactory story.

I don’t know what that’s gonna be. You know, you have a lot of people who will argue that we need to recenter Christianity in American life. I don’t think that’s, I don’t think that’s right. You know, my sense as a, you know, having grown up in the church but sort of not being a practicing person right now, is that there ought to be some way of feeling awe at the universe and our place within it, and, you know, recognizing that the capabilities we develop for ourselves as a species allow us to understand the universe better and get to an ever better place in terms of what we can do technologically and how we can take care of each other.

Uh, but I don’t know if that’s gonna be good enough for everyone or if there needs to be a story that provides more sort of, uh, more of a fun narrative, uh- … and that maybe holds out the, the possibility of sort of transcendence in a way that people who are used to worshiping in the church understand it.

So I don’t, I don’t know. Like, I guess one thing I hoped with this book is that people would start to- Have a conversation about what that needs to look like, and we might find ourselves in that way working toward some better understanding. I, I guess to give an example of what I talk about in terms of alternative stories, you have people in Silicon Valley who very nearly worship technology for its own sake, and AI has really amplified this, and they almost have this sort of messianic fervor that they’re engaged in, in trying to create this new world where, you know, who knows what we can do, uh, overcome death and settle the galaxy and whatnot.

Um, and like, in some ways that’s attractive. Like, I like the idea that technology can help us get to better places. But I, I feel like the story really needs to center human welfare, human wellbeing, humankind itself, like the things that make us essentially human, the arts and the things we’re able to produce for each other.

You need a story that’s gonna be appealing to people, and AI will allow us to settle Neptune is not necessarily that. Well, things like- Even if that would be cool, I guess. I don’t know.

messing it up. Yeah, it’s-

And I feel like that’s kind of the decision that people are making. And for me, I’m in the same boat as you, and I, I feel like, anyways, after the reading the book, in that I feel like we need to move more along the lines of we need to be good for each other and then every life has worth and, um, there’s something better out there.

But I, I struggle with it a little bit because, um… So for example, my old friends from high school and I went on a trip this weekend. We do this every couple years. But one thing that we talked about was like, how do we teach our kids without religion to be good and what does that mean in society, right?

So like, what does it mean if you don’t have a church to go to to be a moral member of a larger group? And I think some of us struggle with like what that means. And so like if you have the stories or ways that you can accomplish that, like how does that help us get to a better place in society? And because the cultural discussions that you’re talking about in the book are like the cultural lessons people s- share with each other, but also their children, and so I feel like that’s a part of it too is like what can we teach the next generation such that they can build the society in a better way than we did?

And I think that that idea, that value has been present in many institutions in our society, you know, some very explicitly Christian, some not, for y- you know, the past 2,000 years. And I think the thing that’s really gotten us in trouble in a lot of ways is the permission we’ve given ourselves to relax that and to not feel that obligation because it’s a lot easier not to.

And it’s much more, you know, it’s much more enjoyable to sit at home and binge watch something or, you know, just do what’s comfortable than it is to go out and do the hard work of constructing society. You know, it’s an act of faith to go out there and do that and it, it means you… It’s something you do if you value others strongly.

And so I think where we need to get to is a story that, that really, you know, brings home the importance of that, of doing that work for others because others matter, um, you know, those alive now and those in the future. My experience with my kids is that this makes sense, right? It’s pretty intuitive. It doesn’t have to go along with some broader narrative about everything.

But the reality is that for a lot of people, that’s the, the thing they want. They want the story that allows things to make sense, and that’s where I sort of throw my hands up a little bit in the book because I, I don’t have that story. Um, and, uh, you know, whatever story we come up with, I wanna make sure that it’s inclusive and it doesn’t end up telling a lot of people that, “Hey, you’re wrong about this.”

I feel like it’s something that we could naturally or… come to, but yeah, I don’t know.

Oh,

Another interesting thing you mentioned as well is, like, there’s never a perfect past. It’s only where we are right now and what the future could be. Because the past is all colored by the experiences and, and the times that people lived in, ’cause you can’t put yourself back in agrarian society and imagine any way that people would be feeling or discussing the way that they interacted with other people, et cetera.

But you can understand where you are at now, and you can imagine what could be in the future.

And I think that when you sort of look at the roots of human progress- Developing those moral abilities is a, you know, key reason that we got here, and we should see ourselves as not at the endpoint, right? There are better ways of being and ways of thinking about what we’re doing here and how we should treat each other that I think will unlock both new productive possibilities, you know, new ways of turning the resources around us into good stuff, but also a lot greater love and respect for each other and…

Like, this is, I think, is really the big motivation I have here is it’s so frustrating to be in a place where, you know, the world has never been richer, our technological prowess has never been greater, and we have every reason to think that there are more big ideas out there waiting to be discovered.

But we’re just failing utterly to turn that into a more just world where everyone can feel like they are participating fully in society, are able to develop their potential and all those things. And, and, like, the only way we’re gonna get there is if we see it as our responsibility to do the work to make that happen.

It’s a calling that sort of applies at every level, you know, whether you’re sort of trying to improve your kid’s public school or trying to improve your city and, and come together to maybe pay a little more in tax so that you can have better infrastructure, that kind of thing. Or whether you’re trying to hold together American democracy or ensure that this incredibly powerful new technology and AI is made to serve us and create the things that we want to see in the world and that we don’t just for, you know, the sake of comfort allow it to take over our lives.

I’m thinking of, um, we had Daniel Wortel-London on the podcast and talk about his book, The Menace of Prosperity. I don’t know if you’ve read that one. It’s super interesting, but it, it’s basically the economic development of New York from, like, 1870 to the present. And the arguments that happened where, you know, you go from two different ways of thinking, a Georgist way, and then the way that we went now with capitalism and, and the way that, you know, we tax properties and things like that, to now, which is stacked and stacked and stacked upon itself so that we’re a kind of a sclerotic mess, and we can’t make change because of all the additive things that we’ve done since that time period.

And so it feels good sometimes to just say, “Knock it all down and start over again.” But is that actually the right way to go? Or is it just you veer a little bit off to a different direction to get to a point where we wanna be? I mean, I don’t, I don’t think you have an answer to this, but I think it’s, like, an interesting question about, you know, if we know these histories of, like, things went a certain way and got to a point where they didn’t work, and so we start over again.

Could that happen again? I mean, I think that’s an interesting question to ask everybody is, like, what does that look like if we did rethink economic development from the ground up rather than starting at the top of the tower?

You know, I think there are cases when everything gets blown up or where the failure to really pursue incremental change means that things fall apart. History’s sort of full of examples like that. Um, but you know, also, I think if we look at the modern era- We also see that incremental change makes a very big deal, right?

Like, we could say that it would be nicer if our economic path had been a little bit different, if it had taken us someplace that wasn’t, you know, quite as rooted in the capitalism that we have now. But it, it’s nonetheless been the case that the sort of persistent work by reformers over 200 years has made the world much better.

You know, it’s made cities livable. It’s made it so that workers have basic rights, that we don’t have the dire poverty we saw at the beginning of the 20th century. So I, you know, I think we should have faith in the power of incremental change. I don’t know if that will be enough now, but I do know that blowing everything up will be incredibly costly to those of us who are alive now and, and our children, ’cause it’s, it can’t be rebuilt back overnight.

And so that’s a scary prospect, and I think we ought to do our best to, to avert lots of human suffering.

And if you start taking big swings at that machinery, our ability to cooperate in large numbers, you know, just, just falls apart, and it’s gonna lead to a lot of dead people. Um- Mm-hmm … and, and we don’t want that. So I, I wish I had a more complete understanding of what’s possible so that I could give us more guidance on kind of what the right way forward is.

Uh, but I definitely think that as a society, we’ve sort of lost hope that the work to improve things will pay off or could ever pay off, and that’s a deeply unhelpful and counterproductive way of being, and we would be in a much better place if we had faith that that effort could work.

I’m thinking specifically about, like, China and the building of 48,000 miles of high-speed rail. Um, and you know, technological advancements. Obviously, there’s a different governmental system. There’s all kinds of other things that go along with that. But, you know, here in California, I’m frustrated that we can’t build high-speed rail in a reasonable amount of time.

I back it. I think it’s important. But also, I know that, you know, by the time I ride it, the people that I would have gone and visited in Bakersfield might not live there anymore. So to go to China with my wife and be able to ride from Beijing to Datong and to Taiyuan in one and a half hours, two hours’ time, when it used to take eight on a sleeper train, that’s intoxicating to someone like me, who’s an urbanist at heart and believes that infrastructure could be part of the way that we kind of redefine ourselves.

My view in the book is that, and this may sound trite, but what we need really is a better understanding of why it’s good to accept personal sacrifices for the greater good. That’s something that we’ve been able to do in the past. It’s something we could do now. We could say, “You know what? It’s unethical for you to file a million lawsuits because you don’t want this thing that’s gonna dramatically improve people’s lives along these dimensions to be built.

That’s just wrong.” And, you know, I think we could get to a place where we felt pride in the capacity of our built landscape to change in dramatic ways over time. That’s not gonna be the only thing that will make this work. There has to be a lot of practical change that goes alongside all that, but I also think that if we do the governmental reforms that we talk about to try to make this stuff work better, there will still be roadblocks thrown up if we don’t change the fundamental underlying sense that it is right to do things for the greater good and to make sacrifices along the way.

When we think about the abundance movement in general, and if we think about issues with climate, in a lot of ways, that’s what’s missing, is this underlying story that makes it something more than just a wonky project that’s built on cost-benefit analysis or whatever. That actually, this is about telling a story about the better futures that we can achieve if we all believe in them and make that possible.

And I would like people to think more in those terms as they pursue these projects that we could actually get done.

One thing you don’t talk about i- in the book, and I was interested about, is kind of the Middle Ages, the period between the origins of Christianity and the Enlightenment. Because there were, like, dark… It’s called the Dark Ages for a reason, right? Like, there was a story that was collected over many years and embellished and, uh, you know, there’s stuff that, in there that obviously I think is ridiculous and you think is ridiculous, but they made it happen, and they got a lot of people to believe in it.

And actually, recently, I talked about this on the show before, too, but I was, like, listening to David Roberts at Volts, and he had a guest on, and I can’t remember his name, but they were talking about, like, misinformation and the way to combat it. And I find that fascinating from the standpoint of the way that they said was, like, cultural proof and the ability of people to share stories and share information with each other.

The rise of certain urban bloggers, the War on Cars podcast, the City Nerds of the world, and how, you know, they’re pulling people along. You might not agree with what they’re saying necessarily, but they’re actually providing that cultural proof that allows people to think differently about their cities, to think that there’s something better than just car culture.

Creating that narrative and creating that story that can move forward because you’re not gonna change the mind of a person who believes in flat Earth. You know, you can’t give them any type of information that would change their mind. But what you can do is get people on the edges to be part of a project with you, be part of a movement with you.

And I think that that’s a very powerful thing that comes up in your book as well, which is just, like, this cultural change, this cultural exchange can move us forward. But we kind of maybe lost a little bit of an understanding about how we do that. I think that the right does this fairly well. They, the stories they tell or there are things they repeat over and over again.

But I don’t know if people on the left are as good at telling that story of the things that do go right. I mean, we tend to, you know, punch ourselves more than we punch outwards. I mean, here in San Francisco, I’ve told this story recently, too, it’s like they do a pretty good job at paving roads and fixing them.

There’s not a lot of potholes in my neighborhood anymore because they’ve gone through systematically and repaved, and it’s pretty nice to ride your bike on a lot of the streets around here. But that’s not a story anybody’s telling. They should, but they’re not, and it’s frustrating, I think, in that way because we should be telling these stories of the good that comes from when a government works correctly.

And I think, you know, that’s not necessarily something that’s in the DNA of the left today because it’s so embraced sort of empiricism. And don’t get me wrong, like empiricism is great. Science is great. Like, these things are really important. But I think we’ve gotten to a place where we think everything is a technical problem and that, you know, we need to come up with the best analysis, and if we present this analysis compellingly enough Then our vision of the world will be ascendant, and I, I think that’s just not going to be enough, and it’s kind of deeply unproductive for us to have that view of the world.

It really, I think, sort of sells us short as people. Like, we are people with agency who care about meaning and aren’t just interested in cost-benefit analysis. Um- And there are wonderful stories to tell about urban life, about the good things that it does for people, about using technology to reduce the harm we do to the environment in various ways.

And, you know, I think people are telling compelling stories about some of this, but in ways that I, I sort of worry about, right? And I think you’ve– I sort of… The book talks a little bit about people making de-growth arguments and a large group of people who kind of regret- the human impact on the planet and kind of feel like maybe if we just hit pause and try to green everything and not grow from here, that’s really the solution.

And, uh, you know, that is an attractive vision to a lot of people. I, I think, I think that’s a dead end, and that we need to understand that the way forward is to achieve good things, but to do it by continuing to develop our knowledge and our capabilities. But the really compelling story about that hasn’t been told yet.

You know, I very much respect the guys that wrote Abundance. I don’t feel like it, you know, a future of flying cars and vertical farms, it has to be more than that. It has to be like, why? What’s the point? Why are we enjoying our life in that environment? Not just why do we have those things. And so yeah, ideally we develop our capacity to tell those stories more effectively and, and figure out what the big overarching theme is.

And what is that? Well, maybe it’s childcare, maybe it’s healthcare, maybe it’s affordable transportation, maybe it’s affordable housing. Maybe it’s like… And, and so when you go down the things that are in everybody’s budgets, right? Like what’s costing people money and why is it costing them money? And you could tell a good story about cities and urbanism and the way that we’ve organized our landscape around us, and I think that there’s a powerful story in there specifically.

That’s why, I mean, I do this podcast . But I think there’s something to be said about that specifically.

I think that we also need, alongside those sorts of visions and stories, a bigger picture take as well because I think that where we are now, we’re sort of past the point where growth is satisfying basic needs, right? Yeah. We’ve, we’re sort of evermore in this post-material world, even as much as we do worry about the cost of things, and we need a reason to cooperate in pursuit of stuff that’s gonna make our lives better, that isn’t just doing this will put more money in your pocket and then you can go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think those stories can be perfectly compatible and I guess I just wanna make sure everyone sees the need for both of them. And, uh, it can be frustrating trying to make this case to people uh, ’cause they’re like, “No, no, we need to just walk away at it.” Um, and God love the walks, but, um-

there’s, you know, there’s more to society

It’s certainly not… You know, the last book I wrote, The Wealth of Humans, was sort of like, “Hey, this is an idea, and here’s the research that supports it,” and so on. And this is, this ended up being something very different. As you noted before, kind of there’s a lot of personal stuff in there and me grappling with my, with my own place in the world.

Um-

But they were incredibly generous with me and trusted me to write it the way I wanted to write it and have it go out in the world this way. So I’m very grateful to them for that.

I wrote through for reading this book. We could talk about this for several hours, I’m sure, but I wanna be mindful of your time. Where can folks find a copy? Because they should go get one.

You may find it in a bookstore near you.