American Affairs Journal

The United States has the unfortunate distinction of having some of the highest transportation infrastructure costs in the world. Urban rail costs in the United States are 50 percent higher than in Germany, double the costs of Norway, and nearly triple the costs of Sweden. Phase One of New York’s Second Avenue Subway was built at the eye-watering cost of $2.5 billion per mile, eight to twelve times the cost of similar projects in European countries. Phase Two is budgeted even higher, at $4 billion per mile. The exorbitant costs of rail construction in the United States mean that many such projects never get off the drawing board. In cities such as Austin, Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia, enormous projected costs have resulted in rail projects being canceled or scaled back significantly. And it’s not only rail infrastructure. Road tunnels, highway bridges, and roadways are all more expensive to build in the United States than in major European countries…

The mass offshoring of a high-innovation sector in which the United States has been a global leader for decades has been happening with the knowledge and approval of pharmaceutical executives looking to make short-term profits. Naturally, it would have disastrous consequences for the United States. Beyond the national security concerns associated with losing biotech to a peer strategic adversary, biotech has become a valuable industry that provides patients with lifesaving drugs, scientists and lab technicians with high-quality jobs, and formerly deindustrialized cities with hubs of innovation. The loss of biotech to China is imminent, and it is essential for national leaders and policymakers to stem the flow with an industrial policy for biotech…

When containerization arrived in force through the 1960s and 1970s, Manhattan’s waterfront lost. Its piers became obsolete. The neighborhoods built around dock work hollowed out over a generation. The container didn’t reward proximity to the city or historical primacy or labor skill. We are at an equivalent moment right now, and almost nobody is looking at the land. If overland freight cost approaches zero as a result of autonomous trucking, the premium for proximity to intermodal terminals weakens and manufacturing location math changes. The same bet available to buyers of land in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1958 is available today. Taking it requires one to see what the old infrastructure is about to stop rewarding, and what the new constraint is about to start requiring…

There is a temptation to categorize Texas and California under the two states’ traditional labels: Texas, the land of property rights; California, the land of regulation. But the truth is nearly the reverse. Texas does not actually hold that all property is sacred in the way property is commonly considered. It holds that the productive, extractive use of property outranks the passive holding of it. In California, a neighbor’s right to be heard can stop you from building on your own land; in Texas, a stranger’s right to use it can take it from you. As our legal academy is fond of pointing out, property is a bundle of rights, with none more impactful than possession and development. California has made the first sacred, Texas the second. But how did these two states develop such opposing systems of property rights? To answer that question requires winding back to the moment that both decided that they had had enough of that great American bogeyman, the railroad…

Americans have been voting with their feet and leaving California for Texas. There are many reasons for these moves, but foremost is that Texas has a lower cost of living, and by far the most important aspect of cost of living is housing. The obvious reason that California homes are more expensive is that the state makes it harder to build. But the question of why it is so much harder to build in California is not as obvious as some may think. In both Texas and California, land-use regulations are mainly local, and the states’ basic zoning-enabling laws for local government are similar…

The American housing debate still appears deceptively familiar: build more homes, loosen zoning restrictions, accelerate permitting, reduce construction costs, and help households qualify for mortgages. These goals remain important, especially in states where housing supply has failed to keep up with population and income growth. But they no longer fully capture what housing affordability now entails. A home must not only be permitted, built, purchased, and financed. It must also be insured. That requirement is becoming harder to satisfy…

Our debt-heavy architecture is not a thought-out tenet of academic finance. Instead, it is substantially a function of practical circumstance: the deductibility of interest payments on corporate debt from pretax profits. That simple reality makes debt financing generally cheaper than raising equity. And while there are other reasons why businesses might want to use debt, especially the investment leverage that it provides to equity owners, the tax shield and the resulting lower “cost” of debt often tip the finance scales in favor of borrowing versus putting in one’s own capital. This bias was not part of the plan. Because there was no plan. Debt’s allure emerged not from careful deliberation about an optimal corporate capital structure at the University of Chicago, but from the exigencies of financing World War I. What began as a hastily adopted wartime measure has hardened through time to become a deeply rooted expectation. A century later, we inhabit a financial world substantially shaped by this distinction between cheaper debt and dearer equity. It is a distinction that might have had some justification at the time but now leads to corporate decisions that otherwise might not make business sense…

The United States is rich in resources and poor in foresight. When Covid-19 arrived, the Strategic National Stockpile lacked a sufficient supply of N95 masks to equip the country’s critical workers through even a mild pandemic, let alone the reusable, pandemic-proof equipment that a more severe outbreak would demand. The available evidence suggests we are no better prepared today. This neglect exacerbates one of our greatest security vulnerabilities, as technology is only making it easier to engineer pandemics. But the same preparedness deficit recurs wherever critical goods are expensive to hold, seldom needed, and catastrophic to lack. The causes may seem obvious: markets underprovide public goods, and the state fails to fill the gap because policymakers are discouraged from investing in preparedness for events that probably won’t happen while they’re in office. Yet this clean story cannot explain why there are no private stockpiles contracted to supply private buyers…

The actual effects of AI on the labor market still seem shrouded in deep uncertainty. When it comes to predictions on near-term impacts, we can see two camps emerge. A deep bench of established and renowned labor economists continues to expect “small” effect sizes, at least by the standards of the drastic predictions common in San Francisco. They predict local disruptions, yes, but expect they’ll be offset by broad-based productivity gains and job growth in other fields. Yet in much of Silicon Valley, a different view prevails. The creators of the technology, most prominently Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, predict widespread displacement and high unemployment. If there is absorption of the displaced, it will be into worse jobs that might not even be around for long. On that view, AI is markedly abnormal: while past technologies have complemented distinctly human contributions, such as intelligence or creativity, AI is sufficiently broad and general that we should expect it to exceed and supplant these human contributions to the economy, leaving human workers largely obsolete…

In 1991, Michael McFaul felt that he was on the edge of utopia. Russia was free of communism, and America was free to usher in a new era of liberal internationalist hegemony. The arc of history had never bent so far toward justice. Over thirty years later, those dreams have crashed back to Earth. And in Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, McFaul seeks to put together how it all went wrong. His answer is unsurprising: an international movement of conservatives, led by Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sought to destroy democracy. With President Donald Trump’s election victories, they have nearly succeeded. Hope lies in a vigorous counterattack from the liberal internationalists. It would be very easy for conservatives and nationalists to dismiss his book as a musty last gasp of the post–Cold War liberal elite. His work might well be the literary equivalent of a Japanese soldier still fighting in 1975. But it should not be ignored…

Theories of technological domination are compelling not only because of their critical force but also because of their consolatory effect. They lend a certain heroism and grandeur to the idiocy and messiness of social decline. It is more honorable to imagine oneself as the victim of total surveillance and control than to admit that the disintegration of the social fabric and the deterioration of public discourse may arise from our own capacity for self-ruin. There is, in other words, something flattering about being oppressed. The fantasy of oppression spares us from confronting the fact that, compared to the history of democratic revolutions and liberation movements, our current predicament is a little embarrassing. The challenge of social criticism in the age of Big Tech may be to resist the allure of oppression narratives and develop ways of thinking through the strange banality of digital damage…

What is the relationship between the rise and fall of U.S. global power and the ebb and flow of radical Islamic terrorism? Our generic notion of Islam is a product of nineteenth-century pan-Islamic thinkers more than it is of Orientalists. We could add that it is suited to a modern world in which abstract conceptions of collective agency reflect a global capitalist economy which is itself rooted in highly abstracted categories of capital and labor. It is as a result of modernity that Islam shifted from merely describing Muslims’ religious practices to coming to be seen as “an abstract and supposedly self-propelling structure, like capitalism.” While Islam may contain multitudes, it is also a quintessentially globalist idea, and its historic radicalization into Islamism and jihadism flows from the failure of globalism to transcend the profane politics of the nation-state. As we shall see, the very material conditions that allowed for Islam to emerge as a horizon for global humanity could only last as long as the lopsided international distribution of power that sustained U.S. hegemony…

In October of 2026, Albertans will head to the polls for another referendum on a bundle of proposals that angle toward greater Albertan control over education, health care, the courts, and more power and leverage against the federal government. Five of ten questions relate to immigration restrictions, namely limiting access to public services and voting for noncitizens. But the referendum’s biggest bombshell is a question that reads: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?” In other words, Albertans are, for the first time in their history, being tested on whether they wish to secede entirely from Canada. And the question bites hard into a country already on edge about its sovereignty…