To paraphrase Keynes: When circumstances change, I change my focus.
I originally created this blog in 2016, with a focus on issues that had occupied me during most of my professional career– housing, urban planning, real estate, municipal finance, urban economics, and the environment.
It didn’t take long for my purpose to become somewhat out of step with the times. Donald Trump got elected President, and many of the assumptions which underlay my thinking came into question. That effect was most clear with environmental issues; discussing improvements to state or local sustainability efforts, for example, seemed dissonant in a political world where the U.S. government denied anthropogenic climate change and was actively trying to boost greenhouse gas emissions. Similar problems crept into other areas of my interest, say, public finance. Trump and Mitch McConnell’s efforts to undermine the fiscal stability of blue states and cities eclipsed some of the structural economic issues I had worked on previously. Then, of course, Covid came along, introducing massive uncertainty to policy analysis and overshadowing many of the technical issues that previously concerned me.
I continued to add posts through 2021, but the tone and content necessarily became more “macro” and political as the changing circumstances demanded.
Slowly at first, then rapidly after Trump’s re-election in 2024, I realized that the policy world I lived in for most of my career was gone. That was a world where Democrats and Republicans disagreed on specific policy goals and techniques but basically shared the same vision of a liberal democratic society and the rules that should govern it. It’s now more clear that 1950-2010 was a unique period of consensus regarding the shape of a modern society. With Trump and Elon Musk’s chainsaw approach to the federal budget, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice and other agencies, the elimination or evisceration of federal agencies like the Department of Education and the EPA, the co-mingling of the President’s personal finances with the country’s business, the undermining of our fundamental alliances and the entire Post WWII world order, and the rest of the radical Project 2025 agenda, it’s no longer just a matter of improving public policies. The very continuation of the United States as a liberal democracy is in question.
In coming months, I hope to resume posting about the issues that have always interested me. But I’ll also engage the larger political issues and conflicts that will shape American society in the coming decades. When circumstances change, you have to change your focus.