What Can We Afford (A Tour Across American Inequality & A Search For The Road Ahead)

A reported road trip across the American economic landscape, documenting the ties between workers’ financial struggles, big business, and broken markets, from The New York Times economics reporter Talmon Joseph Smith.

Can America actually afford all that its people and workers deserve? The pro-democracy coalition in the United States has mostly unified around social progressivism, but a trickier question, for both everyday workers and elites, is whether to commit the country to economic progressivism.

In the wake of the pandemic, there were heady hopes of societal and economic renewal but they retrenched as inflation surged. And in spite of labor productivity and corporate profitability reaching all-time highs, scores of workers with full-time jobs are asking themselves how it’s possible they could still feel so financially precarious. Doubts have crept in. Can we truly afford public healthcare, plentiful housing, decent retirements, and living wages for everyone?

Corporate lobbies often speak about unavoidable tradeoffs, like principals telling us to pick between lunch or recess. The pivotal issue is finding out how many presumed tradeoffs are true. Is the US public debt, for instance, solely a burden or an instrument of future savings? Is doing what’s best for workers bad for business, or could it actually boost commercial growth?

Branching out from his backroom meetings on Wall Street and in Washington, Talmon Joseph Smith spent the past several years driving across the country connecting the dots and getting know the people in dozens of towns and cities fighting to make a living: in the Carolinas in the wake of Hurricane Helene, in Memphis after decades of white flight, in West Texas amidst oil booms and immigration battles, in Colorado and Minneapolis through experiments in affordable housing and wage floors, and back home in New Orleans twenty years after Katrina. Throughout this draft of our recent economic history, Smith offers the same earnest questions to everyone he meets—nurses, bankers, small business owners, oil men, policy wonks, pastors, and trillion-dollar money managers: what are the actual barriers to us achieving a more broadly prosperous society? And which barriers have we overstated, or maybe even entirely imagined? There are some truths, he writes, that we can no longer afford to ignore.