The Builder Issue

In the last few years, we have become awash in talk about how the West doesn’t build anymore.

Widely discussed “where’s my jetpack?” diagnoses and “time to build” manifestos have been offered by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, J. Storrs Hall, and Ezra Klein.

Economist Tyler Cowen and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison have proposed an entire new discipline called “progress studies,” and are now advisors to the Roots of Progress Institute.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has proposed a new bipartisan “abundance agenda.”

And entire new outfits have cropped up to explore this line of thought, from James Pethokoukis’s Faster, Please! Substack to Stripe’s Works in Progress magazine to the new nonprofit Institute for Progress.

The builders are right: we are stuck. But the risk for any new intellectual vogue is that it can easily devolve into vibes. American intellectual culture was reflexively pro-tech in the 2000s. Then it turned reflexively tech-skeptical in the 2010s. Are we just setting ourselves up for one more swing of the pendulum in the 2020s?

That’s why your friends at The New Atlantis are on the case. With this special issue, we’re offering a few targeted interventions in the Builder Discourse.