The numbers speak for themselves: the Energy Corridor covers some nearly 2,000 acres, 20 miles west of Houston’s central core. It is home to eight Fortune 500 companies, has 67,000 jobs, 27 million square feet of office space, and nearly 4 million square feet of retail and restaurant space. The residential population is 20,000 strong and growing, and should continue to thrive so long as fossil fuels continue to supply four-fifths of the world’s energy supplies. It and a host of new communities further west — many developing their own retail and residential centers — have accounted for nearly 86% of the region’s growth since the year 2000. 

Houston’s light touch regulation and openness to urban expansion accounts for much of the new development, according to Tim Cisneros, a local developer and architect. Over excellent steak at a local Uruguayan restaurant in the Energy Corridor’s City Centre dining-and-retail hub, Cisneros tells me his big opportunities are increasingly in the peripheries, in places like Sugar Land, Pearland, the Woodlands, and Cinco Ranch, all metropolitan Houston or adjacent communities created in the past few decades. “In places like this,” Cisneros says. “You get the urban experience even when you are not in the city.”

The conventional wisdom is that being big and dense is the key to success. As Neil Irwin wrote in The New York Times in 2018, the future would be one “where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities.” However America’s essential story has always been one of migration — first from New England to the Midwest in the early 19th century, then from the countryside to big cities, followed by mass migration to California after World War II. Today’s big shift is the movement of companies and people to business-friendly regions in the suburbs and exurbs.

Corporations are leaving the great urban cores of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles due to high energy prices, regulatory constraints and sky-high taxes. They are locating instead in less glamorous places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh. A ranking of American business climates by Site Selection gave top ratings to Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Florida, and Midwestern states like Ohio and Indiana. 

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Tomorrow’s cities are here

By Joel Kotkin

Houston has emerged as first in job creation among the nation’s largest metro areas, growing 50% faster than New York, twice as fast as Los Angeles, and over seven times faster than greater Chicago in the past year. Overall, mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations of between 1 million and 10 million, are adding jobs the fastest. 

It used to be that dense cities were considered to be inherently more productive. However, technology such as remote work, video conferencing, and instantaneous communication is enabling  worker dispersion, bearing out Frank Lloyd Wright’s prediction that in the future “the city should be everywhere and nowhere.” And a recent report from Brown University suggests that neither city size nor density strongly correlates with higher productivity. This merely reflects reality: today, the 50 fastest-growing counties, almost all in metropolitan peripheries, are gaining jobs at well more than two times the general rate.

In the once glittering downtowns, there has been a 90% decline in the prices of commercial real estate in some cases. This is not just a post-pandemic phenomenon. Office occupancy started to decline by the turn of the new millennium, and construction of new space also began to fall around that time. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of the year 2000.

This reflects an economy already dispersing at a rapid rate. Between 2010 and 2017, 91% of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside of central business districts. Remote work has proven a gift to some outlying areas, sparking growth even in parts of southern Appalachia. The 50 highest-growth counties, almost all of them in exurbia, experienced an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of other counties in 2019. These aren’t “bedroom communities”; they are spread out cities.   

Some urban cores, notably Manhattan, remain powerful in terms of media and culture, but no longer dominate the country’s economic life. The rise of AI may accelerate this process by downsizing many of the activities key to urban centers. 

Growth in the business-services industry has also trended toward smaller metro areas of 1 million to 5 million people, particularly over the most recent five year period. Booming business service-industry hubs include smaller metros such as Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Omaha, Orlando, and Portland, Maine. In contrast, San Francisco and San Jose are suffering the nation’s biggest employment declines, as well as stubbornly high vacancies for commercial real estate. 

Moving out of big urban areas used to mean a downgrade in earnings, but now, salaries across the 19-state American Heartland region, essentially the territory between the Appalachians and the Rockies, are above the national average.  The hinterland’s improving conditions are further buffeted by growth in jobs making material goods. Cities like Miami, Charlotte, and Knoxville — none of them historically associated with industry — have seen the most robust industrial growth, while the last generation’s industrial leaders — cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle — suffered a marked decline. Traditional manufacturing-oriented communities such as  Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, are also benefiting from re-shoring businesses and foreign investment.  

Increasingly, great urban centers play an essentially symbolic role, known for glamor and high-income residents. In New York, while the overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has also increased. The result is a bifurcated urbanity, more like that of a stratified Medieval city rather than an engine of upward mobility; for example the Bronx, just across the Harlem River from increasingly bourgeois Manhattan, remains the country’s poorest urban county. Even as poverty in suburbs has increased, the suburban poverty rate is only half of that found in big cities. 

These stark class divisions have helped progressives to gain elected office in blue cities like Seattle, Chicago, Washington, LA, and Portland, Oregon. These groups, notably the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, embrace policies that weaken law enforcement, allow for public camping, and seek an expansion of the welfare state by imposing higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals. Ultimately, such policies backfire as technology allows key executives to become more mobile.

The second shift lies with migration of people, particularly young families. America’s urban core counties lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants from 2020 to 2024, which was three times the rate of loss in the previous decade, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Growth has shifted to peripheral areas, largely to areas 20 miles or more from the central core.

This is a longtime trend. In 1950, nearly 24% of the US population lived in the core cities. Today, according to one MIT study, roughly 80% of the nation’s metropolitan population lives in suburbs or exurbs, while barely 8% live in the urban core and another 13% live in traditional transit-oriented suburbs. Since 2010, suburbs have accounted for about 90% of all US metropolitan growth.

In many ways, this represents a return to deep-seated patterns. Americans have long tended to favor single-family houses in lower-density neighborhoods. In the 2020 Census, 92% of the population lived in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4% of the population, mostly located in and around New York City.  

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How Patrick Bateman remade our cities

By Richard A. Greenwald

These trends seem likely to increase as the two key demographic groups, Millennials and immigrants, continue to move to suburbs, and increasingly the exurbs. In the past, many younger people headed for big cities like New York, as well as places like Seattle and Denver, but high  housing prices make settling in these places more difficult, particularly for families. Instead they are moving to affordable regions, such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Houston, where Millennial homeownership has surged. 

The key is that Millennials, born between 1981 and 1994, and now the largest portion of the population, are entering middle age. Lured by lower crime rates, single family homes, and better schools, educated Millennials now are migrating to suburbs or smaller cities. In contrast, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Seattle have lost some of their once magnetic appeal. The top 10 cities for Millennials include Austin, Dallas, Jacksonville, Tampa; Salt Lake City, and Henderson, Nevada.

Attitudinal swings associated with entering middle age are responsible for this shift, according to Robert Schottenstein, CEO of Columbus-based builder M/I Homes, Inc. “This is a flight to safety and security,” Schottenstein told me. “The Millennials are getting older and they are transitioning as they start families.” Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of Millennials preferred suburban living. One clear sign: high-growth exurban counties have added residents ages 25 to 34 by almost four times the national rate.  

Minorities and immigrants, who make up a large share of new buyers, favor not dense metros but sprawling areas such as South Florida, Houston, and Dallas-Ft. Worth, all of which now attract more immigrants than gateway cities like New York and Los Angeles. This reflects a preference for affordable single-family houses; something particularly marked among Latinos.  Roughly half of all Asians and Latinos live in single-family homes.  

Meanwhile it seems likely that migration patterns out of the dense, blue states will continue for the foreseeable future. In a poll taken in early 2026, roughly half of Massachusetts residents said they have considered leaving the state. Similarly, one-third of New York residents already plan to leave within the next five years, as do 4 in 10 Californians. Recently, more are moving not just to Texas and Florida, but even to “hillbilly states” like Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. By 2050, according to the most recent projections, Texas is on track to surpass California as the nation’s most populous state. 

Over time, birthrates will further propel these trends. Dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, Boston, and Chicago, have experienced the most rapid decline in birthrates. The next generation of high school graduates will be concentrated in places like Texas, Florida and the Carolinas, while huge drops are expected in California, New York, and Illinois.  

These trends suggest an America that will look more like the Energy Corridor than like a historic urban core. This prospect may not thrill urban sophisticates, but developers like architect Tim Cisneros are not about to miss an opportunity to meet the aspirations of America’s perpetually restive population. “You go there,” he says, “because that’s where the action is.”

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress this week, Xi Jinping will be nominated for a precedent-defying third term of office. But his grasp on power has not gone unchallenged. Days before the Congress began, a rare protest took place on Sitong bridge in Beijing, calling for the removal of “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping”. “We want to be citizens, not slaves,” read one banner.

The second issue is Common Prosperity. Resurrected in 2021, Common Prosperity is a political slogan and a theme that Xi has described as an essential part of socialism. It is designed to capture the government’s intention to improve the quality of life for China’s middle class and its aspirant members, including owners of small-businesses, migrant workers, and farmers. Its alleged goal is to lower those income and regional inequalities that have blighted China’s economic and social progress, and which might, if unaddressed, trigger social stress and unrest.

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China has given up on the West

By Bill Hayton

There is no question that China has a major problem with income inequality, which is not only high now, but has remained persistently high over time. Its Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality where 0 equates to perfect equality and 1 to total inequality — was about 0.54-0.55 in 2019, according to the China Family Panel Studies survey. This was far higher than in most developed economies. The top 20% of income earners receive about 46% of income, virtually unchanged over the last decade or so, while the bottom 40% get slightly more than 13%. Until now, Chinese citizens have been willing to accept that the CCP would continue to enhance living standards and prosperity for future generations, but if citizens begin to doubt this, the government will have to watch out.

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Is China about to turn on Russia?

By Nathan Levine

One of the most pressing tasks is to increase educational attainment and employment opportunities for China’s citizens, especially those who live in rural areas. Whereas in the past, China needed workers who were simply numerate, literate, and disciplined, it now needs workers who are educated to much higher levels and who can compete in an increasingly technological and digital work environment. But the trend is going the wrong way: in 2020, around 60% of Chinese workers in urban areas were employed in the informal sector where low skills and poor pay prevail, up from 40% about 20 years ago.

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China can't afford to invade Taiwan

By George Magnus

Globally, economic growth rates are declining, despite the unprecedented interventions from central banks and record federal debt from fiscal spending. Investors and governments nervously foresee a future of demographic shifts, unmet pension liabilities, increasing inequality, and the potential for another credit crunch. Again, this was all prior to Covid-19, which could be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Rightfully, much of our current economic attention is focused on the immediate and remedial regarding Covid — applying a tourniquet to the virus via social distancing and wound-packing the economy with stimulus packages. These efforts are vital, but they will ultimately only bring a diseased and dying economy back from the brink. There will be no sustained recovery without fundamental change.

There’s no shortage of suggested remedies. Jamie Dimon, the Business Roundtable, Marc Benioff, Ray Dalio and others have all recognised that something is seriously wrong with capitalism. At Davos earlier this year, Dimon, who is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, released a piece entitled ‘Unless We Change Capitalism, We Might Lose It Forever’ arguing that capitalism needs to make “meaningful changes, like rebuilding our education system and providing skills training, affordable health care policies, substantial infrastructure investment, and sensible immigration reform and climate policies”.

But for all the talk of reform, these Davos-friendly pronouncements tend to undergird existing power structures and serve a tired narrative: perpetual growth, primacy of free-market mechanisms, and ‘win-winism’ (i.e. having impact without sacrificing profit).

They skirt any real regulatory challenge to corporate dominance. They ignore industry’s often deliberate role in charting the wrong path. So, nebulous initiatives and one-off CSR exercises are not enough. We need more than a short dose of ‘thought leadership’ or PR-driven gestures to a supposedly wider set of stakeholders.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

With 40 years of neoliberal economic experimentation, and the shock of Covid-19, we know that simply betting on an improved version of our status quo will not work. Structural change is required to rebuild an economy that works for all, not simply benevolent CEOs acting on generous impulses.

Before the novel coronavirus began to threaten our lives and livelihoods, we were living in an economy that had overshot many traditional metrics of health. Corporate profits and the stock market were at all-time highs and companies spent the majority of the 2017 Trump tax cuts — a record-breaking, eye-popping total of over $806 billion in 2018 — on stock buybacks to inflate their stock prices even higher. An outsized portion of those corporate profits went to management — the US leads the world in CEO to worker compensation ratios (in 2008, the average CEO raked in 278 times what the average worker got).

Furthermore, despite being flush with profits, US corporations have simultaneously amassed more debt than ever. In March last year, The Economist argued that America’s corporate debt mountain could worsen a recession. As of mid 2019, large nonfinancial companies had accumulated $10 trillion dollars in corporate debt, a staggering 48% of GDP (for the 2008 recession, the equivalent figure was $6.6 trillion).

This borrowing binge has been encouraged by central bankers who kept interest rates artificially low and by certain economists who touted debt as a way to spur growth. But even some central bankers are worried. Janet Yellen, the previous Federal Reserve chair, recently expressed her concern that high corporate debt levels would burden an economic recovery.

Record high corporate profits, buybacks, and debt are symptomatic of a system that prioritises ever greater returns for shareholders and executives over the need for resilience.

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The things we do for growth

By Peter Franklin

Albert Bartlett, the late emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder put it this way: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Bartlett viewed the term “sustainable growth” as an oxymoron, recognising that compounding factors like interest and population growth inevitably led to uncontrollable risk.

Loading up on debt is not the only problem with this growth-at-all-costs mentality. There’s also the high levels of market concentration that have left bloated companies in dominant positions across a wide range of industries. Monopolies and oligopolies have used their market power to extract wealth from everyone else. Competition is crushed, workers underpaid, and consumers gouged (see: The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition) — thus generating even more profit and control.

The traditional checks on corporate power include unionisation, strong local supply chains, the opportunity for startups to compete and produce disruptive innovation, and effective enforcement of competition laws. But all of these countervailing forces have been weakened over the last 40 years. Neoliberal economic dogma has put shareholder returns and short-term market efficiency above all other considerations.

Covid-19 has exposed the fragility of this economic model, but it also gives as a chance to  ‘flatten the curve’ of market concentration.

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

Rather than governments opting for the bailouts and regulatory decisions that give large corporations yet more power, now is the time to envision new models for how markets can work in a de-concentrated, cooperative way. I am not arguing for socialism, nor am I arguing for capitalism, as these binaries make little sense when nearly every world economy is a mixture of the two systems.

What we really need to do is to turn away from extractive, winner-take-all growth to a fair and resilient economy based on distributed power, shared prosperity and democratic decision-making. In particular, we need to see reforms to corporate ownership and governance.

We take the shareholder model ownership for granted, whether it’s in the form of publicly traded shares or private equity. Indeed, right now, private equity firm are circling over the crisis-hit economy, looking to buy up distressed companies. The answer, though, is not concentrating ownership even further, but distributing it more widely to workers (and also users, in the case of technology companies).

Employee stock ownership programs (ESOPs) are one model, as are employee ownership trusts (EOT), which give employees equity stakes in their company and include them in profit-sharing schemes. This list highlights the top 100 companies in the US that are majority employee owned through an ESOP. More companies would do well to adopt these models.

Purpose Evergreen Capital champions what’s known as ‘steward ownership’. They define it this way: “The concept of steward-ownership harnesses the power of entrepreneurial for-profit enterprise while preserving a company’s essential purpose to create products and services that deliver societal value and protecting it from extractive capital.” They also have an investment buyout fund for mid-sized companies wanting to transition to steward-ownership, and they have converted over 50 companies to this ownership structure in Germany.

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Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

We have already seen a number of industry bailouts for large corporations, and taxpayers should stand to gain from these socialised losses. One way is for government to take an equity stake in companies, giving taxpayers preferred shares and paying dividends to social security recipients. Alternatively, corporates could issue convertible bonds to the government.

Citizens and workers should stand to gain from the returns of these companies in the good times, not simply pay their bills in the bad.

As for corporate governance, Germany has practiced what’s known as codetermination (giving workers representation on company boards) since the early 1900s. In the 1970s the country instituted these rights into law, requiring worker representation on advisory boards (elected by worker vote) for any company with more than 2000 employees. Today, a majority of EU countries have followed suit with similar legislation. Worker representation in company decision-making should be standard in the US as well, as some studies have shown, it actually increases worker productivity.

The mechanism of a Perpetual Purpose Trust is also being explored as a way to uphold a company’s mission and shield it from investor demand. This structure allows businesses to define their purpose — for example to reinvest all profits back into the business or to primarily serve the interests of its employees. Being solely owned by the trust, the company is protected from profit extraction by predatory investors.

The perpetual purpose trust company structure was setup for the first time in the US two years go by RSF Social Finance and Purpose in the case of the Organically Grown Company. Companies built up or bailed out in the national interest (healthcare companies, drug manufacturing companies, essential parts manufacturing, etc.) could be protected in the same way.

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Are economists really this stupid?

By Tom Chivers

Covid-19 is the first of many future shocks that epidemiologists, climate scientists, and social cohesion theorists are predicting. If we do not use this moment as a time to rebuild and reform our economic system we will be left even more vulnerable to the next catastrophe.

While some will advocate for a return to pre-Covid-19 economic status-quo, others will see this as an opportunity for change. But beware those who advocate change while leaving existing power structure essentially untouched. The language of win-win— ‘doing well by doing good’ — may sound plausible, but we must listen carefully to who defines what it means to win, and who shares in the gains of those wins. Mutual benefit can only occur through exchange, not extraction.

Markets are important mechanisms of exchange that we love and rely on, but we need to reclaim our ability to control them on our terms. We must seize this opportunity to democratise ownership and and create a mission-led system of governance.

There’s no better time than now to reshape the system — and how we respond is up to us.

What these dissatisfactions share is a sense of being trapped in an economic logic whose priorities no longer benefit society as a whole, but that — we are told — cannot be challenged without making things even worse. The foundational premise of that system is continual growth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product) per capita. Economies must grow; if they do not, then recession sinks jobs, lives, entire industries. Tax receipts fall, welfare systems fail, everything staggers.

But what happens when growth harms societies? And what happens when growth comes at the cost of irreparable harm to the environment?

As Sir David Attenborough put it in 2013, “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

This is the argument of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth. The challenge the book sets out is at once simple and staggering. In a finite world, with limited natural resources, how do we deliver prosperity into the future for a human population that keeps on growing?

Jackson, who today is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), argues that we need to start by scrapping GDP as the core metric of prosperity. As the book puts it: “Rising prosperity isn’t self-evidently the same thing as economic growth.”

Growth is not distributed equally, and inequality is widening. At the time of the book’s first publication this was already true; after some ten years of quantitative easing in an attempt by governments to stimulate economies, the situation is even worse. But governments had to print money, because if they did not growth would falter.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

The pursuit of growth is also undermining social bonds and overall wellbeing. In 2018, a commission reported on the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that is blighting lives and worsening health across the UK, driven in part by greater mobility of individuals away from family connections. (Mobility of labour, of course, is essential to drive economic growth.)

This year, even The Economist acknowledged that rising growth does not guarantee rising happiness.

If that were not enough, the resources available to supply continued growth are dwindling: “If the whole world consumed resources at only half the rate the US does […] copper, tin, silver, chromium, zinc and a number of other ‘strategic minerals’ would be depleted in less than four decades.” (Prosperity Without Growth)

Rare earth minerals, essential for technologies from circuit boards to missile guidance systems, are projected to be exhausted in less than two decades. 

And this is before we get to the contested questions of “peak oil”, and climate change, and how far and fast we need to decarbonise — a topic on which even The Economist expressed concern in December this year.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Inasmuch as the public debate considers these nested dilemmas, the vague sentiment is that technology will save us. The jargon term for this is ‘decoupling’ — that is, the ability of the economy to grow without using more resources, by becoming more efficient. But will decoupling happen?

The theoretical core of Jackson’s book is a detailed unpacking of models that suggest it will not, or that if absolute decoupling is possible it will happen so far into the future we will already have wrecked the climate and run out of everything. Rather than rely on this fantasy, Jackson argues, we must challenge the dependence on growth.

But how? The global economic system depends on growth and in times of recession it is the poorest who suffer first. It is a policy double bind: on the one hand, we must think of the environment, so governments encourage us to buy less, consume less, recycle more and so on. But on the other, they must deliver a growing economy, which mean encouraging us to buy more, consume more, keep the economy going. Electorates are, understandably, cynical about the sincerity of this flatly self-contradictory position.

What, then, is the alternative? Jackson is an economist, not a revolutionary firebrand, and his book does not call on us to bring down capitalism. In the second part of Prosperity Without Growth, he instead suggests some quietly radical approaches to bringing the global economy back into the service of human flourishing.

He advocates government intervention to drive much of the change he proposes, including encouraging economies to pivot away from manufacturing, finance and the pursuit of novelty at all costs toward less obviously productive but more human services such as slow food cooperatives, repair and maintenance or leisure services.

He also advocates heavy state support for ecologically-oriented investment. When I contacted him to ask about his book ten years on he spoke positively of the contribution that a “Green New Deal” could make on this front: “It shows a commitment to social and environmental investment that is absolutely essential to achieve a net zero carbon world”, he told me. “Simply put, we just can’t achieve that without this scale of investment, and that form of commitment from Government.”

He also told me he is often criticised for being “too interventionist in relation to the state”, as he puts it. But perhaps (though Jackson does not use the term himself) he might be more fairly described as post-liberal. Prosperity Without Growth is a quiet but excoriating critique of the growing human and ecological costs of liberal economics.

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Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

Intriguingly, within Jackson’s proposals lurks another challenge to liberalism, that to date has not been greatly associated with the left: the critique of radical liberal individualism as a social doctrine. Along with state intervention to tweak the economy and drive ecological investment, Jackson argues that governments should promote “commitment devices”: that is, “social norms and structures that downplay instant gratification and individual desire and promote long-term thinking”.

Examples of ‘commitment devices’ include savings accounts and the institution of marriage. Governments should implement policies that clearly incentivise commitment devices, for doing so will promote social flourishing and resilience even as such institutions offer alternative forms of meaning-making to the pursuit of shopping-as-identity-formation.

Thus, we cannot save the earth without reviving some social values and structures today thought of as small ‘c’ conservative: stable marriage, savings, settled and cohesive communities with lower levels of labour mobility.

I asked Jackson whether some of the more vociferous socially liberal proponents of environmental change had cottoned on to these potentially quite conservative implications of his theories. He told me “This is an interesting question, for sure, and one that I don’t think has really been picked up – even by me!” (Except at UnHerd – see here and here for example.) But, he says, it is incumbent on us to set aside political tribalism in the search for solutions to our current dilemmas.

“I believe there are elements of a Burkean conservatism which are profoundly relevant to a politics of the environment, even as I am convinced that the progressive instincts of the left are essential in our response to social and environmental inequality. I see it as incumbent on those working for change both to understand the underlying motivations of different political positions and also to adopt a pragmatic politic in which solutions are suited to the challenges of today rather than the dogma of yesterday.”

Indeed.

All political philosophies come with sacred ideas, for which all else must be sacrificed. The Left uses accusations of -ism or -phobia to wall off areas it considers beyond the pale, and while the Right likes to imagine it is above such repressive strictures on debate, this is not quite true. For conservatives, ‘growth’ is a sacred idea, in much the same way as racism and other forms of prejudice are for the Left, and the result has been a steady shrinking of acceptable policy space, with social conservatism giving ground at every turn.

Since Thatcher broke the unions, and started the long march of privatisation through the utilities, conservatism and the free market have been treated as essentially the same thing. In mainstream political discourse, the accepted proxy for a healthy free market is GDP growth. In popular terms, to be conservative is to be for growth. Anything that might impede growth is therefore not conservative.

A prime example would be policies that encouraged — or at least didn’t financially penalise — parents to stay at home with their children. This is off-limits for modern conservatives, because it would incentivise millions of people to spend their days doing ‘economically inactive’ things like caring for the old and young and not contributing to GDP. Instead, modern conservatives mumble about feminism and the ‘gender pay gap’, and implement policies to get all those layabouts out earning and spending.

Today, three-quarters of mothers with dependent children work, and only 1.8 million women under 65 are ‘economically inactive’. But now the decades-long growth bonanza triggered by the movement of women from the home to the workplace is tapering off. So Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has set its sights on the retired, no doubt hoping for another growth boost from swelling the ranks of the employed, as well as the savings on state pension payouts.

But who will replace all those older people caring for their grandchildren while both parents work? Modern conservatives can add the cost of all that paid childcare to the growth figures, and congratulate themselves on their stewardship of the country, even as the reciprocal obligations and benefits of family life attenuate ever further.

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Why Britain needs Christian politics

By Christopher Rhodes

Once upon a time, conservatism valued home ownership as a way to help young people plan for the future, put down roots, start families and play a full part in the social fabric. But in the interests of growth modern conservatives have encouraged us to treat housing as an asset class, leveraged for loan collateral or snapped up by overseas buyers for investment. Those who can buy move house every few years to ‘climb the housing ladder’, meaning they never put down roots or participate in local civic life. Prices have skyrocketed, closing out the young.

Over 40% of the social housing flogged at a discount under Right to Buy is now in the hands of rent-seeking landlords. Build more social housing? No, conservatives now argue, the free market should sort it out, driving jobs and growth. Chalk up all the money borrowed and spent against rising homeowner equity to growth, along with rising rental spending and of course house prices themselves. Meanwhile, a generation of young people gives up on home ownership, moulders in grim flat-shares, and vows never to vote Conservative. Who can blame them?

Once upon a time, conservatives saw us as custodians of the landscape and rural ways of life. After all, what could be more conservative than conservation? But for farms to become efficient, drive down prices and contribute to growth they must agglomerate into ever larger agribusinesses with minimal staff, using methods that decimate wildlife, degrade millennia of topsoil and turn varied, life-filled rural vistas into monoculture tundras. Laid-off farm workers can get zero hours jobs in Amazon warehouses, farm cottages can be sold for bankers’ second homes. We can import seasonal fruit pickers. When even that stops being economical, modern conservatives can loosen planning regulations and create jobs and growth concreting over the fields to house all the people they imported to bypass flatlining productivity and drive consumption and growth.

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The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Once upon a time, conservatives thought that government should be democratically accountable to the electorate, and that a nation-state was the largest scale at which a legitimate demos could be convened. But as we are witnessing more or less in real time, when faced with the unenviable task of choosing between growth and democratic accountability or the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, a significant number of modern conservatives now prioritise growth.

Tories get caricatured as heartless, punitive plutocrats fixated on crime, cuts and the wealthy, and it is easy to see why, since more or less every other aspect of conservatism is hamstrung by being subordinate to growth. Modern conservatives can’t even touch the classic conservative topic of immigration because reducing the flow will harm growth. The result, as exhibited by every Tory Home Secretary in recent history, is a policy of holding the door open with one hand while making rude gestures with the other.

Immigrants, it is implied, should move here en masse, to plump our consumption figures and wipe the backsides of all the old people whose offspring can’t afford time off work to care for them. But those useful growth-boosters should all also feel jolly grateful and possibly a bit guilty about being graciously permitted to do so. It is an incoherent position, not to mention insulting to immigrants, who must find the doublethink bewildering.

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Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

There is a great deal of merit in the argument that free markets and economic growth have overall been a force for good in the world. But today, the benefits of growth accrue to an ever smaller proportion of the population. And while Thatcherism bet on the persistence of ‘traditional moral values’ to provide a bulwark against the disruptive power of markets, the decades since her accession have shown Thatcherite market reforms to be increasingly in conflict with Thatcherite morals.

Nowhere has this battle for the soul of conservatism been clearer than in the Brexit referendum. Led by Conservatives, the Remain campaign hectored the masses about the risk to growth and the economy, and ended up losing to millions who have not benefited from growth for some time, and to whom social and cultural matters are now more important than the economy.

Once upon a time, conservatism appealed to the majority. But modern conservatism’s sine qua non — a commitment to growth at all costs — benefits an ever-smaller proportion of the population, undermines the environment, impoverishes rural life, picks at the social fabric, erodes family life and threatens the foundations of democracy and the nation-state. The Conservative Party’s erstwhile base values all these things, and is beginning to realise modern conservatives do not share this view.

Conservatism must choose. It must either call itself something other than conservative, or it must de-prioritise growth. The alternative is that there will soon not be a great deal left worth conserving, not least of conservatism itself.

If that seems exaggerated, consider the facts. Extreme economic hardship almost always produces dramatic political changes. The economic collapse following the Great Depression ushered in fascism throughout Central and Southern Europe and social democracy in most other states.

The stagflation of the 1970s gave rise to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose apparent political and economic successes nudged the rest of the West toward some form of neoliberal economics. Even in the late 1990s, nations that experienced extreme deprivation because of the collapse in the price of oil, such as Venezuela and Russia, overthrew their established political orders in favour of undemocratic authoritarian regimes.

This pattern even held true following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The economies of Greece, Ireland, Iceland, and Spain essentially collapsed under the strain. Each has since either elected a populist-led government (Greece), or seen the share of the vote of the pre-crisis established parties drop by between one-quarter and one-third. The slow-growth countries of France and Italy have both ended the domination of their politics by traditional Right-Left parties; elsewhere the old duopoly is hanging on by a thread, often in coalition with one of the new, populist parties.

Further reading

Ten years on from the crash, the most important banking reform has still not been enacted

By Liam Halligan

The events of 2008 also upended politics in the Anglosphere. The United States and Great Britain were hardest hit, each experiencing large increases in unemployment and expensive bank bailouts. Each has seen the Right challenged by anti-immigration and anti-globalist forces, and each seen the Left rise to obtain or battle for control of the leading centre-Left party. Even placid Australia, whose economy declined after 2008 but never dropped into recession, is seeing record numbers of voters embracing anti-immigrant or other protest parties.

All of this is well known, but the role of economics in these developments is still under-appreciated. According to the OECD, 28 of the 32 member countries on which it has data increased their debt-to-GDP ratio between 2007 and 2018. Countries that experienced deep downturns dramatically increased their debt, even to the point of doubling it (Great Britain, Iceland) or nearly tripling it (Ireland, Spain).

Virtually every major economy now has debt-to-GDP ratios at the level that, pre-2008, would have sent alarm bells ringing in financial markets. Among wealthy economies, only Germany, Switzerland, and a couple of Nordic countries are close to pre-Crisis debt levels. As rich as they are, they cannot bail out the world should another crash occur.

Further reading

Four reasons another crash is on the cards

By Daniel Gayne

In essence, wealthy countries throughout the world bought off political convulsion the old-fashioned way, by borrowing massive amounts of money to fund high levels of government consumption. Individual nations might have the financial capacity to address mild or local downturns, but the free world does not have the cash to bail itself out again. Given what we know from history and recent experience, the political reaction to a combination of crash and austerity will be swift and severe.

There is an alternative to a financial crash followed by political upheaval, but it carries its own political risks. China’s economy is now the largest in the world, and while its household and business debt is high, its formal government debt is not. China’s central bank holds over $3 trillion in hard currency reserves. Assuming that a financial crash in the West does not completely crush the Chinese economy, one can easily imagine Beijing absorbing some of its own domestic debt defaults while bailing out strategic countries that are now part of the Western alliance.

Does anyone think that newly-elected populist governments – or even pre-crash established ones who see the writing on the wall – would turn down offers of low-interest loans from China to avert total collapse? Does anyone think that the longer-term ramifications of that would stop those nations from signing on the dotted line if an equivalent offer were not forthcoming?

These considerations should cause Western governments to sit up. They need to start serious economic reforms now if they want to avoid the risk of everything blowing up.

Further reading

Ten years after the crash, we should still be terrified

By Peter Franklin

There are only three ways to get a debt problem under control. The first is devaluation – if the currency is worth less, then the value of the debt held by creditors would be reduced. Devaluation also can spur growth, as the costs in the devaluing country are suddenly cheaper in terms of the purchasing country’s currency.

The second is inflation – again, with high rates of inflation, the dollar amount of the debt held drops in real terms, making it in theory more affordable if all else remains equal. The problem with both of those remedies is that all else rarely remains equal. Inflation in particular erodes confidence in the future, which erodes investment. That in turn reduces growth, which reduces nominal GDP in future years and thus undermines a country’s ability to service its debt.

Devaluation only works if one is a first-mover country, gaining a relative advantage over other countries that do not devalue and thus spurring growth. If all major countries devalue, or if a small country’s devaluation is then followed by a very large country’s move, the advantage is cancelled and the expected future growth does not occur.

Further reading

As China pitches for reserve currency status, the era of US hegemony is ending

By Liam Halligan

The third option, increasing economic growth without currency debasement, is hard to implement. Orthodox prescriptions from the Right – labour deregulation, lower marginal tax rates, and so forth – always either worsen the debt problem initially, prove politically difficult to pass in the face of opposition from vested interests, or both.

Orthodox prescriptions from the Left – higher levels of public spending and, often, increasing taxes on capital – also produce initially worse financial results and resistance from special interest groups. The solution the Italian populist government has just hit upon – to do both simultaneously – is even riskier financially, as the doubling of Italian government bond yields since the government was formed in May demonstrates.

And so the West slouches on, hoping the centre will hold. It might: one can never predict the future with any certainty. But the warning sounds are present, and growing more urgent, for all who have ears to hear.

Further reading

Chinese capital flows – the ‘dragon energy’ of globalisation

By Peter Franklin