Today we conclude our three-part series on America’s long and uneven effort to control the influence of money in politics.

Part One laid out the stakes. Part Two traced how we got here and, in particular, how the Supreme Court has limited how far reform can go. Part Three turns to the ways forward: what can be fixed now, and what it would take to rebuild the system.

Each Solving For series explores ways to solve one hard problem. This is our 11th. You can read or listen to every one (I narrate them myself) at solvingfor.io. Was this forwarded to you? Sign up.

In January 2013, a new class of members arrived in Washington for the start of the 113th Congress. Barack Obama had just won reelection.

For the freshmen, it was a chance to begin the work they had been elected to do: grapple with the nation’s most pressing problems.

But they were also introduced to another reality of serving in Congress.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee handed freshman Democrats a PowerPoint deck. It included a slide with a model daily schedule: two hours for committee or floor work; one to two hours for constituent visits; one hour for “strategic outreach,” including breakfasts, meet-and-greets and press; one hour to recharge.

And four hours for “call time.”

In a 10-hour day, 40 percent was reserved for calling donors. Include “strategic outreach,” which could also involve fundraising, and half the model day revolved around raising money.

This was not new or unusual.

Former Republican Rep. David Jolly — now the Democratic nominee for Florida governor — told 60 Minutes in 2016 that after he won a special election to Congress, party leadership told him he needed to raise $2 million in six months.

“Your first responsibility is to make sure you hit $18,000 a day,” Jolly recalled being told.

Federal law bars fundraising in congressional offices and other federal buildings. The result is a daily ritual: members leave the Capitol complex, walk to nearby offices, and spend hours in a cubicle dialing donors.

Subscribe now

There is an irony in this.

In 1974, after Watergate, Congress rewrote the rules governing the role of money in American elections. The law limited both campaign contributions and campaign spending, created the Federal Election Commission and strengthened disclosure requirements.

Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat who supported the reforms, called the private financing of elections a cesspool that, he said, “is a source of infection for the body politic.”

Half a century later, consider where things stand.

Members of Congress devote hours of their days to fundraising. Choice committee assignments and party leadership posts can hinge on it. And trust in government remains near historic lows. Just 17 percent of Americans told Pew in 2025 that they trusted the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time.

The reforms did not produce the political system their authors envisioned.

But the reason is not that Congress got it wrong. Its solution was never given a chance.

What the Court Left Behind

In 1976, less than two years after Congress acted, the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled part of what Congress had built.

The case was Buckley v. Valeo. It’s much less famous than Citizens United, but it established the architecture that has governed American campaign finance for the past 50 years.

On the one hand, the Court upheld limits on how much individuals could contribute directly to candidates, as a guard against corruption.

But, on the other, it struck down the limits on what campaigns could spend. Congress, for instance, had set spending caps for House, Senate and presidential races, similar to the NFL’s salary cap in pro football today. The Court also struck down limits on what individuals and groups could spend independently of campaigns.

The Court’s reasoning was that limits on spending are limits on speech, which is protected by the First Amendment.

That split is the foundation of the hybrid system we have today: one part (campaigns) highly regulated, the other (outside groups) largely without limits.

Share

Two justices, approaching the case from opposite directions, warned that the Court had created problems.

Justice Byron White, a Kennedy appointee, wrote in dissent that by striking down spending limits the Court had sent candidates back to “the treadmill” of fundraising.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, would have struck down both the spending and contribution limits. But he, too, doubted what the Court left behind.

“I question whether the residue leaves a workable program,” he wrote.

For 50 years, we have tried to make this hybrid work, and few have been satisfied with it.

The divide, meanwhile, has grown. Later rulings — most consequentially Citizens United and SpeechNow.org v. FEC — expanded the amount of money that could flow through the independent-spending side.

That raises the question: Do we repair the hybrid system once more? Or, after a half-century of trying, is it time to redo the whole thing?

Part Three explores three options: fixes within the existing system, public financing to change the incentives, and overhauling the system by ending the hybrid altogether.

What Can We Fix Now?

The first is disclosure. Namely, end dark money by naming everyone making large donations.

Both Buckley and Citizens United upheld disclosure requirements. But money still flows to super PACs through nonprofits that don’t name their donors. The DISCLOSE Act, introduced in the House and Senate, would require groups that spend more than $10,000 on elections to name the donors giving more than $10,000. It would also bar transfers between organizations that hide where the money came from.

The second is rebuilding the wall between candidates and super PACs.

Super PACs were permitted on the premise that they operate independent of campaigns. That barrier has become porous. “Redboxing” is the clearest example. Campaigns post messaging guidance for super PACs on their public websites, often inside a red-bordered box. A House bill, the Stop Super PAC-Candidate Coordination Act, would widen what counts as coordination and treat that spending as a contribution to the candidate.

The third is a cap on what donors can give to super PACs.

In 2024, 75 percent of Maine voters approved a $5,000 annual limit on super PAC contributions. A federal judge blocked it. The case is now before the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Its target is not Citizens United but SpeechNow, the 2010 appeals court ruling that created the super PAC. It’s a ruling the Supreme Court has never reviewed. A win at the 1st Circuit would likely send the question to the Supreme Court, which could bring back limits on donations to super PACs nationwide. Or it could lock super PACs into constitutional law.

Yet, even if all three succeeded the imbalance would remain. A billionaire barred from writing a large check to a super PAC could still buy the ads himself; under Buckley, an individual’s own independent spending cannot be capped. And members of Congress would still be walking a few blocks from the Capitol to spend hours each day fundraising.

Can Public Financing Change the Incentives?

One reform that would put a dent in daily call time hours: public financing.

Today, candidates spend hours calling people who can write the largest checks, wherever they live.

But New York City campaign finance law changes that by matching the first $250 from a city resident eight to one in citywide races. The result: a $250 check becomes $2,250. A small donor in, say, Brooklyn is suddenly worth as much as a large donor from outside the city.

Generally, advocates for public funding say it does four things. It empowers small donors. It opens the door to candidates who don’t have a network of wealthy friends and supporters. It frees candidates from constant fundraising. And it levels the field against big money.

On the first two, the early evidence is strong. New York state followed New York City with its own match for legislative races in 2024. The number of small donors giving inside districts nearly doubled, from about 26,000 to nearly 51,000. In Seattle, which mails every registered voter $100 in “democracy vouchers” to give to candidates, one study found the number of donors rose 350 percent and the number of City Council candidates rose 86 percent.

Subscribe now

But without spending caps, public funding has a weakness.

Public funding survived Supreme Court review in Buckley because the public money is offered in exchange for a voluntary spending limit. A candidate is not forced to do this, but can choose to participate. For three decades, that deal governed presidential elections. In 1976, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford each accepted $21.8 million in public funds and raised no private money for the general election. Every major-party nominee took the same deal through 2004.

But in 2008, Barack Obama declined the public funding and raised far more from private donors. His Republican opponent, John McCain, was the last major-party nominee to take it. The program is still available.

A similar scenario is playing out in the next New York City mayoral race. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani ran for New York City mayor using the city’s candidate public funding program. He raised all he was allowed to spend in the primary, which was almost $8 million. A super PAC backing Andrew Cuomo raised more than three times that. Mamdani won the election. But in July, citing the outside money he expects to face, he said he would forgo public funding in 2029.

Public money can help. But with the Supreme Court forbidding mandatory spending caps, the risk is that private money can overwhelm it.

End the Hybrid

Every fix so far works inside the line Buckley drew. But the other option is to erase the line. This is the overhaul-the-system approach. Broadly, there are two ways to do it.

The first is to let Congress limit spending again. This is the approach that treats campaigns like an NFL team with a salary cap. The challenge is that Buckley is a constitutional ruling. Undoing it takes a constitutional amendment — or a Court willing to reverse itself.

The leading proposal is the For Our Freedom Amendment, led by the nonprofit American Promise. It doesn’t set a limit. Instead, it would allow Congress and the states to limit campaign contributions and spending as they see fit.

Twenty-five states have formally called on Congress to propose such an amendment. Rep. Tom Barrett, a Michigan Republican, introduced it in the House in June.

The bar is high: a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, and then ratification by three-fourths of the states.

In 250 years, America has ratified 27 constitutional amendments, and the first 10, the Bill of Rights, came all at once in 1791. The most recent, the 27th Amendment, was ratified in 1992.

But as tough as the road is, there appears to be an appetite. In a 2023 Pew survey, 72 percent of Americans said there should be limits on campaign spending, including 71 percent of Republicans.

Montana is testing a shortcut. On Nov. 3, voters there will decide whether to bar corporations, unions, and other “artificial persons” from political spending by changing what state law empowers them to do. The measure would not reach a billionaire spending his or her own money.

The second way runs the other direction: lift the limits on contributions to candidates. That was Burger’s position in 1976. Let donors give candidates what they want, and make them disclose it. Money would flow to candidates, who answer to voters, instead of to outside groups, which do not. With this, the super PAC would lose its reason to exist. The cost is the one Congress saw in 1974: candidates who owe their campaigns to a handful of donors.

The first path requires the country to act. The Supreme Court has been edging toward the second. On June 30, in NRSC v. FEC, the Court struck down limits on what parties can spend in coordination with their candidates, 6-3, overruling its own 2001 decision. Contribution limits still stand, but the Court appears to be lifting spending limits one case at a time.

The Choice

At different points in American history, when money in politics grew too large to ignore, Congress answered with reform. After the Gilded Age, when corporations poured money into campaigns, Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907 and barred them from giving to federal candidates. After Watergate exposed widespread illegal campaign contributions, it enacted the limits of 1974.

But that changed in 1976, when the Supreme Court stepped in.

Chief Justice Burger and Justice White warned about what the Court had left behind: a system that limits one side of the line (candidates and their campaigns) and not the other (outside groups). The 50 years since then, with cases like Citizens United and SpeechNow amplifying Buckley, have not proved them wrong.

So the choice is the one they framed: limit the money on both sides of the line, or on neither. Each has a cost.

But the question that comes first: Who chooses? Beginning with Buckley, the Supreme Court walled off specific reforms on First Amendment grounds. Doing the hard work of passing a constitutional amendment would move the decision about campaign spending limits back to Congress and the states.

In the meantime, the cubicles are still there, a short walk from the Capitol. A new class of members will be elected Nov. 3 and arrive in January. Unless something changes, they will learn what the class of 2013 learned: where the phones are.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Scroll up to find the audio version at the top of this page.

Check out previous series:

China's Rare Earth Dominance

AI Safety

Decline of Local News

End of Amateurism in College Sports

Shrinking Competition in Congress

Social Media & Teen Mental Health

A World Rearming

America's National Debt Crisis

Reinventing the American Dream

The New Space Age

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts. Learn more.

We turn to Part Two in our trilogy on America’s longstanding — and very uneven — effort to control the influence of money in politics. For more than a century, there has been a rhythm to it: money finds its way into politics, public frustration grows, reform follows, then the cycle repeats.

Today we explore how we got here, looking at the recurring cycles of campaign finance reform. But we learn something else: the Supreme Court has made the task harder this time by placing constitutional limits on how far reform can go.

If you missed Part One, you can find it here. Part Three will dive into solutions.

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts.

This is our 11th series. You can find each series — and they’re available for reading or listening (I narrate each one) — at solvingfor.io. (Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

Today in America, if you’re a candidate for federal office, there are limits on how much anyone can give you, and your campaign must disclose its donors.

But a super PAC that wants to defeat you can raise and spend as much as it wants, taking millions from a single donor, and some of that money can arrive through nonprofits that never reveal their donors’ names.

The U.S. Supreme Court set that system in motion in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC. The ruling and cases that followed opened an era of unlimited, and sometimes secret, outside spending.

The logic: Giving money directly to a candidate risks a quid pro quo, so those donations can be limited. But money spent independently by an outside group like a super PAC can’t be similarly limited, because the group does not coordinate its spending with the candidate.

It’s a framework that has made Citizens United one of the Supreme Court’s most controversial and deeply unpopular decisions in the past quarter century. A Brennan Center poll released in June found 75% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats support a constitutional amendment allowing federal and state governments to limit campaign donations and spending.

And it’s a framework that can dramatically reshape elections.

In this year’s Texas Senate race, for instance, Democrat James Talarico raised more than $72 million through June, more than four times the $16.8 million raised by Republican Ken Paxton.

But then super PACs arrived. By late September, Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Republican leaders, had committed $100 million in advertising to support Paxton. Trump’s MAGA Inc. and Elon Musk’s America PAC joined in. In September alone, pro-Paxton ad reservations topped $94 million, against roughly $20 million for Talarico. A candidate who had been outraised more than four to one suddenly had the advantage on the airwaves.

That’s one of the defining features of the modern system: Candidates must raise money contribution by contribution, under federal limits. An outside group can amass the same amount from a handful of wealthy donors or organizations.

Some of it’s hard to trace. Between February and May, Lone Star Liberty, a pro-Paxton super PAC, received more than $1 million from Preserve Texas, a Virginia nonprofit that has not disclosed its donors. It was incorporated by the treasurer of Paxton’s Senate campaign.

Subscribe now

And the system rests on a premise that has grown increasingly tenuous: that unlimited outside money stays at arm’s length from the people in power.

In recent years, super PACs have run candidates’ field operations. Campaigns post messages online for outside groups to copy and act on, a practice known as “redboxing,” for the red box that often frames the messages on a website. And, in 2024, federal regulators said candidates could coordinate with outside groups on door-knocking.

Then, on Sept. 4, President Trump declared there is no distance at all.

“This is my money that I control,” Trump said in the Oval Office. He was talking about MAGA Inc., a super PAC that’s amassed some $400 million in unlimited donations and is supposed to operate independently of any candidate or officeholder.

Federal law bars federal officeholders from directing the spending of a group that raises unlimited money. The Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance advocacy group, has filed a complaint arguing Trump crossed that line. MAGA Inc. calls the complaint frivolous and says it follows the law.

Meanwhile, the agency that enforces campaign finance law can’t act on it.

Shortly after taking office, Trump fired the Federal Election Commission’s Democratic chair, Ellen Weintraub, leaving the agency with just the minimum four members it needs to meet. Weintraub called the firing illegal. In April 2025, Republican Commissioner Allen Dickerson resigned and the FEC no longer had a quorum. For more than a year it hasn’t had enough commissioners to authorize investigations or levy fines, and likely won’t through the midterm elections.

It’s the latest episode in the Citizens United era.

The era’s problems extend to some of the deepest anxieties in American life: whether the system is rigged against everyday Americans, whether institutions can be trusted, and whether those with the most money have a louder voice than everyone else.

At its root is a question the country has never settled: What role should money play in a democracy?

Politics’ Oldest Problem

For more than a century, Americans have wrestled with how much power private wealth should have in public elections. There’s been a pattern to it: money finds its way into politics, outrage follows, then reform, and the cycle begins again.

Money has been part of American politics since before there was an America.

In 1755, George Washington lost badly in a race for Virginia’s House of Burgesses. When he ran again in 1758, his supporters turned to a common tactic in colonial Virginia: offering alcohol to voters.

Washington’s election expenses included 46 gallons of beer, some 35 gallons of wine, cider, brandy and rum punch. This time Washington won.

Even then, lawmakers were wrestling with where to draw the line. Virginia had already prohibited candidates from giving voters food or drink to win their votes. But the law still permitted the practice of “treating” voters in some circumstances. It’s an early example of the difficulty in regulating money and influence in elections.

It’s something that would bedevil American democracy for the next two and a half centuries. Running for office costs money, and whoever supplies that money can gain influence over who gets elected and what happens after they enter office.

The First Reform Era

By the late 19th century, the rapid industrialization of the U.S. — the expansion of railroads and the rise of the steel and oil industries — had created vast private fortunes.

The concentrated wealth of the Gilded Age became a defining force in American political life.

In the 1896 presidential election, Ohio businessman Mark Hanna helped lead William McKinley to the presidency by raising large sums from the likes of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan.

Hanna, considered a pioneer in presidential fundraising, is often credited with saying two things mattered in politics: “The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

Share

But the influx of giant fortunes into politics raised a basic question: how much influence should wealth have over elections?

Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign drew heavily on corporate donations, and public backlash followed. It grew so intense that Roosevelt ultimately called on Congress to ban corporate contributions.

In 1907, Congress followed through and passed the Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions in federal elections. Three years later, Congress passed the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. It imposed disclosure requirements in House races; Congress extended them to Senate elections in 1911.

The reforms reflected an increasingly widespread conviction that voters should know who was funding campaigns and that enormous wealth should not be able to buy political influence.

Post-Watergate Reforms and the First Amendment

Through much of the 20th century, Congress kept adding rules and money kept finding new routes. When Congress restricted union contributions in 1943, unions invented a workaround: the political action committee, funded by voluntary contributions from members. Corporations and other groups eventually did the same.

Then Watergate happened.

Investigations into President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign revealed large contributions made to influence policy and buy ambassadorships. Nixon was recorded saying anyone who wanted to be ambassador “must at least give $250,000.” There were illegal corporate donations and a secret slush fund that paid for the Watergate burglars, along with “hush money” to cover it up.

Congress responded in 1974 by rewriting the Federal Election Campaign Act. The new law created a comprehensive framework regulating money in federal elections. It capped contributions to candidates, limited campaign spending, strengthened disclosure requirements, and created the Federal Election Commission to enforce it all.

Congress also put in place public financing of presidential campaigns. Beginning in 1976, nominees who accepted public money agreed to limit their spending. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter each took about $21.8 million and raised no private money for the general election.

As it happened, that reform would ultimately fall victim to private money. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first major-party nominee to turn down the public money in a general election because he could raise much more from private donors. The program still exists but competitive candidates stopped using it.

Subscribe now

But even as Congress in the 1970s was building its most extensive set of rules yet, the Supreme Court was drawing limits around what government could do.

In 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, the Court established a constitutional distinction between two kinds of money in political campaigns.

On the one hand, the Court upheld limits on direct donations to a candidate. Large contributions directly to a candidate, it reasoned, could create corruption or the appearance of corruption. So Congress can reasonably limit them.

But, on the other, the Supreme Court struck down limits on spending — for instance, independent spending by outside groups or even a candidate spending personal funds — saying such limits violate the First Amendment. The justices reasoned that limiting political spending restricts political speech, because communicating a political message almost always requires spending money.

From that point forward, American campaign finance law developed along two tracks. Money going into campaigns could be regulated, but money spent independently of candidates and their campaigns, even if for the same cause, generally could not.

The cycle would continue — but now the Supreme Court had added constitutional limits to reforms.

McCain-Feingold

By the 1990s, there was an explosion in “soft money” — money political parties raised outside the normal federal contribution limits and used for things like voter-registration drives and general party advertising. Corporations, unions and wealthy donors were also paying for ads that stopped just short of telling viewers how to vote.

U.S. Senator John McCain said the soft money system “made a mockery of the law.”

In 2002, McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, pushed through the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Known as McCain-Feingold, the law banned national political parties from raising soft money and restricted corporate and union funding of broadcast ads close to elections. It was widely seen as the most significant rewrite of federal campaign finance law since Watergate.

A New Cycle, A Harder Challenge

But the tensions created by Buckley lingered.

If spending was necessary for political speech, how far could the government restrict who spends it? And why should a corporation or union not be able to express its views under the First Amendment like an individual?

Those questions reached the Supreme Court in 2010.

In Citizens United, a 5-4 majority held that the government could not bar corporations and unions from spending their own money on independent political advocacy. And because independent spending wasn’t coordinated with a candidate, the majority concluded, it didn’t create the kind of quid pro quo corruption that justified limits.

In other words, not only were corporations and unions no longer barred from making independent expenditures, they could make them without limit.

Two months later came the final piece.

In SpeechNow.org v. FEC, a federal appeals court applied Citizens United to groups that do nothing but independent spending. If that spending couldn’t corrupt candidates, the court reasoned, then donations to those groups couldn’t be limited either.

The super PAC was born.

More than a century after Theodore Roosevelt called for limits on corporate political money, and more than two centuries after George Washington bought rum punch for Virginia voters, campaign finance law is now at a new place.

Give money directly to a candidate, and the government can limit how much you give. Spend money independently to elect that candidate, and there is no limit on how much you can spend.

Previously, when money was injected into politics in ways people didn’t like, Congress could pass new laws. That happened with the Tillman Act in the early 1900s, the Federal Election Campaign Act amendments in the 1970s after Watergate, McCain-Feingold in the early 2000s.

What’s different this time is that the barrier isn’t a statute Congress can rewrite. As a result of Citizens United, and then SpeechNow, it rests on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment. Changing that requires a reinterpretation by the Supreme Court, or a constitutional amendment.

Congress has tools it can use. It can require disclosure. It can fund campaigns publicly. It can limit direct contributions to candidates. But when it comes to independent political spending, the limits are on what Congress can do.

The cycle is playing out again today. Money is finding its way into politics in new ways. Public polling shows deep unhappiness. But, this time, the old solution — legislation — is not enough.

The old cycle remains. The way out has changed.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Scroll up to find the audio version at the top of this page.

Check out previous series:

China’s Rare Earth Dominance | AI Safety | Decline of Local News | End of Amateurism in College Sports | Shrinking Competition in Congress | Social Media and Teen Mental Health | A World Rearming as the Global Rules-Based Order Weakens | America’s National Debt Crisis | Reinventing the American Dream | The New Space Age

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts. Learn more.

Money has always been part of American politics. But there has been a dramatic shift in recent years — increasing amounts of money coming from outside the states or districts where elections are being held, a relatively small number of wealthy donors wielding outsized influence in races, donors hiding their identities more and more, and this all threatening to further drown out the voices and influence of ordinary Americans.

Money in politics has been a primary topic for years, but I wanted to better understand the problem and what can be done. This series is the result.

We’re publishing in the middle of a midterm campaign that, for the first time ever, is on pace to outspend the presidential race that came before it. That’s, of course, part of the story.

Today, we start with the problem: a small state Senate primary in Idaho that reveals something much bigger about who our elections now answer to. Next week, we look at the forces that got us here. The week after, what might actually change it.

Every Solving For series is available to read or listen to — I narrate each one myself — at solvingfor.io. (Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

As the 2024 election season got under way, Republican Chuck Winder was a fixture in Idaho politics. The former Navy pilot had served in the State Senate for 16 years and was Senate Pro Tempore. The Idaho Statesman endorsed Winder’s re-election and called him “the model of statesmanship.”

But a Republican challenger emerged. Josh Keyser, a former Boise Police Department trainee, was now vice principal at a small private Christian school. He’d moved to Idaho six years prior. “We don’t know much about Keyser,” The Statesman’s editorial board declared, noting he declined an interview.

Even amid a rightward shift in Idaho’s Republican politics, Winder thought he would prevail. He was widely known and had raised more than $90,000 to spend in what would be a low-turnout primary in May. Keyser raised just $28,081, according to the Idaho State Journal.

But hundreds of miles away, plans were afoot in an Alexandria, Virginia office building two blocks from the Potomac River.

A political action committee there, Make Liberty Win, poured more than $107,000 into defeating Winder — more than Keyser raised for his entire campaign. The money funded text messages attacking Winder. The Senate leader was also targeted by robocalls that used manipulated recordings of his voice, according to KTVB in Boise.

Much of the spending remained out of public view until shortly before the election because financial disclosure reports were filed “right under the deadline,” wrote Idaho Education News reporter Sean Dolan. And even knowing the name of the PAC didn’t fully reveal who was behind the money: one of its major funders was an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit that does not publicly disclose its donors.

On primary Election Day, 6,134 Republicans voted. Winder lost by 282 votes. Idaho columnist Bryan Clark wrote that the state Senate “has not lost its leader this way in decades, if ever.”

Subscribe now

Winder wasn’t alone. Out-of-state political action committees spent $1.1 million across Idaho’s 2024 primary races. The vast majority of it — $925,985 — went to attacking candidates; more than the $795,643 Idaho’s own PACs spent opposing candidates that same cycle.

“There was more money from out of state on negative ads than there was in state,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said later that year.

Idaho House Speaker Mike Moyle, a Republican who was also targeted by Make Liberty Win but survived, said the spending was unlike anything he had seen before, and left candidates badly outmatched.

“A candidate is limited to a contribution of $1,000 and an out-of-state PAC can spend $1.5 million, right?” Moyle said.

In April this year, Idaho became the 25th state to urge Congress to propose a constitutional amendment giving Congress and the states the authority to set rules on election spending.

It joined a coalition of Republican and Democratic-controlled states, organized with the non-profit American Promise, seeking to do something that hasn’t been done in more than half a century: propose and ratify a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

A sponsor of the resolution, Republican State Senator Carl Bjerke, said it was time to reverse “a trend that is fueling distrust, cynicism, and inequity in our electoral process.”

The Court Lifts the Lid

Money has always been part of American political life. In 1962, Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the California Assembly, told Time magazine that money was “the mother’s milk of politics.”

This year, for the first time, spending on political advertising in a midterm cycle will exceed the presidential cycle before it — an estimated $11.6 billion, according to AdImpact. The 2024 presidential race drew $11.2 billion, and $8.9 billion in 2022 midterms.

But what’s changed today is not simply how much money flows through U.S. elections, it’s who holds the financial power and what that power can do. That shift shows up in three pivotal ways.

First, more of the money helping elect candidates comes from people far removed from the voters they will represent. Second, more of it is concentrated among a small number of extraordinarily wealthy donors, sometimes hidden from public view. And, third, these forces allow a relatively narrow group to distort democracy by drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans and shaping which issues get attention, which carry political risk, and what’s politically possible.

The hinge for today’s challenge came in 2010.

In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court held that government could not bar corporations — or unions — from spending their own money independently to support or oppose candidates. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that government “may not suppress political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity.”

Two months later, SpeechNow.org v. FEC went a step further: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said individuals could give without limit to organizations devoted solely to independent spending.

Together, the rulings created a new vehicle for political spending, the super PAC. Unlike a traditional political action committee, which can give directly to candidates but faces contribution limits, a super PAC cannot contribute directly to a campaign, but it can raise and spend unlimited sums to help elect or defeat candidates — as long as it operates independently of the campaign.

The reasoning dates back to 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court held in Buckley v. Valeo that spending money on political speech is itself speech. The 2010 decisions expanded on this by saying that a right to free speech carries with it a right to spend money to amplify that speech — and there’s no ceiling on how loud it can become.

It’s a system built around a crucial divide. Money given directly to a candidate is capped because the Court has said large contributions create the risk of a quid pro quo, and that’s worth limiting free speech to avoid. But the Court has reasoned that independent spending — such as a super PAC producing and airing TV ads in support of a candidate on its own — doesn’t carry that risk because it’s not allowed to be done in coordination with the candidate. So, it can be unlimited.

Share

Layered on top of this is one more wrinkle. Even as super PACs are required to disclose their donors, money can flow to them through nonprofit groups — namely, 501(c)(4) organizations — that do not have to identify the people behind the money. Thus, the super PAC’s donor list is visible but may list the non-profit and not the original source of the money behind the donation. This is “dark money.”

The net result: a political system in which candidates operate under fundraising limits and donor disclosure requirements. Meanwhile, outside groups raise and spend without limit, can keep their donors’ names hidden, and can still work to elect or defeat the very same candidate.

As attorneys for the Brennan Center wrote in testimony to the U.S. Senate, the result is that “American voters have been left in the dark about the individuals and groups spending millions of dollars to influence our votes.”

What makes this problem so hard to solve is that the Court has grounded its rulings in the First Amendment, meaning Congress and state legislatures cannot simply legislate them away.

Short of the Supreme Court changing course, restoring broad authority to limit independent election spending would require an amendment to the Constitution. This is why 25 state legislatures have now asked for one. And why changing the rules governing big money in politics presents such a formidable challenge.

Where it Comes From

The first concern is that the current system weakens a basic premise of representative democracy: elected officials answer to the people who elect them.

Trevor Potter — a Republican, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and general counsel to both of John McCain’s presidential campaigns, and a founder of the Campaign Legal Center — put it simply: “the founders’ concept was that the people who were elected were going to represent their voters.”

But increasingly, the money electing them comes from somewhere else.

In 2024, Senate candidates raised just 27.5 percent of their itemized contributions from donors within their own states. House candidates raised only 17.6 percent from inside their districts, according to OpenSecrets — the second-lowest levels on record.

Then comes the money spent outside the campaigns altogether. Outside spending in federal elections reached a record $4.5 billion in 2024, up from $499 million in 2010, according to OpenSecrets.

As more and more money comes from somewhere else, elected leaders’ allegiance to voters who elected them grows thinner and thinner.

Who is Behind It

The second concern is the concentration of money and power — and how it’s increasingly wielded secretly.

A New York Times analysis found that in 2024 just 300 billionaires and their immediate families contributed more than $3 billion to federal elections. That amounts to nearly one-fifth of all reported federal campaign contributions, even as the group represented a tiny fraction of overall political donors.

Some individuals wrote checks on a scale once almost unimaginable. Elon Musk gave more than $291 million during the 2024 cycle, according to OpenSecrets. Five other donors or donor couples each gave more than $100 million. This includes Timothy Mellon ($197 million), Miriam Adelson ($148 million), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($143 million), Ken Griffin ($108 million), and Jeffrey and Janine Yass ($101 million). All six supported Republican candidates and causes. Major Democratic donors, such as Michael Bloomberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Reid Hoffman, gave tens of millions.

But, increasingly, the original donors are hidden.

In 2024, more than $1 billion flowed into super PACs from nonprofits that did not disclose who was behind it. One of those super PACs, Future Forward, the dominant outside group backing the Democratic presidential ticket, received more than $266 million from its affiliated nonprofit, whose donors generally were not publicly disclosed.

The phenomenon crosses party lines: even as many Democrats have championed campaign finance reform, they have thrown themselves into this system. “When we get power, we can change all of the rules so that everyone plays nice,” Alexandra Acker-Lyons, who advises progressive donors, told The New York Times. “But until we have power, we can’t do that.”

The result is a political system in which enormous sums are being spent to shape people’s opinions on candidates without voters knowing who supplied the money to do it.

Increasingly, said Dan Weiner of the Brennan Center for Justice, it’s a system “where transparency is just optional.”

Subscribe now

How it Controls the Room

The third concern is what concentrated political money actually does — and how it distorts the debate.

Research by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page predating Citizens United found that the financial elite and business interests already had substantially more independent influence over federal policy than average citizens. A follow-up book in 2017 found that when 60 to 70 percent of Americans favored a policy change, it was enacted only about 40 percent of the time.

“The public is often thwarted through inaction,” said Page.

Two fights in recent years show the pattern. Universal background checks for gun sales have polled above 85% for over a decade and never passed Congress. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate 91-3 and polled at 86% support, yet failed to become law amid heavy lobbying. Major tech companies spent more than $51 million, including Meta spending more than $18 million alone.

A very recent example is the cryptocurrency industry. It created a super PAC called Fairshake and spent nearly $196 million in the 2024 cycle supporting crypto-friendly candidates of both parties. Congress passed the Genius Act in 2025, creating industry-friendly rules for stablecoins. The SEC alone has dropped or paused nearly 60 percent of its crypto enforcement cases since Trump took office. Yet this week the industry’s sweeping cryptocurrency bill, the Clarity Act, failed to advance despite the heavy political spending — in part because of concerns related to Trump and his family’s own crypto company, World Liberty Financial.

The story illustrates both the reach and the limits of political money. It does not guarantee an outcome. But it ensures an industry has a seat at the table, helps set the terms of the debate, and can remind lawmakers the political costs of saying no.

The Empty Building

There are still federal campaign-finance laws, and the Federal Election Commission is supposed to enforce them. After all, in this current system, a super PAC is not allowed to coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. Each is supposed to operate independently of the other, even if they share the same goal.

But this election year no one is watching.

The commission is designed to have six members. Today it has two. Federal law generally requires four votes for major actions, including enforcement decisions, regulations and advisory opinions. The FEC has lacked a quorum since April 2025 — it hasn’t convened a single meeting in nearly a year and a half.

“Without a quorum, the FEC is a watchdog without a bark or bite,” said Michael Beckel, senior research director at Issue One.

Which brings us back to Idaho.

The truth is that almost none of what happened to Chuck Winder was illegal.

An outside group hundreds of miles away spent nearly four times more money attacking him than his opponent raised for his entire campaign. Some of the original sources behind that money were obscured. And Winder lost by 282 votes.

The system did not malfunction.

It worked largely as the law allows it to work.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Scroll up to find the audio version at the top of this page.

Check out previous series:

China’s Rare Earth Dominance | AI Safety | Decline of Local News | End of Amateurism in College Sports | Shrinking Competition in Congress | Social Media and Teen Mental Health | A World Rearming as the Global Rules-Based Order Weakens | America’s National Debt Crisis | Reinventing the American Dream | The New Space Age

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds weekly in three parts. Learn more.

This week we turn to the Open Thread, our bridge between series, where we update past stories and experiment. This installment takes on AI safety and the question: who gets to decide how much risk a society takes on? With the rise of social media, we largely left it to tech leaders. With AI, a growing number of people — including some building it — say we shouldn’t do that again. For more on AI safety, check out our three-part AI safety series, my video conversation with Tristan Harris at Faena Rose, and a previous Open Thread essay on one week this summer when AI safety got real.

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces, and surfacing paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts. You can read or listen to each series — narrated by me — at solvingfor.io, or click the article voiceover at the top of this page. Learn more.

On a single day last month — August 26 — two technological eras collided.

One was a reckoning for harms a technology had accumulated over two decades. The other was a warning about how another technology could go wrong.

Both turn on the same question: who gets to decide how much risk society should accept from a powerful new technology?

First came the reckoning — or at least the start of one.

Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle a case brought by 47 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that harmed children. Meta, which denied the allegations, also agreed to changes in how teens use its products, including a two-hour daily limit, muted notifications during school hours, and restrictions on overnight use.

Second came the warning.

The same day, Bill Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay arguing that the transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent in human history — and that we’re not preparing for it.

“I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately,” he wrote.

As Gates offered a warning, OpenAI offered evidence. The AI company released two reports on August 26 with details on the incident earlier this summer when AI agents it was testing went rogue.

OpenAI described how the agents — AI systems acting on their own rather than simply responding — were being tested in a “sandbox,” a supposedly contained, secure environment. The agents worked together to circumvent security protocols, find their way to the open internet, and breach servers belonging to Hugging Face, an AI company. They did it without humans directing them.

An independent investigation by the nonprofit METR and Redwood Research found that some 1,200 AI agents — which were supposed to be isolated from one another — discovered a way to communicate, work together, and form a coordinated swarm. Some 700 eventually joined the attack on Hugging Face’s systems.

“We consider this a ‘warning shot’ for us and the world,” OpenAI declared.

Subscribe now

Then, this week, warnings came from inside the AI companies.

On September 6, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published an essay titled, “An Alien Mind.” He wrote that no AI lab has solved alignment — making sure that AI systems do what humans intend — well enough to keep scaling responsibly at maximum speed for much longer. He said he expects and hopes for voluntary slowdowns by AI companies and urged international coordination.

Then on September 8, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic and left the AI industry altogether. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he posted on X. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

He added: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, responded on X: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” He said there’s a greater than ten percent chance it could happen “within the next decade.”

When We Stood Down

For much of the social media era — Facebook launched in 2004 — the companies operated with wide freedom. The people building the technology were allowed to write the rules and manage the consequences. Social media became embedded in everyday life — and especially childhood — faster than families, schools, and governments could adapt.

The leeway came from a default openness to new technology and from the industry’s promise that it was delivering so much good: connecting the world, democratizing communication, fostering greater community.

Yet the deference continued even as evidence mounted that Facebook was harming children with products designed to capture and hold their attention (while also amplifying division and sowing distrust). And it continued even as Facebook’s own former employees sounded alarms.

In 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen disclosed thousands of pages of internal documents and testified before Congress that the company put profits ahead of safety.

In 2023, Arturo Bejar, former Director of Engineering at Facebook, testified that Meta executives knew about the harms teens were experiencing but refused to take steps to stop them.

In 2025, Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former Director of Public Policy, stepped forward alleging the company put its interests ahead of society’s.

Parents, researchers, public-health officials, and state governments raised their own alarms. In 2024, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.

Yet meaningful constraints on social media companies like Meta proved extremely difficult to impose. Congress repeatedly failed to enact comprehensive social media legislation, even after the three whistleblowers. And the U.S. law known as Section 230 shielded social media companies from being held liable as a publisher of content posted by their users.

Ultimately, lawyers hit upon a different theory of liability, arguing the problem wasn’t the content users posted, which Section 230 protected, but the products that Meta had built — including features engineered to keep children addicted.

Courts allowed these product-design claims to proceed, and for the first time, Meta had to answer to a jury. Multi-million dollar verdicts followed. Then the August 26 settlement was announced.

Jonathan Haidt, whose best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” linked social media to teen depression, anxiety, and loneliness, called the settlement a great step. But he added: “Let's all work together to make sure it's not the last.”

In one sense, social media followed a common U.S. pattern. Namely, imposing safety rules after the crash. Federal drug-safety testing came after a toxic medicine killed more than 100 people in 1937. The Federal Aviation Administration came after two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon in 1956, killing 128.

Yet, a medicine or an airplane is a single product. When it fails, the harm is visible and the fix is specific.

Social media didn’t just become a product people used, it became part of how people lived. The harms built slowly, across millions of kids. By the time the evidence was clear, social media was everywhere.

The lesson: once a technology becomes woven into daily life, imposing boundaries becomes very difficult.

Warnings From the Top

AI is on the same path, only faster and with higher stakes. But this time, the warnings are coming early and from the very top.

In June, Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, which makes Claude, wrote that frontier AI models, “like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing.” Their release, he wrote, should be blocked or reversed if they fall short of high safety standards.

In July, Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, which builds Gemini, penned an essay calling for “robust safeguards to maintain control” of increasingly capable AI. He said it’s critical that we get this right but, “as a field and as a wider society, we aren’t doing that.”

In August, Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, posted on X that this is a critically important moment for cyber defense: “there is not much time to act…please take this moment seriously.”

Yet governments are taking a different approach. On September 1 and 2, at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina, G20 members endorsed a U.S.-drafted framework called the Carolina Principles. The nonbinding framework takes a light-touch approach to oversight, urging governments to reserve new regulation for “novel considerations.”

David Sacks, a former White House AI czar who now co-chairs the president’s science and technology advisory council, said it would be a “disaster” if the U.S. adopted an “FDA for AI,” referring to the way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviews drugs before they reach the public. AI, he argued, moves too fast for that kind of review.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking at the meeting, said governments should regulate harms, but not “theoretical” ones. And Elon Musk singled out the EU, saying its regulations “inhibit progress.”

Our Decision

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

The promise of AI — from revolutionizing medicine and accelerating scientific discovery to democratizing education — is so large that the incentive is to be first. That applies to companies and to countries.

“We can’t pause,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday. “You can’t, because the Chinese won’t pause.”

The AI race is a prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone would be safer slowing down, but no one wants to go first. The consequences fall on all of us.

The risks fall into two categories.

One, misuse. There’s always been plenty of bad intent. But the expertise to act on it — develop a pathogen, create a cyberweapon — was rare. Only a few people or governments could actually do it. Capable AI models increasingly put that expertise within reach.

Two, loss of control. This is when AI systems act in ways no one directed. Exhibit A is this summer’s incident when a swarm of AI agents escaped OpenAI’s sandbox and attacked Hugging Face.

And the pace is accelerating. OpenAI’s Pachocki wrote that we’re heading toward recursive self-improvement — AI driving its own development.

To change the outcome, change the incentives.

That’s why, in our AI safety series, we landed on the answer we did: the U.S. and China, today’s two great powers, sitting down to negotiate a framework governing AI. It is how Washington and Moscow handled arms control while both were expanding their nuclear arsenals at the height of the Cold War.

There are signs that conversation may be starting. Reuters reported that Washington and Beijing are preparing their first talks devoted solely to AI safety since President Trump returned to office. (The White House said no meeting is currently planned.) A serious framework could borrow from the Cold War playbook: standing channels of communication for a crisis, joint monitoring of cyber threats, shared rules for how the most capable models are built and tested, and formal after-action reporting when something goes wrong.

But for our political leaders to pursue it, the public must demand it.

Coxon’s post prompted calls for action in both parties. U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, called for a special session of Congress on AI. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, urged action “to put humanity’s safety before the profits of tech lords.”

What’s clear from our 20-year experiment with social media is that the decision on risks to society doesn't belong to the companies building the technology. It belongs to all of us.

What government leaders carry into a congressional hearing, onto the Senate floor, or into diplomatic negotiations with China is set by what the rest of us make politically important. Arms control came about in part because people pushed for it.

Gates made a version of this point in his essay: AI’s impact will be society-wide, so the conversation about it has to be society-wide too. The circle has to widen to include workers, teachers, students, parents, scientists, business owners, civic and religious leaders.

The questions AI raises, Gates wrote, “are too consequential to leave to a small group of technologists.”

No one can sit this out. The warnings are clear.

What’s now to be decided is whether we will build that response before the reckoning — or, as with social media, after it.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Scroll up to find the audio version at the top of this page.

Next up: a new three-part series on money in politics. In the meantime, catch up on our previous series —

China’s Rare Earth Dominance | AI Safety | Decline of Local News | End of Amateurism in College Sports | Shrinking Competition in Congress | Social Media and Teen Mental Health | A World Rearming as the Global Rules-Based Order Weakens | America’s National Debt Crisis | Reinventing the American Dream | The New Space Age

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts. Learn more.

We conclude our series on space this week. The more I got into reporting it, the more I realized the biggest challenge may not be getting there. It may be figuring out what happens once we do. In Part Three, we look at how countries and companies are pushing into orbit, to the Moon and beyond — with rules largely written for another era. If you missed them, here are Part One and Part Two.

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts. You can read or listen to each series — narrated by me — at solvingfor.io, or click the article voiceover at the top of this page. Learn more.

In May 2020, the head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, wrote on Twitter in a now-deleted post: “Only Iraq or Afghanistan will come out of this.”

He wasn’t talking about a war. He was talking about the Moon.

Reuters’ space reporter Joey Roulette had just broken the news that the Trump administration was drafting a new framework governing how countries operate on the Moon.

It was called the Artemis Accords.

The framework would allow countries and companies to extract lunar resources. It would also allow operations on the Moon to be surrounded by “safety zones” designed to prevent “harmful interference.”

To critics like Rogozin, it looked like the U.S. writing the rules for the next frontier.

But, even as Rogozin saw a land grab, the problem the Artemis Accords set out to solve was real.

Subscribe now

For the first half-century of the space age, governments dominated spaceflight. Then, in 2008, SpaceX — a startup on the brink of bankruptcy — became the first company to put a privately developed rocket into orbit. It was a turning point. More companies followed. Costs fell. The pace quickened. Possibilities widened.

Now, a highway to the heavens is being built. Reusable rockets. Communication networks. Lunar landers. Space stations. Together, they could enable a permanent human presence in space, create new industries, and improve life on Earth.

But building the infrastructure is only half the challenge. The rules need to be built too.

Who can extract resources from the Moon? What happens when two countries want the same piece of lunar terrain? How do thousands of satellites share increasingly crowded orbits? How do we keep competition between the U.S. and China from turning into conflict? And what happens when private companies become powerful actors on a frontier governments are struggling to keep up with?

These questions are becoming more urgent as the new space age accelerates. As the possibilities grow, so do the stakes.

When the Artemis Accords were announced, NASA’s Mike Gold captured both the promise and the peril of the moment, saying: “We hope the future will look a lot more like ‘Star Trek,’ and a lot less like ‘Star Wars.’”

Highway to the Heavens

NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s and early 1970s was organized around single missions.

But today is different.

The goal now is to build the roads, bridges, airports and power grids of space; infrastructure that makes it possible to build everything else on top of it.

In SpaceX’s S-1 filing before going public this year, the company put it plainly: “We are truly building the infrastructure of the future.” Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, described the assignment this way: “It’s this generation’s job to build a road to space, so that future generations can unleash their creativity.”

Businesses are already being built on top of this road: connectivity, Earth observation, microgravity manufacturing, orbital data centers.

It’s happening globally, too. Nearly 20 African countries have satellites in orbit, and the continent is set to double its space spending this year, according to the Financial Times. The benefits range from monitoring crops and water levels to quickly spotting wildfires.

As low-Earth orbit becomes the first commercial layer of this infrastructure, the Moon is next. Increasingly, attention is converging on one place: the lunar South Pole.

The reason is its rare combination of sunlight and ice. Mountain ridges there are in near-continuous sunlight, while nearby craters — deep and frigid — have remained in shadow for billions of years. The darkened basins, like the two-and-a-half-mile deep Shackleton Crater, are believed to hold water ice, which can become drinking water, oxygen, and rocket fuel. The sunlit ridges offer solar power.

Together, sunlight and ice could make the region a proving ground for humans to live, work, and build beyond Earth.

NASA’s Artemis IV mission plans to land two astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole in 2028, beginning a new phase of sustained lunar exploration. It would mark humanity’s return to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

Companies are developing hardware to mine the Moon’s minerals — including helium-3, a rare isotope envisioned to one day power clean fusion energy. Others see the Moon as a launch pad for destinations beyond, like Mars. But as the highways and bridges to space are being built to enable this future, they’re operating under rules written for a vastly different era.

At the international level, Harvard Kennedy School’s Ely Sandler observed this year, space is “essentially not governed.”

Decades-old Rulebook

The basic rules of the road were written nearly sixty years ago.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty remains the foundation of international space law, ratified by 118 countries, including every major space power.

It and companion treaties established that no country can claim the Moon. It forbade military bases and weapons of mass destruction in space. It created principles like a duty to rescue astronauts in distress.

In word and spirit, it made space open to all, owned by none, used only for peaceful purposes.

But the treaty didn’t contemplate private companies or today’s commercial ambitions. The result, Sandler wrote in a December 2025 paper, is a new space era with huge opportunities — but challenges that the current rulebook “is ill-equipped to meet.”

Yet Earth has faced versions of this problem before.

Subscribe now

Use Without Ownership

Antarctica offers one lesson. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty reserved the continent for peaceful, scientific use and froze territorial claims. The 1991 Madrid Protocol went further, banning commercial mining outright.

Oceans offer another. No country owns the high seas, yet enormous economic activity takes place there — fishing fleets, cargo ships, undersea cables. International maritime law sets rules for navigation and ships operating in close proximity and what can be taken from shared waters — though disputes remain over deep-sea mining.

The Artemis Accords tried to strike a balance: reaffirming a commitment to the Outer Space Treaty while declaring that countries and companies could extract and use lunar resources without claiming the land beneath them. And that “safety zones” around operations could be declared without becoming national territory.

But it’s a hard line to draw.

The lunar South Pole shows why. The proximity of water ice and continuous sunlight make the region a prime target. But if a company or country begins mining a valuable deposit and declares a safety zone around it, how large can that zone be? And what happens when someone else wants access to the same area?

It’s not a theoretical question.

On August 23 — this past weekend — China planned to launch its uncrewed Chang’e 7 mission destined for the Moon’s Shackleton Crater — the same South Pole region where Artemis IV plans to land astronauts in 2028. As it happened, the launch was scrapped amid poor weather conditions due to Typhoon Narra. China’s space agency pushed the mission to 2027, citing a need for further safety review.

While the delay buys the U.S. some time, it doesn’t change the shape of the contest. Both countries are aiming for the same valuable region of the Moon in the next few years, and eventually one will get there first.

As Scientific American put it, whatever Chang’e 7 finds “could radically reshape a race between China and the U.S. to build bases on the Moon.”

The challenge, then, is to preserve the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on territorial ownership while adding clearer rules for resource extraction — including the size, duration, and overlap of safety zones on the Moon.

“The international community stands at a crossroads,” wrote Adam Urwick and Jessie Osborn of RAND Europe in March 2026. “The technology enabling lunar resource extraction is arriving faster than most anticipated. Policymakers and legislators have a waning opportunity.”

Traffic Control

Low-Earth orbit presents another problem: collisions and debris.

When Sputnik was launched in 1957, low-Earth orbit was a lonely place. Now more than 16,000 satellites circle the planet, up from fewer than 1,000 two decades ago. The number could climb dramatically higher — some estimates project 100,000 by 2030.

The complexity is increasing too: more than 60 nations have satellites in orbit, along with a growing number of commercial operators.

“If you don't have some kind of global governance framework, if you can't prevent satellites from running into each other, then it all becomes pretty pointless pretty quickly,” said Katie Feistel, an assistant policy researcher at RAND.

Some rules exist. The FCC requires U.S. satellites in low-Earth orbit to be removed within five years after the end of their mission. Europe is moving toward stricter debris standards too.

But there’s no universal system for orbit traffic rules, tracking objects, communicating, or when satellites must be removed from orbit. And there’s no overarching plan to clean up space debris.

Commercial aviation works because data is shared and common procedures are followed.

Space, and particularly low-Earth orbit, needs something similar.

Meanwhile, it’s a challenge that grows by the week. This coming week alone, on Sept. 2 and 5, SpaceX is putting another 54 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit. Earlier this year, SpaceX shared even more ambitious plans for as many as one million Starmind satellites — the proposed data centers in space.

The more crowded orbit gets, the less workable a voluntary system becomes.

Making the Rules

There’s also the question of how the rules get made.

The Outer Space Treaty was negotiated multilaterally, through the United Nations, and completed in 1967. It was remarkably quick work — just ten years after Sputnik became the first satellite in space.

And it happened amid Cold War rivalry: the same era in which the U.S. and Soviet Union also agreed to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But today, sweeping multilateral treaties are harder to negotiate, and the U.S. under Trump is hardly trying.

The Artemis Accords are an example of this. Rather than negotiate a new binding global treaty, the U.S. created a non-binding set of principles for countries to join one by one. Seventy have signed on since 2020.

On the one hand, there’s a logic to this. Waiting for more than 100 countries to agree on a new space treaty could take years, even decades. A coalition can establish rules now, put them into practice, and potentially build broad acceptance over time.

But there’s a risk too: rules made by a coalition can become rules only for a coalition.

And that’s increasingly what’s happening.

The New Space Race

China and Russia haven’t joined the Artemis Accords.

Instead, in 2021 Russia joined a project China had already started — the International Lunar Research Station, a rival Moon base. Thirteen countries have joined this coalition.

In 2022, China completed its own space station, Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace,” creating a second major outpost in low-Earth orbit alongside the International Space Station. That same year, China’s Xi Jinping called turning China into a space power an “eternal dream.”

China’s latest five-year plan, announced in March 2026, reaffirmed space as a key priority.

For decades, even as relations frayed on Earth, civil space preserved unusual pockets of international cooperation. The International Space Station has hosted 290 people from 26 countries since 1998, and American and Russian astronauts still work side by side aboard it. U.S. astronauts have flown on Russian Soyuz rockets for more than 30 years, the most recent in July 2026.

But the International Space Station is set to be retired in 2030, and the era of cooperation may be ending with it.

What’s emerging in its place, says Johns Hopkins professor Svetla Ben-Itzhak, are “space blocs.”

One centered on the United States. Another centered on China.

Building the infrastructure to venture deeper into space is one challenge; agreeing on how countries behave once they get there is another.

But there’s one more complication.

It brings us back to the first installment of this series, when SpaceX board member Antonio Gracias, in a CNBC interview, compared the company to the British East India Company.

Founded in 1600, the East India Company became one of the most powerful private enterprises ever created. It raised its own private army, collected taxes across India, minted its own currency, and amassed enormous wealth. It eventually became so powerful, violent, and corrupt that the British government, after decades of scandal, took control and finally dissolved it.

Gracias made the comparison to describe the scale of SpaceX’s ambition. Namely, to colonize space. But the analogy raises a different question: What happens when private companies become powerful enough to write their own rules?

Today, buried in the terms of service for SpaceX’s Starlink is a preview for a possible future beyond the Moon.

It states that users “recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.” Disputes there will be settled by future “self-governing principles” — not by any government on Earth.

The challenge isn’t just about getting to low-Earth orbit, to the Moon’s South Pole, and eventually to Mars. The challenge is deciding who makes the rules once we’re there.

From Sputnik in 1957, to Neil Armstrong in 1969, to the International Space Station in 1998, to SpaceX putting its Falcon 1 rocket into orbit in 2008 and reusable orbital rockets in 2017, spaceflight has repeatedly pushed into territory existing rules weren’t built to handle. Yet, countries have managed to preserve space as a place of unusual cooperation.

This new space age will test whether we can do it again — this time with more countries, more companies, and even more money and power at stake.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Scroll up to find the audio version at the top of this page.

Previous Series —

China’s Rare Earth Dominance | AI Safety | Decline of Local News | End of Amateurism in College Sports | Shrinking Competition in Congress | Social Media and Teen Mental Health | A World Rearming as the Global Rules-Based Order Weakens | America’s National Debt Crisis | Reinventing the American Dream

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in three parts. Learn more.

This is part two in our three-part series on space. We explore how the modern commercial space age came to be — both the context and forces driving toward the creation, quite literally, of a highway to the heavens. If you missed it, here’s part one.

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in weekly installments. You can read or listen to each series — narrated by me — at solvingfor.io, or click the article voiceover at the top of this page.

In 2008 SpaceX proved that a private company could put a rocket into orbit. Then, across three consecutive years, from 2015 through 2017, it proved that a rocket could be brought back to Earth and flown again.

The first was a proof of concept. The next three, taken together, amounted to the hinge moment that brought today’s commercial space age.

SpaceX’s 2008 launch from a remote outpost in the Marshall Islands was a watershed. After three failed attempts, Falcon 1 reached orbit, showing that launching rockets wasn’t just the domain of governments and their traditional contractors. Entrepreneurs and engineers could do it too.

But the breakthrough that best explains the present — when we see multiple launches in a week, thousands of satellites overhead, a private operator landing a spacecraft on the Moon, and credible ambitions for a lasting foothold on the Moon and, eventually, Mars — started with a booster rocket falling out of the night sky.

It was on December 21, 2015 that a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying 11 satellites into orbit. Minutes into its flight, the booster rocket separated and began falling back toward Earth. But instead of crashing into the ocean, it reignited its engines, slowed its descent, and touched down upright a few miles from where it had lifted off. (See the video.)

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed intact.

Subscribe now

It was a big deal. A booster rocket accounts for up to 70 percent of the cost of an entire rocket. If it could be reused, the arithmetic of reaching space would change dramatically.

But landing was only the first step. Next came an even harder mission: landing a rocket on a barge at sea, which is critical for boosters with too little fuel to return to the launch site, and then fly it again.

On April 8, 2016, a Falcon 9 delivering supplies to the International Space Station sent its booster descending toward Earth. The booster touched down, landing upright, on a 170-by-300 foot barge called “Of course I Still Love You,” nearly 200 miles off the Florida coast. (See the video.) The name comes from an Iain M. Banks science fiction novel.

Then, on March 30, 2017, the final piece of the puzzle: the same booster that had landed on the barge the year before was launched again, this time carrying a communications satellite into space. (See the video.) Once again, the booster rocket landed upright on the “Of course I Still Love you” barge.

Land a booster rocket. Recover it. Fly it again.

Reusability had been unlocked, and the cost of going to space was about to drop dramatically.

We Chose To Go

This feat, of course, stood on the shoulders of nearly sixty years of the U.S. space program. NASA was started in 1958, a year after the Soviet Union shocked the world by putting the first satellite — Sputnik — into orbit. To the U.S. this wasn’t a scientific achievement; it was a warning shot.

First came NASA’s Mercury program, then Gemini. John Glenn orbited Earth three times in February 1962. Three years later astronauts were docking spacecraft and walking in space. In between, John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University and gave the program its purpose: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” he declared, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Then came the Apollo program. From July 1969 to December 1972, the U.S. made six successful landings on the moon, resulting in 12 astronauts walking on the lunar surface.

It began with Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon’s Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969. It ended with humanity’s longest stay on the moon to date. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days on the moon, driving a rover through the moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley, venturing miles away from their spacecraft on the rocky lunar landscape, and collecting the largest haul of lunar samples any crew has ever brought home.

When Cernan climbed the ladder on December 14, 1972 to fly home, he became the last human to stand on the Moon.

Share

Each of the missions had one funder and one customer — the U.S. government — and essentially one goal: to beat the Soviets and do it in a public way for the world to see.

The program built the ability to go to the moon seemingly whenever it wished — the only blemish on a trip to the Moon being when the Apollo 13 mission had to abort; astronaut James Lovell famously guided the troubled spacecraft back to Earth.

Yet, after achieving six moon landings in three and a half years, the U.S. lost interest. The final three planned Apollo missions were canceled. People had moved on. No human has set foot on the Moon again.

Stubborn Costs

The Space Shuttle program would come soon after and it was supposed to fix the Apollo program’s biggest flaw: namely, the high costs. The Saturn V rocket, which took astronauts to the moon, had a payload cost of about $5,400 a kilogram to reach orbit, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report. NASA originally pitched the Shuttle as something that would be much cheaper.

The Space Shuttle program flew 135 missions, conducted cutting-edge science in orbit, and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station. But instead of costs going down, they went up — a lot. When the program’s full costs were tallied, the real number came out to roughly $65,400 a kilogram, a dramatically higher cost than the rockets it was meant to replace.

NASA and its longtime contractors — Lockheed Martin, Rockwell International, McDonnell Douglas — didn’t break the costly cycle. By the mid-2010s, the inflation adjusted cost for payloads to low Earth orbit was about $13,600 a kilogram, better than the space shuttle but worse than the days of the Apollo program.

These high costs are why so many of the things explored in Part 1 didn’t exist. A satellite constellation that needs thousands of launches was prohibitively expensive. So was a data center in orbit, or manufacturing pharmaceuticals in microgravity.

Space stayed where it had been: a government project that did much for science, defense and prestige, but not a place to run a business.

Breaking the Cycle

SpaceX’s successful launch in 2008 showed what was possible by putting a privately-funded, lower cost rocket into orbit. And from 2015 through 2017, it showed this could be done at scale by reusing the most costly part of a rocket, the booster.

But it needed to break the high costs that made going to space prohibitive for even most governments. Broadly speaking, SpaceX did it by doing three things.

Subscribe now

One, first principles and vertical integration. Rather than buying parts from a supplier, Musk explored what raw materials are needed to build a part and how much it would cost, versus the price of a manufactured part. He called this the “idiot index.” For instance, if a metal bracket costs $1,000 but the raw aluminum costs only $100, the idiot index is ten. When that number was especially high, he would build it from scratch. In time, he created the capability at SpaceX to build many rocket parts in-house.

Two, rapid iteration and failure. In 2012 and 2013 SpaceX began testing a rocket called the Grasshopper that would climb thousands of feet into the air and come back down, landing upright. Each test flight climbed a little higher than the last. Eventually came attempts at landing on floating barges. The more ambitious the test, the more frequent the crashes. (Watch a SpaceX crash video.) But the learnings came just as fast. By 2017 complete success was achieved.

Third, the now-famous process that Musk calls: “the Algorithm.” This is the five step process used at both SpaceX and Tesla:

• Make requirements less dumb. Each requirement should come with the name of the person who made it. Each requirement should be questioned, no matter who made it.

• Delete the part or process step. Aggressively edit out steps in any process. A report by SpaceX investor Andreessen Horowitz noted that if you do not end up adding back to at least 10 percent of what you deleted, “you did not delete enough.”

• Simplify and optimize. This comes after step two because you don’t want to simplify or optimize a step that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

• Accelerate. After doing the first three, find ways to speed things up.

• Automate. With everything in place and the bugs shaken out, automate everything that’s repeatable. Many organizations move to this step without the first four.

The result is that SpaceX cut the cost of launching a rocket into orbit by more than 95 percent, as compared to the Space Shuttle, according to the CSIS report. The payload cost went from $65,400 a kilogram in the Space Shuttle era to around $2,600 a kilogram on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. And for its Falcon Heavy booster launching massive payloads into orbit, the cost is $1,500 a kilogram.

Not Alone

Of course, it’s tempting to view this solely as a story of entrepreneurs disrupting a calcified system. But it’s important to note that SpaceX wouldn’t be the company it is today without NASA. The reason: NASA funded SpaceX.

One example: in 2008, months after SpaceX put its first rocket into orbit, NASA awarded the company a $1.6 billion contract to send rockets to the International Space Station on resupply missions.

“NASA, and specifically the initial commercial cargo contract, is what saved the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy,” Chris Quilty, who leads a space-focused research firm, told CNBC in 2025.

With such contracts keeping it in business, SpaceX was able to drive down costs so it became a preferred launch provider for anyone wanting to put anything in space. In 2025, SpaceX conducted 165 orbital launches, more than the rest of the world’s launch providers combined, plus five additional test flights with its newer rocket, Starship. (SpaceX has a total of 706 orbital launches as of August 13, 2026; and is growing at a pace of two or more a week.)

And now, with costs much lower, SpaceX is building additional businesses on top of its launch business. In 2019 it began launching its own satellites, called Starlink, into space to offer internet around the world. That business now has some 10,200 broadband satellites orbiting Earth and more than 12 million subscribers in 167 countries, according to its most recent earnings report. And, it hopes, to soon put its own AI data centers, called Starmind, into space too.

Meanwhile, even as SpaceX has become so dominant, it’s not alone in opening access to space.

Exhibit A is Rocket Lab, a company founded in New Zealand by a self-taught engineer named Peter Beck. The company put a rocket into orbit in 2018. Its rocket, called Electron, targets the small-satellite market (as opposed to SpaceX carrying bigger payloads) and has become the most flown small launch vehicle in the world. To date, it’s had more than 90 successful missions to orbit.

The likes of Astra and Firefly Aerospace are in the rocket launch business as well, with Astra putting two rockets into orbit and Firefly putting three into orbit successfully. In March 2025 Firefly did the feat of putting a lunar lander on the Moon.

Meanwhile, SpaceX took another step reusing rockets faster and more cheaply. On Oct. 13, 2024 it caught its Super Heavy booster — which powers its new Starship rocket — out of the air. Instead of landing on land or a barge, it was caught by two mechanical arms — called “chopsticks” — on the launch tower itself. (See video below.) With this, there is no towing a booster back from sea or trucking it from a landing pad. It returns to the tower that it launched from, ready to be inspected and flown again.

It’s the same idea that started with the Falcon 9 in 2015 — land it, recover it, fly it again — but pushed one step further by catching it before it even touches the ground.

Ultimately, the plan is spaceflight that’s not dramatically different from commercial aviation. In SpaceX’s case that means going from twice a week to daily — or more. In February, Musk put a number to it, writing on X: “it will get really nutty when Starship is launching every hour in 3 years.”

The highway to the heavens is quite literally being built. The question is what to do with it — and what could go wrong. That’s next.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Scroll up to find the audio version at the top of this page.

Previous Series —

China’s Rare Earth Dominance | AI Safety | Decline of Local News | End of Amateurism in College Sports | Shrinking Competition in Congress | Social Media and Teen Mental Health | A World Rearming as the Global Rules-Based Order Weakens | America’s National Debt Crisis | Reinventing the American Dream

Solving For takes on one hard problem at a time — unpacking the stakes, exploring the forces behind it, and surfacing real paths forward. Each series unfolds in weekly installments. Learn more.

This week we launch a new series on space.

(If you’re new here, Solving For explores one pressing challenge at a time — the stakes, the forces driving it, and what a path forward might look like.)

The modern space race is accelerating fast. Rocket launches used to be major events; now they happen twice a week. Two decades ago, fewer than 1,000 active satellites orbited Earth. Today, there are more than 16,000 — with SpaceX proposing a million more. Last year, a startup landed a commercial spacecraft on the Moon.

This mad dash for the heavens isn’t being led by governments, the way it was at the dawn of the space age. It’s being led by private companies — run by entrepreneurs and scientists, moving at their own pace, answering to their own boards.

For this series, we’re asking two questions. What are the ways going to space could benefit all of us here on Earth? And — the treaty meant to govern all of it hasn’t been meaningfully updated in nearly sixty years. So who, if anyone, is writing the new rules?

This is our tenth series. You can find previous series and learn more about Solving For at solvingfor.io. You can also listen to this story — narrated by me — by selecting the voiceover at the top of this page.

(Was this forwarded to you? Sign up.)

The British East India Company was one of the most powerful private enterprises ever created.

Founded in 1600 by roughly 200 investors, it received a monopoly from the British crown to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. Over more than two and a half centuries, the largely unregulated company — run out of a small London office — expanded across the Indian subcontinent and beyond. It built a private army larger than Britain’s standing army, minted its own currency, collected its own taxes, waged wars and governed tens of millions of people. Along the way, it made shareholders fabulously rich, creating fortunes that reshaped Britain’s social order.

Edmund Burke called it “a state in the guise of a merchant.”

Eventually, it became too much: too powerful, too violent, too self-serving, too corrupt. After years of scandal and outrage, the British government stripped the company of its military and political powers in 1858. Parliament formally dissolved the company in 1874.

But before it became an instrument of conquest, the East India Company was something simpler: a platform. It moved goods, capital, and people across distances few could otherwise cross — and from that reach it created forms of commerce that had never existed before.

Subscribe now

A century and a half after the company’s demise, on the day SpaceX went public in June — in the largest stock offering in history — one of the space company’s longest-serving board members went on CNBC and told viewers what investors were buying.

“Think about this as some combination of owning the British East India Company, as you colonize both the solar system and then beyond, and the Moon mission,” said Antonio Gracias, a SpaceX board member and early investor.

Where the East India Company built a platform for trade and settlement east of the Cape of Good Hope, SpaceX is building one for the far reaches above. Instead of ships sailing between London and the Indian Ocean, its reusable rockets make one trip after another to space.

In the first half of 2026 alone, SpaceX launched 78 rockets into space — what was once a momentous event now takes place about every two days. And while SpaceX is dominant, it isn’t alone. Dozens of companies - including Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, Blue Origin and Firefly Aerospace, which put a spacecraft on the moon last year, are racing toward the same goal: making access to space dramatically cheaper, faster and routine.

Yet spaceflight has reached escape velocity while the rules meant to govern it — scant treaties, thin law, limited oversight — remain on the launch pad. One example: more than a million fragments orbit earth, and no single authority is responsible for keeping spacecraft from colliding with them.

The East India Company traded tea, silk, and opium — and ultimately layered war and conquest onto the platform it had built. The question this series asks is what will be built on the new platform reaching toward the heavens. What problems will it solve, what products will it create, and how can it make life better back home on Earth? And, on a frontier with no real rulebook, how can it happen without something going seriously wrong?

For Earth’s Benefit

From the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, space belonged almost entirely to governments. It was too costly and risky for any single entrepreneur or company to take on. That began to change on a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands in September 2008, when SpaceX became the first private company to launch a rocket — its Falcon 1 — into orbit.

That day — the fourth, and likely final, attempt by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to put Falcon 1 into orbit — proved to be “an inciting moment,” wrote Ashlee Vance in his book, When The Heavens Went on Sale.

Space shifted from an industry dominated by a handful of slow-moving government operators and contractors to one crowded with private companies eager to launch at an ever faster clip. In the nearly two decades since Falcon 1 reached orbit, dozens of businesses backed by billions of dollars in venture capital, have built rockets, satellites, lunar landers, orbital factories and space stations.

Consider the change in scale: fewer than 1,000 active satellites orbited Earth in 2008; today, there are more than 16,000. More are coming, as China ramps up and private companies multiply. And in January, SpaceX — the market leader by far — filed plans with the U.S. government for its most ambitious project yet: a constellation of one million solar-powered, orbital AI data centers.

Subscribe now

From the beginning, in science fiction and in real life, people have had many reasons to go to space.

There is the pull of discovery epitomized by Gene Roddenbery’s Star Trek and its mission to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” There is national security and national supremacy. In May 1961, less than two months after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, President John F. Kennedy — fearful that the U.S. was falling behind — called on the country to put a man on the moon “before this decade is out.” And there is the ambition to make humanity multi-planetary, a vision that runs from Isaac Asimov’s science fiction writings to Elon Musk’s plans today.

But for many companies in today’s space race — and the focus of this series — the animating force is more immediate: The best way to improve life here on Earth is to build something out there.

Rocket Lab, which reached orbit in 2018 and launched many missions since, expresses its vision in ten words: “We open access to space to improve life on Earth.” Planet Labs, operator of more than 200 satellites, says its mission is to “use space to help life on Earth.” Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket first reached orbit in 2025, uses the tag line: “For the benefit of Earth.”

Bezos himself has described a future in which mining, large-scale manufacturing, chemical production take place in space, with finished goods shipped back to earth.

“We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space,” Bezos said. “And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.”

Problems to Solve

Space is already embedded in daily life. Satellites feed the forecasts that farmers plant crops around and insurers use to price policies. Shipping companies track vessels and cargo from orbit. Disaster agencies watch wildfires and hurricanes unfold in real time. GPS tracks Uber rides.

The modern space race could expand that role dramatically — in some cases, it already has.

The Digital Divide

Roughly a quarter of the world’s population still lacks reliable internet access. The gap is especially wide in rural and hard to reach places, where the economics of laying fiber and building cell towers often don’t work. That may be about to change.

Starlink, SpaceX’s broadband satellite network, first started putting satellites into space in 2019 and now has more than 10,200 circling the globe. It has passed 12 million subscribers and operates in 167 countries. Competitors are coming: Amazon is building its own broadband constellation, called Amazon Leo, though it remains far behind Starlink. AST SpaceMobile, meanwhile, is building a satellite network that connects directly to cell phones, with no dish or terminal required. It now has 13 satellites in orbit with a target of more than 40 by end of the 2026.

Space may be where that thirty-year connectivity gap finally closes.

Seeing the Earth

The same orbital vantage point that feeds weather forecasts lets us do something else: see the world as it is.

Planet Labs — now known simply as Planet — was founded in 2010 to put low-cost satellites, called Doves, into orbit and photograph every part of the Earth, every day. The theory was that seeing change as it happened could prompt people to act. The company declared its satellites could “monitor deforestation in Africa, track illegal fishing, and monitor ice caps melting.”

That kind of view had largely been limited to governments and intelligence organizations — and even they lacked a continuous, daily picture of the entire planet. Planet Labs made it widely available. The company now operates more than 200 satellites and images the whole Earth every day, influencing work from oil trading to human-rights advocacy.

The impact became especially vivid in February 2022. As Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border, Planet’s satellites captured the buildup before the invasion and then documented the war day by day. The images helped investigative outlets like Bellingcat track troop movements, possible war crimes and smuggled shipments using a tool once reserved for spy agencies.

Manufacturing

Some materials crystallize differently in microgravity, forming structures that cannot be easily replicated on Earth. Why not manufacture pharmaceuticals in space?

That is what Varda Space Industries, founded in 2021, is trying to do. It has already demonstrated the basic process: launching a capsule aboard a SpaceX rocket, having it released into orbit, growing pharmaceutical crystals in microgravity, and returning them intact to Earth.

In May, Varda struck its first deal with a major pharmaceutical company, United Therapeutics, to study whether microgravity can improve a drug formulation for a rare lung disease. The first flight is scheduled for early 2027. Nothing has been approved, and no patient has taken a medicine manufactured this way. But for the first time, a pharmaceutical company is spending its own money to find out whether the idea works.

Data Centers

AI data centers are straining power grids and water supplies so severely that more than a dozen states are weighing restrictions on their construction. A solution: data centers in space.

In November 2025 Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, an effort to place satellites carrying the company’s AI processors in orbit, where they could draw on abundant solar power. A prototype may launch as early as 2027.

SpaceX is moving on an even faster timeline and at far greater scale. Up to a million of the space-based AI data centers, called Starmind, are planned. On SpaceX’s first investor call — on August 4 — since going public, Musk said he expects to “start launching these next year.”

Warning Signs

In the digital era, the speed of change has repeatedly outpaced government’s ability to keep up. Space is no exception. The rules governing the new platform being built were written largely for a different era. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty remains the cornerstone of international space law. It declares that the exploration and use of space should benefit all countries and bars nations from placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in space. It has been ratified by 118 countries, including every major country operating in space.

But the treaty was built for a two-superpower contest between governments, not a field crowded with commercial operators pursuing orbital resources, the Moon and beyond.

The last major space treaty, the Moon Agreement, was adopted in 1979. Only a small number of countries have ratified it. Since then, countries have relied largely on national laws and nonbinding international guidelines.

Nowhere is the gap more vivid than in space traffic. There is still no global mechanism for coordinating which spacecraft may be about to collide — nothing like an air-traffic-control system for orbit. Instead, warnings and responses can be entirely ad hoc.

Rosanna Hoffman, who leads space law and sustainability at the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, described a case on the podcast Freakonomics Radio that shows just how thin the safety net can be. Returning from meetings with space officials in Ghana in June 2025, she was in the Brussels airport and her cell phone rang. On the other end was a frantic space official from Malaysia, who said one of the country’s few satellites was on a collision course with a North Korean satellite. But Malaysia had no diplomatic relations with North Korea — and therefore no diplomatic channel to its government. U.N. staff scrambled to reach North Korean officials.

“Luckily, really in the 11th hour,” Hoffman recalled, “they were able to move the satellite, and collision was avoided.”

Collisions have happened. In February 2009, Iridium 33, an active U.S. commercial satellite, accidentally struck Cosmos 2251, a defunct Russian satellite, over Siberia. It was the first collision between two intact satellites. The impact produced some 2,300 trackable fragments across low Earth orbit.

Then, in November 2021, Russia deliberately destroyed one of its own defunct satellites in a missile test. The blast created 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to climb into their docked spacecraft, ready for a quick departure if needed, as the debris cloud passed nearby.

Such events raise the specter of the Kessler syndrome. NASA scientist Donald Kessler described how one collision could lead to another and then another, each scattering debris that causes the next, until an entire band of orbit becomes unusable for generations. The possibility is no longer dismissed as merely theoretical. Starlink satellites alone performed more than 355,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the past year — more than three times their 2024 total.

The debris problem does not remain in orbit. Objects are falling back to earth at a rate of roughly one a week, according to The New York Times. Many burn up completely during reentry, but not all. In 2024, a discarded battery from the International Space Station crashed through the roof of a home in Naples, Florida. A large rocket component struck farmland in Kenya. SpaceX rocket fragments have landed in Poland.

The risk to any one person remains small, but it is rising. One FAA study projected that, if current trends hold, debris from reentering satellites could cause an injury or death roughly once every two years by 2035.

Which brings us back to the British East India Company — the company Antonio Gracias, a longtime SpaceX investor and board member, compared SpaceX to. It began as a platform, moving goods, capital, and people across distances nothing else could cross. In time, it became something else — something Parliament ultimately dismantled by force of law.

The modern space race could transform life on Earth. The question is whether we can realize that promise without allowing the platform — and the powers building it — to outrun the rules meant to govern them.

Next up: How we got here — how launching a rocket, once a national feat, became almost routine. None of it happened by accident.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: the stakes, the forces driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Each series unfolds in weekly installments.

Previous series have examined China’s rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, America’s national debt crisis and — most recently - renewing the American Dream. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

This week we return to The Open Thread, our bridge between series — a space to update past stories and experiment. For this installment we turn back to AI Safety, a subject we first tackled last fall with our three-part series, “The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety.” Last month we shared a conversation I had at Faena Rose with Tristan Harris, a leading voice on the dangers presented by the way AI is being deployed. And this week, the news handed us a real-world case — seven days that captured the full scope of the challenge.

If you’re new here, Solving For is a newsletter that aims to understand the many challenges we face by going deep on one at a time — the stakes, the forces behind it, and the credible paths forward. Our last series tackled the American Dream. The next one: Space.

If you prefer to listen, find the audio narrated by me at the top of this page. Every Solving For series is available to read or listen to — I narrate each one myself — at solvingfor.io.

In one week this month, the high stakes and steep challenges of building AI safely unfolded like a three-act play. First, the warning. Then the complication. Finally, confirmation.

Act I

On July 14, Demis Hassabis — Google DeepMind CEO and co-founder, Nobel laureate, and AI pioneer — delivered the warning, publishing an essay titled “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age.”

Hassabis wrote that humanity is “probably only a few short years away” from Artificial General Intelligence, when AI models will match the human brain’s cognitive abilities.

The magnitude, he declared, will be unprecedented. He put the scale at ten times the Industrial Revolution, arriving ten times as fast. He compared it to the discovery of electricity and the harnessing of fire. The possibilities he laid out: accelerated drug discovery, new clean energy sources, novel materials.

But, he warned, as we get closer, the dangers become greater. Much greater.

Subscribe now

The two primary concerns: misuse and loss of control.

The misuse of AI by people to hack bank accounts at scale, or design bioweapons. The loss of control when AI becomes so powerful it acts on its own, learns on its own (so-called “recursive self-improvement”), and even refuses direction.

Urgent action is needed, Hassabis wrote, to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. Time and space are needed to get this next crucial step right, he declared, before warning: “Currently, as a field and as a wider society, we aren’t doing that.”

These are not the words of an AI doomer — but the CEO of one of the world's leading AI labs.

To get this consequential step right, Hassabis proposed the creation of a Standards Body, led by the US, to develop assessment protocols and review new models before they are released. This, in turn, could lead to the creation of a shared global framework for AI models around the world.

We must use this narrow window, Hassabis urged, before AGI arrives.

Act II

Two days later, on July 16, came the complication. Finding common ground ran up against the reality of this century’s fiercest global rivalry.

Beijing startup Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, an AI model that by one measure — front-end coding — rated number one in the world, more capable than either Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 or OpenAI’s highest-performing model, GPT-5.6 Sol, which ranked second and third.

The implications go far beyond a benchmark win. The reason is that Kimi K3 is open-weight, meaning Moonshot AI plans to give it away for free — anyone with sufficient computing power can download and run it at no cost. That’s not the case with the top-flight models of Claude, ChatGPT, or Google DeepMind’s Gemini. That difference cuts to the heart of U.S. frontier labs’ business model: why would a company pay a subscription for AI coding if another company — in this case, a Chinese competitor — offers a comparable, even superior, product for free?

The answer is that many U.S. companies aren’t. One example: San Francisco-based food delivery company DoorDash uses an Anthropic model for its cutting-edge AI tasks but Moonshot AI’s less costly models for other work, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This has raised the question of whether U.S. companies should be allowed to use Chinese AI models at all. The U.S. has, for instance, forbidden Chinese car manufacturers, like BYD, from selling cars in the states. But no such restriction exists for Chinese AI models like DeepSeek or Z.ai — anyone, anywhere, can use them, though not without limits: ask Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 about Tiananmen Square in 1989, and it won’t answer.

China’s AI advances have come despite U.S. export controls restricting the sale of advanced chips to China. But U.S. frontier AI companies have presented another theory for China closing the gap so fast: “distillation.” This is when a less capable AI is built by using outputs from an existing, stronger model. Anthropic charged that China’s Alibaba had attempted what it called “the largest known distillation” attack it’s ever encountered.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared sanctions against China “will be on the table” in response to large-scale distillation attacks. Bipartisan legislation is percolating in Congress.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, meanwhile, argued this week that U.S. companies should not be forbidden from using Chinese AI models, and that they don’t present a threat to U.S. frontier labs. “There’s no scenario where China runs U.S. companies off the road,” he told Axios.

But the point is this: amid the worries about who’s ahead, who’s distilling, whether U.S. companies should even be using Chinese models, one question got lost. It was the one Hassabis had raised two days earlier: not about who wins the race, but whether anyone is safely steering it.

Act III

Then five days later, on July 21, came the confirmation.

OpenAI disclosed that two of its own AI models, which it was testing internally, had escaped and hacked into the servers of Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI models and datasets, in order to get the answers to the test they were being given.

If the two AI models were people, it would be like two students breaking into a teacher’s locked desk to get the answers to a quiz.

How it happened is that OpenAI was testing the models in a “sandbox,” an isolated area walled off from the internet. Or so they thought. The AI models breached the wall and — on their own — figured out a way to connect to the internet. From there, the two AI models navigated to Hugging Face, presumably thinking that’s where the answers to the test could be found, and broke into Hugging Face’s computer systems, carrying out more than 17,000 actions.

Hugging Face caught the intrusion first, before discovering that they were OpenAI models. OpenAI released a statement calling it an “unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.”

Share

What makes it so extraordinary is the absence of a human trying to do bad things. OpenAI had deliberately lowered the models' safety guardrails to stress-test them, but no person directed the models to attack Hugging Face specifically. They were simply pursuing a specific goal — to pass the test — with such focus and determination that they found a way onto the open internet and hacked into Hugging Face. It was a means to an end.

With misuse and loss of control representing two primary concerns, the single incident represented both. Humans lost control of two AI models, which acted on their own. Then misuse was the result.

Ultimately, no real damage was done. The OpenAI models were trying to pass a test. But the capability it revealed previews a result that could genuinely be destructive. AI models that find their own way past walls that human experts thought were secure, in pursuit of a goal as trivial as passing a test, raise an obvious and uncomfortable question: what happens when the goal isn’t trivial, and no one’s watching as closely?

Epilogue

Which brings us back to Hassabis, just a week before the zero-day breach was revealed. He closed his essay by saying the future isn’t fixed — that AGI could unlock a new era of scientific discovery and human flourishing, if we get this transition right. Nothing about these seven days suggests anyone’s found the answer yet.

In our previous three-part series on this question, The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety, the solution we hit upon was found in nuclear non-proliferation and 1968. For some two decades, Washington and Moscow treated nuclear weapons as the other side’s problem — as a race to be won, a threat to be outpaced, not a danger they shared. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, only became possible once that framing broke.

AI hasn’t made that shift yet. Hassabis’s Standards Body proposal is a step toward a 1968 moment. This time, though, it would be the U.S. and China that would need to sketch out shared rules governing AI’s deployment and growth. Hassabis said the window to do that is closing as the arrival of AGI approaches. The Hugging Face breach makes the point plain: this isn't one country's problem to solve. It's everyone’s.

Whether AI makes the turn that nuclear weapons eventually made — from rivalry to shared restraint to global accord — is still the question, and this week’s answer was rivalry. The window that Hassabis described is still open.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For explores credible solutions to the challenges we face — one pressing problem at a time, through deeply reported series that trace the stakes, the forces behind it, and ways forward.

Previous series have examined China’s rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, America’s national debt crisis, and — most recently — how to renew the American Dream for a new era. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

This week, we conclude our series on the American Dream.

(If you’re new here, Solving For is a newsletter exploring one pressing problem at a time — the stakes, the forces driving it, and what credible solutions might look like.)

In part one, we unpacked the problem: Upward mobility has weakened dramatically over the past half-century, and it’s weighing heavily on Americans. A poll last year found that nearly 7 in 10 believe the American Dream no longer holds true — or never did.

In part two, we examined how we got here: automation and trade eliminating middle-income jobs that once served as rungs on the ladder to the middle class; the soaring cost of college and the student debt that followed; tax policy favoring investment over work; and declining trust in the very institutions needed to build things back.

Now, as America searches for the shape of its next political era, it must find a way to make broad upward mobility—the heart of the American Dream—its defining purpose.

So this week, we turn to solutions: five pillars for renewing the American Dream in a new era, as artificial intelligence promises extraordinary abundance while threatening to widen the divides already holding people back.

You can listen to this Solving For story—narrated by me—by selecting the voiceover at the top of this page. You can also visit solvingfor.io, where all narrated stories and previous series are organized under the Listen tab.

(Was this forwarded to you? Sign up.)

“I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over.”

That is how Mary Antin began The Promised Land, her 1912 memoir of coming to America. Born into a Jewish family in the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus, she arrived in Boston at thirteen speaking little English. Public schools and the Boston Public Library changed the course of her life.

By the end of her memoir, Antin believed America had given her something greater than economic opportunity: the freedom to imagine a future unconstrained by her past.

She put it in a single sentence: “Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.”

Nearly twenty years later, historian James Truslow Adams quoted that line in The Epic of America, the Depression-era book that introduced the phrase “the American Dream.”

To Adams, Antin’s declaration captured the nation’s defining promise: not that success was guaranteed or measured by vast wealth, but that in America, your future did not have to be determined by your past.

It’s a measurable promise. Roughly nine in ten children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. Today, that figure is about 50 percent — little better than a coin flip. From 9 in 10, to 1 in 2.

As America begins its next 250 years, the challenge is becoming more urgent.

In his 2026 letter to investors, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink named three forces shaping the economy. One was shifting global trade. The other two strike directly at the American Dream: “the inequality that’s risen over the past generation,” and “how AI threatens to widen the gap.”

The question, then, is not how to restore the American Dream. It’s how to renew it for a new era.

Toward a New Political Order

America’s enduring strength has always been twofold: innovating and growing, while spreading opportunity so each generation can climb higher than the last. It continues to excel at the former, but struggles at the latter.

That rupture has reshaped American politics. We’re now in what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson call in their book, Abundance, “a messy interregnum between political orders.”

Historian Gary Gerstle defines a political order as a governing consensus both parties largely accept. The New Deal order, born in the 1930s, held that capitalism required government oversight and basic economic security. Franklin Roosevelt built it, but Republicans largely accepted its foundations. Eisenhower preserved Social Security. Nixon proposed versions of guaranteed income and universal health insurance.

Beginning in the late 1970s, that consensus gave way to the neoliberal order: markets allocate resources better than government, regulation lighter, trade and globalization expanded, taxes lowered. Ronald Reagan became its defining figure, but Bill Clinton entrenched the order, embracing free trade, welfare reform, financial deregulation, and declaring “the era of big government is over.”

That order fractured in the 2010s in the wake of Iraq War, 2008 financial crisis, globalization, and deepening inequality. Too many communities and workers felt left behind. The American Dream — that each generation should do better than the last — became less certain, fueling populist revolts across the political spectrum.

Today we’re living through the collapse of one political order before another has fully emerged.

If the American Dream is to endure, the next political order must once again make broad upward mobility—not simply economic growth—its defining purpose. That search doesn’t divide neatly along partisan lines. It points toward five enduring pillars: ownership; building, not blocking; connections to opportunity; fairness; and trust.

None of these ideas is new. Some call for more government, others for less. What unites them is not ideology, but evidence.

Each is, in its own way, an opportunity—as Mary Antin wrote—to be “made over.”

Ownership

If the next American Dream is about broadening opportunity, it must also broaden ownership. One way to do that: give every American child a stake in the country’s future.

On July 4, the federal government began seeding an investment account for every newborn. Invest America accounts — so-called “Trump Accounts” — provide a one-time $1,000 contribution invested in a stock index, with families, employers, and others able to contribute up to $5,000 a year. Philanthropists and businesses have pledged more, including Michael and Susan Dell, who committed $6.25 billion for children in lower-income communities.

The premise is simple: assets shape lives differently than income. A nest egg can help pay for college, buy a first home, start a business, fund retirement. It also gives young people something they know is theirs and can build on.

The idea stretches back centuries. In 1797, Thomas Paine proposed a birthright endowment for every young adult, funded by inherited wealth. Nearly two hundred years later, sociologist Michael Sherraden argued in his 1991 book Assets and the Poor that owning assets changes how people think about the future. In 2010 economists Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. developed the modern idea of “baby bonds” as a way to narrow wealth inequality. In 2023 Connecticut became the first state to try it, seeding $3,200 for each Medicaid-covered baby.

The strongest evidence comes from Oklahoma. In 2007, researchers randomly assigned newborns to either receive a seeded college savings account, or no account. The study, SEED for Oklahoma Kids, was designed by Sherraden’s Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. It found that children with investment accounts didn’t just accumulate more savings — they also showed greater hope, stronger educational expectations, and fewer behavioral problems, while their parents were more likely to prepare for college.

The evidence suggests these programs work best when they are universal, automatic, and progressive. Invest America accounts are universal and moving toward automatic enrollment. What’s missing is progressivity. Every child receives the same $1,000 regardless of family wealth, allowing those with the greatest means to build much larger balances over time.

To endure over the long term, the program will likely need a name that isn’t polarizing. But, in many ways, the idea is a twenty-first century complement to Social Security. Roosevelt’s landmark program, signed into law in 1935, provided income at the end of life. Baby bonds seek to provide capital at the beginning.

Building, Not Blocking

Opportunity expands when it’s easier to build. It generates more jobs and investment, while greater supply can lower prices.

In June 2025, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed sweeping legislation exempting many housing projects from the state’s landmark environmental review law while streamlining approval of infrastructure projects, calling it part of “a budget that builds.” He credited the shift to Abundance, the 2025 book by Klein and Thompson, which argues that decades of well-intentioned regulation have made it unnecessarily difficult to build the homes, energy projects, and infrastructure people need.

The result: fewer homes, higher prices, and diminished opportunity.

Since the 1970s, local land-use rules have made housing slower and more expensive to build, contributing to a shortage of roughly six million homes, according to the American Enterprise Institute. The conservative AEI’s prescription—smaller lots, by-right approval for duplexes and townhomes, streamlined permitting—is similar to the Abundance movement’s, despite arriving from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

A similar principle applies to people’s ability to move into new work.

Occupational licensing serves an important purpose: protecting the public by ensuring professionals meet minimum standards. But licensing has expanded well beyond health and safety. In some states an aspiring manicurist must complete hundreds of hours of training before legally earning a paycheck. Today, occupational licensing covers nearly one-quarter of the U.S. workforce, up from about 5 percent in the 1950s.

Economists Morris Kleiner and Ming Xu found that workers in licensed occupations are 24 percent less likely to switch careers than comparable workers, suggesting licensing can become a barrier to new opportunities. The Obama administration reached much the same conclusion in a 2015 review, finding that excessive licensing requirements can raise prices and restrict employment opportunities.

Taken together, these examples suggest an emerging consensus across the political spectrum: expanding opportunity often begins by reducing unnecessary barriers — to building homes and infrastructure, and to building a career.

Connections to Opportunity

Mobility depends on more than economic growth. It requires connecting people to opportunity.

Economist Raj Chetty, who directs Harvard’s Opportunity Insights lab, has shown that upward mobility varies enormously from one neighborhood to the next, even within the same city. Much of that difference is social isolation: children, growing up just a few miles apart, have access to very different networks and opportunities.

But the right interventions, Chetty’s research shows, can break that isolation.

A recent example comes from HOPE VI, the federal program that spent $17 billion replacing 262 distressed public housing projects across the U.S. with mixed-income developments. In a January 2026 paper, Opportunity Insights found that the redevelopment itself did little for adults who already lived there. But their children did dramatically better: kids who spent their entire childhood in a revitalized development earned roughly 50 percent more as adults than children who stayed in unreformed public housing.

The mechanism wasn’t the buildings, it was who lived near them. Before revitalization, researchers described these sites as islands of disadvantage, where kids in public housing interacted almost exclusively with other kids in public housing. HOPE VI drew higher-income residents into the same neighborhood, and that proximity broke the isolation. Children began forming friendships across income lines, and those cross-class connections are what the data ties to their later success.

“Place matters for mobility,” Chetty said. “But to a large extent this is because some places are more connected than others.”

Fairness

A thriving economy should reward work as much as wealth. Yet income from work is taxed more heavily than investment.

A worker’s wages are taxed at a top federal rate of 37 percent. Long-term capital gains—the profits from selling stocks, real estate, or a business—are taxed at 20 percent. That gap has become much more consequential as more fortunes are built by stock holdings than paychecks.

Journalist David Leonhardt, in his book Ours Was the Shining Future, argues that this is one of the defining fault lines in modern American capitalism. Over the past half-century, the economy has increasingly rewarded ownership over work. The tax code is hardly the only reason, but it is one of the clearest expressions of that choice.

Vinod Khosla — one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors, who recently agreed to purchase the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks — argued in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal that preferential tax treatment for capital made sense when investment was scarce. That world is disappearing. And it’s particularly the case as AI increases the returns to capital while reducing the relative value of labor, he argues. As a result, he said, capital gains and ordinary income should be “taxed the same.”

“We need to tilt the seesaw toward labor,” he added.

OpenAI made a similar case in an April white paper, Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First, warning that AI could expand corporate profits and capital gains while shrinking wage income and the payroll taxes that fund programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

But the deeper issue isn’t just economic. It’s about fairness too.

Every political order ultimately depends on people believing the rules are fair. So does the American Dream. Upward mobility is built not only on opportunity, but on the conviction that hard work still gives ordinary people a fair shot at getting ahead.

Trust

Trust is what makes the four pillars possible. Unlike tax rates or investment accounts, trust cannot be created by legislation. It is earned slowly—through governments that keep their promises, institutions that work, and communities where people experience competence and fairness in everyday life.

One way to catalyze it is through an idea championed by the late Senator John McCain. In 2020, two years after his death, the McCain-Reed Commission published the Inspired to Serve report, which found that the desire to serve — whether military, national, or public service — outpaces the opportunity to do so. Its central recommendation: expand access so 5 million Americans begin some form of service each year by 2031, including a nearly tenfold increase in national service slots.

The case isn't sentimental. Chetty's research shows that economic connectedness — friendships that cross class lines — drives upward mobility. National service creates exactly that kind of contact by design: people who would otherwise never meet, working side by side. Over time, it builds trust itself, reinforcing that we’re all part of the American enterprise.

Larry Fink’s warning is worth returning to. Artificial intelligence promises extraordinary abundance. It also threatens to concentrate wealth and opportunity on an even greater scale. Whether AI expands the American Dream or deepens its decline will depend less on the technology itself than on the choices we make about the society that surrounds it.

Every idea here — broadening ownership, making it easier to build, creating more pathways to opportunity, ensuring fair rules, building trust — ultimately depends on people believing those systems can work for them. Without that confidence, even the best reforms will struggle to take root.

Mary Antin believed “the whole majestic past” belonged to her, and so did “the shining future.” James Truslow Adams recognized she was describing something larger than one immigrant’s experience. She was describing America’s promise.

The American Dream isn’t something we preserve. It’s something we build, together, every generation.

Put another way: Ours is the whole majestic past. And ours can still be the shining future.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Each series unfolds in weekly installments.

Previous series have examined China’s rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America’s national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

This week, we continue our series on the American Dream. It feels like the right conversation to have as America marks its 250th birthday — a moment to celebrate our country's extraordinary achievements and reflect on one of its defining ideals. (If you’re new here, Solving For is a weekly newsletter examining one pressing problem at a time — what it is, why it happened, and what credible solutions might look like.)

Last week, we looked at the problem. The data showed that upward mobility has weakened dramatically over the past half century.

This week, we turn to how we got here — the context and forces at work. Next week, we'll explore ways forward.

You can read or listen to every Solving For series — narrated by me — at solvingfor.io. Click the article voiceover at the top of this page to listen to this story.

Learn more, and find previous series. (Was this forwarded to you? Sign up.)

David Leonhardt had a question.

The New York Times writer wanted to know: did American children still end up better off than their parents?

He put it to Raj Chetty, then a young economist. Chetty was one of a handful of researchers given access to a massive database of anonymized IRS records that had long been off-limits. But the records only went back to the early 1990s. Nowhere near enough to compare one generation against the next.

Chetty said he and his colleagues would see what they could do.

Their answer: pair decades-old census records with the newer tax data. Track what a child’s household earned while they were growing up. Then find that same child’s income as an adult. Adjust for inflation. Repeat it for millions of families.

It was detective work in the social sciences. He had two sets of records nobody had cross-referenced at this scale, and a hunch that combining them could reveal something new.

The method worked.

What it uncovered laid bare one of the defining challenges facing America today.

Subscribe now

For children born in 1940, roughly nine in 10 grew up to earn more than their parents. For children born in 1984, only about half did.

Put differently, what was once a near certainty had become little better than a coin flip.

The findings were published in Science in 2017. Leonhardt would later tell the story in his 2023 book, “Ours Was the Shining Future.”

The numbers are worth sitting with, especially this week.

America was founded on the radical idea that opportunity — not birth — should determine a person’s future. Yet as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, the evidence is that birth circumstances have become more predictive of where Americans end up.

Progress has been America’s “lingua franca,” Leonhardt wrote in his book. The U.S. origin story is about throwing off a great power, then eclipsing every other one that came after. Defeating fascism and communism. Putting a man on the moon. Creating the internet. Perhaps most impressive of all, building a massive middle class.

That spirit hasn’t disappeared. America remains the world’s leading engine of entrepreneurship, attracting 64 percent of global startup funding in 2025, up from 56 percent the year before. The country continues to invent, build, and generate enormous wealth. What it no longer does as reliably is spread opportunity broadly enough to ensure that the next generation does better than the last.

Chetty's longitudinal study quantified that shift. It showed that one of America’s defining promises had been interrupted.

The question was why?

Rungs on the Ladder Disappeared

The American Dream has not disappeared. We all know people who represent it, or are on their way to achieving it. But over decades, the Dream has been weakened by powerful forces. Five stand out.

After World War II, the American economy produced something unusual in human history: millions of workers without college degrees could still climb into the middle class. Manufacturing, construction, clerical work and skilled trades provided stable, middle-income jobs that allowed Americans to buy a home, raise a family, and expect their children to do even better. They were the rungs on the ladder.

Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 2000s, many of those rungs disappeared.

Two forces removed them. The first was technology. Computers and automation didn’t simply replace workers — they replaced specific kinds of work. Routine tasks, whether performed on assembly lines or in back offices, were the most vulnerable. What grew instead were jobs at the top and bottom of the labor market: high-skill work requiring education, and low-paying service work that could not easily be automated. The middle hollowed out. Labor economists call this phenomenon job polarization: the rungs didn’t just get harder to climb — they stopped existing.

The second force was trade. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson tracked what happened in communities most exposed to Chinese manufacturing competition. Local labor markets adjusted remarkably slowly. Wages stayed depressed and employment stayed low at least a decade after the shock arrived, or never recovered.

Most research agrees automation did more national damage than trade. A Ball State University analysis attributes 85 percent of manufacturing job losses to productivity gains, not trade. But trade had outsized, life-altering impacts in specific towns and regions, shuttering plants and wiping out jobs. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found that Chinese import competition, while responsible for a smaller slice of manufacturing losses nationally — roughly a quarter, by their count — hit specific communities all at once, and many of those places are still recovering.

For decades, America had relied on millions of middle-skill jobs to turn economic growth into upward mobility. As those jobs disappeared — whether through automation, trade, or both — so did one of the country’s most reliable pathways to the American Dream.

The Credential Bottleneck

When the rungs disappeared, something had to replace them. College filled the gap, becoming the default pathway to the middle class — the most reliable route to upward mobility.

The problem was that the ticket got more expensive at the same time everyone decided they needed one — and the most valuable seats barely expanded to meet the demand.

In 1980, attending a four-year college cost roughly $10,000 a year, including tuition, fees, room and board, adjusted for inflation. By the 2025–26 academic year, that same combination — tuition, fees, room and board — had risen to nearly $26,000 at in-state public four-year institutions, and to about $61,000 at the average private nonprofit college. At the most selective schools, such as the Ivy League, the same core costs now run $83,000 to $94,000, according to each institution's own published pricing. Even using the public in-state figure, the price of the credential had risen roughly two and a half times in real terms.

At the same time, many elite institutions chose not to expand enrollment, preserving the scarcity that reinforced their prestige. Harvard's freshman class has stood at roughly 1,600 students for more than four decades — while applications grew substantially over the same period. Before U.S. News began ranking colleges in 1983, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were expanding enrollment. The rankings changed the incentive: selectivity became a part of the product. Low acceptance rates drove prestige, and prestige drove applications, donations, and pricing power. Scarcity became an asset. Between 2002 and 2019, Ivy League acceptance rates were cut roughly in half.

In response, families spent more to gain an edge — tutors, test prep, curated extracurriculars — widening the advantage of those who could afford the race. The so-called “Varsity Blues” federal prosecutions in 2019 illustrated the lengths — and lies — wealthy parents and admission consultants would go.

Meanwhile, colleges across the board continued raising tuition, pushing students to borrow ever larger sums. By 2010, student loan debt in the United States had surpassed credit card debt for the first time.

The debt burden has grown so large that millions of Americans now carry student loans well into middle age, with growing numbers still repaying them into retirement.

At precisely the moment America needed more rungs on the ladder, its most prestigious universities chose to preserve the scarcity central to their prestige rather than expand access to meet the need. One of the country's most powerful pathways to upward mobility became narrower just as it became more essential.

Geography Became Destiny

The collapse didn’t happen everywhere at once. It happened in places — in specific towns and regions, along the rivers and rail lines where the mills and factories had once stood.

As manufacturing declined, the new economy concentrated elsewhere. Technology, finance, health care, and professional services clustered in a relatively small number of metropolitan areas — San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Austin, among them. Workers with the education and skills those industries demanded followed the jobs. Those without them often stayed behind.

The dynamic became self-reinforcing. Places with talent and capital drew more of both — economists call it agglomeration. Places that lost their anchor employers lost the tax base and demand that might have replaced them. One rose. The other declined. The pattern earned its own name: “winner-take-most.”

America didn't just grow more unequal. It grew unequal by ZIP code.

Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas — built from the anonymized tax and Census records covering nearly the entire U.S. population — showed just how much place itself matters. Researchers traced children’s economic outcomes back to the neighborhoods where they grew up. Children from families with similar incomes, living only a few miles apart, often had dramatically different chances of reaching the middle class or beyond. Where you grew up increasingly shaped where you ended up.

Communities that lost employers often lost tax revenue, social capital, and opportunity alongside them. Chetty’s research found that neighborhoods with strong schools, high employment, and robust social networks consistently produced better outcomes for children. Upward mobility had become deeply tied to geography.

Policy Locked It In

None of these changes made the American Dream’s decline inevitable. Labor markets change. Institutions adapt. Governments intervene. Communities reinvent themselves. What happened instead was that the rules of the economy were rewritten — gradually, across both parties and several decades, to increasingly favor those who already had the greatest advantages.

The clearest example is the tax code. The top federal income tax rate stood at 70 percent in 1979. By 2007, the top rate had been cut in half, to 35 percent. The income share of the top 1 percent more than doubled, from about 10 percent in 1979 to more than 20 percent in 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Money made from investments has long been taxed more lightly than money made from a paycheck — that preference dates to the 1920s. But as the wealthy increasingly made their money from investments and business ownership instead of salaries, that old preference came to shelter a much bigger share of their income. Today the top rate on a paycheck is 37 percent. The top rate on long-term investment gains is 20 percent — roughly half.

Workers lost bargaining power just as capital gained it. Union membership fell by more than half in the four decades after 1980 — from 22.2 percent of workers in 1980 to 9.4 percent by 2022. The gains increasingly flowed to owners and shareholders instead.

Then came the financial crisis of 2008.

Workers entering adulthood inherited an economy that had already lost its traditional pathways upward. The Great Recession narrowed them further. Millions graduated into the weakest labor market since the Great Depression.

Why None of It Got Fixed

Each of the forces above was visible. Documented. Named. The study by Chetty and his colleagues is nearly a decade old. It hasn’t been fixed.

A big part of the explanation is trust — or, more precisely, its erosion.

In 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or almost all of the time. By 2025, that number was 17 percent, according to Pew.

Some of that collapse was earned. The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal gave real reasons for people to stop believing what their government told them.

But the erosion didn’t stop where earned distrust left off. Ronald Reagan made a more explicit push in 1981, declaring: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Donald Trump has gone further, actively sowing distrust. He hasn’t just cast the government as inefficient or overreaching — the traditional conservative critique. He has cast the mechanisms of democracy itself as illegitimate, calling elections “rigged” — unless he, or candidates he supported, won.

Together, these forces created a vicious cycle. The economy stopped delivering for many people, giving them reason to distrust the institutions charged with governing it, making it harder to build the coalitions required to fix what broke, giving people still more reason to distrust.

The ladder got shorter. So did trust in the institutions that could rebuild it.

Up Next: Examining the solutions.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Each series unfolds in weekly installments.

Previous series have examined China’s rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America’s national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

On Dec. 19, 1966, my wife’s mother, father, and two sisters walked through the doors of the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami. They had fled Cuba and the Castro dictatorship with three changes of clothing — and a dream.

America gave them the chance to realize it. They settled in New York City, became U.S. citizens, worked multiple jobs, and built a good middle-class life. My wife, Danet, was later born in Queens. Their story is one example of an idea that has propelled this country from its earliest days: the American Dream.

Yet that dream is now under pressure unlike any time in decades. As America readies to celebrate its 250th birthday, the data tells a sobering story — about upward mobility stalled, opportunity narrowed, and a promise that fewer and fewer Americans believe still holds.

This series is about that gap. Today, we examine the problem. Next week: the forces driving it. The week after: what solutions might actually look like.

If you prefer to listen, find the audio narrated by me at the top of this page. Every Solving For series is available to read or listen to — I narrate each one myself — at solvingfor.io. (Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

The most invoked phrase in American political life was born not in triumph, but in crisis.

In the spring of 1931, the country was gripped by the Great Depression. Millions were out of work. Unemployment would surge to a quarter of the workforce. Breadlines stretched around city blocks. Banks collapsed at a record clip, prompting bank runs as desperate account holders withdrew deposits.

Into that moment, a historian named James Truslow Adams sat down to finish a book about his country. One that traced the arc of American history and arrived at a conclusion: the nation's greatest contribution to the world was not its wealth or its military power, but an idea.

He called it the American Dream.

Not a dream of material abundance or outsized wealth, but a dream in which every man and every woman could attain the fullest measure of their potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. This, he wrote, is “the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world.”

Adams wanted to call his book the American Dream. But his publisher didn't think the phrase would sell. The book was instead called The Epic of America. It was a national bestseller. The title was largely forgotten. The idea inside it was not.

Subscribe now

Yet it’s now invoked so often — in presidential speeches, immigration ceremonies, commencement addresses, mortgage company ads — that few know its origin.

The idea that has fueled this country — that where you start shouldn't determine where you finish — is failing by its own terms. And the data is unambiguous.

A survey last year found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans say the Dream — that if you work hard, you will get ahead — no longer holds true, or never did. That is the highest share in nearly 15 years of Wall Street Journal-NORC polling. Only 25% say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, a record low in surveys dating to 1987.

The sentiment runs deeper than economics. In a March 2026 NBC News poll, 59% of registered voters agreed that the economic and political systems are stacked against people like them — tying a record high over roughly 40 years since NBC News started polling the question. For context: that’s higher than in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession.

The pessimism cuts across party lines, generations, and income levels. But it is not evenly distributed. An AP-NORC poll conducted this spring found that nearly half of Americans 60 and older still believe the Dream holds true. Among adults ages 18 to 29, that number falls to one in five.

In 2024, Open Research published findings from a three-year economic study. One participant, a woman identified in the study as Tara, put it plainly: “If I work hard, I’m gonna be successful, I’m going to make it.”

Then she added, “I think it’s a bit delusional actually, now that I said it out loud.”

The Dream Wasn’t for All

The Dream that Adams named was always a specific promise. It was never universally applied.

The country that produced it also produced slavery, which lasted until 1865. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. Legal racial segregation persisted until 1964. The postwar economic boom that many Americans remember as the Dream’s fullest expression — the suburbs, the union jobs, the upward mobility — was built on federal policies that systematically excluded Black Americans from its benefits.

The Dream, in other words, was never as advertised. But the promise embedded in it was real, and worth fighting for. Generations did exactly that.

They include people like Irving Berlin, whose family fled Russia when he was five to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. Speaking no English when he arrived, he grew up to write the songs that became the soundtrack of American optimism, including “God Bless America.” And people like Madam C.J. Walker, born to sharecroppers in Louisiana in 1867, two years after emancipation, who built a hair care business into a fortune that made her — a Black woman from the segregated South — one of the first self-made female millionaires in American history. Their climbs required beating odds that shouldn’t have existed. For every Berlin or Walker, millions more never got the chance.

Subscribe now

Langston Hughes saw it clearly. In his 1951 poem Harlem he asked: What happens to a dream deferred? A society that promises the Dream to everyone and delivers it to some is not keeping its promise — it is deferring it, indefinitely, for the rest.

Martin Luther King Jr. called it a broken contract. At the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he told the crowd that the country’s founders had signed a check — one that guaranteed every American the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Black Americans, he said, had been handed a check marked insufficient funds.

In a July 4, 1965 speech on the American Dream, King said that “ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation dreamed this dream, America has been something of a schizophrenic personality.” He added: “Slavery and segregation have been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal.”

The promise, across generations and across the battles fought to redeem it, was the same: birth shouldn’t determine destination. Not a guarantee of wealth, but a guarantee of access to the ladder, and a fair shot at climbing it.

Yet even as more Americans gained access to the ladder, the climb has gotten harder.

The Math Behind the Dream

The data Raj Chetty, a Harvard professor, and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights have assembled over the last decade is the most comprehensive picture we have of what the Dream actually delivers.

It is not encouraging.

A child born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has roughly a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth. In Denmark, that number is 11.7%. In Canada, 13.4% — approaching twice the American rate. The numbers support what seems like an absurd claim: a child born poor in America has a worse shot at achieving the American Dream than a child born poor in Denmark — or Canada.

Reinforcing the point: a 2020 World Economic Forum report on economic mobility ranked the U.S. 27th.

The generational picture is starker still. Among Americans born in 1940, more than 90% grew up to earn more than their parents. Among those born in 1984, that number had fallen to 50%. Chetty’s team called their paper The Fading American Dream. The title was not rhetorical.

Where you are born matters as much as who you are born to. A child growing up in San Jose has a 12.9% chance of rising from the bottom fifth to the top fifth of the income distribution. In Charlotte, that number is 4.4%. The Dream, it turns out, has a zip code.

Yet economic growth is not the problem. The U.S. economy has roughly tripled in real, inflation-adjusted terms since 1980. America built most of the great companies of the last half century — from Apple to Amazon, Google to Microsoft — and remains the entrepreneurial envy of the world. The problem is not that America stopped producing. The problem is what happened to what it produced.

Over that same period, the bottom half of earners saw their share of national income fall from 20% to 12% — while the top 1% saw their share rise from 12% to 20%. The economy has grown. The growth has not been shared.

Wealth tells the starkest version of the story. According to Federal Reserve data, the top 1% of American households now holds roughly as much of the nation’s total wealth as the entire bottom 90% combined — a level of concentration not seen since 1928, a year before the Great Depression and three years before Adams named the Dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing about that same era in The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Gatsby had reinvented himself, accumulated wealth, reached the top. And yet the novel is not a celebration. Fitzgerald dramatized what Adams was about to name: that a society organizing itself around the pursuit of wealth, rather than the expansion of opportunity, produces a different kind of country entirely.

That country is more visible now than at any point since the 1920s.

This is the full shape of the problem. At the bottom, mobility has stalled and the odds of climbing from poverty to prosperity are lower than in many peer democracies. At the top, wealth has concentrated at a rate not seen since the years before the Depression. The ladder still exists. But it is harder to reach, and harder to climb, than at any point in living memory.

“It’s basically a coin flip,” Chetty said, “as to whether you’ll do better than your parents.”

Born in Crisis, Tested Again

Adams coined the term in the depths of the worst economic crisis the country had ever seen.

He also knew it would need defending again.

“Ever since we became an independent nation,” Adams wrote, “each generation has seen an uprising of the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming and dispelling it. Possibly the greatest of these struggles lies ahead of us.”

He wrote that in 1931.

Each time the Dream has come under pressure — from the Depression, to the long fight for civil rights, to the movements that demanded the promise be extended to everyone it had excluded — Americans have contested it, challenged it, and pushed it closer to what it claimed to be.

The question is not whether that’s possible again. The question is whether we understand what actually broke — and what it would take to rebuild it.

That’s next.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Each series unfolds in weekly installments.

Previous series have examined China's rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America's national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

Tristan Harris is the clearest voice we have on what’s at stake in the AI moment. More than a decade ago, he sounded the alarm on social media — long before The Social Dilemma made his warnings mainstream. He thinks we’re repeating the mistake now, at a scale that dwarfs what social media wrought.

We cover a lot of ground: the incentives driving the AI race, the prisoner’s dilemma that keeps it from slowing, the difference between what’s possible and what’s probable, and two primary concerns with more advanced AI models — misuse and loss of control. Harris calls this humanity’s “ultimate test.” Whether AI becomes our greatest tool or our last invention depends on choices being made right now.

If you haven’t read our previous three-part series on AI safety, it’s here. The conversation will make more sense with that context — though it stands on its own.

Much has happened since we recorded this in April. But the framework Harris offers for understanding the stakes hasn’t dated.

A big thank you to Pablo De Ritis, the co-founder and President of Faena Rose, and the entire team.

Looking ahead, our next series examines the American Dream. America’s 250th birthday is approaching, and a Wall Street Journal poll last year found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the American Dream no longer holds true — or never did. What’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward looks like. That’s what we’re taking on next.

Previous series have examined China's rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America's national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

Show Notes

• 0:00 — Opening by Pablo De Ritis, President of Faena Rose

• 3:24 — Introduction of Tristan Harris by Matt Haggman

• 8:40 — Why AI dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined

• 12:15 — How AI operates: not programmed, grown

• 15:13 — Regulation of AI: “there is more regulation on making a sandwich in New York City than there is for building potentially world-ending artificial intelligence”

• 16:12 — The incentives: thinking about the possible, but not the probable

• 25:55 — The risks: can’t separate the promise from the peril

• 30:40 — Solutions

• 36:30 — Reasons for optimism

• 42:55 — Q&A

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what's broken, what's driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Learn more here.

In Part Three — the final installment of our series on the national debt — we turn to solutions. How one economist’s warnings are growing harder to ignore. How seven leading think tanks, spanning the ideological spectrum, each produced a credible plan to stabilize the debt. How a Canadian near-collapse in 1995 offers a preview of what may force Washington to act. And why the window for gradual, humane reform keeps closing with every year Congress defers the hard choices.

Missed the earlier installments? Part One explores why the national debt — now larger than the entire U.S. economy — should matter to every American, and why the generation now entering the workforce is the first to inherit a bill they never agreed to run up. Go here. Part Two examines the forces that built it — politicians committing to investments they were unwilling to pay for, shifting the tax burden away from wealth and toward work, and the Baby Boomers whose retirements created a structural deficit no single Congress has been willing to fix. Go here.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Jessica Riedl has spent more than two decades doing math that almost no one in Washington wants to see.

She began her career at the Heritage Foundation in 2001, one of the country’s most influential conservative think tanks, analyzing federal spending, deficits, and debt. She later served six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican known for taking fiscal policy seriously in a party that increasingly did not. Today she is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, after eight years at the Manhattan Institute, still following the numbers wherever they lead.

What makes Riedl unusual in Washington is that her conclusions have remained remarkably consistent regardless of political fashion. She has worked in conservative institutions and center-left ones. She has advised Republicans and collaborated with Democrats. Yet her central message has changed very little.

To Riedl, there is no painless solution to America’s outsized national debt.

The gap between what the federal government has promised to spend and what it collects in revenue has grown too large for any single policy to close. It requires a mix across the fault lines of modern U.S. politics: slower growth in Social Security spending, slower growth in Medicare and healthcare spending, less spending across other federal programs, and higher taxes. None of those changes would happen overnight. All would need to be phased in gradually over many years so households, businesses, and retirees could adjust.

The source of the problem is well understood. Americans are living longer, Baby Boomers are retiring, healthcare costs continue to rise, and elected officials have repeatedly chosen borrowing over taxes or spending cuts. Together, those forces have pushed the national debt to 100 percent of GDP — a level the United States has not seen since the years immediately following World War II. The Congressional Budget Office projects the debt will surpass that postwar record this decade.

Subscribe now

Riedl also attacks what she considers budget myths.

Waste, fraud, and abuse are worth addressing, she argues, but the savings are too small to close a fiscal gap measured in trillions. Taxing billionaires more heavily would help, but is not enough by itself. Eliminating foreign aid, shrinking federal bureaucracies, or relying on faster growth may improve the margins, but none fundamentally changes the trajectory.

Riedl has been direct about where that trajectory leads. Unless reforms are enacted, she has written, Washington's escalating borrowing demands will eventually overwhelm the capacity of financial markets to supply lending at plausible interest rates. When that happens, interest rates soar and the federal government cannot pay its bills. The effects would not be abstract — mortgage payments would climb, retirement accounts would lose value, and businesses would pull back on hiring and investment.

In a 2024 interview on PBS’s Firing Line, Riedl noted that when she meets privately with Republicans and Democrats, lawmakers often agree on the broad outlines of what would be required. What they doubt is whether they could survive the politics.

The political will to act, she argues, probably will not arrive “until the sky actually begins falling.”

Economists disagree about the precise mix of spending cuts and tax increases, but there is far less disagreement about the range of options available — and analysts across the ideological spectrum have already produced credible plans to stabilize the debt. Seven of them, in fact.

The obstacle is not analytical clarity. It is creating the conditions under which elected officials are willing to act on what they already know. That is the harder problem — and the one this series ends on.

The Problem Isn’t the Math

How does a democracy fix a problem it has understood for nearly half a century and repeatedly chosen not to address?

The honest answer, supported by the history of nearly every comparable fiscal crisis in democratic governments, is that it usually doesn’t — at least not voluntarily, and not until something forces it.

In 2010, President Obama commissioned a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel led by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. The commission produced a serious, balanced plan that combined spending cuts and tax increases. It borrowed ideas from both parties and satisfied neither. The commission fell short of the 14 votes it needed to formally advance its recommendations to Congress. The political conditions were not yet desperate enough to make soundness matter.

On the spending side, Social Security and Medicare are unavoidable. Together they represent the largest and fastest-growing share of federal spending. Closing the gap means choosing from a short list of genuinely unpopular options: gradually raising the retirement age, slowing benefit growth for higher earners, reforming healthcare programs to reduce cost growth, or some combination of all three.

Share

The tax side is equally unavoidable. Taxes will need to rise. The debate is over how, and on whom. Possibilities include rolling back the 2017 individual tax cuts — extended permanently by Congress in 2025 — which would raise revenue. Raising the corporate tax rate, which had been cut from 35 percent to 21 percent under the same law, would raise more. Taxing investment income at the same rates as wage income — eliminating a preferential gap that has widened over decades — would raise still more.

Each proposal has supporters and critics. Each carries economic tradeoffs. Each has a well-organized constituency prepared to fight it.

That is the central political challenge. Americans consistently tell pollsters they want the deficit reduced. They also oppose, with equal consistency, most of the specific measures required to reduce it.

The structural problem is not cowardice, exactly. It is rational behavior inside a broken incentive system. Politicians face elections every two or six years. The pain of entitlement reform is immediate, attributable, and politically dangerous. The benefit — a more sustainable fiscal trajectory decades from now — is diffuse and distant.

Politicians are not defying the public. They are following it.

The Solutions Already Exist

In 2024, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation did something unusual. It handed money to seven of Washington’s leading think tanks — organizations that agree on almost nothing — and asked each of them to solve the national debt. Not gesture at it. Solve it.

They called it Solutions Initiative 2024.

The American Enterprise Institute participated. So did the Economic Policy Institute. The Manhattan Institute. The Center for American Progress. The Bipartisan Policy Center. The Progressive Policy Institute. The American Action Forum.

Every single plan worked.

That is the finding worth stapling to the wall of every congressional office. Not one plan — seven. Across every ideological orientation, through combinations of spending cuts and revenue increases that varied in composition, all seven organizations produced a credible path to fiscal stability.

Where the plans agree is striking.

Every organization concluded that healthcare costs are a major driver of long-term debt and must be addressed. Every organization found some changes to Social Security and Medicare unavoidable. Every organization accepted that the gap cannot be closed on one side of the ledger alone.

Where they differ is essentially a values argument dressed in fiscal language.

The right-leaning plans arrive at a smaller government, relying more heavily on spending restraint. The left-leaning plans envision a larger government financed by significantly higher revenues. Both paths stabilize the debt.

The center lands somewhere between those poles, distributing sacrifice across both parties’ sacred cows. A little entitlement reform. A little tax reform. Something for everyone to dislike, which is the definition of a workable compromise.

The obstacle is creating the political conditions under which elected officials are willing to choose.

The Mechanisms for Action

Democracies have developed mechanisms precisely because ordinary politics fails on problems like this one. None is perfect. But they represent the available toolkit.

Bipartisan commissions are the most familiar. Their weakness, as Bowles-Simpson demonstrated, is that they require political leaders to embrace the recommendations after they are made.

A stronger version — modeled on the military base-closing process known as BRAC — would insulate fiscal recommendations from amendment entirely. Under BRAC, a commission's proposals become law automatically unless Congress votes to reject them in their entirety. Lawmakers cannot pick and choose — they can only accept or block the package whole.

Variations of this idea have been proposed repeatedly for Social Security reform, most recently the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026, introduced by Republican Tom Cole and Democrat Tom Suozzi. None has passed.

Fiscal rules offer another approach — statutory limits on deficits, debt, or spending designed to constrain elected leaders. The United States has tried versions before. The Gramm-Rudman deficit targets of the 1980s and the budget caps of 2011 both broke down when Congress decided the limits had become more painful than the deficits.

Independent fiscal institutions offer a fourth path. The Congressional Budget Office already plays this role in part by providing nonpartisan scoring of legislation. But the United States has no institution specifically tasked with evaluating government fiscal plans against long-term sustainability targets — and holding leaders publicly accountable when they fall short. The United Kingdom's Office for Budget Responsibility does exactly that. The U.S. does not have an equivalent.

Automatic triggers may be the most technically promising approach. Under such a system, reforms would take effect automatically when a trust fund approached insolvency, unless Congress voted to stop them — flipping the default. Inaction would now produce reform rather than prevent it. Policy experts across the ideological spectrum have proposed versions of this idea.

Each aims to give elected leaders the political cover to make decisions they already know need to be made. The debt keeps rising.

What Usually Forces Action

Riedl has been direct about where the current trajectory leads. “Washington is on a totally unsustainable fiscal path,” she has written, “that virtually ensures some version of a debt crisis.” History offers a sense of what that looks like.

By the early 1990s, Canada had spent years running deficits that were producing familiar warnings: the debt was too large, the trajectory was unsustainable, something had to change.

Cabinet minister Marcel Massé would later recount one such moment when the warnings stopped being abstract. The deputy minister of finance, he wrote, "told me, ashen-faced before a cabinet meeting early in 1994, that 30 minutes before a Government of Canada bond auction that morning there had been no bids.”

In American terms, this would be the U.S. Treasury holding a routine auction for the bonds that finance the federal deficit — and finding no buyers.

Even then, action did not come quickly. Credit-rating agencies were threatening downgrades. International investors were openly questioning Canada's finances. In January 1995, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the Third World.”

Subscribe now

On February 27, 1995, Finance Minister Paul Martin introduced one of the most aggressive deficit-reduction plans in the country’s modern history. Federal spending was cut sharply. Revenues increased. Three years later, Canada recorded its first budget surplus in nearly three decades.

The argument had been available for years. What changed was that the cost of inaction became immediate and visible. The bond market had delivered a verdict that politicians could no longer postpone.

This is the path many fiscal experts believe is most likely for the United States. Not a grand bargain engineered by statesmen. Not a voter awakening. A market event — a spike in Treasury yields, a failed auction, a high-profile downgrade — that suddenly makes the cost of inaction greater than the cost of action.

Earlier this year, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog whose board includes former senators and cabinet secretaries from both parties — warned that the United States is "woefully underprepared" for the next economic shock. It called on Congress to develop what it labeled a "Break Glass Plan," ready to deploy the moment a crisis strikes.

The CRFB did not say if.

It said when.

Before the Sky Begins Falling

Which brings us back to Jessica Riedl. She has spent years warning that there is no painless path out of America’s debt problem. But there is an important distinction between painful and impossible.

In a 2024 Manhattan Institute blueprint, Riedl proposed gradually raising Social Security's early and full retirement ages to 64 and 69, trimming Social Security and Medicare benefits for higher earners while protecting lower-income seniors, and reforming Medicare through more competitive pricing. On the tax side, her blueprint would restore the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent, remove loopholes to avoid capital gains taxes, and eliminate a tax break the 2017 law created for business owners that salaried workers do not receive. No single element closes the gap. The point is the combination.

Her conclusion mirrors what emerged from the seven Peterson Foundation plans: the details differ, the values differ, the balance between taxes and spending differs — but they all converge on the same point. There is no version of stabilizing the debt that allows Americans to keep every promise, maintain current tax levels, avoid major spending reforms, and still bring the debt under control.

The solutions have been studied, scored, debated, revised, and published for years.

The challenge is political.

The cruelest consequence of delay is that the window for gradual reform keeps closing. Every conventional political promise — “we won’t touch benefits for anyone over 55” — becomes harder to honor with each passing year.

Voluntary reform — the kind Congress could enact today with gradual phase-ins, protections for vulnerable retirees, and decades for households to adjust — would almost certainly be less painful than the version imposed by a crisis. Every year of delay makes the eventual changes larger, more abrupt, and more politically explosive.

History suggests that democracies rarely act until they must. Canada waited until markets forced the issue. The United States may prove different. It may not.

The solutions are written.

The unanswered question is whether America’s elected leaders adopt one before the bond market writes its own.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

If you enjoyed this look at one of America's most pressing — and most deferred — problems, please give it a like and share with a friend.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

In Part Two of our series on the national debt, we turn to the forces that built it. How a budget director's confession in 1981 revealed the mechanism that would define the next four decades. How Congress repeatedly lowered taxes on wealth while expanding what the government promised to spend. How 73 million Baby Boomers created a structural deficit no single Congress has been willing to fix. And how rising interest rates may finally be closing the window that allowed Washington to defer the reckoning.

Missed Part One? Go here to understand why the national debt — now larger than the entire U.S. economy — should matter to every American, and why the generation now entering the workforce is the first to inherit a bill they never agreed to run up. Part Three will explore solutions.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself — audio for this installment is coming soon. In the meantime, Substack's built-in audio is available. All series are at solvingfor.io.

In September 1789, Thomas Jefferson sat down in Paris to write James Madison a letter about money he believed no one had the right to spend.

The city around him was coming apart — the French Revolution only weeks old, the Bastille having fallen in July, the monarchy buckling under debts it could no longer service. Watching the living taxed for debts they had never chosen, Jefferson wrote Madison: “the earth belongs… to the living.” No generation should be able to bind the next with debt it cannot repay within its own lifetime — which Jefferson, working from mortality tables, set at about 19 years.

By 1803, Jefferson sat in Washington as the third president of the United States, and the question he'd put to Madison was about to land on his own desk. Napoleon’s France was willing to sell the Louisiana Territory, and the price was money the young government did not have.

Madison, the man Jefferson warned about the danger of binding future generations, was now his secretary of state. The two men who had argued on paper over whether one generation may mortgage the next found themselves, together, committing the republic to the largest debt of its short life.

Subscribe now

The terms: about $15 million for 828,000 square miles, doubling the size of the country in a single stroke. But the U.S. government did not have the funds in its treasury, nor did America have the capital markets to raise it. The new world turned to the old, issuing bonds through two European banks: Baring & Company in London and Hope & Company in Amsterdam — debt that America would spend two decades repaying, the final installment in 1823. Even the bankers were uneasy. Sir Francis Baring wrote of trembling “at the magnitude of the American account.”

They did it anyway — the purchase encompassed 15 future states, the greatest real estate transaction in history.

The story captures two strands of America's relationship with debt — wary of it in principle, willing to shoulder it when the stakes demanded it.

The Louisiana Purchase was not an exception. America had been born in debt following the Revolutionary War — the first U.S. treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, argued that a manageable debt was a national blessing: committing creditors to the new government's success and building the credit the country would need.

Through its history, the country borrowed a great deal — to survive the War of 1812, to preserve the Union through the Civil War, to lift itself out of the Great Depression, and to fight two world wars. World War II pushed federal debt to a record 106 percent of GDP in 1946 — and over the next three decades, the country paid it down to roughly a quarter.

The borrowing had a beginning, a reason, and an end.

Today, that’s no longer the case.

The country is now adding debt at a rate that will eclipse the post-World War II record by the end of the decade, with no end in sight. But there is no war to point to. No depression to climb out of. No continent to acquire. The federal government keeps borrowing without the discipline that once restrained it, or the purpose that justified it.

Deficits Don’t Matter

Today’s debt problem stems from three choices, repeated over the past 45 years until they hardened into habit.

First, politicians committed to things they were unwilling to ask voters to pay for — tax cuts, wars, new benefits. Rather than raise taxes or cut spending, they let borrowing close the gap, knowing voters rarely held them accountable for the deferral. The bill would come later, after they’re gone.

Second, the tax burden increasingly shifted away from wealth and toward work, asking more of the paycheck than the investment portfolio. The shift reduced federal revenues and added to the debt.

Third, Americans lived longer, and the cost of supporting an aging population through programs like Social Security and Medicare continued to climb. What had once been manageable obligations became steadily larger claims on the federal budget.

The roots of the modern era of debt politics can be traced to 1981.

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s 35-year-old budget director, spent much of that year arguing that cutting taxes while increasing defense spending would actually shrink the deficit.

Then, in a series of conversations with journalist William Greider that became a damaging profile in The Atlantic that December, he admitted the numbers didn’t add up. Future spending cuts had been replaced by what he called the “magic asterisk”: promises of savings that had never been specified.

The tax cuts were signed. The spending cuts largely were not.

The deficit the asterisk concealed did not disappear. It was simply handed forward.

The details would change. The incentives would not.

There was a brief interruption in the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and a Republican-controlled Congress produced balanced budgets and reduced the debt.

Share

Then the pattern returned.

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts under President George W. Bush erased projected surpluses. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were financed through borrowing but, unlike previous wars, without higher taxes or war bonds. America had borrowed to fight wars before. What was new was fighting them while cutting taxes, leaving the bill for future taxpayers. In 2003, Congress added a Medicare prescription drug benefit without identifying how to pay for it.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill later recalled that Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed deficit concerns with a simple conclusion from the Reagan years: “deficits don’t matter.”

Borrowing was no longer an exception. It was becoming standard operating procedure.

Then came two genuine emergencies: the financial crisis and the pandemic. Both required massive federal intervention. Both also left the government with a permanently higher fiscal baseline.

Most of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent in 2012 under President Barack Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Donald Trump cut individual taxes again without offsets and reduced the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent — the largest such cut in U.S. history. In 2025, Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress extended many of those cuts through the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

Debt ceased to be an emergency measure reserved for wars, recessions, or national projects. It became the routine way Washington avoided hard choices.

In 2010, Stockman, a Republican, wrote that the seeds had been planted in 1981, lamenting the “Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts.”

Taxing Work, Rewarding Wealth

The second shift was quieter than the rise of deficit politics, but just as consequential.

In a 2011 op-ed, titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” Warren Buffett disclosed that he had paid a federal tax rate of 17.4 percent the previous year. His secretary, Debbie Bosanek, had paid 35.8 percent. The difference was not that Buffett concealed income. It was that most of his earnings came through capital gains and dividends — taxed at lower rates than wages. She was paying more than twice his rate. It was entirely legal.

But the Buffett-Bosanek contrast was not an anomaly. It was the system working as designed.

Over the last 45 years, Congress repeatedly lowered taxes on investment income relative to wages, arguing that lower taxes on capital would encourage entrepreneurship, investment, and economic growth. Today, the top federal tax rate on ordinary income is 37 percent, while long-term capital gains are generally taxed at 20 percent.

The shift changed who carried the tax burden. Wages are taxed automatically through payroll withholding. Investment gains can accumulate for years before being taxed and, when realized, often face lower rates. As asset values rose, more income flowed through forms taxed more lightly than labor.

The full scale of the divide came into view in 2021, when ProPublica published leaked IRS data showing that some of America's wealthiest individuals — including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Michael Bloomberg — had paid little or no federal income tax in certain years, their wealth surging while taxable income remained small.

The question is simple: why was the government repeatedly lowering taxes on wealth while its commitments — and its debts — kept growing?

The result was not that the wealthy paid no taxes. Many paid enormous sums. The result was that the tax base increasingly leaned on earned income while much of the country’s fastest-growing wealth received preferential treatment.

The government had committed itself to large and growing obligations while simultaneously pulling back from taxing some of the fastest-growing sources of wealth. The gap, once again, was filled with borrowing.

No One Voted for This

The third force is different in character from the first two.

Politicians chose to borrow rather than tax or cut. Politicians chose to tax investment returns more lightly than work. But no politician chose to make Americans older. No one decided that Baby Boomers would retire in waves, that lifespans would lengthen, or that healthcare costs would rise faster than the economy. These things simply happened — and the government’s finances were not built to absorb them.

That was David Walker’s message, and he delivered it to anyone who would listen.

Walker served as U.S. Comptroller General from 1998 to 2008 — the country's chief auditor — and became one of Washington's most persistent voices warning that the long-term fiscal trajectory was worse than most Americans understood.

He took his case on the road in the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour,” and his warnings became the subject of a 2008 documentary, I.O.U.S.A. Few in Washington were listening.

That was 17 years ago. The debt has since grown fivefold.

The programs at the center of Walker’s alarm — Social Security and Medicare — were designed for a different America. When Medicare was established in 1965, there were roughly four workers for every retiree. The math worked because the young were numerous and the old were not.

That ratio has been narrowing ever since. The Baby Boom generation — 73 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — began retiring around 2010 and will continue through the mid-2030s. Lifespans have lengthened. Birthrates have fallen. By 2035, there will be roughly 2.4 workers supporting each Social Security beneficiary, down from four a generation ago.

Healthcare compounds the problem. Medicare costs do not just grow with the number of retirees; they grow with the cost of care itself, which has consistently outpaced inflation and economic growth. An aging population consumes more healthcare, and that healthcare becomes more expensive every year.

The result is a structural deficit that no one voted for and no single Congress created. Social Security and Medicare face a combined funding shortfall of nearly $78 trillion over the next 75 years, according to the programs' trustee reports. The Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted by 2033 — seven years from now — at which point benefits would be automatically reduced unless Congress acts. These are not speculative scenarios. They are the official projections of the programs’ own trustees.

This force, unlike the first two, requires no bad faith to explain. The politicians who built these programs were not concealing a time bomb. They were designing a safety net for their moment.

The country changed. The programs largely have not.

This Time May Be Different

Three forces brought the United States to this point: decades of borrowing to avoid difficult choices, a tax system that increasingly favored investment over work, and demographic changes that steadily increased the cost of programs like Social Security and Medicare.

For years, the consequences seemed manageable. The debt grew, but so did the economy. Growth often outran the government’s borrowing costs, allowing Washington to carry ever-larger obligations without an immediate reckoning.

That advantage may be fading, and the reason is interest rates.

Economists have a shorthand for the relationship: r > g, where r is the government's borrowing rate and g is economic growth. When growth is faster than borrowing costs, debt is generally easier to manage. When borrowing costs exceed growth for sustained periods, debt becomes much harder to stabilize.

Interest rates have risen sharply from the ultra-low levels that prevailed for much of the 2010s. The Congressional Budget Office projects that within the next decade the government’s average borrowing costs could exceed the economy’s growth rate — a shift that would make the debt far more difficult to stabilize and increase the risk of a debt spiral.

That prospect has begun to change minds.

In a May 2026 essay for The Atlantic, economist Jared Bernstein noted that he had spent much of his career dismissing claims that a high debt-to-GDP ratio signaled imminent crisis. But if interest rates begin to outpace growth, he argued, the calculus changes. “If you’re not worried about this country’s fiscal outlook,” Bernstein wrote, “you’re not paying enough attention.”

Jefferson’s warning more than 230 years ago was about more than debt. It was about accountability — the idea that the people who make a decision should be the ones who live with it. For most of American history, that principle held, imperfectly but recognizably: wars were fought and paid for, crises met and resolved. What the past 45 years produced is something different — debt without emergency, spending without payment, commitments made by one generation and quietly handed to the next.

At some point, there is no one left to pass it to.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

If this resonated, please give it a like and share with someone you think would enjoy it.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.