Dreaming bigger

The problem with our plans is not that they’re too bold. It’s that they’re too small.

Is there any institution more American than the public school? It's central to the fabric of our communities - of course, the place where we learn our times tables, but also where we make lifelong friends, act in plays and put on bake sales, hold community meetings and vote.

But the familiarity of schools masks what a radical achievement they are. The aspiration of American public education is to provide every child with a primary and secondary education—in fact, to require them to take advantage of it. Few American public programs aim to serve the entire population, and most of those boil down to writing checks. Public education provides direct, complex, expert, labor-intensive services, every day, to millions of recipients at thousands of locations. It is surely among the most ambitious projects in American history.

The story of how we got universal primary and secondary education is about educators and reformers and civic visionaries, but it is also a story of economic transformation. Building and maintaining schools for every community and training and paying the teachers to serve every child is expensive. Public education developed over generations, but it’s no accident that compulsory education, and particularly universal secondary education, only started to become a reality in the early twentieth century. It took industrialization to create the wealth that could pay for it, and reformers worked to channel that wealth into establishing the system we now take for granted.

That story is just one example of a broader story, one that’s central to understanding and driving progress but that is too rarely told in politics. In essence:

• Innovation improves efficiency: With new methods, we can get more done with fewer resources, or do things that used to be impossible.

• Efficiency creates capacity: We can commit the resources we save to new work.

• Capacity enables progress: If used correctly, additional capacity lets us improve lives.

Let’s say right away that growth has its risks: it can create inequality, poor treatment of workers, disruptions to communities, damage to the environment, and other harms, all of which need to be addressed. I said “if used correctly” because we need to be intentional about making sure prosperity is shared.

But growth is absolutely necessary to progress of every kind, because it expands the envelope of what's possible. In the twentieth century, America built a strong middle class, in which millions of Americans enjoyed an unprecedented degree of prosperity and security. That’s a triumph of government programs and labor unions, but was made possible by a growing, global, industrialized economy. We made staggering scientific progress, because that economy could afford to fund research. We created safety nets for the vulnerable and brought connectivity and computing to the masses. Some of this was public, much of it private, but all of it was made possible by economic expansion. Great works have costs, and growth pays them.

There is so much work ahead to make meaningful progress. In this century, we should not merely defend what past generations built but complete another undertaking - another ten undertakings - on the scale of public education.

Those should include:

• Ensuring each of us has the care we need, from childcare to healthcare (including mental healthcare) to elder care and more

• Improving public education and closing achievement gaps, including better support and compensation for teachers

• Giving everyone a chance at meaningful work, including the education and skills development to be ready for it

• Addressing climate change, including completing a major global energy transition

• Developing new and transformative medical treatments

• Advancing scientific research and exploration in every field

• Supporting the world in achieving the degree of prosperity and freedom we enjoy

…and many more we can’t even think of yet.

Our economy is remarkable but seems to be reaching its limit. The middle class is struggling, we are in debt, and we are not sure how to pay for the programs we have, let alone introduce new ones. We need to once again increase our capacity, dramatically, so that the private and public sectors can deliver more of what people need.

But support for growth has never been weaker. Republicans are now in lockstep behind an anti-growth agenda: trade restrictions; attacks on K-12 education, universities, and research; and weakening the rule of law through chaos, cronyism, and intimidation.

Meanwhile, while many Democrats support growth, the loudest voices in the party are indifferent to it. Look at the campaign websites of Democrats running for office - too often, of all the positions listed (sometimes dozens of them), not one is a plan for growth. Bizarrely, prominent, established Democrats don’t feel compelled to say how we will accomplish our goals. That may be because our political culture treats economic growth and social progress as forces in opposition, rather than recognizing that one is required for the other.

That way of thinking severely limits what’s possible. We might be able to tax our way to accomplishing a few goals, but not much more than that, and at the risk of weakening the economic engine that we need to make further progress. In other words, the problem with many progressive plans for the future is not that they are too radical but that they are too small. Without a plan for growth, we aren’t serious about progress. If we’re not serious about progress, we won’t inspire people to join us and reject the hollow promises of the President and his movement.

This campaign will not make that mistake. I care deeply about driving growth, not because I want the rich to get richer, but because we can’t get to the future our children deserve without it. I want that future to feel as natural to them as the local high school does to me. There are things we can do to drive long-term growth - among them funding research and innovation, ensuring an open and competitive economy, drawing the best and brightest from around the world to build and invent in America, and finding ways to rapidly but responsibly take advantage of emerging technologies like AI - that we are making central, and will talk about in more depth as we go. Innovation and growth should be the foundation of a progressive vision for the future, and we need leaders who understand that.