Essays by Eric Hall
California used to build.
It moved rivers across deserts, threw rail over the Sierra, and raised the finest public universities in the world. Then we stopped building and started managing decline. These essays make the case that we can build again — and that decline was never destiny.
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What would California build if we recovered our nerve?
For most of its history, California did a simple thing exceptionally well: it built. It made room for wave after wave of people who arrived with nothing but the willingness to work. A family could land here, find a job, buy a home on one income, and reasonably expect their children to do better. That was the deal, and the building is what made it real.
Somewhere in the last fifty years, we lost the nerve. We ration water. We plan for blackouts. We tolerate housing shortages and treat some of the highest living costs in America as normal — as the unavoidable price of living somewhere beautiful. We hold hearings, commission studies, file lawsuits, and congratulate ourselves for having followed the process, even when the process delivers nothing a human being can live in.
California remains extraordinary. But it is way off track. I don’t believe decline is destiny — I think it’s a habit, and habits can be broken.
What you’ll find here
Most weeks I publish an essay grounded in history, real numbers and the physical world. The subjects vary; the underlying question doesn’t: what would it take for ordinary people to thrive here again?
- EnergyThe enormous new demand coming from AI, electric transportation, advanced manufacturing and an increasingly automated economy.
- HousingWhy one of the wealthiest places on Earth behaves as though shelter must remain artificially scarce — and why the problem isn’t land, but process.
- Water, ports and transportationThe infrastructure required to support a growing, productive state.
- New cities and special economic zonesAmbitious ideas that the machinery of hungry governmental process squeezes out of the room.
- California in the PacificOur place in a larger Pacific region, including new possibilities in deepening our historic relationship with Baja California.
- AI and life after workFor thousands of years humans have found purpose in work. What happens when we hand our work-life to our tools?
- OwnershipWays ordinary Californians might share directly in the new public infrastructure and the vast wealth enabling the new economy.
Some proposals are practical and immediate. Others are deliberately audacious. Some may make you uncomfortable. None of them will ask you to settle for less. You don’t need to be a policy expert to read this — you only need to be curious about what might exist on the other side of “no.”
A few places to start
Show Us the Megawatts — California Is Exporting the AI Boom
California talks about leading artificial intelligence while the power-hungry infrastructure that makes AI possible is being built elsewhere. Why aren’t we leading the new economy?
The California Abundance Fund
What if Californians became owners — not merely ratepayers — of the energy and infrastructure the AI economy requires? Our middle class should benefit from the use of its data.
Who Is Drinking Panama’s Milkshake?
Every once in a while you may receive a dispatch from some other shore, on some other topic.
Come along for the argument.
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