Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is. Nature will not permit unbounded gr

Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is. Nature will not permit unbounded growth, but she will permit the pursuit of arbitrarily tight tolerances. To me, this is the key cultural shift that America requires: not to build to expand, but build to improve. There is a feeling of compression, intricacy, delicacy here. That is, we can stay legitimately busy increasing the fractal complexity (and beauty) of society and infrastructure without expanding. If we nostalgically fetishize growth, we may feel better in the short term but we become a destructive virus in the long term.