Donald Trump becomes president of a nation that is deeply divided by class, race, health, and opportunity. In his acceptance speech, he pledged to be the president for all Americans. He also gave a very promising hint of how to pursue that objective in practice.
Trump is a real-estate developer, so it’s not surprising that his brief acceptance speech was dominated by the idea of “rebuilding,” a word he mentioned four times:
Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream…. We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.
This is a valid, indeed uplifting perspective. America desperately needs rebuilding. Its infrastructure is decrepit; its energy system is out of date for a climate-threatened economy; its coastal areas are already showing grave vulnerability to rising sea levels and extreme storms; its Rust Belt cities like Grand Rapids, Michigan, are boarded up; its inner cities across the country are unhealthy for the children being raised in them. Rebuilding America’s inner cities and creating a twenty-first-century infrastructure could be Trump’s greatest legacy.
Trump’s pledge to make America’s infrastructure “second to none” is a correct and bold goal, for America’s competitiveness, future job creation, public health, and wellbeing. Yet as I will explain in this book, America today is certainly no longer “second to none.” On a recent Sustainable Development Goals Index, the United States ranked twenty-second out of thirty-four high-income countries. For Americans returning from foreign travel, the well-known sign that they’ve touched down at home is that the elevators, escalators, and moving walkways of our once-proud airports are out of order.
A builder-president could indeed help to restore vitality to the U.S. economy and put millions to work in the process. All of the major candidates in the 2016 campaign pledged a major effort to build America’s infrastructure. Indeed, Trump suggested a hefty price tag of $1 trillion, which is a realistic sum and target for the coming five years (roughly 1 percent of national income per year).
The keys to success in building the new America economy can be summarized in three words: smart, fair, and sustainable.
A smart economy means deploying the best of cutting-edge technology. Our energy grids should be smart in economizing on energy use and in incorporating distributed energy sources (such as wind and solar power) into the grid. Our transport system should be smart in enabling self-driving electric vehicles within our cities and twenty-first-century high-speed rail between them.
A fair economy would start with Trump’s pledge to rebuild the inner cities. Such a pledge should include affordable housing; decent urban public schools and public health facilities; efficient transport services for low-income communities; parks and green spaces in places now burdened by urban blight; the cleanup of urban toxic dumps; comprehensive recycling rather than landfills; and safe water for all Americans, so that the drinking-water disaster that afflicts Flint, Michigan, and similar crises elsewhere are brought to a rapid end and never recur.
A sustainable economy means acknowledging and anticipating the dire environmental threats facing America’s cities and infrastructure. The vulnerability of New Orleans levees had been predicted by scientists and engineers long before Hurricane Katrina. The flooding of New York City had been predicted long before Hurricane Sandy. The risks ahead to the United States in the event of unchecked climate change can be found in countless scientific and policy studies, such as Risky Business and the National Climate Assessment.1
Much could go wrong in an undirected building boom that is not smart, fair, and sustainable. Trump’s campaign pledges to restore the Keystone XL Pipeline and U.S. coal production are cases in point. Investing in a boom in fossil fuels would be an expensive dead end. Such projects will inevitably be closed soon after they are completed, if not in a Trump administration then in the ones that follow. They are simply untenable environmentally, no matter what the lobbyists assert. Billions of dollars would be thrown down the drain to develop resources that will never be used.
It’s funny that climate deniers are chortling about the incoming Trump administration. Nature doesn’t care what they think, and neither do the 192 other countries on the planet that signed the recent Paris Climate Agreement. Fossil fuel companies can spend money developing unusable resources, but they would be throwing money down the mineshaft, as would the investors buying the bonds financing such hapless projects.
Trump made another very important pledge in his acceptance speech that should underpin a successful strategy for building the new American economy:
I will harness the creative talents of our people, and we will call upon the best and brightest to leverage their tremendous talent for the benefit of all.
America has nearly 5,000 colleges and universities across the country, including every congressional district, with the finest collection of engineering and scientific faculty and knowledge in the world. These institutions of higher learning have schools of public policy, social work, public health, business administration, and environmental science. Most importantly, they have 21 million young Americans enrolled to gain expertise in the skills needed for leadership and skills in the twenty-first century.
By harnessing the vast brainpower and experience in our colleges and universities, in civil society and business, America could indeed enter an era of successful rebuilding, one that creates a smart, fair, and sustainable economy that is truly second to none, and that serves as an inspiration for other parts of the world.
This book offers an up-to-date look at America’s opportunities and challenges as the new Trump administration and Congress take office. I recommend that the United States adopt the Sustainable Development Goals, suitably adapted to its specific conditions and needs, as key guideposts for building the new economy. It is our task, across the nation, to build a new economy that is smart, fair, and sustainable.
I hope that the evidence and ideas in this book will help to meet this enormous and shared task of our era.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
November 10, 2016
New York City