Sam Bowman | What’s holding back progress (and how to fix it)

Beatrice (Host): Welcome to the Existential Hope podcast. I’m here today with Sam Bowman, who is the editor of Works in Progress, which we’ll hear more about. Why don’t we start there? Could you introduce yourself and tell us what Works in Progress is?

Sam Bowman: Great — thanks very much for having me on. It’s delightful to be here.

I run and helped set up a magazine that focuses on what we call new and underrated ideas to improve the world. These can be in science, technology, or economics. What we’re looking for — to use a bit of jargon — are high-leverage ideas: small things that could actually happen but would have a large impact.

For example, we’re very interested in getting houses built — making it easier to build homes in rich, prosperous cities. We’ll get to why that matters in a minute. But what we’re really interested in is places that are actually doing it — cities that have managed to build more housing. Because often people in the “YIMBY” world — and we’re kind of in that world, though I’m not sure I love the term — say, “It’s important to build more houses!” and then just tell politicians to figure out how.

The hard bit is figuring out the politics of getting housing built. So we study cities that have actually done it — how they did it, and what the rest of the world can learn from them.

Another example from science that we love is gene drives — using CRISPR to insert genes into the population of an animal species. For instance, you could stop mosquitoes from transmitting malaria. Or you could, perhaps controversially, eliminate a city’s rat population by making the males infertile but not the females.

Some people might find that alarming — playing God, and so on — but it’s real technology. The real question is whether we should use it, and how to manage the risks.

So we like ideas like that: underexplored, high-impact, and a bit outside the mainstream. That’s what we try to highlight at Works in Progress.

Beatrice: It’s a great magazine! I actually want to ask — why a magazine? Did you think that was the best way to reach people with these ideas?

Sam Bowman: Yeah — there are a bunch of reasons. The main one is that I’ve worked at think tanks for a long time doing policy work. And something I noticed is that many think tanks use fairly outdated ways to share their ideas — methods that made sense before the internet, before social media, before platforms like Substack made it easy to build an audience.

White papers and long reports still have value — don’t get me wrong, some think tanks do a fantastic job (I’m a big fan of the Institute for Progress, for example). But persuasion depends on attention. You need people to want to read you, to find you interesting.

A well-written long read is a great way to do that — it lets us offer substance and storytelling. I think of what we do as an exchange: readers give us their time and attention, and we take that seriously. In return, we give them solid facts, a well-crafted story, and a clear argument.

Our rule is this: Would a reader who isn’t persuaded by the piece still be glad they read it?
If the answer is yes, we publish. If not, we rewrite or cut it.

So the goal is to make ideas about improving the world genuinely engaging. And it’s been working — our audience is growing, and we now even have a new print edition.

We deliberately avoided the “daily news” model. News cycles pull you into covering what the president said today — and that means you miss slow-burning, important topics that never make headlines. By publishing less frequently and on our own schedule, we get to focus on things that matter even if they’re not trending.

Beatrice: That makes sense. How would you compare Works in Progress to, say, a Substack?

Sam Bowman: Good question. I think of Substack as a friendly competitor. If someone’s reading a Substack, they’re probably not reading Works in Progress — but they’re part of the same ecosystem.

The best Substacks are often quite personal — a single writer’s voice, developing big ideas over time. That’s great, but it’s also very individual. Works in Progress gives writers a platform and editorial support to build a complete, coherent piece.

Not everyone wants to run their own Substack — it takes time, consistency, and audience-building. Even great writers can publish two amazing essays and only reach twenty people if they don’t have that base.

So what we do is build that platform for them. We bring the audience, editing, and credibility. And we act as a trusted intermediary — we fact-check, we vet authors, and readers know they can trust our work.

That’s going to matter even more in the age of AI, when it’s easy to produce plausible-sounding nonsense. Trusted media that checks its facts will become more important, not less.

Beatrice: You’ve definitely carved out a unique space. One reason I wanted you on the podcast is that, at Foresight, we focus a lot on science and tech — how to advance them. But what’s become clear to me is that often tech isn’t the bottleneck. It’s everything around it.

So when technology isn’t the bottleneck — what is? Can you give examples?

Sam Bowman: Totally. You’re right — in the long run, science and tech are the bottleneck. Over human history, they’re what drive living standards up. But right now, in many developed countries, there are other big constraints.

A useful way to think about growth is to distinguish between frontier growth — expanding the limits of our knowledge — and catch-up growth — applying what’s already known.

A lot of the developed world, even places like the U.S., are not really at the frontier. Many businesses and systems are much less productive than they could be, for reasons that have nothing to do with technology.

One major constraint is where people can go — and who they can work with. Housing restrictions in cities limit mobility. The most productive cities are vastly richer than the rest of their countries, but we don’t let enough people move there.

That keeps potential workers stuck in less productive places, and as a result, everyone is poorer.

Transport infrastructure is another constraint. You can’t have thriving cities without good transport. In many cases, what we need isn’t just more housing, but better mobility. Some “cities” are so sprawling and poorly connected that people might as well live hundreds of miles apart.

Then there’s energy. Every kind of production — digital, industrial, you name it — depends on cheap, abundant energy. So fixing energy systems is crucial for sustained growth.

To sum up: in rich countries, the core bottlenecks are housing, transport, and energy. Fix those, and we could see dramatic growth in a short time — far faster than waiting for the next big tech breakthrough.

Sam Bowman: A lot of developed countries are assumed to be “at the frontier,” but no country truly is. The U.S. is among the richest and most advanced, yet plenty of firms and workers are far below best practice.

One big constraint is location — who people can combine with. Housing limits in top cities stop people from moving to where they’d be most productive. In every rich country, major cities are much richer than the national average because dense talent pools enable more sophisticated businesses and faster idea exchange.

When we restrict housing in those cities, people who would have moved don’t — even though their skills would be more valuable there. Someone with the same abilities might stay in rural County Cork, say, instead of moving to Dublin or London to do a job that doesn’t exist back home. That’s lost output and income.

Transport infrastructure is the next constraint. Sometimes it’s not housing you need so much as connectivity. You can have a place that looks like a city from space, but if it takes hours to get across it, it functions like scattered towns. Better roads, freer-flowing traffic, rail, metros, trams — even well-run buses — let cities become truly integrated labor markets.

Then energy: it’s a common input to almost everything, increasingly including digital sectors like AI. If I had to choose, I’d fix housing and transit before energy, but energy still matters a lot — especially for advanced manufacturing and compute-heavy industries.

All three connect back to frontier progress, too. Breakthroughs cluster where people cluster — labs, departments, industrial hubs. Letting people co-locate drives not just catch-up growth, but new ideas.

We could get dramatically more growth, quickly, by fixing housing, transport, and energy in developed countries — much more than we can expect in the same short window from pure technological advance (even if tech dominates in the long run).

Beatrice: That’s counterintuitive to many people. And we’re sitting in San Francisco — a perfect case of expensive housing and tough transport.

Sam Bowman: San Francisco is a good counterexample to my thesis in one way. It’s dysfunctional in a lot of respects — bad housing policy, poor urban form, very low density, severe street-level disorder in parts of the city — and yet it’s been the global center of tech for decades. That suggests life finds a way; economic gravity is powerful.

But I still think fixing housing here would unlock much more advancement. The Bay Area would be far larger, firms could hire many more people at still-good but less distortionary wages, and the overall ecosystem would accelerate. If I had to name one single intervention anywhere, it might be “fix Bay Area housing” — it’d be steroids for tech and AI. I could be wrong, but I doubt adding lots of people would do nothing.

Why is the gravity here so strong? Path dependence. If we were designing from scratch, we wouldn’t pick recent-years San Francisco as the ideal global tech hub. But that’s not how economies work. Stanford fosters early semiconductors; semiconductors beget software; software the internet; the internet leads to today’s AI stack. None of this was centrally planned, and it’s very hard to transplant.

People have tried to “move San Francisco” to Miami or Austin. It never really works because the accumulated networks, suppliers, investors, and tacit knowledge are here. That also implies many economic-development efforts fail when they try to conjure a frontier cluster in a place that doesn’t already have one. If it does work somewhere, great — but usually the highest-yield move is to let successful cities grow and make it easy for people to move to them, rather than trying to move the cluster to people who don’t want to relocate.

That sounds mundane — housing isn’t sexy. I get AI FOMO talking about bricks while friends “build God.” But moving people to opportunity is simpler and more reliable than moving opportunity to people.

Take Sweden’s Northvolt example: massive effort to anchor a frontier industry in a place few want to live. When the company stumbles, a lot of public effort sits on a shaky base. Or look at TSMC: the world depends on chips made in Taiwan. Strategically, the U.S. is spending huge sums to replicate advanced fabs domestically. I think that’s justified — but even with near-unlimited money, it’s hard. That shows how difficult it is to relocate complex industrial ecosystems.

So: rather than heroic attempts to transplant clusters, expand the ones we have. Let London, New York, the Bay Area, and peers grow — and connect them with transit — so more people can plug into the frontier.

Beatrice: So if it’s so hard to build in places like San Francisco, why does this keep happening? Are there recurring patterns that make it so difficult?

Sam Bowman: Yes. We actually have an article in the new print issue of Works in Progress called The Great Downzoning that digs into this. Even if you’re not a history buff, it’s useful, because understanding why these rules came in is key to fixing them. It’s like Chesterton’s fence — before you tear it down, you need to know why it was built.

Originally, zoning rules came from a mix of legitimate and illegitimate motives. In the 19th century, cities exploded. Populations grew tenfold in some cases — Chicago’s grew a thousandfold. People flooded in, and previously nice residential areas quickly turned into overcrowded, unhealthy slums. Homeowners wanted to preserve cleanliness and safety — which is reasonable — but also, in many cases, social exclusivity — which wasn’t.

Early on, people used private covenants to preserve their neighborhoods: legal agreements saying, “You can’t subdivide your home,” or, in the U.S., even worse, “You can’t sell or rent to certain racial groups.” In Europe, it was mostly about class or income. These covenants started breaking down as cities expanded and ownership fragmented — it became too expensive for individuals to enforce them. So, local governments stepped in to regulate instead.

That’s how zoning emerged: to preserve what residents saw as the character and quality of their area. Over time, the original reasons — some good, some bad — calcified into rigid, blanket restrictions that make it nearly impossible to build anything new.

What this shows is that most people’s resistance to housing isn’t about greed or wanting to inflate property values — it’s about wanting their neighborhood to stay pleasant and familiar. They’re worried that new development will bring noise, traffic, or crime. These are often understandable, if sometimes overstated, concerns.

Once we grasp that, we can start designing rules that meet those reasonable objections while still allowing new housing. For example, figuring out how to build in ways that don’t overwhelm an area’s infrastructure or change its feel too drastically.

When it comes to transport or energy, a similar impulse plays out — people want to preserve nature and avoid the industrial scars of the 19th century. As societies got richer, environmental protection became a stronger instinct. That’s good, but it’s also become inflexible — to the point where it’s nearly impossible to build nuclear power because you might disturb a nesting bird near the coast.

So across housing, transport, and energy, the common cause is the same: a legitimate desire to preserve what’s good — taken so far that it prevents us from building what’s better.

Beatrice: Right, and I guess a simplified version of that is that people are afraid of change, or they just don’t like change happening around them.

Sam Bowman: Exactly—and they’re entirely entitled to that. If you move into an area that’s great for kids, safe and quiet, it’s perfectly fair not to want that to change. Where you live matters for more than economic reasons; it’s about family, community, identity.

In economics, we talk about externalities—how your actions affect others. We usually apply that to pollution, but it applies just as much to local change. The trouble is when externalities are handled in an all-or-nothing way: “You may not ever pollute,” or, “You may not ever change this neighborhood.” We need to get back to making trade-offs—recognizing that in some cases, the loss is worth it.

What we really need are mechanisms that let people identify where those trade-offs make sense—where building should happen.

Beatrice: Because it seems obvious that regulations from 100 years ago might not make sense now. Are we updating how we do regulation anywhere?

Sam Bowman: A few places, yes. The best ideas I’ve seen come down to local decision-making.

There are basically two schools of thought. One says, go higher up—move decisions from local to state or national levels. That’s what California has started doing. Instead of cities controlling all housing approval, the state steps in and sets certain mandates. Cities don’t represent people who would live there if they could, but the state can take a broader view.

This has worked recently with California’s SB 79, which preempts local rules in areas near transit stations. It says: around rail and bus hubs, you have to allow denser housing. Nowhere else, just those zones. That way, fewer people object because it doesn’t affect them directly. That’s been surprisingly effective.

The second approach—the one I prefer—is the opposite: push decisions downward to smaller groups. Let neighborhoods vote to upzone themselves if they want to. Why would they? Because if you own a house and you get permission to redevelop it into apartments, your land value skyrockets. You might not want change for aesthetic reasons, but would you turn down a $2 million gain? Most people wouldn’t.

We’ve seen this work elsewhere. In Israel, apartment residents can collectively vote to demolish and rebuild their building taller. Everyone gets a new, bigger apartment; new units are sold to pay for construction. In South Korea, similar policies fueled dramatic urban renewal. Japan has a version called “land readjustment,” where landowners pool property for development, then each gets a share of the finished project.

Houston did an interesting variation: the whole city was upzoned by default, but neighborhoods could opt out. About 20% did, but that meant 80% became easier to build in—and housing supply surged without a political war.

So there are models that work. What we’re trying to do at Works in Progress is collect these case studies, show how they succeeded, and make them easy for others to copy.

Beatrice: How can we speed things like that up? Is this mainly a Western problem?

Sam Bowman: Yes, it’s largely a Western problem. And I do think the Western world knows it’s “sick,” but it doesn’t realize how many of its symptoms share the same causes.

A few years ago, I co-wrote a piece called The Housing Theory of Everything. The argument was that so many problems—from slow economic growth to low birth rates—stem from housing shortages.

Take birth rates. They’re collapsing, especially in rich countries. That’s not just abstract demography; it’s about human lives and choices. When people can’t afford homes or suitable spaces to raise kids, they delay or have fewer children than they want. That’s a massive human cost that doesn’t show up in GDP but matters deeply.

Housing shortages also worsen climate change. When people can’t live in dense, walkable areas, they sprawl out and drive more. To be clear, I’m not anti-car—cars are great, and everyone who wants one should be able to have one. But we should also build the kinds of neighborhoods people want: compact, walkable, mixed-use areas that are in highest demand.

Those homes have lower emissions, better transit access, healthier residents who walk more, and richer community life. Just look at the most expensive neighborhoods—brownstones in Brooklyn, old parts of Boston—they’re dense and human-scaled. People are literally voting with their wallets for that environment, yet we barely build it anymore.

Now, I don’t want to sound like a crank and claim that fixing housing solves everything. It won’t. Climate change would still be a problem, but it would be easier to tackle with stronger growth. Growth is a master key—it lets you solve other issues. With growth, you can fund prisons to reduce crime, pay for public-sector reform, or invest in new technology. Without it, every problem becomes a zero-sum fight.

I think the weak growth most Western countries have had in recent decades is the root cause of many of their social and political frustrations.

Beatrice: That’s a great point. You’ve also said in another interview that people’s opposition to new building often comes down to aesthetics. Can you explain that?

Sam Bowman: Yes—and it’s actually huge. One of the most underrated reasons people resist development is that they expect new buildings to be ugly.

If you look at architecture up until about a hundred years ago—say, the 1940s—most of it was built in styles that are easy to like. Then came a shift: modernist and avant-garde movements became dominant. Architects and planners started designing for artistic progress rather than public enjoyment. “Pastiche”—copying traditional styles—became a dirty word.

But most normal people don’t care about architectural theory. They just want things that look nice. Architecture is different from other arts because you can’t opt out of it—you have to live among it. You don’t have to listen to music you dislike, but you can’t avoid walking past a building.

Economics plays a role too—plain glass and concrete are cheaper—but not as much as people assume. We used to mass-produce ornamentation cheaply. It’s possible to build beautifully without breaking the bank.

So people have a rational expectation that a new development near them will look bad, hurt the neighborhood’s character, and make it less pleasant to walk through. No wonder they object.

If we built things that were actually beautiful—human-scaled, with detail, good materials, and inviting ground floors—I’m not saying everyone would suddenly become pro-housing, but it would soften opposition a lot.

Beatrice: That makes total sense. People probably just don’t want to live next to something that feels soulless or alienating.

Sam Bowman: Exactly. I live in a part of London with beautiful old Georgian and Victorian buildings—and right next to them are blocks built after the war that are just… ugly. Poorly built, cheap materials, unpleasant to walk past. It’s completely understandable that people would say, “If that’s what you’re building, I don’t want it near me.”

If instead, we built something that felt timeless and well-crafted, people would be more open. I’m not claiming it would convert everyone to the YIMBY cause, but it would at least reduce the hostility.

Beatrice: And it’s funny, because you’ve said you were surprised by how much people care about aesthetics—but Works in Progress itself is known for being very beautifully designed.

Sam Bowman: Yes, that’s true! I’ve been on a bit of a journey there. When I was younger, I had a very economistic mindset: utilitarian, focused on efficiency and measurable impact. I rolled my eyes at anything that sounded too abstract or “airy.”

But over time, I realized beauty and design do matter—deeply. Working on Works in Progress made that clear. We could have launched as a simple WordPress blog, but we put care into design because it signals respect for the reader. When people saw that we’d invested thought into every detail, they felt our work was worth their attention.

Design says something about who you are—it reflects care and seriousness. I’ve come to appreciate that aesthetics aren’t a luxury; they’re a form of communication.

Beatrice: We actually used your website as inspiration when redoing ours!

Sam Bowman: That’s the best compliment. I’m genuinely delighted to hear that.

Beatrice: So, connecting that to what we discussed earlier—people like pastiche because it feels familiar, tied to what they grew up with. Which connects to culture more broadly. At the Progress Conference yesterday, I was talking to someone who had data showing how few young people believe the world is getting better. In France, it was something like nine percent. Even in the U.S., it was only about thirty.

Sam Bowman: Yes, that’s deeply worrying—and it’s tied to everything we’ve been discussing. When people don’t see visible progress around them—new housing, new infrastructure, new beauty—they stop believing progress is possible.

So I think we need two kinds of change. First, invisible high-leverage reforms—policies that quietly improve things without huge political fights. Fixing housing is a great example: you can design local opt-ins or zoning reforms that work without endless partisan drama. Those small wins can restore people’s sense that improvement is happening.

Second, we need an elite consensus around growth. The people who shape opinion—politicians, journalists, academics—need to agree that growth is the foundation of everything else. Without it, you can’t tackle inequality, climate change, or anything long-term.

Right now, Western countries have dozens of competing “top priorities.” But nothing works without growth. When economies grow, you can afford to reform public services, fund clean energy, reduce crime—all of it. Without growth, every problem becomes a tug-of-war over a fixed pie.

We need to make believing in progress high-status again—to make “pro-growth” the respectable, default position.

Beatrice: That makes sense. If people can actually feel progress, they’ll start believing it’s possible again.

Sam Bowman: Exactly. One of my favorite phrases comes from a New Zealand politician named Roger Douglas. He said, “You have to let the dog see the rabbit.” Meaning, people won’t get excited about abstract promises of growth—but once they experience it, once they see progress, they want more of it.

When you have growth, optimism becomes self-reinforcing. When you don’t, people start to assume that improvement is impossible, and politics turns zero-sum. Everyone fights over scraps.

So what we need are small, achievable wins that make growth visible. Once people see things improving—new homes, better transit, cleaner energy—they’ll start demanding more of it.

At the same time, elites—on both the left and right—need to make an explicit bargain: we may disagree on everything else, but we all agree that growth is the priority.
You can’t fix inequality, fund green technology, or keep public services solvent without it.

If you look at countries that escaped stagnation—places like Ireland or South Korea—it’s because their elites agreed: “We want to stop being poor.” They built a cross-party consensus that growth was the shared mission.

That’s what’s missing in much of the West right now. Too many people see growth as just another ideology instead of the precondition for solving everything else.

Beatrice: So what’s your “existential hope” scenario? What would a truly optimistic path forward look like?

Sam Bowman: In the realistic-but-hopeful version of the future, countries start passing laws that either remove the blockers—like California’s reforms—or create new local incentives, like South Korea’s housing policies. Suddenly, building becomes possible again.

Once that happens, you get a cascade of effects. Cities expand; housing supply surges. People who’ve been stuck living with parents or crammed into flatshares finally get their own place. That triggers all sorts of positive knock-on effects—more family formation, higher birth rates, greater mobility, better jobs.

Imagine New York growing to forty million people, or the Bay Area tripling in size. London could double. That scale of expansion would unleash enormous productivity. Companies would hire more easily, startups would form faster, and new ideas would spread quicker simply because more people could live and work together.

And once people see the results—more prosperity, cleaner and safer cities, visible progress—they rediscover a sense of forward motion. They remember that the world can get better.

That cultural shift is as important as the economic one. When people believe the future can be brighter, they start working to make it so.

Beatrice: That’s a beautiful vision.

Sam Bowman: Thanks. And the best part is—it’s achievable. These aren’t moonshot technologies or trillion-dollar programs. They’re changes to rules, incentives, and norms.

If we can show through example—through case studies, through stories—that reform is possible, then optimism can spread again. That’s why I love this work. Even small progress in one place can spark hope everywhere else.

Beatrice: It ties back to science and tech, right? If people come together and rebuild that sense of possibility, that’s how we push the frontier again.

Sam Bowman: Exactly. There’s this false idea that housing and infrastructure are somehow separate from science and technology—but they’re completely intertwined. Every breakthrough depends on people being able to live and work together in productive clusters.

Someone wrote an article recently arguing that the “build, baby, build” mindset is misguided—that growth comes from technology, not construction. I think that’s half right. Growth does come from technology and new ideas—but building is what allows those ideas to spread and multiply. It’s the platform everything else rests on.

It’s not an either–or choice. Building more—homes, labs, transport, energy—helps us apply new technologies and create the conditions for new ones. It’s the closest thing to a free lunch we have.

And to be clear, I didn’t start out caring about housing. Fifteen years ago, I didn’t think about it at all. It only became obvious once I realized that it’s really about people. Where people are determines who they can work with, what ideas they can develop, and how quickly progress happens.

So, yes—housing, transit, and energy may sound boring compared to AI or quantum computing, but they’re the foundation of everything.

Beatrice: That’s a great way to frame it. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about one more thing—the “DoE” effort here in the U.S. that tried to reform government spending. It didn’t go well. Do you think things like that hurt this broader movement?

Sam Bowman: I think it did some damage, yes, though not to the underlying idea of reform. It mainly showed how not to do it. The instinct was right—you want to make government more effective and efficient—but they overpromised and underprepared.

When you set yourself huge, vague targets without a clear plan, you end up cutting the wrong things. That’s what happened: they went after programs that were easy to cut, not necessarily wasteful ones. It’s like trying to lose weight by amputating a limb—it works, but it’s not smart policy.

Reform needs to be strategic. You can’t just knock the door down and hope to rebuild from the rubble. You have to build new systems alongside the old ones, test them, and transition over once they work.

France actually did something brilliant with childcare. Rather than deregulating existing nurseries—which would’ve sparked panic—they created a new, lightly regulated category of childminders. It was voluntary, parallel to the old system. Over time, people just moved to it because it worked better.

That’s how good reform happens: not by smashing what exists, but by giving people a better option.

Beatrice: That’s such a hopeful example.

Sam Bowman: It is. And it speaks to a bigger truth: reform doesn’t have to mean chaos. If we understand the interests and fears of the people involved—whether they’re parents, local residents, or public servants—we can design change they’ll actually support.

That’s what makes me optimistic. There are real examples out there—Madrid’s affordable metro expansion, Japan’s land-readjustment housing, Houston’s zoning reforms—that show what’s possible when we get it right.

The challenge now is to learn from those successes, adapt them, and scale them. The world isn’t short on good ideas—it’s short on belief that we can still act on them.

Beatrice: That’s the perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us—it was an incredible conversation.

Sam Bowman: Thank you. It was a real pleasure. And if listeners take one thing away, it’s this: we can fix a lot more than we think. We just have to start building again.