Annie Lowrey

The government is more responsive to wealthy communities than poor communities, and to wealthy people than poor people.

An explosion of meat-replacement products has followed the path set by almond milk in the past few years, not just tempeh- or seitan- or soy-based products that taste nothing like meat, but meat simulacra.

Many women are the lower-earning partner in a married couple, thanks in part to forces that relegate women to less remunerative professions and pay them less for the same work.

Maybe kindness is not a distraction from or orthogonal to change. Maybe it is a pathway to it.

Americans have become more atomized by education, income, and political leanings. That polarization has meant sharply increased antipathy toward people with different beliefs.

In some ways, modern life has made us unkind. That unkindness has profound personal effects. And if we can build a kinder society, that would make life better for everyone.

Wolves are afraid of humans, whereas dogs are not. Wolves hunt game, whereas dogs scavenge human leftovers or eat what their human companions put out for dinner. Wolves are not great at following human commands, whereas dogs are brilliant at it.

The risk that people pose to wolfdogs is far greater, statistically, than the risk that wolfdogs pose to people. Many are bred in miserable, inhumane conditions, and kept in equally miserable, inhumane conditions.

Domestic dogs thrive in the backyard and at the foot of the bed. Wolves thrive on the hunt in the country's wildlands.

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.

Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.

Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.

Cell-based meat, or 'clean' meat - real meat produced in labs - has not become a commercial product yet. But analysts expect it to hit the shelves in 2021 or soon thereafter, and start-ups in this space, such as Memphis Meats, have raised tens of millions of dollars.

During a coronavirus-induced downturn, families will be at greater risk for food insecurity, eviction, and job loss; kids will go hungry; food pantries and social-service organizations will come under more strain.

Perhaps the country's most pressing problem is its high uninsured rate. Every other country as wealthy as the United States has figured out how to cover its entire population, generally at a much lower cost, too.

Americans are no less susceptible to disease, joblessness, and family changes than their peers in rich nations, but they are made more fragile by these crises. The country has a thinner safety net, fewer public goods, and less social insurance than other countries.

The country should not have to wonder whether politicians' stock trades were corrupt. It should not have to think about politicians' portfolios at all.

Members of Congress - with or without inside information - simply should not be allowed to trade stocks.

A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements.

As a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols - to law and order, meted out discriminately.

Police forces across America need root-to-stem changes - to their internal cultures, training and hiring practices, insurance, and governing regulations.

Fighting recessions and building public infrastructure, including care, health, and educational infrastructure - this should not be the work of citizens. When it is, let's acknowledge that's a tragedy.

In functioning high-income countries, the government guarantees the provision of essential goods and services: medical care, transit between cities, supplies for public schools, financial support to weather a period of unemployment.

The world needs to slash emissions by tens of billions of tons annually, which categorically requires government investment and government regulations.

Depriving immigrant families of health care, healthy food, insurance, and antipoverty supports does not just hurt them. In the long term, it hurts everyone.

The rise of populist movements and the shrinking of the middle class - with all the economic pain and political turbulence that comes with that - seems to have increased the appetite of both parties for dramatic proposals.

Home-health and personal-care work is one of the country's fastest-growing occupational sectors. But it is one marked by low pay and meager benefits, a problem that might become more urgent as the U.S.'s population continues to age.

Taxes do have a clear record of curbing the consumption of, and thus the public-health impact of, tobacco and alcohol.

Even very low-income communities are seeing rising rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease as a result. But many countries lack the tax revenue and medical infrastructure to treat such conditions, leading to a burgeoning global-health crisis.

Urbanization, falling poverty rates, and growing global trade have changed the diets and expanded the waistlines of the world's poor, with processed food and sweetened drinks becoming household staples.

Indeed, the share of teachers in a union has fallen to less than half, driven in part by older, unionized teachers retiring, the rise of certain districts' reliance on charters and other private education options, and legal changes that have curtailed the ability of unions to bargain on behalf of workers.

It is a country that professes to care for babies. But in the United States, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries. Premature birth and low birth weight are common ailments, with lifelong and even intergenerational effects.

Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women. Black women in the United States die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.

Economic anxiety might not have won Donald Trump the White House, but much of his strongest support came from more sclerotic rural and industrial areas.

Aided by the Great Society and the New Deal, the middle class grew, everywhere from Winnetka to Orlando to Humboldt.

In Opportunity Zones, as they are called, investors will receive huge tax breaks for building office parks, warehouses, housing, grocery stores, and the like, helping to ease poverty and end blight in distressed communities.

Recycling, cutting back on driving, and changing out old light bulbs for energy-efficient ones might save half a ton of carbon a year. A household going car-free, flight-free, and vegan - changes impractical, if not outright impossible, for many families to make - might reduce emissions by four tons a year.

Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids.

Immigrant families pay taxes. They work. They start businesses. They spend money in their communities. They join native-born families in being economically productive, both paying money to the government and receiving benefits from the government.

In the longer term, immigrants contribute more to the government's coffers than they receive in social spending. Moreover, these programs are not just welfare or a handout, but also an investment, helping ensure that families are healthy, educated, and able to work and support themselves over the course of generations.

The gig economy isn't taking over, but it has become a useful emblem of what it is like to work for a living in late-stage capitalism.

The workforce is getting Uberized. The gig economy is taking over the world. Independent-contractor jobs are the new normal.

Arguably, it might prompt consumers to think about their consumption, with paper straws and reusable grocery bags and shared urban bicycles acting as a gateway to more meaningful changes.

Products marketed as being earth-friendly are often not that earth-friendly.

Making a paper straw requires growing a tree, cutting it down, and pulping and pressing it into a tube. Manufacturers then use fossil fuels to ship the straws to stores and cafes. Many paper straws on the market are not even compostable or recyclable, as promised.

For animals, for humans, for the planet: It makes sense to curb meat consumption, and that is something vegans and omnivores agree on. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report reducing their meat consumption, and many are sensitive to the way their diet might be damaging the planet.

Cows and other livestock account for roughly one-sixth of all greenhouse-gas emissions, and as a general point, eating meat means taxing the Earth.

The bunker business is just one instantiation, the grandest instantiation, of what you might think of as conspiracy capitalism.

Millennials are worth less on paper than members of older generations are, and are worth less on paper than members of older generations were at the same point in their lives.

Kids of the 1980s and 1990s have had a new, huge, financially catastrophic demand on their meager post-recession earnings, too: a trillion dollars of educational debt. About a quarter of Gen Xers who went to college took out loans to do so, compared with half of Millennials.