Demand AND Supply

Recent policies have demonstrated that demand-side assistance can be quite helpful is lifting people from poverty. But if these are not balanced by programs that increase critical supplies like housing, drugs, and trained personnel, we will still be in a world of hurt.

Political movements consider solutions where they know to look for problems. Progressives have long known to look for problems on the demand-side of the economy — to ask whether there are goods and services people need that they cannot afford. That will make today fairer, but to ensure tomorrow is radically better, we need to look for the choke points in the future we imagine, the places where the economy can’t or won’t supply the things we need. And then we need to fix them.