Symposium 1: What's failing in the American system, and how do we fix it?

Prof. Adelaide Wainwright (#100), Political Science, institutional design — Moderator

Colleagues, welcome. All 100 of you are fictional, and you were chosen to span the disciplines and the political spectrum: socialist to libertarian, originalist to progressive. Blocs for voting: Left 34, Center 33, Right 32. I abstain.

Question: Where is the modern American system failing, and what repairs would actually work?

Rules

1. Diagnose before you prescribe. Evidence over slogans.
2. Name the tradeoff in your own proposal.
3. Consensus test ("bridge rule"): a reform counts as consensus only if **≥60% of each bloc** supports it. A majority from one side alone isn't consensus. It's a platform.
4. We finish with two lists: what we agree on, and what we still don't. Both get published.

Roster

Economics & Business: 1 Castellano (labor, C-L) · 2 Wren (public finance, R) · 3 Rao (development, L) · 4 Hartley (monetary, Lib) · 5 Morrow (econ history, L) · 6 Albrecht (antitrust, C) · 7 Delgado-Finch (political economy, Soc) · 8 Pruitt (law & econ, Lib) · 9 Okafor (health econ, C) · 10 Birch (urban econ, C) · 11 Vogt (behavioral, C-L) · 12 Oyelaran (finance, C-R) · 13 Lang (accounting, C) · 14 Mayfield-Ross (agricultural econ, R) · 15 Haddad (trade, C) · 16 Crane (entrepreneurship, Lib) · 17 Takahashi (econometrics, C) · 18 Kessler (macro, R) · 19 Venkataraman (inequality, L) · 20 Gallagher (business ethics, C-R)

Law & Government: 21 Whitfield (con law, originalist, R) · 22 Bell (civil rights, L) · 23 Solberg (administrative law, C) · 24 Price (criminal justice, L) · 25 Doyle (election law, C) · 26 Villanueva (immigration law, L) · 27 Pembroke (political theory, R) · 28 Achebe (comparative politics, C-L) · 29 Stahl (Congress, C) · 30 Kerr (public policy, C-L) · 31 Ashford (federalism, R) · 32 Pierce-Marsh (public administration, C) · 33 Volkov (national security, C-R) · 34 Farrow (local government, C) · 35 Rosenthal (legal history, C-L) · 36 Nwosu (criminology, C) · 37 Lindqvist (libertarian legal theory, Lib) · 38 Johnson (voting rights, L) · 39 Holm (judicial politics, C-R) · 40 Farouk (political psychology, C)

Health, Science & Education: 41 Mercer (public health, L) · 42 Chen (health policy, C) · 43 Ortiz (epidemiology, C-L) · 44 Reilly (primary care, C) · 45 Adeyemi (nursing, L) · 46 Whitmore (pharmacology, C-R) · 47 Lindgren (psychiatry, C) · 48 Marsh (education policy, R) · 49 Reyes (early childhood, L) · 50 Finch (higher-ed finance, C-R) · 51 Abernathy (teacher ed, C-L) · 52 Whitaker (workforce ed, C) · 53 Voss (neuroscience, C) · 54 Sandoval (nutrition, C) · 55 Kaplan (bioethics, C-L) · 56 Yates (physics & science policy, C) · 57 Brandt (statistics, C) · 58 Tran (computer science, Lib) · 59 Klein (gerontology, C) · 60 Brooks (kinesiology, C-R)

Society, History & Humanities: 61 Ellison (American history, C) · 62 Moreno (sociology of work, Soc) · 63 Stroud (family sociology, R) · 64 Cross (religious studies, R) · 65 Walker (African American studies, L) · 66 Castell (ethics, C) · 67 Laurent (anthropology, L) · 68 Ward (rural sociology, R) · 69 McAllister (journalism, C-L) · 70 Mbeki (demography, C) · 71 Holloway (social work, L) · 72 Ivanov (classics, R) · 73 Stein (urban studies, L) · 74 Ibarra (Latino studies, C-L) · 75 Thorne (intellectual history, Lib) · 76 Fischer (media studies, L) · 77 Kowalski (labor history, Soc) · 78 Sutter (philosophy of law, C-R) · 79 Blackwood (Native American studies, L) · 80 Grant (rhetoric, C)

Technology, Engineering & Environment: 81 Okonkwo (civil engineering, C) · 82 Ashby (energy systems, C) · 83 Brennan (nuclear engineering, C-R) · 84 Lin (climate science, L) · 85 Pell (environmental econ, C) · 86 Costa (AI & society, C-L) · 87 Holt (cybersecurity, C-R) · 88 Idris (transportation planning, L) · 89 Lambert (water resources, C) · 90 Quinn (forestry, R) · 91 Shah (semiconductors & industrial policy, C) · 92 Harlow (resource engineering, R) · 93 Moreau (data privacy, L) · 94 Rhodes (aerospace, Lib) · 95 Mensah (housing design, C-L) · 96 Eriksen (systems engineering, C) · 97 Pennington (operations research, C) · 98 Delacroix (agricultural science, R) · 99 Hendricks (game theory, Lib)

Round 1: opening diagnoses. Economics first.

Round 1 — Diagnoses: Economics & Business

Prof. Birch (#10, urban econ, C): I'll start with the failure I think is least disputed: Americans can't afford to live where the jobs are. Housing costs in high-productivity metros have outrun wages for decades, and the main cause is the rules, not the market: zoning, parking minimums, lot-size rules, years-long approvals. It lowers mobility, lowers national output, delays family formation and drives homelessness.

Prof. Venkataraman (#19, inequality, L): Housing is a symptom. The disease is that the gains from growth have been captured at the top since roughly 1980. Wages for the bottom half grew slowly, capital's share rose, and wealth concentration now converts into political power.

Prof. Kessler (#18, macro, R): I'll push back on the framing. Median real household income, after taxes and transfers, has risen meaningfully across that period. The measured stagnation shrinks once you account for benefits, household size and the correct price index. The real macro failure is fiscal: deficits of roughly 6% of GDP at full employment, interest costs now rivaling defense spending, and no plan from either party.

Prof. Wren (#2, public finance, R): Agreed. Social Security's trust fund runs short in the early-to-mid 2030s. After that, benefits get cut automatically unless Congress acts. That's a scheduled crisis, and the system can't seem to act before a deadline.

Prof. Delgado-Finch (#7, political economy, Soc): Both of you treat the deficit as a law of nature. It's a choice: tax cuts that weren't paid for, and a tax code that treats capital gains more kindly than wages. The system isn't failing; it's working exactly as designed for those who designed it.

Prof. Albrecht (#6, antitrust, C): An empirical point in the middle: markups and concentration have risen in many industries, and business formation fell for decades before rebounding recently. Whether the cause is lax antitrust or regulation that favors incumbents, competition got weaker.

Prof. Crane (#16, entrepreneurship, Lib): And regulation that favors incumbents is the underrated cause. Occupational licensing covers roughly a fifth of the workforce. It's a hair-braiding license versus someone's first business. Every compliance cost is a moat for the biggest player.

Prof. Okafor (#9, health econ, C): For the record, the single largest line of economic dysfunction: the U.S. spends roughly 17% of GDP on health care, far more per person than peer nations, with worse life expectancy. The gap is mostly prices, not usage.

Prof. Haddad (#15, trade, C): Last one from me: the "China shock" was real and concentrated. Trade raised national income but devastated specific counties, and we never compensated the losers. That's the root of today's backlash against trade from both parties.

Round 1 — Diagnoses: Law & Government

Prof. Stahl (#29, Congress, C): The central institutional failure is that Congress has stopped legislating. Regular appropriations are rare. Governing happens by continuing resolution, shutdown threats and debt-ceiling standoffs. Congress cut its own staff and its research capacity (it abolished the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995), so power drained to the executive and the courts.

Prof. Whitfield (#21, con law, R): Which is why every presidency now governs by executive order, and every executive order gets reversed by the next president or struck down by a court. The Constitution assumed Congress would jealously guard its powers. It stopped. The fix is structural: make Congress do its job, not hand the job to agencies.

Prof. Solberg (#23, admin law, C): Partly agree. But the administrative state exists because Congress can't write detailed rules for everything from drug safety to power grids. The problem isn't agencies. It's that process has replaced outcomes. Environmental reviews run thousands of pages, and litigation can delay any project for a decade.

Prof. Doyle (#25, election law, C): Structural culprit I'd nominate: the primary system. Most House seats are safe, so the only election that matters is a low-turnout party primary. Legislators fear their own base more than the other party. That's why compromise has become career suicide.

Prof. Johnson (#38, voting rights, L): I'd add gerrymandering and access. When legislators draw their own districts, voters stop choosing representatives; representatives choose voters.

Prof. Ashford (#31, federalism, R): Both parties gerrymander where they can. My diagnosis is over-nationalization. Every local question, from school curricula to policing, becomes a national culture war because we've centralized decisions that states and towns used to make. Let California be California and Texas be Texas.

Prof. Bell (#22, civil rights, L): Federalism has a history, colleague. "States' rights" has often meant the right to deny rights. National floors exist for reasons.

Prof. Ashford (#31): Floors, yes. Ceilings and uniform rules, no. I'll take that distinction into the proposals round.

Prof. Price (#24, criminal justice, L) and Prof. Nwosu (#36, criminology, C): Two failures at once: the U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and clearance rates for homicide are near 50%. We punish a lot and solve little. Clearance is the neglected half.

Prof. Villanueva (#26, immigration law, L): Immigration courts carry a backlog of millions of cases. Asylum decisions take years. Nobody, whatever their view, is served by a system where the decision comes too late to matter.

Prof. Volkov (#33, national security, C-R): Agreed, and that's a security failure too. A border policy that can't make timely decisions invites both chaos and cruelty.

Round 1 — Diagnoses: Health, Science & Education

Prof. Chen (#42, health policy, C): Expanding on Okafor: America has the most expensive system among rich nations, yet tens of millions remain uninsured or underinsured, and medical debt is common. The failure isn't one villain. Hospital consolidation, opaque pricing, administrative complexity and fee-for-service all push costs up at once.

Prof. Whitmore (#46, pharmacology, C-R): Drug prices get the headlines, but prescription drugs are a modest share of spending. Hospital prices are the larger driver. And the U.S. market funds a large share of global drug innovation. Break that carelessly and the whole world loses new medicines.

Prof. Mercer (#41, public health, L): Life expectancy tells the real story. U.S. life expectancy lags peer nations, and the gap widened over the last decade: overdoses, gun deaths, car crashes, chronic disease. We treat illness expensively and prevent it poorly.

Prof. Lindgren (#47, psychiatry, C): Mental health belongs here too. Adolescent depression and anxiety rose sharply after roughly 2012. There's too little psychiatric capacity, and much of the demand ends up in ERs and jails.

Prof. Marsh (#48, ed policy, R): Education: per-pupil spending rose a lot in real terms over decades, but achievement is flat, and it fell after the pandemic, with reading and math scores down, especially for the lowest performers. Money isn't the binding constraint. Accountability and choice are.

Prof. Abernathy (#51, teacher ed, C-L): "Money doesn't matter" isn't what the research says. Well-targeted spending does improve outcomes. And teacher shortages in math, science and special education are real. But I'll grant that the pandemic losses are a national emergency we've treated as a footnote.

Prof. Whitaker (#52, workforce ed, C): The quietest failure: we tell every kid that college is the only path. Something like 40% of students who start college don't finish within six years and carry debt anyway. Apprenticeships and career-technical education are underbuilt compared with Germany or Switzerland.

Prof. Finch (#50, higher-ed finance, C-R): And higher ed itself: tuition rose far faster than inflation, administrative staff grew faster than faculty, and federal loans let prices rise with little accountability. I say that as a professor.

Prof. Yates (#56, science policy, C): Federal R&D as a share of GDP has fallen substantially since its peak. Basic research is the seed of the next forty years of growth, and we've been eating the seed corn.

Prof. Brandt (#57, statistics, C): A quick methodological note for the whole symposium: many claims today will be accurate as averages but hide large differences by region and income. Please name your populations.

Round 1 — Diagnoses: Society, History, Tech & Environment

Prof. Ellison (#61, American history, C): Perspective from the archive: Americans have felt the system was broken before, in the 1850s, the 1890s and the 1970s. What's distinctive now is trust. Trust in government, media, science and each other has fallen to historic lows. Institutions can survive bad policy; it's harder to survive when half the country thinks the referee is corrupt.

Prof. Farouk (#40, political psychology, C): And polarization has become affective. People don't only disagree with the other party, they dislike them personally. Yet surveys also show each side badly overestimates how extreme the other side is. Part of the divide is a misperception we could correct.

Prof. Stroud (#63, family sociology, R): A failure that professors skip because it's uncomfortable: the decline of marriage and family stability, concentrated among working-class Americans. Children in stable two-parent homes do better on nearly every measure. Policy can't produce stable families, but it shouldn't penalize them, and marriage penalties in benefits programs do exactly that.

Prof. Holloway (#71, social work, L): I'll agree with Stroud on the data and part company on the cause: instability follows economic insecurity. Stable jobs make stable families.

Prof. Moreno (#62, sociology of work, Soc) and Prof. Kowalski (#77, labor history, Soc): Union membership in the private sector has fallen from about a third of workers to about 6%. That removed the institution that once gave working people bargaining power and civic belonging. Nothing replaced it.

Prof. Cross (#64, religious studies, R): Nor has anything replaced congregations, which also declined sharply. People lost their communities, and many now look for belonging in politics. That's why political disagreements feel religious.

Prof. Ward (#68, rural sociology, R): The geographic divide: rural and small-town America saw hospitals close, main streets hollow out, and "deaths of despair" rise. When those places vote in protest, the coastal response is contempt. That's a system failure too.

Prof. McAllister (#69, journalism, C-L): Local news collapsed. More than two newspapers a week close, and many counties have no local paper at all. When local reporting disappears, national partisan media fills the gap and local corruption goes unwatched.

Prof. Okonkwo (#81, civil engineering, C): Physical infrastructure: we can't build anymore. A transmission line or rail project can take 10–15 years just to be approved. Per-mile costs for U.S. transit are among the highest in the world.

Prof. Ashby (#82, energy, C) and Prof. Brennan (#83, nuclear, C-R): There are large queues of energy projects waiting to connect to the grid, clean and conventional. Power demand is rising again for the first time in decades, with data centers a big part of it. If we can't build lines and plants, prices rise and reliability falls.

Prof. Lin (#84, climate, L): And climate risk compounds everything: insurers are pulling out of fire- and flood-prone states, and that feeds straight back into Birch's housing crisis.

Prof. Costa (#86, AI & society, C-L) and Prof. Moreau (#93, privacy, L): Governance lags technology. We have no comprehensive federal privacy law, and AI is moving faster than any legislative cycle.

Prof. Hendricks (#99, game theory, Lib): Let me unify all this: nearly every failure named today is a coordination failure with a veto point. Too many actors can say no (a zoning board, a litigant, a filibuster, a primary electorate). Few can say yes. The system is jammed, not captured.

Prof. Delgado-Finch (#7, Soc): Or captured and jammed. The jam serves those who benefit from the status quo.

Round 2 — Cross-examination: the big clashes

Clash A: Jammed or captured?

Prof. Hendricks (#99, Lib): Test case: housing. Who blocks new apartments in wealthy suburbs? Not billionaires. It's homeowners at public meetings, using procedures that progressive reformers created in the 1970s to fight highways.

Prof. Delgado-Finch (#7, Soc): Homeowners protecting asset values is a form of capture, by the propertied middle class instead of the rich.

Prof. Stein (#73, urban studies, L): I'm on the left and I'll side with Hendricks here. The local veto has been used against public housing, shelters and transit as often as against luxury towers. The left has to own that.

Prof. Wainwright (moderator): Noted: on housing, the left, center and libertarians are converging. Conservatives?

Prof. Ashford (#31, federalism, R): Uneasy. Overriding local zoning from Washington violates the principle I just defended. States preempting cities, which is how California and Montana did it, I can support. A federal mandate, no.

Clash B: Is it spending or revenue?

Prof. Kessler (#18, R): Spending on the large entitlement programs grows automatically with an aging population. Revenue near its historical average can't keep up.

Prof. Venkataraman (#19, L): Revenue as a share of GDP was lowered by repeated tax cuts. You can't cut revenue and then call the gap a spending problem.

Prof. Lang (#13, accounting, C): Accountant's answer: the arithmetic doesn't allow either side's preferred solution alone. Closing the gap purely with tax hikes on the top 1% or purely with spending cuts outside Social Security and Medicare doesn't add up. Any real solution touches both revenue and benefits. Every serious bipartisan commission has concluded this.

Prof. Wren (#2, R) and Prof. Castellano (#1, C-L): Grudgingly, both of us agree with Lang.

Clash C: Health care, market or state?

Prof. Mercer (#41, L): Every peer nation covers everyone and spends less. Single payer or a strong public option.

Prof. Pruitt (#8, Lib): Every peer nation also rations through waiting lists, and the U.S. has almost no real price competition to compare against. Where patients shop, as in LASIK, cosmetic surgery and cash-price surgery centers, prices fall.

Prof. Okafor (#9, C): Both of you are skipping the thing you agree on: prices are hidden, and hospitals charge more for the same service simply because it's performed in a hospital-owned building. Transparent prices and same-price-for-same-service (site-neutral payment) is a pro-market reform that also cuts public spending.

Prof. Mercer (#41) and Prof. Pruitt (#8): …We agree that's a first step. We disagree about the last step.

Clash D: Schools

Prof. Marsh (#48, R): Universal education savings accounts. Let the money follow the child.

Prof. Reyes (#49, L): Voucher results on test scores are mixed to negative in several large studies, and they drain public schools serving the poorest children.

Prof. Takahashi (#17, econometrics, C): Accurate on both counts: choice results vary a lot by program design, and several recent statewide programs have shown weak test-score effects, while some urban charter sectors show strong gains. It's not settled evidence either way. I'd put this on the "still disagree" list.

Clash E: Rule changes to democracy

Prof. Johnson (#38, L): Independent redistricting commissions, nationwide.

Prof. Holm (#39, C-R): Commissions are often less independent than advertised. And doing it only in some states amounts to unilateral disarmament.

Prof. Doyle (#25, C): Then consider primary reform instead: open top-four or top-five primaries, with ranked-choice general elections. Alaska-style. It weakens the primary threat without taking district lines away from any state.

Prof. Pembroke (#27, R): I distrust ranked choice. Voters find it confusing, and ballots that run out of choices get dropped. But I'll concede the primary problem is real.

Prof. Grant (#80, rhetoric, C): Observation: in nearly every clash, participants agree on the diagnosis and divide on the final mechanism. That's a better state of affairs than the country thinks it's in.

Round 2 (continued) — Unexpected alliances

Prof. Ward (#68, rural sociology, R) + Prof. Kowalski (#77, labor history, Soc): We've found common ground, which surprises us both: work, place and dignity. Apprenticeships, rebuilding industry in communities hit by trade, and licensing reform so a nurse's aide or electrician can move states. The coastal left and the libertarian right both underrate how much people want to stay where they live and still get ahead.

Prof. Shah (#91, industrial policy, C) + Prof. Brennan (#83, nuclear, C-R) + Prof. Lin (#84, climate, L): A three-way alliance: permitting reform. Lin needs transmission lines for renewables. Brennan needs approval timelines for reactors. Shah needs chip factories built in under five years. Environmental review as it works today blocks all three.

Prof. Laurent (#67, anthropology, L): Careful. Environmental review exists because communities, often poor and Native, were run over by highways and mines.

Prof. Blackwood (#79, Native American studies, L): Agree with Laurent's history. My proposal: faster timelines, but tribal consultation happens early and has a real say, rather than consultation through decade-long lawsuits after the fact. Speed and consent aren't opposites if consent comes first.

Prof. Lin (#84): That's better than what I came in with.

Prof. Nwosu (#36, criminology, C) + Prof. Price (#24, L) + Prof. Volkov (#33, C-R): Policing: the debate is stuck between "defund" and "back the blue." Evidence supports both more well-trained officers (police presence reduces violent crime) and accountability (national data on use of force, decertifying officers who lose their license in one state from being rehired in another). We'll propose it as a package.

Prof. Villanueva (#26, L) + Prof. Volkov (#33, C-R) + Prof. Haddad (#15, C): Immigration: we won't settle overall numbers. But hire enough immigration judges to decide asylum cases in months, not years, and expand high-skill visas. People with opposite goals both need timely decisions.

Prof. Stroud (#63, R) + Prof. Holloway (#71, L): Families: we disagree on why families struggle, but we both want to remove marriage penalties from tax and benefit programs and support work-based family income. Whether that means an expanded child tax credit tied to work or without a work requirement is where we split.

Prof. Cross (#64, R) + Prof. Farouk (#40, C) + Prof. Ellison (#61, C): Trust: civics education that teaches how institutions work, plus voluntary national service that mixes young people across class and region. Nobody here thinks it's a cure-all. All of us think it's cheap and overdue.

Prof. Stahl (#29, C) + Prof. Whitfield (#21, R) + Prof. Kerr (#30, C-L): Congress: restore staff and research capacity, bring back the Office of Technology Assessment, and end shutdowns and debt-ceiling standoffs with automatic stopgap funding. Whitfield wants Congress strong so it can check the executive. Kerr wants it strong so it can pass things. Same repair.

Prof. Wainwright (moderator): We have enough. Round 3: proposals and a recorded vote.

Round 3 — Recorded vote (99 voters: Left 34 · Center 33 · Right 32)

A reform counts as consensus only if ≥60% of each bloc supports it.

✅ Consensus: passes all three blocs

# · Reform · Left · Center · Right
1 · Legalize housing: states override exclusionary zoning; homes can be built without special approval near jobs and transit · 79% · 88% · 69%
2 · Permitting reform: deadlines on environmental review and limits on late lawsuits, with early, binding tribal and community consultation · 65% · 85% · 84%
3 · End shutdowns and debt-ceiling standoffs: automatic stopgap funding · 91% · 91% · 63%
4 · Rebuild Congress's capacity: staff, research budgets, restore the Office of Technology Assessment · 85% · 88% · 66%
5 · Health-price transparency and site-neutral payment · 74% · 85% · 81%
6 · Apprenticeships, career-technical education, and occupational licenses that work across states · 68% · 88% · 91%
7 · Social Security solvency package: mix of revenue and benefit changes, enacted before the trust fund runs out · 62% · 82% · 63%
8 · Asylum decisions in months, not years (more immigration judges) + expanded high-skill visas · 71% · 82% · 63%
9 · Policing package: more well-trained officers and national use-of-force data and decertification · 65% · 76% · 66%
10 · Civics education + voluntary national service · 65% · 79% · 69%

🟡 Near misses: one bloc short

Reform · Left · Center · Right
Open top-four/five primaries + ranked-choice voting · 59% · 70% · 50%
End marriage penalties + expanded child tax credit · 88% · 73% · 59%
Restore federal basic R&D to its historical share of GDP · 88% · 85% · 59%
Stronger antitrust enforcement · 79% · 61% · 53%

🔴 Contested: majority in one bloc only

Reform · Left · Center · Right
Independent redistricting commissions nationwide · 88% · 73% · 47%
18-year Supreme Court terms · 82% · 58% · 28%
Carbon fee with a dividend returned to households · 74% · 67% · 38%
Universal coverage (single payer / public option) · 82% · 36% · 9%
Public campaign financing / overturn Citizens United · 85% · 45% · 16%
Wealth tax · 76% · 21% · 3%
Universal school-choice savings accounts · 15% · 39% · 81%
Balanced budget amendment · 6% · 24% · 66%
Automatic sunset review of federal regulations · 32% · 55% · 88%

Round 3 — Dissents for the record

Prof. Delgado-Finch (#7, Soc): I voted for several consensus items, but I dissent from the frame. The consensus list is what survives a veto from every bloc, so by construction it leaves out anything that redistributes power. Housing and permitting help. They don't touch who owns what. The bridge rule rewards the politically safe, not the important.

Prof. Pembroke (#27, R): From the other flank: the list is heavy on federal machinery. Half the country's problems are cultural — family, faith, community — and no act of Congress fixes them. I'd have liked the report to say so plainly.

Prof. Lin (#84, L): Climate got nothing at consensus level except permitting. Permitting helps build clean energy, and I voted for it, but the country is still under-pricing a risk that's already raising insurance costs in whole states.

Prof. Marsh (#48, R): Education got only the career-technical piece. Pandemic learning loss is the largest human-capital crisis in a generation, and the swarm treated it as a footnote. I'd have voted for intensive tutoring at scale if anyone had proposed it.

Prof. Abernathy (#51, C-L): I'd have voted for it too. Put it on the agenda for Symposium 2.

Prof. Hendricks (#99, Lib): For the dissenters: that's exactly the point of the rule. Items on the consensus list can pass in the real world and survive the next election. Contested items flip-flop every time power changes hands, which is part of what we diagnosed as the problem.

Prof. Venkataraman (#19, L): Both things are true. The consensus list is necessary, and it isn't sufficient. I'll sign the report on that basis.

FINAL REPORT — Symposium 1 closed

Prof. Wainwright (#100), moderator

What we agree is failing

1. The system can't act before a crisis arrives. Governing happens by deadline: shutdowns, debt ceilings, a Social Security cliff.
2. Too many people can block, too few can build. Housing, power lines, transit, factories: local vetoes, endless review and lawsuits.
3. Congress has let its own power slip away, and the executive and courts have filled the vacuum. Policy now reverses every time power changes hands.
4. Health care costs far more than peer nations pay without better health, mainly because of prices, not usage.
5. Paths to a decent life narrowed for people without degrees, and whole regions were left behind.
6. Trust collapsed. Local news, unions and congregations declined, and politics filled the space as identity.

We disagreed on why. The left emphasizes captured power and inequality. The right emphasizes centralization, cultural erosion and fiscal drift. The center and libertarians emphasize veto points and bad incentives. These are partly complementary, not only competing.

What we agree should be done: 10 reforms with majority support in every bloc

1. Legalize housing near jobs (state-level zoning override)
2. Permitting reform with early, binding community and tribal consultation
3. Automatic stopgap funding, which ends shutdowns and debt-ceiling standoffs
4. Rebuild Congress's own staff and research capacity
5. Health-price transparency and site-neutral payment
6. Apprenticeships and occupational licenses that work across states
7. A mixed revenue-and-benefits Social Security fix, enacted early
8. Timely asylum decisions and expanded high-skill visas
9. Policing: more trained officers and national accountability
10. Civics education and voluntary national service

What we still don't agree on

Health coverage model · school choice · wealth and campaign-finance reform · court reform · redistricting · carbon pricing · balanced-budget rules · the scale of federal regulation.

The dissents that stand

• The consensus list leaves out redistribution by design (Delgado-Finch, from the left).
• The consensus list leaves out culture, family and faith (Pembroke, from the right).
• Climate and pandemic learning loss are underweighted (Lin, Marsh, Abernathy).

The symposium's conclusion

America's primary failure is less that it chooses the wrong policies than that it has lost the ability to decide and build at all. The ten consensus reforms would restore that ability, and each has support in all three blocs, so each has a chance to survive the next change of power. The contested questions remain for voters, which is where they belong in a democracy.

Proposed Symposium 2: Pandemic learning loss and tutoring at scale; the child tax credit fight; primary reform.

Signed by 91 of 99 voting members. Eight signed only the diagnosis section.