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We cant afford to maintain the roads we have, so why do we keep building more? The Highway Trust Fund is the primary federal mechanism for surface transportation. It receives revenue mainly from the federal fuel tax (18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel) plus taxes on tires, heavy vehicles, and some other sources. The fund has two accounts: (1) the Highway Account (road construction, maintenance, and other surface transportation projects), and (2) the much smaller Mass Transit Account. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Debates about how Americans should pay for roads are endless: General taxpayer funding, regardless of whether someone drives Per-mile charges (vehicle miles traveled fees) Weight-based fees, since heavy trucks and EVs cause disproportionate damage And the less common full privatization, letting owners/operators set tolls and other forms of charging road users But the debates often sidestep or ignore any sense of urgency. The fact is there’s a massive and growing funding gap. Under the current setup, we cant afford to maintain whats already been built, let alone pay to build and maintain new construction projects. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sounds the alarm, even if its in dry, academic language. Shortfall Historically, most federal spending for highways has been paid for by revenueslargely from excise taxes on gasoline, diesel, and other motor fuelsthat are credited to the highway account of the Highway Trust Fund (HTF). For more than two decades, those revenues have fallen short of federal spending on highways, prompting transfers from the Treasurys general fund to the trust fund to make up the difference. The CBO projects that balances in both the highway and transit accounts of the HTF will be exhausted in 2028. If the taxes that are currently credited to the trust fund remained in place and if funding for highway and transit programs increased annually at the rate of inflation, the shortfalls accumulated in the HTFs highway and transit accounts from 2024 to 2033 would total $241 billion, according to CBOs May 2023 baseline budget projections. The HTF is in a state of bankruptcy, but we keep chugging along as if theres no real financial urgency. For more than 20 years, taxpayers have been subsidizing roads because the people who use the roads dont pay enough to cover the costs. The fund has avoided collapse only through repeated bailouts from the U.S. Treasury’s general fund totaling more than $275 billion since the mid-2000s. Who should pay? Tapping into the general fund might seem fair if all taxpayers put the same amount of wear and tear on the transportation system, but thats obviously not the case. About 19% of people ages 20 to 24 dont have a drivers license, and 30% to 40% of people older than 85 dont have a drivers license. Not to mention the wide variety of driving contexts of people who are licensed, the types of vehicles used, and how often they contribute to clogged street networks during rush hours. The underlying revenue problem has to be fixed, which means the debate has to go deeper, from Who should pay? to How do we make sure revenue covers road expenses? Systemic problem is an overused term in urbanism, but thats the best way to describe the transportation funding debacle. Cars are more fuel efficient, EVs pay no fuel tax, and other taxes have stayed the same since the early 1990s. Im not even arguing in favor of taxes, Im simply drawing your attention to the obvious problem that there isnt enough money to cover the costs of road maintenance or road expansion. Basic budgeting If we treated this issue like a household budget facing chronic overspending, the questions would be straightforward: How can we reduce expenses? How can we increase revenue? Is maintenance more important than new construction? If we can’t even afford to maintain the current system, how quickly can we halt new spending on expansions? What alternative mobility options (transit, biking, walking, ridesharing, remote work) can ease the burden using the infrastructure we already have? This fiscal disaster isn’t abstract policy wonkery, it’s a hard constraint on what the U.S. can realistically build and maintain. Ignoring it risks more patchwork bailouts, more maintenance delays, and eventual service breakdowns. Bottom line, we need to ask better questions and vigorously explore and debate the trade-offs. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
Below, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shares five key insights from her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of 10 books of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction and has held various visiting professorships and fellowships at elite academic institutions. Her first novel was The Mind-Body Problem. Whats the big idea? We all want to feel connected to others and know that we matter. The ways we go about making our lives matter shape who we are, the meaning we find, and the mark we leave on the world. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Goldstein herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea app. 1. Our need to feel that we matter in the way that most matters to us is one of the two prime motivators of human behavior. The other prime motivator is our need for connectedness. Theres a tendency to confuse these two, since they both have to do, in a certain sense, with mattering. Connectedness is our need to feel that there are certain others who will pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not. In other words, we need to feel that we matter to certain people. These are the people whom we regard as in our lives, and we crucially need people in our lives typically our family, friends, romantic partners, sometimes our colleagues, neighbors, or community members. We are born into a helplessness unmatched in the animal kingdom, and if, in our prolonged immaturity, no caretakers regard us as deserving of their special attention, we die. Our need for connectedness, in its most fundamental sense, begins here and continues throughout our life. We are social animals. But thats not all that we are. Which brings me to the mattering instinct. Unlike our need for connectedness, which intrinsically concerns our relationship to others, the mattering instinct intrinsically concerns our relationship with ourselves. It consists of our longing to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of our own attentionthe monumental attention we have to give ourselves in pursuing our life. And unlike connectedness, which is a trait that humans share with other gregarious species, the mattering instinct characterizes us humans alone. It comes to us by way of our evolved capacity for self-reflection, and it provides us with our existential dimension. The mattering instinct forces us into the sphere of values without equipping us to see our way through. We are social beings, yes, but we are also, because of the mattering instinct, existentially questing creatures. 2. Connectedness and the mattering instinct are essential to life satisfaction, which is a far deeper desire for us than our desire for happiness. Its life satisfaction that provides us the sense that we are flourishing in our lives, and we can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness, frustration, and disappointment in pursuit of our flourishing. In one of his most famous statements, Sigmund Freud said, Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. Freud was right about the duality at our core, only I would amend his statement. For Freuds love, I would substitute connectedness, since our need to feel that we are being paid special attention by those whom we regard as in our lives can assume forms quite distinct from love. And for Freuds work, I would substitute the sense of mattering, which in Freuds case, derived from his work. There is a strong tendency in all of us, including Freud, to universalize our own way of responding to the mattering instinct, to assert that my response to the mattering instinct must be, if it is right for me, the right response for everyone. 3. Humans display dazzling diversity in responding to our shared mattering instinct. I represent this diversity with what I call the Mattering Map, an idea which goes back to that first novel. The Mattering Map is composed of a multitude of regions, each of them premised on a different answer to the question of what matters in making a life that matters. The Mattering Map is where we amuse, bemuse, and sometimes absolutely appall one another by our life choices in responding to the mattering instinct. Depending on where were situated on the Mattering Map, we pursue different mattering projects, which, in channeling the mattering instinct, propel us into our future, giving us, in a sense, our reason to live. Our mattering projects can be selfish or altruistic, individualistic or communitarian, competitive or cooperative, religious or secular, creative or destructive. But whether its tending ones garden or ones cause, ones relationships or ones reputation, ones immortal soul or ones net worth, these mattering projects become the loci of some of our deepest emotions. We judge how well our lives are going by how well our mattering projects are going. Its our mattering projects, at least insofar as theyre working for us, that yield our lives a sense of coherence, purpose, and meaningfulness. While our shared mattering instinct expresses our distinctiveness as a species, our individual mattering projects express our distinctiveness from one another. Just as the language instinct resulted in the great variety of human languages, requiring the art of translation, so the mattering instinct results in the great variety of incommensurable forms of human life, requiring the art of interpretation. But beneath all this diversity among us, there are some general patterns to be discerned. 4. There are four general mattering strategies. These are transcendent mattering, social mattering, heroic mattering, and competitive mattering. We may employ more than one of these strategies, depending on the circumstances, but typically one of them prevails in us, determined by our individual temperament and life experiences. This sorts us into transcenders, socializers, heroic strivers, and competitors. You can think of these as the four continents of the Mattering Map: Transcenders seek their mattering in religious or spiritual terms, striving to matter to the transempirical spiritual presence which, according to their belief, exists and which they may or may not call God, but which they believe has purposefully created them. They look to their mattering from on high. This is the premise of all the traditional religions as well as those views that dub themselves SBNRspiritual but not religious. Socializers seek their mattering from other humans. They essentially collapse the two cornerstones of our humanness into one. To matter existentially, for a socializer, is to matter to those who are in their lives. Heroic strivers arent seeking their mattring from othersneither from humans nor from on high. Rather their sense of mattering comes from seeking to satisfy their own standards of excellence. These standards may be intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical. Competitors conceive of mattering, either their own or their groups, in zero-sum terms. To the extent that they matter, others must matter less. 5. Our mattering instinct is responsible for humanitys greatest achievements and greatest atrocities. Notice that in speaking of greatest achievements and greatest atrocities, Ive switched to evaluative terms. For most of the book, I confine myself to non-evaluatively mapping out the differences between uswe creatures of matter who long to matterhoping to provide a framework for how we might be able to see past our deepest and most fraught differences to our even deeper commonality. But inevitably, we have to confront the question of whether some of these ways of responding to the mattering instinct are better than others. We are the same in our longing, but stubbornly diverse in our responses to that longing, making it imperative that, if we are to live together in recognition of the dignity of human life in all its incommensurable forms, we find an objective standard to distinguish between better and worse ways of responding to the mattering instinct. The very science that explains how we evolved into creatures of matter, longing to matter, also suggests an answer to the evaluative question. At the heart of the explanation and the suggestion lies the law of entropy, formally known as the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all physical systems are internally heading toward disorder and dissolution. Life itself is a counter-entropic struggle, and the best of our mattering projects are, like life itself, counter-entropic. Everything worth living forlife, love, health, knowledge, peace, compassion, creativity, beauty, flourishingare highly ordered states that must be hard-won local reprieves from the law of entropy. A life well-lived is a life that, while pursuing mattering in a way that best accords with a persons individuality, allies itself with lifes own counter-entropic struggle. What better answer could there be to the age-old question of the meaning of life? Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
My daughter, Ivy, recently joined a swim club. As a former competitive swimmer, it’s been a delight to witness. Every time I take her to practice, I feel a wave of nostalgia that reminds me of all the many years I spent in the pool and all the many teammates I collected along the way. It excites me to think that she, too, will have her own experiences and life lessons, just as swimming taught me. But something peculiar struck me as I watched her practice: 45 minutes of their one-hour training was spent on the basics. Kick drills. Pull drills. All the essentials about swimming that we don’t think very much about, the foundational techniques that make for a good swimmer. When I think about my time as a swimmer, I don’t remember that part very muchthe boring basics. Yet, like Ivy, I most certainly spent an exorbitant amount of time developing those fundamentals in the early stages of my swim tenure, the parts of swimming that I took for granted, i.e., the obvious stuff. The same applies when it comes to our organizations; far too often, we take the obvious parts about leading people for granted. With the growing complexities of shepherding modern organizations, we tend to forget about the basicsthe obvious stuff. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Purpose, mission, conviction For instance, intuitively we know that people are more engaged when they feel connected to something with greater meaning, call it purpose or mission. I like to think of it as conviction. Regardless of the nomenclature, this meaning gives the organization a strategic North Star to guide its way and a reason for being that people can buy into, giving their labor more meaning. However, many businesses rely on external incentives, like the carrot and stick of promotions, and superficial metrics like stock prices and productivity as the primary drivers of work motivation. But people want more from their organizations than the transactional exchange of labor for wagesa transaction that, in itself, seems unbalanced these days on account of burnout and quiet-cracking. No wonder workers in the United States are increasingly declining promotions on the job; “moving up the ladder” is no longer seen as the ultimate reward of work. People want to belong. They want to feel safe. They want to feel appreciated. They want their labor to matter. This is all basic stuff, right? Its obvious, and that’s the problem. The obvious nature of “the basics” can cause leaders to inadvertently ignore them. In doing so, they subsequently foster environments where people feel disconnected and detached from their work. And no one wants that. Back to basics So, what are we to do? Our conversation with Nadia Kokni, vice president of global brand marketing at Puma, for the latest episode of our podcast, From the Culture, provides a clear recommendation: Get back to the basics. Get back to the obvious stuff that isn’t so obvious until someone points it out to you. That is to say, we have to remind ourselves of all the things we inherently know but have forgotten along the way amid the onslaught of information life presents us with on a day-to-day basis. When the foundation begins to break down, so goes everything else. Take music acts, for instance. When a band loses its way after a successful run of album releases, what do they do to rekindle their good fortune? They go back to basics. They reunite with the producers and songwriters from the first album. They go back to the studio where they first recorded. They try to summon the spirit that got them into music in the first place. They hearken back to all those things that got them where they arethe foundational things they likely took for granted on the road to their ascension. Now that I’ve gotten back in the water as a fortysomething-year-old, attempting to stick to a New Year’s resolution to live a healthier life, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Ivy’s practices. During my morning workouts, I’m much more conscious of my stroke technique and foot placement while kicking, making adjustments here and there to be better. Despite all my years of swimming, I’m still working on the basicsand the same goes for how we think about our work. When things get off course, you have to go back to basics. If we aim to improve how our organizations function, perhaps we should start with the deceptively simple things that we know but often forget. I know it’s obvious, but the obvious typically isn’t obvious until someone points it out to you. And that’s the point. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
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