For policymakers and researchers

New Athens is fundamentally an effort to save America from population collapse without violating basic American values. Our vision demands we tackle dozens of America’s thorniest problems all at once. This is a strategic decision. Our country is increasingly unable to solve problems outside of crises. A new city is, in effect, a crisis that doesn’t hurt people. There’s a long history in the U.S. of people trying to start new cities. Most were religious cults and made quick enemies of the general public. On the contrary, our goal is to serve normal Americans and develop common-sense solutions that can be adopted by other jurisdictions.

If you’ve spent your career modeling solutions to America’s thorniest problems, and would like to actually try them, we want to talk with you. Email us.

New Athens is fundamentally an effort to save America from population collapse without violating basic American values.

Our solution is to create an environment where young adults want to have kids, parenthood is fulfilling, and the kids feel the same about starting families of their own one day. In other words, value parents—and spark a dramatic rise in birth rates as a second-order outcome. In practice, we’re boiling this down to a easy-to-remember idea: The first great American city for families, where a family of four can live comfortably on a single income.

New Athens is fundamentally an effort to save America from population collapse without violating basic American values. The problem is profound: If birth rates in America stay where they already are, we face population collapse and likely economic collapse within most of our lifetimes. There is a long history in the US of people trying to start new cities. Most were religious cults and made quick enemies of the general public. On the contrary, our goal is to serve normal Americans and develop common-sense solutions that can be adopted by other jurisdictions that share our desire to not have their populations literally die off. Our solution is to create an environment where young adults want to have kids, parenthood is fulfilling, and the kids feel the same about starting families of their own one day. In other words, value parents—and spark a dramatic rise in birth rates as a second-order outcome. In practice, we’re boiling this down to a easy-to-remember idea: The first great American city for families, where a family of four can live comfortably on a single income.

The problem

If birth rates in America stay where they already are, we face population collapse and likely economic collapse within the next 30 years. So does the entire developed world. This is not our perspective—it’s the growing consensus of economists and policymakers globally. The problem has been brewing slowly for decades as researchers held out hope for a natural correction. That correction never came, and Covid accelerated the decline. Over the last 12 months, awareness has skyrocketed and various solutions have burst into the public conversation.

It’s a common mistake to think that fewer people just means less stuff going on. Instead, to personalize this, removing young people is akin to your car running out of gas. You’ll still have a car—we’ll still have nice buildings and fancy phones—but your car won’t move, our buildings will be empty, and our phones’ batteries will all be dead. That may be an overstatement, but only slightly: the American economy relies on a steady stream of young people to fill jobs, create new businesses, and keep the safety net afloat, including the Social Security system. In recorded history, not a single culture has ever recovered from a birth rate as low as ours already is today. History tells us the decline will not be steady, but likely abrupt, violent, and total.

Our vision requires tackling dozens of America’s thorniest problems all at once. What sounds crazy is in fact practical: past a certain level of disfunction (that we past long ago), big problems can only be solved in the context of wider reform.

Our solution

Our solution is easy to state: create an environment where young adults want to have kids, parenthood is fulfilling, and the kids feel the same about starting families of their own one day. In other words, value parents—and spark a dramatic rise in birth rates as a second-order outcome. In practice, we’re boiling this down to a very easy-to-remember idea: The first great American city for families, where a family of four can live comfortably on a single income.

Our hypothesis is that the only way to achieve this is to change a lot of things quickly. Not a handful of changes, but thousands of changes simultaneously orchestrated across dozens of institutions. At first blush this sounds radical, but it’s not: the changes are things people in different fields have been clamoring for for decades. Almost all have even been implemented successfully, just not everywhere, and not together. Almost nothing on our wishlist is new. What’s new is doing it all, and fast, from a fresh start.

Our perspective is that the only way to cut through red tape at scale is to avoid it in the first place. That means building a new city. Empty land, thousands of people who’ve opted-in for an experiment, and a fresh, mostly-blank legislative slate. And a sense of urgency. New Athens hasn’t broken ground, but you can already join the waitlist to move to the city.

Bottom line: New Athens belongs to the long, deeply-American tradition of civic reform, and we believe we’ll successfully increase birth rates.

The utterly loathsome alternatives

Our approach matches a growing consensus in policymaking circles, that we, as a country, need to run big, bold experiments fast. Unfortunately, there are four other solutions on the table that are evil, disgusting, un-American, or some combination. Not going to sugar coat it. This is not a conversation we revel in, but if you’re inclined to think New Athens is a crazy idea, you should be aware of the alternatives.

Grow children in vats in factories: We wish we were making this up. There is now a growing eugenics industry in Silicon Valley building the technology for made-to-order babies. Like a new car with red paint and leather seats, not white paint and cloth seats. Investment began close to a decade ago and now spans over a dozen companies. The companies use different words: instead of eugenics, they say “embryo screening,” and there are no vats yet: paid surrogates are used, typically poor women, who the companies aim to replace with “artificial wombs” that can be operated at factory scale. These are not hidden conversations. In a long interview recently published in the New York Times, a prominent CEO, Noor Siddiqui, shamed parents as selfish and uncaring for having sex in order to make babies. Sex for babies puts children in needless danger of genetic disease. Loving parents give their kids the best shot at a good life by conceiving with IVF and “genetic screening.” Good god. The eugenics industry in Silicon Valley is dwarfed by China’s, where biotech companies face fewer guardrails and, in the wake of the One Child policy, population collapse is a more urgent problem for the communist party.

Replace people with AI-powered humanoid robots: Wish we were making this up, too. Many policymakers have come to believe that, even if every American woman got pregnant tonight, we don’t have 16 years to wait for those kids to grow up and enter the workforce. Labor market data arguably bears this out, especially in the construction industry. It is already so difficult to hire people, especially skilled tradesman, that many companies and municipalities can barely maintain their existing physical infrastructure. Many smart people are drawn to the robot solution because it may actually be feasible. There’s almost no red tape. It’s primarily a technical problem—and we have a lot of tech people in America. But the deeper problem is what happens to a society designed by and for humans that suddenly has no use for humans. We are not heartened by solutions like those proposed by leaders of the World Economic Forum, for governments to take the benevolent path of giving their “useless” citizens drugs and video games and waiting for everyone to die naturally. Again, good god.

Mass immigration of people from hostile cultures: Didn’t work.

A debt-fueled welfare revolution: For over a decade, multiple countries in Europe have experimented with massively-expensive changes to tax policy and welfare programs to encourage parenthood. The problem is not moral hazard (congrats!), but the cost and the fact that the strategy hasn’t worked—anywhere. At best, birth rates have inched up, but not enough to prevent collapse. And because programs have been rolled out country-wide, some have been criticized as sexually coercive, a complaint that’s hard to defend to citizens who voted against the programs in the first place.