New Athens
The first great American city for families
3 followers
The first great American city for families
3 followers
New Athens is a proposed new US city where a family of four can live comfortably on a single income. Fundamentally, the city is an effort to save America from population collapse without violating basic American values.
Before You Apply
Hello! I'm Jackson. New Athens is:
Designed to do the very hardest thing in the world, which every developed country has failed to achieve for at least the last 50 years: increase the birth rate and avoid population collapse.
Founded on one of the very few political ideas with wide bipartisan support: it should be possible to raise a family on a single income.
The largest non-doomer hedge against every leading AI company: New Athens profits from a future where humans and machines do not merge, but instead coexist as complimentary species. Or, if most humans merge after all, New Athens is a hedge against a solar kill shot: a self-sustaining city of humans who are not reliant on brain implants for cognition. Think Battlestar Galactica, but inside everyone's head, on earth.
A deescalation of current trends towards civil war: New Athens is an exciting and healthy outlet for revolutionary political ideas that simultaniously incentivizes national stability. America's founders saw state-level experimentation as a buffer against national upheaval. From the perspective of our current political class, New Athens serves the same calming function.
Honestly, there's a lot of backstory here, much of it personal. It usually bugs me when founders prattle on with their private musings, but considering I'm asking people—you included—to consider moving to a city I'm shaping, it's worth sharing some notes about my path to this point.
In the 2010's I founded a few different companies in SF. The most interesting was a branding agency that helped startups (and big companies like Google, and VC firms we've all heard of here) recruit employees based on the cultural objectives of founders. In short, I saw a rare, surprisingly careful flavor of hypergrowth unfold across a dozen or so companies. Then I got disillusioned. My fundamental complaint was over a question so few tech people were asking, namely "we can build X, but should we?"
I moved to rural Ohio. When my oldest son turned four, I became obsessed with the education system. I quickly learned our local schools were...how to put this diplomatically...unspeakably arrogant and a temple to intellectual laziness. So I helped start a classical charter school associated with Hillsdale College—that bastion of conservatism so many of my tech friends loved to hate. In this new world I grew a whole new community of whip smart, curious, and humble (yup) people who were nonetheless very, very bad at building organizations.
New Athens was born from this stew of cultural experiences and observations of our political moment, especially the on-the-ground strengths and weaknesses of Democrats and Republicans. Through it all, believe it or not, I never particularly disliked any person I worked with. The radical leftists, the arch conservatives—they all had something to say, and when I stopped to listen, which I actually did on occasion, it was a rare day I didn't nod along in some amount of agreement.
The ah-ha came soon enough. I was stumbling around dozens of ideas. But one phrase, "raise a family on a single income," started changing conversations. It reminded me of the feeling of finding product-market-fit, back in my tech days: eyes would bulge. "That—fucking THAT. I want THAT." That was the vibe. And then the next moment, people—and truly, I mean everyone—would either laugh or grow sad, or both, and tell me those days will never come back.
I'll shamelessly admit I guzzled the "Make Something People Want" Kool Aid in the 2010's. (Not sure that's still being served in AI-land.) In a sense, New Athens is an exercise in taking "raise a family on a single income" to its logical extreme. And it turns out, a lot of people, and companies, and governments, and maybe even humanity itself, stands to benefit if I/we/America can figure out how to deliver. To come full circle, yes, we should build this.
Last thought for now: If you've got a sharp eye, you'll notice that the city building process, as it's structured, is an enormous staffing model. In so many ways I'm a generalist, and New Athens will sink or swim on the wisdom of specialists. If that describes you, shoot me a DM or email me at jackson@movetonewathens.com.
Jackson