Launching This Fall

Coming this September

Massachusetts has what most states envy. We have the capital, lots of it, and the best universities in the country. Our hospitals draw patients from across the world. Talent continues to arrive despite immigration crackdowns and high housing costs. What we’ve lost is the knack for turning all of that into things people can live in and use. It’s painfully obviuous in our remarkably low housing production. Unreliable trains and rising power bills show it too.

Mass Theory is about closing that gap. We are pro-building and pro-abundance, with no hedging on either. We ask one thing of any policy. Did it work? The people who write here do the actual work. They are staffers, planners, operators, and civil servants who almost never get to speak in public.

The name comes from Horace Mann. In 1848 he wrote that under the Massachusetts theory, everyone gets a fair shot at earning a living and keeps what they earn. We want to find out whether that still holds. Then we want to help make it true again.

We cover housing and transit, energy costs, economic strategy, health care, schools, and whether the state can get any of it done.