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In last week\u2019s episode of the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns, talked with the economist Alison Schrager about uncertainty and risk. In this week\u2019s episode, Chuck provides some additional thoughts on risk\u2014and, in particular, the risks towns and cities are taking with their financial futures.\nNot only are communities making bad bets by going all-in on the Suburban Experiment, they assume the government (state and federal) or the market will be there to bail them out if the worse\u2014functional,\xa0 or actual, insolvency\u2014happens. But, as Chuck demonstrates, that\u2019s an awfully big assumption.\nFor one thing, the federal government and the market are taking huge risks themselves. We can\u2019t count on the market to bail us out; the market today is almost absurdly irrational. And the federal government is a tenuous partner at best. No one has studied just much money the feds can actually afford to borrow. How much debt runway do we have? No one knows, but we\u2019re hurtling down it with abandon.\nFor another thing, because our communities are being built according to the same one-size-fits-all suburban development pattern, they\u2019re likely to fail in the same way. We\u2019re 100% correlated, Chuck says. In that scenario, which cities will get rescued? What will differentiate your town from the one up the road?\nDrawing on the work of Tomas Sedlacek, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and others, Chuck talks about all the assumptions the government, market, and local communities are all making about one another. Then he talks about how the truly strong towns can take their financial futures into their own hands.\nAdditional Show Notes\n\nAllison Schrager: "The only insurance against uncertainty is resilience.\u201d (Podcast)\n\n\n\u201cNo one knows how much the government can borrow,\u201d by Noah Smith\n\n\nTomas Sedlacek: A More Humane Economics (Podcast)\n\n\nCharles Marohn (Twitter)\n\n\nRelated Strong Towns Content\n\n\u201cWinning Is the Absence of Losing,\u201d by Charles Marohn\n\n\nArticles on antifragility\n\n\n\u201cStrong Towns 101: Risk and Reward,\u201d by Charles Marohn\n\n\n\u201cThe Difference between Growth and Wealth,\u201d by Charles Marohn