More Than Decline

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted a wide range of social problems, from the slow deaths of American communities to cultural hypochondriasis to the damage that can be done by a too-powerful government bureaucracy.

One subject given surprisingly short shrift was the dawning realization that America can’t make things anymore. Be it computer chips or cheap masks, American consumers—living in what was once the most powerful industrial behemoth in the world—couldn’t get access to what they needed, or were charged exorbitantly more for the privilege.

How could this be? And what could be done to fix it? One theory on the latter, the “Abundance Agenda,” posits that what’s needed is a return of capacity. The central thesis, articulated in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson, is that what we need to solve all of America’s challenges is to focus on providing more of everything.

“Abundance” is getting at something critically important. America has lost the capacity to make things, and this creates both the risk and reality of shortages and vulnerability.

But what we should worry about are the shortages that impact everyday Americans, and the attendant problems of an economy that doesn’t serve them. Abundance, as presently articulated in the pages of the Atlantic and elsewhere, over-indexes on the concerns of the laptop class—the lack of things like green energy or affordable colleges. It should be no wonder, then, that so many of the policies that have spun out of the agenda have been progressive. And we need to wrestle with the constraints of an American state already $35 trillion in debt: We simply can’t afford an expansive wish list of policy formulations.

But we shouldn’t write off abundance—and the thinking that undergirds it—as some type of liberal utopianism or grab-bag of handouts; there’s a compelling reason why so many people, left, right, and center, are looking at it.