.) So one reason the abundance agenda isn’t as popular as I’d like may be that we’re older than we used to be.
Also, older people already have a lot of stuff, which means that they have more to worry about losing and less need to worry about, say, getting locked out of the housing market by sky-high prices. Of course, the old stand to benefit immensely from further abundance — from medical innovations that could extend their lives, technologies that could help them live independently longer, and better lives for the children and grandchildren they love.
Moreover, American society is already so prosperous that additional riches have diminishing marginal returns, even for the young. Going from one room for the family to one bedroom for each person is a much bigger improvement in quality of life than going from one bedroom per person to two. Going from not enough food to too much is more important than upshifting to even more too much.
This has a certain undeniable appeal, so, to succeed, abundance-agenda advocates need a good counter. Luckily, they have one: saving thousands of babies may not be as great as saving millions, but it is still a very important thing to do. Tens of thousands of children alive today would have died if our parents had complacently settled for 1990’s. This same exercise can be repeated in area after area of progress, from auto safety to cancer treatments.
It might be tempting to argue that people can still manage selected areas of progress without committing to broad growth, but in practice this is hard to manage. In stagnant economies, investments in medical research are locked into zero-sum competition with current consumption. A quick look at Americans’ savings rate and the government’s finances suggests that future-oriented investment will not win the contest.