Abundant America: Part 2: Pivoting from Scarcity to Abundance, Fear to Hope

Musical chairs games have clear winners and losers. Life? Not necessarily. Photo by Artaxerxes.

Growing up, I was good – really good; good in a “tell yo’ mama” way*– at musical chairs. You know the game. Ten people sit down in chairs in a big circle. The music starts and you walk around while someone takes away one of the chairs. When the music stops the ten people scramble for the nine remaining chairs. Someone doesn’t get one and loses. The music starts again, the remaining group gets back up and another chair is taken away. Another person loses. That goes on till there are two people circling one chair.

In elementary school, I would play this game maybe once a year, but I remember having nightmares about it throughout the rest of the year. I would wake up in terror that I had gotten stuck without a chair to sit in.

You could be forgiven if you’re having a similar nightmare these days. We hear every day that there’s only a limited amount of ideas, jobs, energy, homes, and if we don’t stop the people who are taking them, we’ll be losers.

The chairs are being taken away, one by one — maybe by immigrants, or dark-skinned people, or other countries. The compelling political argument of our day is one of scarcity. It sounds like this:

·      There aren’t enough jobs to go around in the United States. So we need to keep out diversity programs, immigrants and foreign goods;

·      There aren’t enough places to live in the United States. So we need to hold on to the homes we have so those without can’t take them, and we need to stop new housing in case it devalues what we own;

Oil is scarce. And we’re not making any more.

·      There’s not enough oil and coal and gas. And sense that’s the only kind of real energy there is, we need to grab as much of it as we can for as long as we can — before others do. .

·      The tech and medicine we have now is the tech and medicine we’ll have in the future. So we need to stop wasting government money on scientific research for discoveries and protect what we have.

But what if all those ideas were wrong?

In their new book, Abundance (see my previous post on the book), Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that it’s time to embrace a completely different perspective on what is possible, and imagine a world where we are motivated not by fear, but by optimism, not by a belief in scarcity, but a belief in, well,  abundance.

 ·      What if we believed there could be a continuing supply of innovations and discoveries that addressed our biggest challenges, created new jobs and improved quality of life?;

·      What if we discovered new strategies to eliminate barriers to new housing construction?;

·      What if we discovered practical ways to harness unlimited amounts of renewable energy?;

Solar energy is abundant, and gets renewed every day. What will it take to make it more affordable?

·      What if we could be convinced that international trade wasn’t zero sum, and instead made it possible for both sides of a trade to benefit?

In their book, Klein and Thompson argue that this kind of abundance is part of America’s essential DNA — that going forward it is possible, necessary and potentially a winning political strategy for whoever embraces it. If we get rid of the well-meaning regulations that make science harder to do, homes harder to build, clean energy harder to site, we benefit. If we invest in discovery and renewables, the pie expands. If we can get beyond our NIMBYism, more people will have more places to live. If the US sells the things that we make best to other countries and buy from them the things that they make best, there may not be winners and losers. Maybe everybody wins.

Klein and Thompson point out that people on both the right and the left are falling for the scarcity argument: they quote Jerusalem Demises from The Atlantic:

“The tendency  to turn against outsiders in the face of critical shortages…It’s in all of us.”

“Most people see others as a threat to their resources, whether it’s immigrants coming for your housing, yuppies pushing up rents, other students taking slots at all the good schools, or just more people on the road, adding to congestion.”

Getting beyond that mindset means swimming upstream against the assumption of scarcity and believing that progress is possible. Turning an attitude of abundance into a political movement will require an entire infrastructure that we don’t have right now: new think tanks and policy networks to develop strategies; new political leaders to turn them into programs; strong project managers to turn programs into reality and a pivot by all of us from doom scrolling to optimism.

Klein and Thompson don’t tell us how to do all that, but leaving their book, I’m inspired. They set out a pretty inspiring mission statement:

“We see a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world. We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction. This is a story that must be built out of bricks and steel and solar panels and transmission lines, not just words. But it is a story… truer to both what we have done and what we will do, than the narrow narrative of scarcity that has taken hold.

“Abundance contains within it a bigness that befits the American project. It is the promise of not just more, but more of what matters.”

Abundance is a belief that the next time we get out of our chairs for another verse of the game of life, we will find ways to add chairs, not take them away. That’s a dream, not a nightmare.

-Leslie

*Feel free to judge me; obviously I was a shifty, cutthroat gradeschooler. I was also really good at dividing numbers by 7.

Notes:

The rules of musical chairs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_chairs

Abundance book overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_book)