The real challenge lies in persuading people to believe and understand all of this.
We all like things to be a certain way, to have creature comforts and familiarity. We can have all of that and we don’t have to sacrifice what we already like. In fact, this sort of abundance agenda is one of the only ways that we will be able to maintain the path that we are on.
We have to do these things. There is often a zero-sum mindset when it comes to new policy, which shows up in arguments against the abundance agenda and things like it.
For example:
Here in the United States, we have a dismal life expectancy rate. This is due to a lot of factors outside of healthcare—like guns and motor vehicles—that are killing us, but a healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt people is probably a good goal to pursue. Living on the brink of financial distress due to a medical bill is a stressor for many. Americans should prioritize mental and physical health without fearing financial ruin. The decision to have children shouldn’t be solely influenced by the cost of childcare. In 2021, three-quarters of Americans said the nation’s healthcare system needs either “major” changes or needs to be “completely reformed.”
“But I don’t want to pay for other people’s healthcare!” Okay! This is a fundamental principle of insurance. Insurance pools together what you and a bunch of other people pay monthly, and that’s what people get paid out of—pooling premiums from many participants to pay for the expenses for a few. Everyone contributes to the pool with the understanding that if they need help, the pool will cover them, even though many will pay in more than they take out.
We need to rethink how private insurance functions. Instead of focusing on profits and exclusions, we need to aim for a system that prioritizes the well-being of the population. This requires more pricing transparency, increased accessible coverage, and fairer premiums based on collective risk-sharing. Companies like Ethos, Lemonade, and Oscar Health are focused on using technology through providing telemedicine services, simplifying what it takes to apply for a policy, as well as advocating for transparency.
There also need to be options for having coverage that is not employer-based. An expansion of government options like Medicare is clearly one option, but Medicare already faces funding issues. That’s why there are two things here that are incredibly important to focus on:
State-level buy-in health insurance plans: Public option plans (versus traditional private insurance) that operate with the goal of increasing affordable healthcare access, especially for lower-income individuals who don’t qualify for Medicaid.
Mutual aid societies: These are member-owned and operated funds that provide support to freelancers and others in the community that they serve.
Having more doctors can also make a difference. Expanding medical education programs and providing incentives for doctors to practice in underserved areas can aid in addressing the physician shortage. When more healthcare professionals are available, people can get the care they need without excessively long waits or unaffordable expenses.
Embracing preventative care can save lives and money in the long run. By investing in regular checkups, screenings, and education on healthy lifestyles, we can catch health issues earlier and reduce the need for costly treatments down the line. This is foundational—the earlier we catch stuff, the better. As Juan Enriquez wrote in Scientific American in 2022:
The U.S. uses a fee-for-service model, in which patients pay for the procedures that doctors perform, not for the outcomes they achieve. This financing structure has led to a health-care system that has advanced, technological interventions for the very sick, but poor public-health infrastructure. Fee-for-service has distorted health-care priorities in favor of expensive treatments for people who are sick, rather than measures to keep them from getting sick in the first place. It has encouraged health-care spending on rare diseases; special-interest groups lobby Congress and the National Institutes of Health on behalf of small groups of people, sometimes at the expense of focusing on preventive measures that could improve the lives of more people.
Keeping people from getting sick in the first place is one of the biggest things we can do to reduce costs. In addition to that, across the board, price transparency is key to reining in healthcare costs, as well as pushing back on industry consolidation. More flexibility with insurance plans across the board, as well as encouraging use of programs such as health savings accounts and high-deductible plans, can help as well.
“Immigrants will take our jobs!”
No! They won’t! This is a beautiful example of how supply can enhance our world. We need to implement guardrails that protect against the mechanics of oversupply—too many people and not enough support for them in terms of jobs or housing is a recipe for disaster. If we can reform our working conditions, that will be beneficial to almost everyone.
By providing a streamlined pathway to citizenship for immigrants, we can tap in to a diverse pool of talent and skills, enriching our society and economy.
Ohio is a key example of how powerful immigration can be—and how it’s not about taking jobs but creating opportunity. Ohio has struggled with population decline over the past many years. However, immigrants make up 4.2 percent of the state’s population, but constitute 11.8 percent of its STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) workforce.
During 2010 to 2015, Ohio saw a 120,000 increase in immigrant entrepreneurs, while business foundings by native-born Americans declined. Many have suggested a “state-sponsored immigrant program” allowing states like Ohio to benefit from bringing in people to build up their local communities.
When parents have access to affordable childcare, paid family leave, and flexible work arrangements, they can balance their work and family responsibilities more effectively. The United States has a horrendous maternal leave policy (with no federal paid maternity leave that covers all workers) and no paternal leave.
The current length of maternity leave in the United States is twelve weeks of unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) but there is no federal mandate for paid parental leave. Some states have policies that provide paid leave, like California and New York, but the state of affairs is pretty abysmal. There probably isn’t an ideal length for maternal and paternal leave, but the World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for six months, which is probably an argument for at least six months of maternity leave. Allowing people to spend more time with their families is a long-term investment in the future of the country. This not only benefits families, but also boosts productivity and helps businesses retain talented employees, maintaining a more stable labor force participation rate.
We also need to address childcare—offering access to public education to pre-K students, ensuring after-school alternatives, as well as raising the pay of childcare workers to incentivize more people into the space. Children are the foundation of our future. The least we can do is take care of them.
As of May 2022, childcare workers are paid a mean annual wage of $29,750, which is incredibly low, especially considering the importance of this job. Ideal pay is always difficult, but perhaps we can at least compensate them similarly to elementary school teachers (who also deserve a raise).
Claire Suddath, a journalist in Brooklyn, has done a lot of work examining the cost of childcare and why it’s so expensive—both for a provider (regulations such as fire-safety codes, CPR requirements, and square footage requirements make it expensive to run a facility) and for parents (because childcare facilities are expensive to run, and they only operate with a 1% profit margin, so it’s truly expensive). Suddath explained on NPR’s Fresh Air how childcare is not workable in the free-market sectors, and we need some sort of solution.
When you talk to economists, they say this is a perfect example of what they call a “classic market failure,” which is when the price point for a good or a service—in this particular instance it’s child care—is too expensive for the consumers, by which I mean families, and too expensive or unaffordable for the providers, the people providing that service, in [this] case, child care owners and workers. And there’s no way to fix that in a private market setting. And we have other examples of this in our society. We recognize that we want everyone, regardless of income, to have access to a fire department. If your house catches on fire, we don’t ask, “Well, can you afford to put it out?” It’s better for us collectively if we put the fire out, we collectively pay for a fire department, we put the fire out so that it doesn’t spread to another person’s home because they happen to live next to someone who can’t afford the fire department. We have police, we have libraries, we have public schools, but child care has never been thought of in that way, even though I think, very obviously, it should have been a long time ago.
Our children are the future—they are the thing that arguably matters most in the world. It will take treating childcare as a sort of public good—similar to a fire station or a library—to ensure that our future (and those who are raising the future) are well taken care of.
Finally, creating accessible workplaces is key. By removing barriers and providing reasonable accommodations in the workplace, we can unlock the potential of many individuals who want to contribute to society—and deserve to be able to. Things like ramps, elevators, screen readers, voice recognition software, and flexible working arrangements can go a long way in bringing people into the workforce.
Giving people the opportunities that they want with jobs that they want is the key to economic growth. Reforming immigration, providing working parent support, and creating more accessible workplaces helps get more people to their dreams—and grows the economy along the way.
“More housing will make my own home value go down!”
We talked about how Americans make a lot of money from their homes in the chapter on labor markets. But here’s the thing: Many people who scrimp and save to buy a piece of property never reap the highly touted financial benefits or reach the promised land of economic security. The sociologist John Dean’s warning in his 1945 book Homeownership: Is It Sound? still holds true today: “For some families some houses represent wise buys, but a culture and real estate industry that give blanket endorsement to ownership fail to indicate which families and which houses.” If we can find ways for people to own the businesses that they are affiliated with, or give them more access to informed investing opportunities, there will be less pressure on housing being a major source of wealth generation. Homes shouldn’t be speculative assets! Homes should be homes!
It’s essential to rethink the role of homes in our society. Instead of viewing them solely as speculative assets, let’s prioritize their primary purpose—to be homes. A home is a place where families grow, memories are made, and communities thrive. It’s about providing safe and stable living conditions for everyone, not just using housing as an investment vehicle for a few.
Now, I know it might sound wild—after all, who doesn’t like making money from real estate?—and there’s still room for that opportunity, but it’s also essential to create an environment where everyone can have access to safe and stable housing. When we strike this balance, we can build a more equitable society where housing is not just a means of accumulating wealth but a fundamental right for all.
In 2022, Jerusalem Demsas wrote the piece “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” which addressed these points, specifically about the difference between seeing homes as an asset versus a place to live and be safe:
Wealth building through homeownership requires selling at the right time, and research indicates that longer tenures in a home translate to lower returns. But the right time to sell may not line up with the right time for you to move. “Buying low and selling high” when the asset we are talking about is where you live is pretty absurd advice. People want to live near family, near good schools, near parks, or in neighborhoods with the types of amenities they desire, not trade their location like penny stocks.
The piece continues with a deep dive into the expectation of home price increases driving wealth—and how that isn’t always a sustainable (nor reasonable) path for true wealth generation.
Paying off a mortgage is a form of “forced savings,” in which people save by paying for shelter rather than consciously putting money aside. According to a report by an economist at the National Association of Realtors looking at the housing market from 2011 to 2021, however, price appreciation accounts for roughly 86 percent of the wealth associated with owning a home. That means almost all of the gains come not from paying down a mortgage (money that you literally put into the home) but from rising price tags outside of any individual homeowner’s control. This is a key, uncomfortable point: Home values, which purportedly built the middle class, are predicated not on sweat equity or hard work but on luck.
A lot of wealth generated through home ownership is luck. And we need to create the conditions for more luck.
Rezoning is key for creating accessible housing supply. We have a housing crisis—rising home prices have crushed the American Dream. A lot of this is an imbalance of supply and demand—we have a 3.8 million home shortage, a number that has doubled over the past decade.
The housing crisis creates a bifurcation of wealth in two ways. The older generation that has house wealth will pass that off to their children. And those who got into the housing market when rates were 3% are locked in—for better and for worse. Two groups that create the haves and the have-nots.
A lot of fixing this will be amending restrictive zoning rules, especially in cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, and San Francisco. We need to reform single-family ordinances (The New York Times reported that 75 percent of residential land in American cities is limited to single-family homes) so developers will build more multifamily complexes or smaller, more affordable homes.
The solution here is to reform single-family zoning ordinances and behavior, making it legal (or incentivizing through tax credits, percentage of affordable unit mandates, or some other behavior-shaping mechanism) for developers to build multifamily housing units and for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on their property, which would allow more people to inhabit the same plot of land.
It’s not just a federal issue—twenty-two states currently limit or prohibit inclusionary zoning at the local level, which needs to be cleaned up. The government can provide financial incentives such as grants for inclusive zoning or block funding for exclusionary zoning.
Also, the concerns of the NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard) need to be addressed. Because housing is a speculative asset, they want their house to go up in value and really worry (naturally) when that’s threatened by the expansion of other housing. There are two things here:
Homes should not be the only source of wealth. We need to encourage more stock ownership, as well as rethink ownership of businesses and companies that you work for.
Building new homes doesn’t necessarily decrease the value of the homes around it. A state Supreme Court ruling in New Jersey, Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mount Laurel Township, prohibits exclusionary zoning and requires that all municipalities provide a “fair share” of affordable residences. The mandate has forced more than 340 New Jersey towns to develop affordable housing units, and this did not lower property values or result in higher crime and higher taxes. And if residents really want to fight it, they can pay extra taxes for affordable units to be developed elsewhere. It’s about accountability.
Owning a home is a big part of feeling connected to a community. It’s also the economy (as Edward Leamer discussed in his ever-poignant paper “Housing IS the Business Cycle”). People deserve a place to live. And there are ways to provide that.
“I don’t want to pay for other people’s college!”
Guess what, you don’t have to! Endowments at many postsecondary institutions are essential for funding education. For instance, Harvard is practically a hedge fund with an academic logo. We can make education more accessible and affordable by controlling administrative bloat, educating students on the loans they are taking out (and yes, forgiving them), and exploring new forms of financing for school, such as the expansion of work-study programs.
But education is more than just college. We need to give workers more chances for better careers and pay. Companies should train their employees more, and community colleges play a big role but need improvement. There needs to be an expansion of post-high-school options, with realistic paths toward what students can achieve throughout their entire life (fostering ambition), versus just focusing on expanding wages.
Upskilling programs are key. A 2021 study of Walmart’s Live Better U (where Walmart pays tuition and expenses for employees pursuing higher education) found that workers who completed the program were almost twice as likely to be promoted and were more satisfied with their work life.
As another example, a study of healthcare provider Cigna’s 2012–2014 tuition reimbursement program found that participants were more likely to stay with the company. As a result, for every dollar the company invested in the program, it saved $1.29 in costs associated with hiring and management. It’s not only a cost savings tool, but it also helps to create better informed economic citizens—a win for everyone.
An expansion of trade apprenticeship programs, especially in work for plumbers and electricians, is incredibly important. We are going to have a massive shortage of those who are able to do work that needs to happen (the real-world maintenance, if you will), which is concerning. Reforming community colleges, providing more resources such as transportation assistance, on-the-job training, and clear and accessible routes for students will go a long way in filling the gaps we have in the workforce.
“Green energy is abandoning Big Oil!”
No, not really! We cannot implement green energy policy without green energy investment. We still need to keep fossil fuels up and running as we transition to a more sustainable world. Transitioning to clean energy systems isn’t possible without constructing more power plants—which we’d need regardless to meet rising energy demand—and fossil fuels are required to build them. Very few existing industrial plants, mining operations, manufacturing facilities, and construction machines are powered by electricity. Batteries—including the ones needed to power electric vehicles—require enormous amounts of lithium, a commodity known as “white gold.” Demand for lithium is surging across the planet. Extracting and processing it and other raw materials at the scale we need isn’t possible without burning fossil fuels. Plus, we’ll still rely on fossil fuel plants as backup for years due to the lack of scalable battery backup technology, as a full transition to nuclear, wind, and solar power is decades away.
Similarly, while many proclaim, “I would never take the train and want to keep my car,” fast and reliable public transit is an incredible equalizer. If people can get to where they need to go safely and effectively, that is an economic boon!
In many cities, the areas with the worst access to public transit tend to be the most impoverished. And access to just about everything associated with economic opportunity—jobs, good-quality foods (escaping food deserts) and goods (at reasonable prices), healthcare, and schooling—relies on the ability to get around in an efficient way, and for an affordable price. In a widely cited 2013 study on economic mobility, economists led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty found areas with shorter commutes have “significantly higher rates of upward mobility.”
A 2015 study by the University of Minnesota titled “Access Across America” found that cities with better transit systems demonstrated a higher number of accessible job opportunities. Multiple studies, including one from the National Association of Realtors in the United States, have found that properties located closer to public transit lines tend to have higher values, suggesting that there’s an economic premium on good transit accessibility. A 2013 report by APTA titled “The Role of Transit in Support of High Growth Business Clusters in the U.S.” found that cities with robust public transit systems demonstrated better economic resilience during economic downturns.
This matters for everyone because if the city’s transportation infrastructure—be it buses, trains, or walking paths—becomes more navigable, producing even a marginal improvement in the economy, this benefits everyone.
Finally, we need to embrace a new mindset.
In addition to the abundance agenda I’ve outlined, we should also embrace what Martin Gurri coined “an adventure mindset,” valuing high risk and innovation more than fear-mongering and political impotence.
In order to fully embrace this mindset and agenda, we need systems and institutions in place that allow us to do so. Changing the economy and our collective financial health is truly about policy and demanding more from our policymakers.
In the coming years, the likelihood of seeing progress on all of this largely hinges on a confluence of political will, public demand, technological advancements, and global collaboration (which is kind of annoying). Substantive progress demands international cooperation on some level and domestic cooperation always. Things like:
Climate change: International summits like the Paris Agreement, the World Economic Forum, and other big, flashy hangouts often end with world leaders making promising announcements about ambitious interventions and new targets, but they have a spotty record when it comes to follow-through. Pledging to reduce carbon emissions is one thing; navigating the logistics of modernizing outdated power grids, building renewable energy infrastructure, figuring out how to store renewable energy, getting approval from Congress to pass necessary bills (in the United States’ case), etc., is another thing—and the United States and China, among other leading industrialized nations, have consistently fallen short of fulfilling their promises on the agreed-upon timelines.
Healthcare: In the United States especially, everyone knows that our healthcare system is abysmal. But steps to change it often get bogged down in political debate or lobbying pressures, and patient welfare is put to the side in favor of profits. Other countries have managed to figure it out, and the United States can, too.
Housing Crisis: We don’t have enough affordable homes, and bureaucratic funding, red tape, zoning restrictions, and lack of funding can stall all these projects. Policymakers need to collaborate with the private sector to build more homes. (The government can’t do everything, but they can incentivize everything.)
Yet, significant headway (American individualism, lobbying resistance, all of that) requires the alignment of policies with financial mechanisms, such as green bonds or carbon pricing, to incentivize businesses to adopt sustainable practices. Grassroots movements, environmental advocacy, and an informed electorate will be paramount in pushing policymakers toward more assertive action—and it will happen.
This can seem like a long road, but it’s one that we can walk. We know what to do, but we need to start walking and, along the way, convince others that it’s the right path for everyone. Humans are so brilliant and innovative. The emergence of artificial intelligence and how fast technology is advancing shows us that. The key to our collective future is enabling everyone to create brilliant and innovative changes and improvements that foster a sustainable world.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talked about how many people end up in fields adjacent to their real dreams, just to feel close to what they truly want. Of course, we can’t always get what we want; the world does not exist to fulfill our every desire. But carrying that truth—recognizing where our passions are—is really important.
The more we can say, “This is what I care about, this is what my community cares about,” the better we can be! Of course, doing so isn’t easy. We have to find one another again, but that might not be the answer, either. We are stories upon stories, and as the Japanese Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro put it, “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: this is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
The way forward for the economy and society at large is some form of reconnection. As the Canadian comedian Norm Macdonald said, “We are not superior to the Universe but merely a fraction of it.”
Policy is fundamentally broken. (We already knew that.) We know that we can fix it. We just have to engage with the capital-S System and each other.
But policy is broken because we have forgotten about the people underlying the economy. We have become so accustomed to the “consumption-on-demand” society we operate in that we have forgotten that this society is based on people. We have to tell better stories so we can learn to cooperate with one another again.
We have to find hope and avoid cynicism. As Maria Popova said in her 2016 commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania:
Today, the soul is in dire need of stewardship and protection from cynicism. The best defense against it is vigorous, intelligent, sincere hope—not blind optimism, because that too is a form of resignation, to believe that everything will work out just fine and we need not apply ourselves. I mean hope bolstered by critical thinking that is clear-headed in identifying what is lacking, in ourselves or the world, but then envisions ways to create it and endeavors to do that. In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.
There are things to be nervous (yet excited) about, like artificial intelligence. The Austrian priest and social critic Ivan Illich talked about how we “are degraded to the status of mere consumers” as the power of the machines around us increases. There is a world in which humans and machines grow together—AI can make humans smarter, for example—but there are trade-offs to that.
Not to get too woo-woo, but the energy we create determines the way we engage with the world around us, and in turn, shapes our collective future. The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist described our communion with reality this way:
The world we experience—which is the only one we can know—is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it…Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is…the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets.
But we also have to learn to accept that suffering is intrinsic to the human condition—a tenet of many religions, and something the secular world could take more cues from. Mary Gaitskill, novelist and essayist, wrote:
Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It’s to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the “story” must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life, and art based on the empowering message and positive image is just such a refusal.
I know it’s hard—for me, I struggle with all of it! Overthinking, anxiety, loneliness (being human mostly), and some other rocks in my shoe. And it’s hard to maintain positivity with the toxicity of social media—a world built on takes, on monetized opinion, on who can yell the loudest.
Imagination, which Ursula K. Le Guin described as “an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human” is important. But so is real-world data. We have to make sure people get paid enough to live. And we have to use our imagination to create a better world for all of us to live in.
People are the economy. So let’s make the economy about people.