The New Abundance

Beyond Material Wealth in 21st Century America

Here in the U.S., we are already materially wealthy. If the poorest Americans (bottom 20%) were a country, from a material consumption standpoint they would be richer than the average European.

Our homes are unimaginably huge. The average person below the poverty line in the U.S. lives in more square footage than does the average European (see here and here).

To take a different metric, about 80% of people below the poverty line have AC in the US (from 2009, certainly higher today) vs. about 25% in France, with as few as 14% in 2016. Similarly with microwave ovens, flat screen TVs, washers and dryers, automobiles, and essentially all consumer goods. Not only are Americans more likely to have such consumer amenities, but American appliances are typically much bigger than are their European counterparts.

The average person below the poverty line in the US is astonishingly wealthy by both historical and global standards today.

The Trajectory of Material Wealth

The poet Frederick Turner has a fabulous article titled, “Make Everybody Rich.” In it, he notes that if the average annual economic growth in the 21st century is equal to what it was in the 20th century, the average per capita income in 2100 will be $300,000.

Will we be happier when the average per capita income is $300K? How about $1 million? $10 million?

Will the average person below the poverty line be flourishing when they have a 10,000 square foot home, robotic servants, and AI personal tutors for their children, AI medical diagnoses and robotic treatments for most ailments?

We largely have the conditions for arbitrarily high levels of material wealth. With robotics, AI, and low cost nuclear energy, arbitrary levels of material abundance will become commonplace in the near future.

By the standards our parents and grandparents grew up with, we are ALREADY living at astonishing levels of material abundance.

We are ALREADY Living at Astonishing Levels of Material Prosperity

I grew up below the poverty line in the 1970s. When I was 10, my family moved from suburban Denver to a 160 acre farm in northern Minnesota near Lake Itasca. We were incredibly poor, with no indoor plumbing initially, occasionally only beans to eat, and one Christmas my only present from my parents was a blanket because the house was so cold all winter. We almost never ate in restaurants, and even fast food was considered an unnecessary and rare expense. Other than radio, I didn’t have music to listen to until I was 16, when I was able to get a cassette tape recorder. I didn’t fly until I was 10, when my grandparents paid for it, and only flew the second time when I was 18 and headed for college. And of course, my upbringing was unimaginably wealthy compared to that of my grandparents.

While not hippies, my parents were part of the “back to the land” movement of the early 70s and we subscribed to Mother Earth News, which at one point published an article on “How to Build a House for $50,” basically a big hole in the ground sealed off from the elements. Living simply and naturally was very much part of the zeitgeist at the time.

I’ve since lived in simple cabins without heating or plumbing on several occasions, including for a few months when my son was about a year old. To this day I occasionally look up acreage in northern New Mexico that can be purchased for $3,000-$5,000. After my parents divorced, my dad lived for years in a camper that cost less than $10,000 in today’s dollars. I could easily live in one as well, hauling water from town, if I ever wanted to live simply.

It is simply no big deal for people without children to live simply. Because going to a laundromat is unpleasant, getting to the point of luxury wealth where one can afford a washing machine at home is the single most important luxury (one can hang clothes outside in lieu of a dryer easily enough). To be fair, a well in northern New Mexico could cost $50K or more, but after a year or two of hauling water one could install a well.

For those not ready to be fully rural, there are many towns in the Midwest with fixer upper homes for less than $50K, and many more less than $100K. The point is that while, yes, Coastal cities with excessive land use regulations are outrageously expensive, sucking up 30-50% of income, there are many low cost options for those who are geographically mobile. Young people who want to live in NYC, LA, or SF for the social life and glamour may choose to do so and put up with high housing costs, but they should realize it is a choice.

Again, my wife was raised in a traditional African family compound, with a material standard of living far below that of anyone in the U.S. But she was safe to leave in the morning and roam freely throughout the compound visiting family and catching lunch at whatever cousin’s home she happened to be in. In traditional African family compounds, it is trivial to raise children while living at levels of material poverty which are unimaginable in the US.

We need to begin to understand that by global and historical standards, material poverty is already a modest issue today in the US and will become an increasingly minor issue going forward.

One of my favorite recent books is Larry Siegel’s, Fewer, Richer, Greener. He provides an overwhelming empirical case that in the future there will be fewer people on earth, they will all be much richer, and that the environment will be “greener,” less polluted and with a rebounding of flora and fauna, than is the case today.

Almost all exceptions to this generalization are due to the fact that we limit access through regulation (e.g. housing costs in coastal cities). As more people realize this obvious fact that economists have known for centuries, more cities will reduce obstacles to building more housing and it will become increasingly obvious that expensive housing is a deliberate policy choice. Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s recent book Abundance is an attempt to get the center left (and thus the Democratic Party) to rally around “an abundance agenda” including deregulating the housing market. They get that the housing costs that lead to debilitating poverty are due to government decisions rather than market mechanisms.

Of course, insofar as we are playing status games (rather than discussing actual material conditions), we will never have “enough” because status is comparative. Even when the bottom 1% have 100,000 square foot homes, can afford global vacations that are luxurious by today’s standards, and have better education and health care, they won’t be satisfied because they’ll be at the bottom of the status game with respect to material wealth.

The Primacy of Culture for Abundance in Wellbeing

We need to understand that in a world of ubiquitous material wealth, personal self-mastery and positive cultures in which to raise our children and in which our children can find friends and ultimately mate are the biggest and most important source of abundance going forward.

The most important circumstances of poverty in the US today are cultural, not material. Utah has the highest rates of social mobility, despite the lowest expenditure on K12 education, because LDS culture provides effective focus and personal mastery. Regardless of material wealth, someone who cannot focus or who has no control over their appetites will likely be miserable. There are such people with inherited wealth who are miserable. There are such people below the poverty line who are miserable.

I’m a secular intellectual who couldn’t possibly pretend to believe in Mormon theology. Yet I have immense respect for the well thought out social structures they’ve designed for ensuring healthy families and developing positive habits in young people. A big part of these social structures is a social agreement not to compete in standard status games as exemplified by popular culture. Maybe compete to learn rather than have the most expensive sneakers or the most Instagram followers?

Of course, Mormons have their own status games, as do the Amish, monks in religious communities, Jews in traditional kibbutism, hippies in free love communities, etc. Human beings always participate in status games. But there is no necessity that everyone plays materialistic status games as profiled on social media, pop culture, and commercial media (e.g. “Housewives of New Jersey”).

When faced with the evidence that even Americans below the poverty line are materially wealthy by historical and global standards, many people who admire Europe argue that Europeans benefit from better access to education and health care.

The US is already one of the highest spenders in K12 education globally, with K12 education spending tripling since the 1970s. If we triple it again, or even increase it tenfold, will the outcomes be much better? I predict that cultures in which learning is respected will continue to outperform cultures in which learning is not respected regardless of per capita spending on education.

With AI tutors allowing for greater personalization than ever before, I predict that for families in which children have been enculturated to focus on learning, we’ll see a golden age of education. Conversely, for families with no traditional home-based focus on learning, results will not improve.

With respect to health care, the vast majority of health care costs go towards the treatment of lifestyle diseases - 75% -90% for “chronic diseases” such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc. and significantly more for substance abuse, accidents (including drunk driving), etc. If one has good lifestyle habits, or better yet is embedded in a culture with good lifestyle habits, then one is significantly less likely to need health care. For instance, Mormons are much healthier than the norm and recent Latino immigrants are much healthier than the norm (the Hispanic health paradox).

When I was in graduate school in Chicago in the late 1980s, the Cabrini Green housing project was in the news almost weekly for children being shot from stray bullets due to the gang violence. At one point the residents organized to go through the apartments unit by unit to kick out anyone with guns or drugs in their apartment. The ACLU stopped them.

On the other hand, no parent should have to live in a place where their child risks being randomly shot.

Meanwhile, why has black homeschooling increased 5x since COVID, and why are African American parents advocates of school choice? Because they want their children to be raised in a safe, respectful, healthy environment aligned with their values.

Ambiance and Culture as the Ultimate 21st Century Abundance

Last week I spoke with a successful entrepreneur who can live anywhere he pleases. He was asking me about where were the best alternative schools in the world. He doesn’t want his children to attend a conventional prep school with hours of homework every night. He also doesn’t want his children to attend a hippy alternative school where they learn nothing. He wants his children to develop a sense of purpose, to learn how to focus deeply on something they love, and to be exposed to high level intellectual skills.

Separately Tiago Forte, a learning entrepreneur, posted on X.com about the best places to live on the world for expats who can live anywhere. His criteria:

1. A few hours outside a major city

2. In the mountains

3. Near a lake

4. In a tourist destination or wealthy enclave

5. With few foreigners

6. In a warm, friendly culture

7. No too close to an airport

8. Low labor costs

9. A slow, non-work centric lifestyle

10. In a similar time zone to the U.S.

11. Where things aren’t too convenient

12. With good schools

13. Good weather

14. Bonus criterion: Bohemian, artsy vibe

He was living in Valle de Bravo, near Mexico City, and under “good schools” he mentions “(incredibly for such a small town) a Montessori and Waldorf school and others.” He is among the class of persons who considers alternative education part of a desirable feature of the best locations in the world to live. He notes, “This is the crux if you have kids, because good schools are hard to find anywhere. I would start the whole search for a location on this basis.”

Meanwhile, the tech elite of Austin are increasingly enrolling their children in high agency microschools, starting their own, or homeschooling with learning pods. Quality of life, including raising motivated children who love learning and who love their schools, is becoming the ultimate luxury good for elites.

Simultaneously, they are running away from schools that are disempowering for children because they teach children that the world is a terrible place. I expect insofar as many elite private schools teach doom and gloom as much as public schools do, those forms of “elite” education will gradually lose market share as well.

At the level of community, private community developments such as Serenbe include various community amenities and are thereby able to charge 30% more for real estate. In some respects these amenities are a deliberate recreation of small town life in a warm, safe community that was common decades ago.

Legalizing Markets in Happiness and Wellbeing to Create Widespread Abundance

One of the reasons we are not moving in this direction more quickly is that many of those who advocate for market solutions have often emphasized the extent to which markets deliver material prosperity. They have done so, abundantly, so much so that the intelligent left-centrists such as Klein and Thompson are now acknowledging this more openly. But the next stage is for people intelligent, intellectually honest people across the political spectrum to acknowledge that markets are delivering other goods more effectively as well. We need education markets to deliver positive cultural goods, such as self-mastery and positive peer cultures, to all socioeconomic groups.

Ultimately this is why the entrepreneurial creation of culture and community is already the greatest need for the 21st century. We need to legalize markets in happiness and wellbeing to ensure widespread access to real abundance in the 21st century. Material abundance is already here and it is clearly not enough.