I suppose I need to take on the new book “Abundance” at some point. Perhaps I should read the book first? Well, I doubt most people talking about it have read the book. I’ve read at least half a dozen review of it, and not one of them was able to summarize it in a simple sentence or two that I am able to remember. And this would seem to be a problem politically. I personally had an impression of it as being about technological progress, because I remembered reading a 2012 book by Peter Diamandis called Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think. It is not about that. Then I thought it must be about inequality, because the U.S. is a rich country with a big and growing inequality problem, and that is why the cast masses of people do not have abundance. But it is definitely not about that, in fact it argues that the Democratic Party should mostly not be talking about inequality.

Okay, so without reading the book (yet), it seems to go back to this 2022 article in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson called A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. If it were truly simple, again, I should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two, but I can’t. But here goes in a few sentences:

• Unnecessary complicated Federal bureaucracy slows down or stops implementation of many things we like, such as Covid tests (dated example), issuance of visas for skilled foreigners like nurses and teachers (hoo boy, dated example).
• The public and private sectors together have failed to invest enough to keep up with critical technologies like semiconductor manufacturing and automated port operations (not mentioned here, but in the news a lot lately, is ship building).
• We’re not solving our massive market failures in housing (local zoning laws are cited) and health care. In the case of the latter, the author cites the government and medical industry artificially limiting the supply of licensed doctors and nurses.
• The clean energy rollout has been somewhat of a bust, or at least very slow.
• He talks about colleges, but only cites the fact that “elite colleges” only enroll a small fraction of the nation’s students.
• Infrastructure…er, he only talks about transportation, as the majority of discussions on infrastructure do. But yes, it is hard, slow, and expensive to implement.

And…I’m out of time, but I’d like to come back to each of these at some point. Each one has a complicated, messy set of origins and potential solutions. I am having trouble seeing a sound bite version of these solutions. But the idea of “Abundance” seems to be that if we solve these problems, we get abundance, so they are worth solving.