Guideposts: The Age of Turbulence: — Abundance Vs. Scarcity

In this age of turbulence, the urgent issue facing investors is abundance versus scarcity. If we are entering a new world of scarcity, opportunity migrates to profitable niches, where monopolists feed on bottlenecks. Businesses win by seizing control of constricted markets. We buy gold, land, real estate, and a few titled titanic companies and hope for the best.

If we are embarking on an era of ever greater abundance, however, investors can batten on a cornucopia of new upside surprises of invention and creativity. The promethean startups in Gilder’s Private Reserve become rocket ships to new realms of wealth and opportunity.

I thus celebrate the appearance of this great best-selling blockbuster book on abundance. I regret it turns out not to be the original and pathbreaking “Superabundance” by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley (Cato, 2023) but mere “Abundance” by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, just out from Simon and Schuster.

Hey, you can’t win them all. Ezra and Derek’s abundance dreamscape consists of fruited plains scintillating with some 500,000 miles worth of solar panels and “towering wind turbines.” Meanwhile, agriculture shuns the sunlight on tiered shelves in vertical urban greenhouses fed with light emitting diodes. Biotech meat factories grow animal cells to generate chicken breasts and ribeye steaks with no live animals needed. Looming on the horizons will be vast supersucker factories converting carbon dioxide into stones.

Meanwhile, roads will abound with electrical vehicle charging stations, the sky will throng with post office drones, space will afford huge realms for secreting new pills beyond gravitational skews, and any land not needed for panels and platforms will be “rewilded.” Overall, the economy will afford more pay for everyone, and less work.

So, Klein and Thompson’s success seems to be bad news for everyone else, particularly conservatives. But the idea of abundance is powerful enough even to redeem this supremely fashionable tome.

“To have the future we want,” they declare, “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Apart from the tedious myopia of the climate change cult of emergency socialism, this book is replete with sharp insights, ingenious histories, and even visionary optimism. If the Democrats follow their guidance, American liberalism can forge useful roles in the age of superabundance.

Explaining Theodore “Wright’s Law” of the learning curve, Klein and Thompson show that “some things get cheaper as we learn to build more.” They offer a telling critique of the “Eureka myth” in which mere ideas can prevail amidst mazes of regulatory paralysis. They point out that invention is often abundant compared the capabilities for its “tinkering, embodiment, and scaling” in design, engineering, and implementation.

They are acute and original in their analysis of regulatory blight, following without attribution in the prophetic footsteps of Philip Howard, who has written seven books showing the perversity of rules and regulations without clear responsibility for outcomes and authority to achieve goals. As our authors put it, pointing to stifling scarcities enforced by regulations in housing, energy, and even the environment, “If an outcome recurs again and again, across time and place, it is the result of choices that became rules.”

For investors, this book provides the good news of a sophisticated first step by Democratic opinion leaders from the shackles of material scarcity toward the practicalities a liberating superabundance.