I have to admit: I’m baffled by the “abundance” movement. You may have run across it in recent books, tweets and Substacks, pitching an abundance agenda as a new packaging for the left.
Fearing a long journey in the political wilderness, Democrats are trying on different skins, much like the serial killer in “Silence of the Lambs.” The Bernie Sanders-esque “benefits over billionaires” is as tired as prune juice. So now we have “Supply-Side Progressives.” And “Abundance Liberals.” Just writing this triggers my oxymoron radar.
Abundance could work. It certainly sounds better than anything else I’ve heard recently, including James Carville’s suggestion for Democrats to “play dead.” But my immediate reaction was: Where’ve ya been?
In 1981 George Gilder wrote about supply-side economics in his book “Wealth and Poverty.” Ronald Reagan read it and embraced its message, enabling decades of technology-led growth. Also, Mr. Gilder was one of the first to talk about abundance. His most important economic axiom, for me anyway, is “waste what’s abundant to make up for what’s scarce.” Silicon Valley lives by this.
“What’s abundant is cheap,” Mr. Gilder told me at a dinner in 2009. “The price signal tells you to waste it. What’s scarce is expensive. Instead of using economics to allocate what’s scarce, just waste something else until what you want is no longer scarce.”
We waste abundant cheap transistors inside microchips to offset the need for expensive computers and wires. We waste abundant bandwidth instead of driving to a library to look stuff up.
