Since our species first emerged on the planet some 300,000 years ago, the overriding problem for most humans has been the struggle for food and shelter. But in 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes foresaw that economic growth (despite the Great Depression) would mean that in a century, the vast majority of people in developed societies would enjoy mass plenty and only a small number of unfortunates would still struggle with material deprivation. This would mean that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” But Keynes worried that transitioning to this new problem would present huge difficulties for humanity: “there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without dread.”
Brink Lindsey, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, has written a visionary new book addressing Keynes’ conundrum. In The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, Lindsey ponders the paradox that people in developed countries live in conditions of unparalleled wealth, health, and technological progress — and yet most people feel disappointment rather than gratitude at the results. We enjoy an abundance of material goods, yet most people are missing out on the sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging that define human flourishing.
In this podcast discussion, Lindsey describes the “triple crisis of capitalism” that has brought material prosperity but also social disintegration, sputtering dynamism, and dysfunctional politics. But he also sees encouraging signs that point toward how mass flourishing might be accomplished in developments that include new technological breakthroughs and the growing Abundance movement. Ultimately he hopes for a future in which people will have closer relationships with each other as well as the natural world, and in which humanity’s drive to explore and understand will reach into the larger universe. “Our destiny is up to us,” he concludes, “and therefore we should make the most of that chance. We ought to aim high.”
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: General pessimism and dread about the future are things you can get people across the political spectrum to agree on. Why, if things are so great and are objectively better than they’ve ever been before, why is there so much angst and unhappiness?
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center.
Brink Lindsey: And I’m Brink Lindsey from the Niskanen Center.
Geoff Kabaservice: Welcome to the Vital Center podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. Good to be with you again, Brink.
Brink Lindsey: Great to be with you, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: So this is now your third appearance on this podcast, which means you’ve been on more than anyone else. And there are two other causes for celebration, one of which is that we’re finally recording in the same time zone, even in the same city. And that is because you are here in Washington, DC in connection with the publication of your great new book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, which came out on January 5th, 2026 from Oxford University Press. Congratulations!
Brink Lindsey: Indeed. Thank you very much. I have been in DC, and I’ll be in DC for a couple of weeks to flog the book. So it’s, among other things, my first exposure to winter weather in five years. I live in Thailand. I’ve found it exotic and exhilarating, not horrible.
Geoff Kabaservice: Today is actually a particularly cold day. I am in the Niskanen offices, which are unheated because the building doesn’t heat our offices on weekends or holidays, so I may actually put on a coat at some point. But like I said, this is a great new book. Congratulations again.
I want to make sure we don’t bury the lede by talking about all of the fascinating issues that you raise in this book before we’ve laid out its general thesis. So let me say first that the book takes its title from a phrase by the English economist John Maynard Keynes in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which was published in 1930. This of course was a time when the world had collapsed into the Great Depression, so it’s on some level astonishing that Keynes’ essay is optimistic about the economic prospects for future generations a hundred years into the future — that is to say, a few years from now, when you and I are speaking.
And Keynes understood that, despite the widespread misery of that time, that Depression would only be (in the long run) a temporary interruption in a longer trend of cumulative growth. And he concluded that in the long run, this meant that humankind was solving the main problem that had confronted our species since its earliest days, 300,000 or so years ago: that is, the struggle for material subsistence. But Keynes foresaw that if growth were to go on for another century, then “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” But at the same time, Keynes worried that there would be problems in humanity transitioning from its traditional purpose to a new one. In fact, he wrote that “there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without dread.” So as you went about writing your book, wouldn’t one think that leisure and abundance would be prospects to welcome rather than dread?
Brink Lindsey: Well, he argues that the transition from tackling the economic problem to facing up to “the permanent problem” would be traumatic because it would require societies to unlearn habits formed over untold generations and reorient their life from a scarcity-based mentality of accumulating and competition to one based more on realizing one’s own capacity for intrinsic purposes rather than for extrinsic rewards. So he thought that this process, this transition of relearning how to live, would occasion something along the lines of what he called “a general nervous breakdown.”
I thought that sounded like a pretty good description for the malaise that the US and other advanced democracies find themselves in here in the twenty-first century. We’re the richest, healthiest, best educated, most humanely governed societies that have ever existed. And yet everything is doom and gloom these days, where economic growth has slowed to a crawl through most of the advanced economies (even if the United States is doing relatively well), class divisions have deepened and reasserted themselves and have sparked, in my opinion, the global populist uprising now underway throughout the more developed countries against established institutions and governing elites. Social connections are fraying, mental health problems are on the rise, raw IQ scores are falling, birth rates are plummeting, and just general pessimism and dread about the future are things you can get people across the political spectrum to agree on.
So why are we in this predicament? Why, if things are so great and are objectively better than they’ve ever been before, why is there so much angst and unhappiness? I think we are caught in this no-man’s-land between mass plenty and mass flourishing. Having achieved a state of affairs where absolute material poverty is now, in the rich countries, the wild and tragic exception rather than the grim dismal norm, we’ve moved the goalposts on what we think makes for a successful life and a thriving society. It’s no longer enough simply to provide more material goods. We need meaning and purpose and status and belonging. We want quality of life. We want self-realization. And these intangible things our current way of life, our current capitalist consumer’s way of life, isn’t very good at providing for most of us. It’s doing quite well, I think, for the twenty to thirty percent of people who are in the highly educated professional and managerial elite, but for everybody else, not so much. They’re on the outside looking in. And I believe that that state of affairs is an important contributor to the political mayhem that we’ve been undergoing in recent years.
Geoff Kabaservice: As a thought experiment, I once heard a joke in the Soviet Union (back when there was a Soviet Union): The country falls on hard times, needs to raise hard currency, and so the Politburo sells Lenin’s Tomb and all its contents to an American entrepreneur. He moves it from Red Square to Times Square, and it becomes a big tourist attraction. And then one day American scientists discover how to reanimate a perfectly preserved corpse, and so they test their discovery on Lenin. It succeeds! He wakes up, he yawns, he stretches, he walks out of his tomb into Times Square with all of its skyscrapers and neon and huge crowds, bustling stores and businesses. And he claps his hands and says: “Yes! It all worked out exactly as I had intended.”
Brink Lindsey: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: So what if Maynard Keynes were to be reanimated and brought here to present-day Washington DC with us? How would he feel about the predictions he had made in his 1930 essay?
Brink Lindsey: Well, he had certainly gotten some things quite badly wrong. He imagined that by now we would have progressed far enough along in substituting other motives for economic motives that we’d only be working about 15 hours a week — so that was off. His own view of what a post-scarcity flourishing society would look like is very much an Oxbridge don’s view of things and not really lining up very well with what a whole bunch of the human population might think of as the good life. So in his sketch of a future in which people are just converted into the lilies of the field, where they toil not and don’t have any care for the morrow, that really does not speak to me. I want a society that continues to be dynamic, that’s continuing to stretch the frontiers of knowledge and of mastery over nature so that people are still engaged in big, important projects, but in a context within which those who aren’t doing those things can find other things to do that fill their lives with structure and meaning.
Geoff Kabaservice: What’s interesting to me about this book relative to some of your other works is that politics doesn’t play a big role in it. The terms “Republicans” and “Democrats” don’t show up that often. I can’t remember if the president appears by name in your book. And yet this does seem to be relevant to the moment in which we find ourselves. This was the least functional Congress, in the last year, in recent history. And if Keynes was trying to think about how humans could live agreeably, wisely, and well, it’s probably not a good sign that we have a president who doesn’t seem to be agreeable, wise, or perhaps even well. So I wonder if you had a conscious effort in thinking about things beyond politics in this book as you were writing it.
Brink Lindsey: Sure, thinking about things deeper than politics. Politics comes up in the book. There’s a chapter on our dysfunctional politics. It figures into my diagnosis of the ills facing twenty-first century rich countries, which I call a “triple crisis of capitalism.” I’ll go into that a little bit, but it’s a crisis of inclusion — that is a breakdown in the relationship between growing material welfare and growing and improving overall wellbeing. You see that at a macro scale in terms of the reemergence of deep class divisions. You see it at the micro scale through the sort of literal process of social disintegration: the breakdown of vital social connections, the rise of loneliness and friendlessness, the angst that teenagers who are addicted to social comparison via social media are going through. So we have this problem, the problem of where economic growth isn’t doing a good job of bringing a large majority into favorable conditions for living the good life. Meanwhile, we have what I call the crisis of dynamism. Not only is the relationship between growth and overall wellbeing weakening, but the capacity of the system to produce growth itself, to continue pushing the technological frontier outwards, is sputtering.
And then finally we have a crisis of politics. A lot of the problems that I talk about, in the crises of dynamism and inclusion, are problems that could be ameliorated through collective action in the political sphere. But the problem is that the politics is not upstream from the cultural problems that are causing the social problems in capitalism. They are also creeping up and causing our dysfunctional politics.
I see the dysfunctions of our politics today as peculiarly rich-country problems born from our new class divide along educational lines. That’s a peculiar feature of a post-industrial information-age economy, that kind of class divide; a feature of our new media environment, which was supposed to bring us all together and instead is making us divide up in tribes and hate each other; and a feature of the growing general power of the professional and managerial elite, not only over our economic lives but over politics as well. Since the 1960s, politics has become more and more of a game for highly educated professionals and technocrats. The old mass participation in politics through unions, through mass membership organizations like Chambers of Commerce and the Grange, all of that really started fading in the 1960s. And political participation got replaced by single-issue advocacy groups that were run by professionals, and the only membership obligation is to write a check to them.
So we have a different kind of politics. Rather than the old kind of politics of an elite (and strivers who identify with the elite) versus the have-not masses in a have versus have-not politics, now we have a politics of two rival elites: one business-oriented, one professional/managerial-oriented. And it has left ordinary people frozen out of that process. Elite people have different concerns than ordinary folks. They tend to have cultural views that are exotic and weird by normie standards, and there has been a lot of backlash against trying to shove those exotic cultural views down the normies’ throats — a lot of backlash from that. So politics is caught up in the same problems that we need politics to solve.
Geoff Kabaservice: Does it seem to you that this triple crisis of capitalism has been something that has been unfolding over a long period of time, decades even? Or are there particular inflection points that you would point to?
Brink Lindsey: I think it has been gathering steam since mass affluence dawned in America in the postwar ’50s. I think a lot of the cultural upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s were the handiwork of (at that time) rather small groups of people who got a lot of attention, but the things they stood for gradually leached out into the broader culture and broader population. So we’ve seen the counterculture, adversary culture, a deep antipathy to one’s own society, one’s own institutions and history — that was a very tiny group of very loud, attention-getting people in the ’60s, but that has become kind of conventional wisdom on the left side of the political spectrum. And then, in horseshoe theory coming to pass, there’s a whole lot of alienation from American institutions on the populist right now as well.
So I see really that, first of all, the achievement of mass affluence changed the problem set from the economic problem to the permanent problem — so the goalposts got moved. At the same time, the changing economic structures, under conditions of mass affluence and various cultural responses to the conditions of mass affluence, I think have significantly complicated the transition that we need to make. And we have seen that play out. We’ve seen these problems grow and curdle and toxify from the ’60s through the present day. Of course, our politics has taken a wild negative turn in the social media age, so that’s an inflection point of a kind: the dropping of gatekeepers that allowed things that had been confined to the underside of the log to get exposed to the light of day. But our problems are decades in the making.
Geoff Kabaservice: In 2007, Brink, you published a book called The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. And as a student of Lindsey-ism, I think of your new book, The Permanent Problem, as in some ways a return to and rethinking of and refinement of the themes of your earlier book. Now, the jumping-off point in that book was not Keynes but Karl Marx, who had envisioned a future that in some ways curiously resembled that foretold by Keynes. Marx predicted that both the traditional “idiocy of rural life” and the immiseration of urban workers would be swept away. The development of new productive forces would not only do away with starvation, it would allow humanity’s physical needs to be met with only modest effort. And what Marx called “the realm of necessity” would be replaced by “the realm of freedom,” which would usher in a beginning of what he called “that development of human energy which is an end in itself.” So if you could, could you tell me about that earlier book and how your consideration of this question of abundance and freedom has and has not changed over the almost twenty years since you wrote it?
Brink Lindsey: Yes. My working title for that book was “The Realm of Freedom.” I have a thing for titling books after libertarian bogeymen. But actually, I’ll mention a more recent book first. Even though this book, to people who know me and have read me before, certainly contains some clear departures and divergences from prior thinking on some important questions, nonetheless I see what I’m trying to do in The Permanent Problem as a real outgrowth from previous work. So more recently, Steve Teles (of Johns Hopkins and a Niskanen Senior Fellow) and I wrote a book in 2017 called The Captured Economy. And that book was a story about slow economic growth, high economic inequality, and dysfunctional politics that made both of them worse. So you can see The Permanent Problem and my diagnosis of a triple crisis as a widening and amplification of that story. Slow growth translates into flagging dynamism, high inequality translates into declining inclusion, and the dysfunctional politics crops up in both books.
So in The Permanent Problem, I was confronting these characteristic problems of the twenty-first century but at a much deeper level: not at the policy and institutional level, but at a cultural and civilizational level. And as far as an intellectual framework to make sense of that, I went back to a previous book I had written: The Age of Abundance, which came out in 2007 but was conceived in the glow of the “end of history” ‘90s and written in the early ‘00s.
That book took as its starting point the claim that the advent of mass affluence, the transformation from a world where poverty is normal to a world where poverty is exceptional, was a radical and underappreciatedly radical change in the human condition. And given such a huge change in ground reality, we ought to have expected big political and cultural tumult in the wake of that change. That was the thesis of The Age of Abundance, written (again) at a time when a lot of the problems of the twenty-first century had yet to reveal themselves. I saw that the arrival of mass affluence was creating both extremely hopeful opportunities and then also creating snares and potential traps for people to go wrong.
But I thought then, quite self-satisfiedly, that the main sturm und drang had been in the ’60s and ’70s, and we had worked through that and that now it was upward and onward. Whereas in fact, I think a lot of the dark sides of the cultural responses to mass affluence really started to make themselves felt only in the twenty-first century. So when I wanted to expand the analysis in The Captured Economy to go deeper, and to go back to this frame of mass affluence as a really important change that had happened and an important element in any story of explaining how we got to where we are… The working title I had for the project — it wasn’t even a book project yet, but just a project of musing and note-taking and reading — was The Age of Abundance: What the Hell Happened?
Geoff Kabaservice: Some of the themes of The Permanent Problem (the book) first appeared in your Substack of the same name. If memory serves, you began that during the pandemic. And what was so interesting about that Substack was the way in which you were having an argument with yourself in real time, with each essay responding to some of the themes raised in the other ones, but also in some sense to some of the things you had believed in the past that maybe you had changed your mind about. And you were addressing these huge themes of the sustainability of capitalism, the threats to liberal democracy, the future of humanity. Many of those themes and some of the specifics of those essays did make it into the book. Although this book has lots of moving parts, it also structures those arguments you made on your Substack in what I think is a coherent and impressive way. Broadly speaking, the first seven chapters are a diagnosis of the problems that have beset humanity in this transition toward mass flourishing, and the last three chapters are an attempt to peer into the future for possible avenues toward arriving at that flourishing.
Brink Lindsey: Which is three times — three times! — more prescription than the typical policy wonk book, which normally has nine chapters of everything’s going wrong and one limp “What is to be done?” chapter.
Geoff Kabaservice: Or even just a paragraph: “Put me into power and me and my cohort will make everything better.” This to my mind is what makes The Permanent Problem ultimately an optimistic book. As you write, “The seeds of a much better world have been planted and are already sprouting. We have only to recognize them for what they are and give them proper care and encouragement.” So to paraphrase the notable philosophers Ian Dury and the Blockheads, what are some of your reasons to be cheerful?
Brink Lindsey: On the crisis of dynamism front — on the sputtering of economic and technological growth, where extended years of stagnation are becoming normal in rich countries — we see today this rise of what on the center-left is called the Abundance movement and on the center-right is called the Progress movement. But it’s a recognition that progress in the world of bits (that is, information technology) has been rollicking along since the 1970s, accelerating and upending our lives and giving us all kinds of wonderful things — and also presenting all kinds of dark temptations and wrong turns that we might take. And we’ve been so captivated by that, we didn’t spend a lot of time noticing how much progress in the world of atoms had slowed to a crawl. And in fact, in the ’70s, we had kind of this Great Refusal. We had put footprints on the moon, and we decided not to go there anymore. We had mastered nuclear power, and we stopped building any more nuclear power plants. We achieved supersonic aviation, and then we stopped doing that. So it was almost similar to the Chinese empire that had launched the great global voyages in the 1400s and then said, “Nah.”
Geoff Kabaservice: You used this phrase that I don’t think most people will have run across: the “anti-Promethean spirit.” Can you say something about that?
Brink Lindsey: I talk about the backlash against large-scale technological growth, which was intimately associated with the rise of the environmental movement. One could picture an environmental movement that was also techno-optimistic: “Technology has rescued us from poverty, yay! It’s caused a lot of filth and degradation to the natural environment, boo! The solution to bad technology is better technology. So let’s figure out how to remediate our environment, and figure out how to put filters on things, and figure out how to develop new, cleaner sources of energy.”
But instead, the environmental consciousness… I think we got rich enough to the point where the quantitative aspects of our life were going well enough that we could pay more attention to the qualitative aspects of our life. There’s a curve that, as countries get to a certain GDP per capita, they start caring more about the natural environment around them, so that I think was a natural thing to be expected at a particular time of economic development. But we just happened to hit that point in economic development right after a very bloody and awful twentieth century with the deployment of industrial technology — not for mass improvement but for mass death and for Holocaust.
And then the apex of technological development was the nuclear bomb, which was technological prowess deployed towards self-destruction, and we lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. So there were a whole lot of reasons for people to be skeptical about the old naive belief in progress with a capital-P. And so I think that souring on that old naive belief in progress was ascendant right when environmental consciousness kicked in. And we got what I call the anti-Promethean backlash: a general hostility towards a large-scale rearrangement of atoms because of all the possible downsides.
That fits in, I think, with a larger conservatism that isn’t ideological in any way, just psychological. It’s what the psychologists call loss aversion: people tend to care more about hanging onto what they have, even at the expense of foregoing additional gains, because it hurts more to lose stuff you already have than to not profit further. And I think by the ’60s and ’70s, America had gotten rich enough that there were now a whole lot of people and a whole lot of groups that had a big stake in the status quo as it was, and further disruptive change meant a threat to their privileged position. As we got richer, communications technology improved, which meant it was much easier for us to organize these conservative groups and for them to band together and start throwing sand in the gears of creative destruction. So I think you have this ideological and very basic human response to mass affluence that combined in a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition of the high-minded and the low-minded, with both pushing in the same direction.
Geoff Kabaservice: And when you say “conservative” in that recent sentence, you mean that with a small-c?
Brink Lindsey: Yes, anti-change.
Geoff Kabaservice: Because in many cases, these were people who regarded themselves as the epitome of all things progressive.
Brink Lindsey: Correct. And so I think especially on the center-left with the challenge of climate change, and then across the board with the reemergence of global geopolitical competition with China, we’re awakening to the need to revive technological dynamism again. I think that’s a constructive step. This renewed interest in dynamism and the world of atoms is occurring at the same time as a cultural reappraisal of our headlong leap into virtual, mediated experience online. All through the ’90s and ’00s, we just saw nothing but upside in the online world. But since around 2015, 2016, there has been a general tech backlash, with people blaming social media for the sad state of our political discourse and people seeing spikes in mental health and emotional health problems amongst adolescents, who are the people most exposed to the funhouse mirrors of online life.
We sense in ourselves — those of us who grew up in a pre-online world — we sense the deterioration of our attention span and our cognitive faculties under the deluge of constant short-hit distractions. And we worry about what happens to young minds who didn’t have our privilege of growing up in an analog world and learning to think when there wasn’t an alternative to outsourcing thinking to ChatGPT.
So there is this broad-based reappraisal of the relative merits of online life and flesh-and-blood life. And I think a growing disgust with the dysfunctions of overexposure to virtual experience and a desire to touch grass and get back in contact with the physical and the personal — that I think is a very healthy cultural development. And I think it marries with the technocratic wonkery of the Abundance movement to produce a whole bunch of seeds for renewal and hope.
Geoff Kabaservice: As you know, most science fiction written nowadays tends to be very dystopian, apocalyptic, dark. But there are some of the technologies you’re writing about in The Permanent Problem that would have seemed more familiar to readers of Tom Swift and Arthur C. Clark and the more optimistic age of science fiction. And these include things like vertical farming, artificial meat, 3D printers, AI of course, things like asteroid mining, and all of the clean energy that will be needed to power these innovations including geothermal and small modular nuclear reactors. But there’s also, you say, a need to use technology to lower the cost of living — radically. And in this sense, you actually don’t think the Abundance movement is thinking big enough.
Brink Lindsey: It’s just getting started, so I don’t want to say that they’ve… There’s no criticism in my assessment. It’s just that there’s a good start and there’s a lot farther to go. So just maybe a word about my vision for a more hopeful future… It grows out of my diagnosis for what’s wrong now. In particular, one important change that has happened is that once upon a time the progress of the capitalist system depended upon large inputs of brute physical labor and mindless clerical labor, contributions that ordinary less-skilled workers made. Those workers were arrayed on the front lines of progress along with their managers and bosses, all engaged in a common project of industrializing the country and pulling the country into modernity. On the downside, the dependence of progress on dirty, dangerous work produced this very deep and nasty class cleavage that gave rise to the socialist movement and to totalitarian communism. It was a really destabilizing conflict.
Our conflict now is completely the opposite, the mirror image. Now technological progress has weaned itself from dependence on the contributions of ordinary people. A lot of that old work has been automated or, in rich countries, has been outsourced to poor countries. So as far as rich countries are concerned, technological progress, the movement of the system forward, is really a game for highly trained specialists. So that leaves ordinary people on the outside looking in. I think that has occasioned a big downgrading in social status for ordinary workers and ordinary people that is behind a lot of the social disconnection which is especially advanced outside of the college educated elite. But if the problem is that pushing the system forward no longer is a mass mobilization enterprise, then the opportunity there is that the people who used to be mass-mobilized into pushing progress forward might be able to structure their lives differently, aiming not towards helping the system but towards helping themselves and the people that they care about live good, substantive lives.
And at the center of well-lived lives, for almost all of us, are strong face-to-face personal relationships. My diagnosis for the fundamental reason those connections have unraveled is that we are victims of our success. These face-to-face personal relationships used to fulfill vital practical functions. Our spouse was a partner in economic co-production. Our children were economic assets that helped out on the farm and took care of us when we were old. Our friends and neighbors were an insurance policy against bad times and allies for violent threats to the community. And hanging out with them was just about the only alternative to the mind-crushing boredom of just sitting out on the porch and listening to the crickets.
But since then, a lot of the functions that used to be engaged in by our face-to-face peers, we’ve outsourced them either to the commercial marketplace or to the welfare state. And as a result, those people in our life (which are the most important thing for our overall welfare) have been demoted to just become one consumption option amidst a sea of expertly marketed alternatives. And because those alternatives are marketed well, and because they have short-term hits of dopamine that are hard to resist at the margins again and again and again, we turn away from the things that really matter and towards short-term distractions and entertainment — to our long-term detriment.
So that’s a long way of saying that, in my view, a flourishing society is one in which face-to-face relationships are vital and durable and are the foundation for most people’s wellbeing and welfare. And to make that happen, those face-to-face relationships need to be re-imbued with practical functions. So I envision a long-term future that is much more decentralized, much more pluralistic than today, organized in the long term around… Of course there will still be big, large-scale capitalism in big cities and people spending their entire careers doing that, as well as people dipping in and out of the system to make bank. But outside of the large extended capitalist order, I see an archipelago of small-scale communities that have a significant degree of self-sufficiency.
Technological progress… Abundance first needs to aim just to make us rich enough — and to make the cost of the basic goods of modern life, including housing, transportation, energy, healthcare — cheap enough so that we’ve significantly expanded the ranks of the independently wealthy, so that retiring in your thirties is an option for a lot of people, and working Keynes’ fifteen hours a week is an option for a lot of other people. Working episodically now and again over the course of your life (when you want to) is an option as well. We need that. We also need to direct technological progress towards technologies that can sustain small-scale communities: things like small modular nuclear reactors, vertical farming, 3D-printed housing, and the like.
There was a book that came out a few years ago by a socialist author named Aaron Bastani with the delightful title of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The communism part’s never going to work, but what I have in mind is something like highly automated luxury localism.
Geoff Kabaservice: I like it. Let us pause for a moment from talking about the present and the future and talk about the past — more specifically your past. As I said at the outset of this conversation, this is your third time on this podcast. But one of those appearances was our joint interview with Brad DeLong about his economic history, Slouching Towards Utopia, and your first appearance was way back in 2021 before the format of this podcast had really cohered. So this means I haven’t ever asked you on the podcast about your upbringing and education and other personal details, although we did get into subjects like your boyhood love of the American space program and the fact that you had (and presumably still have) autographed photographs of every astronaut from the Apollo era. So let me ask you the same question you asked Virginia Postrel, the great writer on futurism and dynamism, when you had her on your podcast. Like Virginia, you were born and raised in the South — in your case in Tallahassee, Florida — and you left the Southeast to go to college and didn’t really look back. And if you ever had a Southern accent, you don’t seem to have one now. But do you still carry the stamp of Dixie? And does your Southernness explain anything about you as a thinker and writer?
Brink Lindsey: Yes. I was born in the Deep South and have 100% Dixie roots. And those roots, growing up in a deeply connected Southern family, gave me some expectations for what a good life ought to be that now seem very wise, given all the distance we’ve covered running away from those old truths. That importance put on family and on roots, I think, is something that I’ve grown to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older. But I was lucky to grow up in a bookish family. My mom and dad were both first-generation college grads, both book-lovers — my mom especially. In our house, all wall space was converted to bookshelves. So I grew up in that kind of environment. I grew up in the South but not necessarily of the South. And I felt, especially in my adolescence, pretty seriously alienated from the good-old-boy culture of high school life.
But again, I think that a dynamic society and an inclusive society go together, and that dynamic society gives people wings. But those don’t tend to last, don’t tend to be durable, unless people also have roots. So out of my Southern background, I see the interconnection between those in my own life, that it was my rootedness that allowed me to dream big and go far from home. It was because I started in that matrix of dense connection and care. So that’s one takeaway, I guess.
Geoff Kabaservice: I also went to high school in Florida, and actually we knew a lot about Leon High School in Tallahassee.
Brink Lindsey: That’s where I went.
Geoff Kabaservice: It had a good academic reputation and it had been around a long time — I want to say it’s one of Florida’s oldest high schools. But we also knew that the Panhandle was probably the most conservative part of Florida, even though Tallahassee also has Florida State University within it. So it’s an odd mix of places.
Brink Lindsey: Yeah. We were the state capital, so there were state government workers from all over the state and college-educated people generally, and then we had the big state university. So those were important additions to the social mix in Tallahassee, because otherwise it was just pure unrelieved rural Dixie all around.
Geoff Kabaservice: Also though … How do I put this? In your book on The Age of Abundance, you wrote a lot about the Sunbelt and its rise in America, politically and economically and socially. And in many ways, to have grown up in Florida was to have been part of the future as it was taking shape, as opposed to growing up in New England where you’re seeing the old model recede with every passing year. And there are certainly are economists like Gary Winslett arguing that American manufacturing really needs to be more like it is in the Sunbelt as it moves forward. So I wonder if that had any impact on you.
Brink Lindsey: Yes. As you mentioned, I was a huge enthusiast about the American space program, and Florida was the home of the American Space Coast. And so back then, Floridians had a lot of pride about being a state on the forefront of progress. We were there launching men to the moon. We were also the fastest-growing state in the country. We debuted a future of entertainment with Disney World in the early ’70s. So there was a lot of dynamism in Deep-South Florida in the ’60s and ’70s.
Geoff Kabaservice:
I grew up in Brevard County, which is where the Space Center is, and our area code was 321 — as in, “Liftoff!” So there was that too. You went to Princeton after high school, and Princeton is the most southern of the Ivy League schools — geographically at least and maybe in other ways as well. Or did it seem to you that way?
Brink Lindsey: It had that reputation. It traditionally was kind of a finishing school and attracted more people from the South, most famously starting with James Madison, Class of 1771, moving up there from Virginia. But in my time, a lot of that old Ivy League culture still existed but had been reduced to camp. We LARPed that stuff. We playacted the whole preppy scene. The Preppy Handbook had just come out like the summer before I started college. So it was all heavily dosed with irony, which made it fun. We could play the old games, but with a wink.
Geoff Kabaservice: What was your major?
Brink Lindsey: I majored in history.
Geoff Kabaservice: And did you have a particular area of focus?
Brink Lindsey: I focused on Early Modern History, from the Renaissance to the American and French Revolutions. I wrote my thesis on the career of Tom Paine. He was a participant in both the American and French Revolution, so he was the culmination of a lot of trends.
Geoff Kabaservice: And he has actually been much spoken of recently, back in the news. Was Gordon Wood a big figure for you?
Brink Lindsey: I read him in my American Revolution course, for sure. He was at Brown, not where I was, but I was and remain a fan of his writing.
Geoff Kabaservice: When you grew up in Florida, there were Confederate statues, monuments, other things like that in and around that part of Florida. When you were going to Princeton, Woodrow Wilson was still revered as having gone on from the presidency of the university to the White House. Do you have ambivalent feelings about the fact that Wilson has now been consigned to the dustbin of history?
Brink Lindsey: It’s a funny thing, because as a longtime professional libertarian, Wilson is one of the real dark hats in libertarian historiography: a leader of the progressive creation of the modern regulatory state and a determined foe of traditional American limited government and constitutionalism. And yet, the erasure of Wilson from Princeton I just find weird and creepy and in the same realm as the airbrushing out of Bolsheviks who had lost out in power struggles in Stalin’s purges. He was a president of Princeton University who transformed the university and was as responsible as anybody for its modern form. So to pretend that he’s not important to Princeton’s story is just to ignore history. So even though I’m not a … There’s plenty of things that Wilson did, and what has gotten him canceled now is his ferocious racism and his moves to segregate Washington DC employment and government service.
But Princeton should memorialize Woodrow Wilson because he’s really important to their story, warts and all. I’m fine with not memorializing Confederate leaders who rose up in treasonous uprisings against the United States. We should remember them, but we don’t have to memorialize them and laud them. So I’m okay with that level of iconoclasm, of statue tearing-down. I’m okay with that. Of course, when that got rolling, things just went insanely out of hand and people were tearing down statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson… Unlike the Confederate generals, we revere those people in spite of their connections to slavery, not because of their connections to slavery. And then somebody even tore down a Frederick Douglass statue at one point in the mayhem. Mobs will be mobs.
Geoff Kabaservice: You mentioned your youthful libertarianism. How did you come by it?
Brink Lindsey: The typical gateway drug for libertarians, especially of my age who came to these things in the ‘70s, was reading Ayn Rand.
Geoff Kabaservice: When I interviewed Matt Zwolinski, who came under the influence of Rand as an adolescent, I pointed out that Jerome Tuccille, I think, once wrote a book called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand.
Brink Lindsey: That’s right, it does. I’m not quite sure now these days what’s going on in the libertarian movement and how much that old book now is still producing converts, but it did for me. And I read this book, which is about the world falling apart — I read it in 1978 when the world seemed to be falling apart. I was a receptive audience. And so I was filled with zeal that I had a mission in life to defend individual rights and individual freedom against the collectivist threat. I still think that the core libertarian insights are important and carry a lot of weight. I just no longer see them as the sum and substance of political wisdom. I see them as elements in a larger package of good ideas that you should be carrying in your head when you’re thinking about politics.
Geoff Kabaservice: Did you have any political heroes in those younger years?
Brink Lindsey: I was too radical to get too excited about any practicing politician. But I was in an extremely unusual circumstance. I was in a five-man suite my freshman year — this was the fall of 1980 — and all five of us voted for Reagan. There could not have been another dorm room on campus that replicated that, because we had polling that came out that fall and, as I recall, Reagan polled at something like 10 to 15%, Carter polled in the 20s, and the rest of the Princeton student body was all-in on John Anderson.
Geoff Kabaservice: Good old third-party John Anderson… After Princeton came Harvard Law School and then a career in corporate law, if I remember correctly.
Brink Lindsey: Regulatory law, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: Which took you all around the world?
Brink Lindsey: Yes. I spent seven or eight years doing international trade regulation, representing foreign companies exporting to the United States and getting tripped up in various protectionist laws that back then defined very complicated criteria for the imposition of special additional tariffs. Now we just blanket the world in tariffs according to the presidential whim, but back then there was an elaborate process for doing so, and I was a lawyer on the other side. People who paid the checks were foreign manufacturers and exporters, but I saw myself as indirectly representing the American consumer.
Geoff Kabaservice: I came to Washington DC about a quarter-century ago, and I came here to work in a management consulting company focusing on healthcare. And after about six years of that, I was making four times what I make right now, but I stepped away from it because I wanted a more satisfying and meaningful life. And to be honest, I wanted to have conversations like the ones we’re having right now. You did the same. Tell me about that.
Brink Lindsey: Similar story. I was an associate at a law firm. That means I’m an employee, not a partner, not someone who shares in the profits. The division between the two — going from senior associate to junior partner — is usually at least a doubling of income. And over the next few years, it could have been a three-, four-, five-X in income. So there at the end of my waning associate days, I had long been interested in doing something else, doing something in the intellectual world and the world of ideas and the world of political ideas. And so think tank life appealed to me. I thought I had enough self-knowledge to know that I had the moral fiber to make the pay cut that was in the cards right then, but I might not be able to summon up that moral fiber if instead of a 30 or 40% pay cut, I was taking a 90% pay cut. So I made the swap of pecuniary for psychic income at that time.
And just to tie that into the themes of the book, this is something people like us do all the time. We call it work-life balance. We are blessed with the option to not maximize dollar-earning in our career decisions. We can let the intrinsic satisfactions of work be an important factor in deciding what we do for a living. A small group of people have that freedom. Most people don’t. Even so, all of us exercise that freedom in a world where work-life balance is presumed to be a completely individualistic thing. You do it on your own and there’s no broader cultural or institutional support for a life that prioritizes family and friends and local connection. You’ve got to swim against the economic tide to do that. I’m looking forward to a world where we’re rich enough that all of us can afford the options that you and I have exercised. And we can build lives better in tune with human nature, with our technological prowess, rather than continuing to try to live at deep variance with human nature, which puts us in deep psychological and existential dependence on other human beings.
Geoff Kabaservice: I thought it important to point out that when you are counseling a move away from dependence on materialism, consumerism, you have some credibility on that score. So you eventually moved into a doctrine you called with the clunky name of liberaltarianism, which represented a move away from the hardcore libertarianism toward a more liberal outlook. Is liberaltarianism in some sense the predecessor of today’s Abundance movement? Do you see them as your progeny?
Brink Lindsey: Libertarians always thought of themselves as transcending the left-right divide. They were neither conservatives nor liberals. They agreed with the left on some things and the right on other things, but they stood up above that. And at a purely philosophical level, you can certainly make that argument. But sociologically, the fact is that libertarians were a mutant strain of the right all along. They hung out with the right, they were treated as the redheaded stepchildren of the right. People at the Cato Institute regularly wrote for National Review and The Weekly Standard and didn’t write so much for The New Republic and The Nation. And part of that was because conservatives liked us and made a home for us, and progressives told us to go pound sand.
Fusionism was a conservative idea. The model of the post-war conservative movement is this fusion of free market economics and social conservatism and Cold War hawkery; it put those three together into a triad. And so in the late days of the George W. Bush administration, it seemed to me that Fusionist project was pretty moribund and there was a whole lot of libertarians who were deeply disgusted with Bush’s big-government spending, surveillance state activities, et cetera. So it occurred to me that this might be a time to explore the possibilities of a libertarian-left fusionism. We agreed with liberals on criminal justice issues and immigration issues and war on drugs issues and personal freedoms issues. And so there were a lot of things where we could make common cause with them and finesse our differences, in the same way that we had made common cause with conservatives and finessed our differences there.
As a political idea, it was spectacularly ill-timed. I came out with this article, “Liberaltarians,” in The New Republic in December of ’06. That was right after the 2006 midterms, where the Dems had swept both houses. It is when Democrats lose elections, as in 2024, that they get into this lacerating self-questioning mode and start wondering where they’ve gone wrong and thinking about if they need to reformulate things. But there was none of that going on in the period between ’06 and ’08. And then in ’08, they found a once-in-a-generation charismatic political talent, Barack Obama, who swept into office and carried both houses as well. So there was just no appetite whatsoever for taking advice from outsiders.
At the same time on the right, Obama’s victory made a lot of libertarians lurch to the right, and there was a lot less interest in my liberaltarianism from within the libertarian ranks than there had been before. But I would say, just as a rethink of the purpose or the utility of libertarian principles, liberaltarianism lives on in the Niskanen Center and in the Abundance movement. As I said, I haven’t lost faith in these core ideas: the suspicion of centralized power, the recognition of the immense creative power of bottom-up spontaneous cooperation, especially as mediated through markets, an alertness to the ways in which government policies and programs (however well-intentioned) can go disastrously wrong. All of those things are important partial truths. I think they remained underappreciated partial truths.
At the time the libertarian movement came onto the scene in the ’60s and ’70s, at the tail end of the huge growth spurt in social democratic governments throughout the rich countries at a time when one third of the planet lived under regimes that were sworn to the complete extinction of capitalism — those insights were really underappreciated back then. And so I think the libertarian movement served a real positive role back then. I came to see over the twenty-first century that the alignment between the partial truths of libertarianism and the main challenges of the day was not as good as it had been before. I came to see libertarian principles, again, as not the sum and substance of political wisdom, and certainly not as radical libertarians see them: as justifications for the dismantling of the modern regulatory and welfare state. I now see them as tools for making the modern regulatory and welfare state work better.
And we see that in the Niskanen Center’s policy vision, one which sees a robust entrepreneurial, go-go market economy and a strong, well-built-out, well-financed welfare state or social insurance state not as profound blood enemies and deep antagonists, but rather as necessary complements that make each other better. That complementarity of the welfare state and the market order is central to the Niskanen Center vision. And that explains or matches up with my liberaltarian vision: that these libertarian truths still have an important place, but they just aren’t the whole story anymore.
Geoff Kabaservice: Since we’re playing with ideas of time travel, let’s pretend that a copy of The Permanent Problem fell into the hands of 2006 liberaltarian Brink Lindsey. He’d be very pleased to see that his author’s photo still looks good, no doubt. But he would also wonder: Is this still a work of a liberaltarian that has been changed by time and events? Or have there been other things on which his beliefs have changed? Flipping through the footnotes, for example, he’d be like: “What is this ‘Effective Altruism’ that he seems to be interested in? Where does this distaste for factory farming come from? Does living in Thailand have any impact on his thinking?” What do you suppose he would say?
Brink Lindsey:
I think it was a great benefit to be able to think out loud in Substack essays on the way to writing this book, because I had to talk myself out of a lot of the ways I previously saw the world. And in general, I was born in ’62 in the depths of the Cold War. And so between then and 1989, coming to political awareness in the ’70s, from the ’70s until ’89, I saw myself in an embattled world where the good guys were engaged in the long twilight struggle against the bad guys and the outcome was uncertain. But then, with the fall of Berlin Wall and the bloodless collapse of the Soviet Empire, with the ‘90s internet boom, I became much more optimistic and came to think that the path of least resistance was towards a freer, richer, better governed world. There would be two steps forward, one step back, and there would be trouble in the provinces, but still the main story was a very optimistic one in my mind. And so back then, when I was a professional optimist, cultural criticism, social criticism, pointing out the various warts and wrinkles of life under consumer capitalism — they all made me wrinkle my nose and roll my eyes. I didn’t have a lot of time for any of that stuff.
Since around the time Donald Trump sewed up the nomination of a major American political party, I came to the conclusion that the problems of American society ran deeper than I had previously thought. And I saw that the same political dynamics were playing out all over the world, so it wasn’t just an America-specific story; this was a deep-seated story. And I already had this big intellectual framework for explaining the big-picture tectonic movements of society, and that was the challenges of mass affluence.
So I switched out of this mode of feeling like I needed to defend optimism and an optimistic take on the world. I’m now much more comfortable with a Dickensian pose that it’s the best of times and the worst of times. I can wrap my mind around the fact that some things are incredibly hopeful and dazzling and amazing, and other things just fill you with dread and gloom — and they’re both happening at the same time.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m not a temperamentally optimistic person, and never really have been. So when I think about this question of flourishing, I tend to think about an experiment from the early 1970s (you might have heard about this) which successfully solved the permanent problem — not for humans but for mice. And this was the Universe-25 experiment by John B. Calhoun, where he put four pairs of mice in a controlled environment: unlimited food and water, no predators, monitored temperature. The perfect environment for mice to thrive. And indeed they did explode in terms of population, from eight mice to over 2000. But then it all began to go horribly wrong. And the population reached a size and density where mice couldn’t find their proper roles. Females stopped breeding. Some males became super-aggressive even to the point of cannibalism. Other male mice became completely withdrawn. And then the whole colony died out. But it does occur to me, in thinking about this, that to try to describe the future — particularly in a way that’s hopeful — actually requires more courage than just being pessimistic and dystopian. Would you agree?
Brink Lindsey: I think so. It’s easy to look smart being cynical and pooh-poohing things and pointing out the problems and things. And in our day, earnestness is very uncool.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s cringe.
Brink Lindsey: Yes, and easy to mock. And yet I think that one of our biggest problems these days is the absence of any genuine, concrete visions of a more hopeful future. And so even at the risk of being cringe and of putting forward a view of the future that some people can figure out ways to mock because it’s different from what we’re doing now — that’s okay. That’s what we need to do. We need to expose ourselves to that kind of lazy criticism. If we’re going to build a brighter future and a better future, we have to take the risk of envisioning what it might look like, and make the claim that there are some ways of life that are more conducive to wellbeing and flourishing than others, and make the case for that. And so that’s what I’ve tried to do. And in my own small way, I hope I’ve made some minute contribution towards that kind of outcome being more likely.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think you have, because in some ways to describe your hopes for the future is also to put a stake in the ground about what you hope might be accomplished politically in the here and now. One of the nineteenth century’s great bestsellers was Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward, which was wrong in many of its specific predictions about the future but nonetheless inspired huge movements: in the labor movement, consumerism, the socialist movement, progressivism…
Brink Lindsey: I think after Uncles Tom’s Cabin it was the biggest bestseller in the nineteenth-century United States.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s precisely right. I hope your book finds a similar mass audience. But at any rate I’m really sure, Brink, that the ideas you raise will be picked up by other interesting thinkers, and that will have an impact for years to come. So thanks again for talking with me today, and congratulations again on your new book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing.
Brink Lindsey: Thank you, Geoff. It was a pleasure.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanenincenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC.
