Abundance offers more growth. But will it make us happy?

[Photo by Drazen_/Getty Images]

What does the good life look like? One elected official friendly with Inclusive Abundance’s staff says to keep it simple: “people want a good job, to own their home, for their kids to get a good education, respect, and to go on vacation occasionally.” This advice generally aligns with the work of happiness researchers, who touch on the importance of social connections, financial health, and purpose. For most of us, in short, happiness won’t be found in total monasticism or hedonism but in the hard-built, normal life.

How can more people get access to that good life? Abundance starts with economic growth.¹ Building a ton of housing and energy will grow the economy. So will investing in new technologies. Indeed, for abundance to make sense, you kind of have to believe in growth. So I’ll talk about the relationship between growth and happiness first, then show how abundance policy can fill the gaps left by growth, thereby offering the good life freely across America.

The merits of growth

To some on the left, growth sounds synonymous with unmitigated capitalism, heedless environmental destruction, and yawning inequality. Even if those critics accept that growth generally benefits most people, they may think that growing an already rich society is a dead-end. Think of the widely cited study by Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman suggesting that while money does provide happiness up to a certain point, that effect peters off after $75,000.² Surely the last thing we need is “more stuff!”

If only it were that simple. According to more recent research, higher-income people are straight up happier with no known satiation point. The graph looks like this:

Note the x-axis — it shows what each doubling in income does for life satisfaction. The line of best fit isn’t linear, but log, meaning each dollar is expected to have less effect than the last.

A scenario might be helpful to demonstrate how this works.

Imagine a young man, Jeff, living at home with his overbearing parents two years after graduating college, an hour out from a major city because he can’t afford to live downtown. (He might even make $75k, still not enough to afford a studio.) He commutes in every day, an immiserating experience when traffic is bad, to be an office manager at an accounting firm. He also comes in on weekends to see friends, though he can’t drink because he has to drive home at the end of the night.

Economic growth could change that. Maybe due to pro-growth policies, Costco decides to invest in a new HQ and retail in his area, creating dozens of new management and operations jobs that Jeff is qualified for. He applies and gets one, allowing him to switch for a raise or use his new leverage to negotiate a considerable raise at his old firm. He can now afford to move to the city near his friends. (We did it, Jeff!) Not yet a career pinnacle, marriage, or kids, but a solid step towards that good life. The same story will play out for hundreds more people who work in various sectors and may be proceeding to different life stages. Suddenly, some family decides to have another kid. Or they can finally go on a vacation and make indelible memories. It’s good when there’s more to go around.

You can see how these effects mean that richer countries are happier. That’s another empirical result. There’s something else happening there, too: technologies and institutions that lead to growth — classically including medicine and maternal healthcare, electrification, the rule of law — don’t only lead to growth, but tend to lead to better, more empowered lives.

There will often be times when it’s reasonable to pursue goals other than national growth. It really is important to think about protecting nature and combating inequality along the way. (Better yet, pursue egalitarian growth or environmentally friendly growth when possible.) Growth-inhibiting policies make sense when there’s a national security imperative, or when something in demand is addictive or dangerous to others besides the consumers. We choose not to legalize hard drugs, for instance, despite the boost it would likely provide to growth.

But be wary of politicians advertising housing and jobs without a plan for growth. What results is a game of musical chairs. To take a topical example, tariffs do a good job of temporarily protecting jobs in whatever industry they apply to. Sounds good — we like jobs. But they generally do so by raising prices in that industry and generating a windfall for its businesses. They might protect Jane’s job at the industrial appliance factory. But Jeff will never get his, as Americans pay more for their appliances and have less money to spend on other stuff. The Costco expansion gets shelved.

Generally, then, growth is the best starting point for ensuring more people can live great lives. Growth may be instrumental, but it’s a powerful instrument.

Growth requires management

Despite the United States’ largest-in-world-history economy and highest inflation-adjusted wages on record, we’re not seeing record life satisfaction and declarations of utopia. Life satisfaction, instead, is basically static. There are clear declines across the board in high satisfaction, which marks a divergence from the previous two decades, when it closely followed the state of the economy.

What gives?

It starts with the economic problems that growth alone can’t solve.

For one, growth is a form of change. The Rust Belt and Appalachia have seen considerable social decline as the nation has grown away from their core industries. Once-prosperous coal states like West Virginia are now among the nation’s poorest and least happy. The result is severe economic and social losses for non-college-educated workers and a wave of “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol. When growth causes dramatic shifts in prosperity across place, the concentrated misery may outweigh the diffuse gains.

For most Americans, the bigger problem is this: bad policy has weakened the ability of growth to provide things of value. It’s now cheaper to buy clothes and televisions than ever, sure. But where policy creates bottlenecks, costs have skyrocketed. This happens to apply to many of the things that matter most — housing in jobs-rich areas, healthcare, childcare, etc. For many, this disconnects wealth from personal progress and wellbeing.

Of course, this is the gap abundance seeks to close. Growth makes the economy bigger and better; abundance steers growth so that people across class and region can really feel it and can actually buy more of the things that matter. (Check out our library for a sample of the ideas we think can do this.)

And then there are social and cultural problems

But beyond these economic issues, American society and culture are under pressure from some serious depressive forces.

The decline of religion alone has complicated many Americans’ search for meaning. But other anchor institutions of American life have also noticeably deteriorated. The public no longer counts on universities, government agencies, philanthropy, and big businesses to deliver continuous progress and justify optimism about the future. These organizations have become increasingly interior and risk-averse, seeking to shield themselves from criticism and liability — to survive — rather than to achieve great, new things. This comes at the cost of slowly eroding the institutions’ performance and alienating them from the people they are supposed to serve.

Then there’s the smartphone and social internet, which have put little, perfected machines of comparison and isolation and outrage in everyone’s pocket. Jealousy literally is a disease, spread by the “unstable environment of flickering images” that the critic Christopher Lasch once warned about. We are distracted from the choices, perspectives, and connections that would make us happy, with young people seeming to bear the brunt of the fallout.

Does abundance have answers on society and culture?

Where traditional abundance has confident answers on the problems of growth management, it has only partial answers to these cultural challenges. It can’t give you purpose. It can’t offer you the respect of your family, neighbors, or nation or fill the vacuum left by organized religion.

What abundance can do is motivate some of our institutions to achieve great things. By also turbocharging growth — and ensuring that growth can help us buy and achieve meaningful things — it can revitalize our expectations of the future and recharge American life.

But if we want to broaden our agenda and strengthen our answer to cultural degradation, the abundance movement should go further. I hope this can be the opening of that conversation. I’m disposed to current ideas like youth social media bans and digital ad taxation. You can make an argument about externalities or one about the addictive properties of the smartphone. Abundance doesn’t mean an abundance of this.

But it’s abundance-y to think about what we can produce more of, rather than less of. Can we make more awe here in the real world instead of simply curtailing the digital? Piloting a grant program for screen-free, immersive experiences for youth and young adults could be a place to start.

How we supplement growth and build a culture of optimism and connection isn’t straightforward. But it’s a better question than the one many are asking. Yes, growth is good.

1. I’ll treat that as synonymous with income growth throughout the piece.

2. Deaton and Kahneman actually find that happiness plateaus but life satisfaction doesn’t, but even this happiness finding has been overturned by Matt Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers (“Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved”), who find happiness only plateaus for the last happy 20% of people. This has the convenient side effect of flattening the distinction between life satisfaction and happiness for the purposes of this piece.