The Age of Abundance
There’s a strange quiet in the American project. For decades, we were a country animated by a belief in our capacity to build - not just ideas, but systems, cities, vaccines, railroads, internets. We believed in abundance, in a future that would be better not just for some but for all. That belief has been eroded - not by ideology alone, but by drift, by a political system allergic to complexity, by institutions that have traded ambition for caution, and by a culture that confuses critique for contribution.
But the truth is that abundance is possible. Not hypothetical. Not utopian. Possible.
Housing can be plentiful and beautiful. Energy can be clean and cheap. Healthcare can be fast and universal. Education can be flexible and excellent. We know this because we have the tools. What we lack is not knowledge, but focus. Not imagination, but coordination.
To bring about abundance, we need space (both literal and institutional) for people who are building it. That means something more than grants or funding rounds. It means physical and cognitive space, structured around deep, uninterrupted work. We’re far too oriented around performative productivity, tweeting ideas instead of engineering them, reacting instead of constructing.
We need places designed for doing. Focused laboratories of the future. A modern-day Bell Labs for civilization-building. A Salk Institute for abundance. The lesson from history is clear: great things do not emerge from the churn of daily distraction. They come from protected time, deep work, collaborative iteration, and institutional support that doesn’t flinch when the goalposts move.
Let’s not romanticize scarcity. Let’s not pretend that virtue lives in limits we impose on ourselves out of fear rather than wisdom. There is a humble dignity in building. There is beauty in the act of creation. We are not overreaching when we say every person should have access to a good home, to energy that doesn't warm the planet, to medicine that heals, to a life not defined by living on a precarious edge.
The work of abundance is not just technical, it is moral. And it requires a culture of seriousness - a seriousness that understands that progress isn’t automatic, that institutions must be reimagined, and that the future is something you have to fight to build.
Let us build a space for that fight. Let us gather the builders, the rewriters of code and policy, the radical idealists and the stubborn visionaries. Give them the time and focus they need. The promise of what the world could be like is so tantalizingly achievable that we would be foolish to not pursue that promise with everything we’ve got. The result could be miraculous. The result could be abundance.
So let’s begin.