Dear Reader (even the champions of the Evading Arrest Obstacle Course),
Cold-blooded creatures, like lizards, snakes, and Martin Shkreli, can’t feel temperature. But since their energy level is determined by how warm it is outside, these ectotherms (as the kids say) start to move slower if they’re not warm enough. So, if we were descended from lizards instead of primates, on a cold day weathermen would say “bring a sweater, it’s slow outside” (hat tip Sheldon Cooper). (Of course, if you’re of a QAnon-bent, it’s possible this is what our hidden rulers say to each other all the time).
In Star Trek, one such species is the Gorn. In “The Arena,” one of the best episodes of the original series, Captain Kirk is put on a planet to fight it out with a Gorn, a permanently smiling lizard man warrior (he sorta looked like a roid’d-out Sleestak). The Gorn is stronger than Kirk, so Kirk must figure out how to use resources from the natural environment. He eventually figures out how to make a rudimentary bazooka.
The ability to use our brains to figure out how to make stuff from our natural environment is how wealth is created. That’s not the only way, I suppose. But every other way ultimately rests on this process. You can get rich trading stocks, but the vast majority of those stocks are shares of companies that take stuff, do things to it or with it, then sell them at a profit. The companies that don’t sell at a profit go out of business.
As a general rule, nations that use more stuff get richer the more they use. There’s some chicken-or-egg caveats to it. The richer you get, the more money you have to use more stuff. But the more (useful) stuff you have, the easier it is to make it into valuable things.
I occasionally wonder how different the world would be if silicon were really rare. Computer chips are made from silicon, but silicon is mainly found in sand and sand is plentiful (sorry, Anakin Skywalker). But imagine sand were really rare, or really difficult to mine (economically, “rarity” and “difficult to extract” mean basically the same thing).
Or put it this way, if you could only make computer chips from gold, we’d have a lot fewer computers, but what computers that existed would be a lot more valuable, and not just because they contained gold. (Gold, unlike diamonds, is actually very rare. If you took all the gold that has ever been mined, it would fit in about 3 ½ Olympic-sized swimming pools). I mean, if you ran an investment firm or engineering company, imagine how much of a comparative advantage you’d have over competitors that still had to use abacuses and pencils.
As many listeners of the solo Remnant shout while listening to me ramble about crop-rotation in the 14th century, you may be asking what I’m getting at.
Again: There are lots of fancy theories about how economic growth works, how wealth is created, and how to get more. They’re not all wrong or dumb or needlessly complicated—though quite a few are. But stripped of all the fancy math and buzz phrases, economic growth basically comes from getting better at turning stuff (oil, coal, light, water, really tired hamsters running on a wheel) into energy and using that energy to turn other stuff into more valuable stuff. The more commodities an economy consumes, the more it grows. Cheap energy makes everything else cheaper. And, again, in economic terms, wealth is just another way of saying that the stuff you want is inexpensive, or affordable.
As Scott Lincicome put it the other day, “cheap means affordable, and affordable is very good.” Lincicome was responding to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who insisted that “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream”—a phrase designed to make Lincicome’s eyes twitch.
If you think being rich means being able to buy (or rent!) the stuff you desire most intensely, then there are two ways to be materially rich. One is to have enough money to buy extremely expensive things. The other is for extremely expensive things to become sufficiently cheap—more affordable—for you to acquire them.
We spend an enormous amount of time and energy thinking and talking about the first kind of richness. Complaints about how the “rich get richer” is at the heart of debates about inequality and taxation. Some of it falls under the category of class envy. Some of it is just mawkish gawking at the lifestyles of the rich and famous. And some of it wholly defensible interest in what captains of industry, the donor class, Masters of the Universe, are up to. That stuff gets all of the attention because it’s easier to understand, easier to personalize, and easier to demonize.
But the second kind of wealth is much more important. Think of it this way: If you have a kid with a fatal disease, there’s no price for the cure that’s not worth paying. When that cure is rare, only the rich can afford it. When that cure is available to everyone, everyone gets rich(er). When the first cars rolled out, only the rich could afford them. As the cars got more inexpensive, the middle class got richer because they could afford something once considered a symbol of wealth.
My friends at HumanProgress.org have been heroically trying to explain this point to anyone who will listen for years. One way they do this is by focusing on time. Your time on earth is finite (though thanks to capitalism, it’s generally less finite than it was for most of human history). Time is your most precious resource. Time is like your life currency. It’s also a shorthand for how much labor and energy—i.e. effort—you’re willing to spend for a given thing. Let’s say that in 1960, it took you an hour of work to make enough money to buy the food you needed for that day. By 2021, that hour shrank to 13.5 minutes. You can say that the cost of food fell by 77.5 percent. Or you can say that you got 77.5 percent richer—at least when it comes to food.
The great problem with the mass enrichification (I declare it a word!) of society has almost nothing to do with economics and almost everything to do with sociology and psychology. That’s because, once you move out of objective poverty—not knowing where your next meager meal is coming from and that kind of thing—our lizard brains start valuing positional goods over material goods. We’re less concerned with, or impressed by, owning a car, never mind how much better a cheap car today is than a luxury car a decade ago, and more concerned with how much better someone else’s car is. A vast amount of the debate over income inequality has nothing to do with poverty and a lot to do with resentment over the fact that some people are getting richer than us.
I’ve covered a lot of that already, at book length, even.
I still believe what I’ve previously written, but I’ve also changed my mind a little as well. You see, when I talk about this stuff, It’s too easy to sound like I’m dismissing people’s gripes about their economic plight. I think it’s fair to say everyone is ungrateful—or just criminally ignorant—when they say things were better a century (or 10 centuries) ago. But it’s small-hearted to be dismissive of people who feel like they’re being screwed by the society they live in. And I confess that I have sounded like that on occasion.
The phrase “the American dream” is often credited to James Truslow Adams, who definitely popularized it in his 1931 book, The Epic of America. He wrote:
The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
That definition of the American dream works for me. He’s right, it’s not merely a dream of motor cars and high wages. But motor cars and high wages are part of it—at least for some people. In other words, material prosperity is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of the American dream. I’ve written a ton about “earned success” and how the pursuit of happiness is an individual right that is best realized for most people collectively or communally. The pursuit of happiness, as a psychological matter, is the search for places—communities, jobs, institutions (starting with the family)—where you feel valued, where your contributions (broadly defined) are recognized by others and therefore by yourself as meaningful.
And an enormous number of people feel stuck, trapped in a place and therefore unable to launch that search. I came to this realization after reading Yoni Appelbaum’s brilliant book, aptly titled, Stuck: How the Privileged and Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. (I don’t necessarily agree entirely with the subtitle. But those quibbles are irrelevant to this discussion.)
For my entire life I’ve heard journalists, think-tankers, eggheads, politicians, and economic analysts talk about how America is more mobile than ever. And it’s just not true. Oh, it’s true for them and the people they live and work with. But it’s not true for the rest of America.
Yoni Appelbaum documents how, at the end of the 19th century, 1 out of 3 Americans changed addresses in any given year. By the middle of the 20th century 1 out of 5 moved every year. Today, only 1 in 13 do. The reasons for this, as Appelbaum documents exhaustively, boil down to zoning and other regulations designed to make homebuilding more difficult and homeowning more expensive. I’ll admit I’m especially receptive to the argument because Appelbaum, a progressive, is willing to point fingers at the progressive do-gooders and NIMBYs who are disproportionately responsible. But that, too, is a discussion for another time.
I’m interested in the sociology of it. People are literally happier when they move to the places they want to live in to be the people they want to be. (In the great debate between my friends Kevin Williamson and Michael Brendan Dougherty over the town of Garbutt, New York, and all it represents, I am now more fully on team Kevin than ever before). Contrary to many of my intuitions, high levels of mobility are better for forming and sustaining the little platoons of civic life. Just as the free trade of goods makes people not just wealthier, but happier, because they get to have the stuff they want, the free movement of labor makes people happier and communities wealthier.
Appelbaum has even persuaded me that the Big Sort is basically wrong. Yes, our politics have become more polarized, but not because people have moved to places where their politics conform to the prevailing views. We’ve polarized because so many people are stuck where they are and end up conforming to those views. When people move a lot, they are exposed to new perspectives. When people sit still, the existing perspectives deepen and, often, darken.
Which brings me back to energy. In an industrial civilization, we talk about energy as an industrial commodity—oil, gas, coal, etc. But humans are their own source of energy. The pursuit of happiness is a motivation. That word’s roots are all about energy: inspiring, causing, empowering, movement.
Motives—the profit motive, the desire for earned success, the yearning to provide for a family, to create value—are in human terms a form of energy. Cities may be powered by electricity, but what makes cities powerful engines for economic growth and human productivity is human energy.
And the more you stifle energy, the less wealth you create. Republicans like to talk about how we’ve “turned off the spigots” of domestic energy. We stopped drilling under Joe Biden, etc. This was mostly untrue. We broke all sorts of oil and gas production records under Biden. But Democrats were afraid to correct the record because their base wanted to believe what the Republicans were saying.
Meanwhile, what was true under Biden, but also under many other administrations, is that we’ve stifled human energy. We do this in many different ways. As I always say, “complexity is a subsidy” and we’ve been subsidizing the hell out of the well-off and the well-connected for a very long time.
What do I mean by complexity? Bureaucracy and regulation are the obvious examples. We often require licenses for work that shouldn’t be licensed—like hairbraiding—as a way to protect and enrich those with licenses. Cosmetology students practice haircuts more than medical students practice lumbar punctures. We require college degrees when there’s no good reason for it. We put hurdles on businesses in the name of the environment or equality that are often more about the virtue signaling of the regulators than about achieving their goals. We even have people arguing that “de-growth” should be the demotivating passion of public policy.
Elites have the capital—financial, legal, cognitive, institutional—that lets them exploit the rules. For instance, Jillian Lederman has a piece in the Wall Street Journal today about how kids who go to elite private schools use the Americans with Disabilities Act to get unlimited time or use extra resources for standardized tests. One private school student says, ““Everyone that I’ve talked to says that if you don’t have extra time, then your parents don’t love you, because it’s so easy to get it.” My daughter was furious at how so many of her classmates gamed the system like this—because they all had college admissions consultants and the like.
But the biggest barrier to entry to the pursuit of happiness these days is making it harder to move. Oh, we’ve made transportation easier and cheaper. But we’ve made the ability to set up in a new destination much harder.
Movement creates heat, and when things get hot they expand. In an expanding economy, more spaces are created for people to find a place, a calling, a home. They change jobs and addresses as they seek the American Dream that Adams described. When the economy slows, things get cold. Not for those who benefit from complexity, but for those trapped by it. Bring a sweater, it’s slow outside.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: The Fair Jessica got home from Alaska yesterday, and the girls are very happy about it. Also yesterday, some vultures landed in a tree by our backyard (yes, we have vultures around). Zoë did not approve. And stood at rigid attention staring at them for 15 minutes until they left. Dingo vigilance. On Wednesday, I had to go to Philly for a panel and I left the girls alone for about four hours. They were convinced I left them alone for several years. But they forgave me. Otherwise, the girls are good.
The Dispawtch
Owner’s Name: Suzanne DeMichele
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I’ve been following and reading Jonah for decades. As soon as his new endeavor was announced, I signed up immediately and have been enjoying The Dispatch immensely ever since.
Personal Details: I run a pet sitting business and have three dogs (two bulldogs and a Newfoundland) and my life generally revolves around them, as well as the dogs in my care.
Pet’s Breed: English Bulldog
Gotcha Story: My good friend breeds bulldogs and only has a litter every three-to-four years. We weren’t exactly looking at the time, but fell in love with his sweet face and goofy personality.
Pet’s Likes: Hiking, rafting, swimming, zooming, used tissues, splashing in the kiddie pool, tennis balls
Pet’s Dislikes: Tape measures, vacuums, and tiny dogs that yap/bark at him.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: He is thrilled when he can sneak a (delicious) used tissue out of the garbage or finds one somewhere in the house. He has also marched in our local parade as part of a group for wounded veterans and their children to represent the Marines. But he is also very proud of running 5Ks and hiking/walking several miles a day. We love to show people that bulldogs can be more than couch potatoes!
Bad Pet: We have a backyard chicken coop, and last year he managed to sneak past while we were feeding the chickens and got a hold of one of them. A very expensive emergency avian vet visit later, said chicken was no worse for the wear, and Higgins still insists she was up to no good and he was justified in his actions.
Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.
