{"id":262206,"date":"2026-02-01T08:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T08:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/262206\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T08:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T08:15:08","slug":"is-affluence-a-barrier-to-living-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/262206\/","title":{"rendered":"Is affluence a barrier to living well?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The great economist John Maynard Keynes argued in his 1930 essay \u201cEconomic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren<\/a>\u201d that \u201cmankind is solving its economic problem.\u201d The accumulation of capital and the advancement of technology had put living standards on an upward trajectory that, according to Keynes, would end \u201cthe struggle for subsistence\u201d within a hundred years.<\/p>\n

The prospect of solving this economic problem filled Keynes with dread. Humanity, he asserted, \u201cwill be deprived of its traditional purpose.\u201d Keynes worried about \u201cthe readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades,\u201d and predicted that society would experience \u201ca general \u2018nervous breakdown.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

I was reminded of Keynes\u2019s essay when reading Brink Lindsey\u2019s important new book,\u00a0The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing<\/a>. Lindsey, a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, argues that Keynes\u2019s predictions have come to pass: Wealthy liberal democracies have essentially solved the problem of material provision \u2013 and are now experiencing a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

In Lindsey\u2019s telling, individuals in rich democracies are overweight, addicted to their phones, and have declining literacy skills, as well as IQ and SAT scores. Compared to past generations, they experience worse mental-health outcomes, have fewer close friends, and spend more time alone and less time having sex. They are also less likely to marry, procreate, and attend religious services, while being more likely to overdose on drugs. These societies exhibit reduced dynamism, slowing productivity growth, rising class divides, and diminishing trust in government and support for liberal democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo put it bluntly,\u201d Lindsey writes, \u201csociety is falling apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lindsey\u2019s assessment is consistent with post-liberal commentators\u2019 arguments that democratic capitalism is exhausted, a failed experiment and an obstacle to human flourishing.<\/p>\n

Capitalism is not exhausted. The argument that it is has a root in the widespread anxiety during the waning years of the last decade about advanced economies\u2019 ability to continue innovating. That concern seems wildly misplaced in our current age of wonders, with GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and weight loss, as well as rapid progress on treatments for life-threatening diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s and cancer. Then there is generative AI, which even the most pessimistic forecasts expect will increase trend productivity growth noticeably over the next decade.<\/p>\n

The post-liberal critique does indeed identify many areas of genuine concern, but it does not tell the whole story \u2013 namely, that wealthy democratic societies are doing better than ever across many important and broad measures. For example, life expectancy in the United States is\u00a0rising again<\/a>, after a dip during the pandemic, and is higher now than it was during\u00a0the 1990s<\/a>, when support for neoliberalism was at its peak. Moreover, the\u00a0mortality rate<\/a>\u00a0from heart disease in the US fell by 66% from 1970 to 2022, while the country\u2019s\u00a0rate of violent crime<\/a>\u00a0has been halved over the past three decades.<\/p>\n

By 2021, US households had historically unparalleled\u00a0access to information<\/a>, with 95% owning a computer and 90% subscribing to broadband internet. Workers have substantially more vacation days than in the past. From 1980 to 2013, air passenger fatalities\u00a0fell<\/a>\u00a0from 100 per 100 billion passenger-miles to less than one.<\/p>\n

Has mass affluence led to a society that is \u201cfalling apart?\u201d Hardly. American society was much less affluent and in much worse shape in the 1850s \u2013 to the point that a civil war erupted in 1861. France today is much more stable than during the Reign of Terror. At the global level, society was more stable \u2013 and much wealthier \u2013 during the 2010s than the 1910s.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpermanent problem\u201d for man, Keynes wrote in 1930, is not the struggle for subsistence. It is \u201chow 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Post-liberal commentators think that democratic capitalism has failed on this score. Lindsey, who shares much of their critique but (to my knowledge) still considers himself a liberal, seems to agree, writing: \u201cWhen the challenge was beating back material scarcity, capitalism delivered; now, however, when the task is to convert material plenty into widespread spiritual riches, it is floundering.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Keynes (and Lindsey) made a crucial conceptual error by assuming that the struggle for subsistence precedes the struggle to live well. It is more accurate to think of them as occurring concurrently. After all, serious moral philosophy dates back to the 5th century BC, even though the ancient Greeks had not mastered material provision.<\/p>\n

At the individual level, we see this in our own lives. Young families work hard to build and grow income streams, but their lives do not exist in one dimension. They feel the weight of \u201cpressing economic cares\u201d while simultaneously trying to live wisely and well.<\/p>\n

Nor should we conclude \u2013 as Keynes predicted and Lindsey affirms \u2013 that the struggle for subsistence is behind us. Living at the subsistence level is much more expensive in 2026 than it was in 1799, when 67-year-old George Washington, a fabulously wealthy man for his day,\u00a0died<\/a>\u00a0of a throat ailment that today would be easily treated with airway support and antibiotics. In this sense, we have not solved the \u201ceconomic problem\u201d \u2013 and likely never will \u2013 because the goods and services considered to be baseline necessities will grow and expand over time.<\/p>\n

Two things are true: Relative to our ancestors, we occupy a world of material abundance. And we are not living as wisely or as well as we could. But the former has not caused the latter. Every society has struggled with the question of how to live well. We are a fallen people in a fallen world \u2013 a condition we have struggled to explain since Adam and Eve\u2019s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We know that today\u2019s post-liberal thinkers are struggling as well, because their argument is so self-evidently wrong.<\/p>\n

Michael R. Strain, Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)\u00a0(Templeton Press, 2020). This content is \u00a9 Project Syndicate<\/a>, 2026, and is here with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The great economist John Maynard Keynes argued in his 1930 essay \u201cEconomic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren\u201d that \u201cmankind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-262206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}