How to Regain America's Vitality
This piece is adapted from "America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay". Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Encounter Books.
Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, wrote a blogpost in early 2020 titled “It’s Time to Build.” It drew much comment, mostly favorable. Even the critics agreed with Andreessen’s sentiment but were skeptical that America still has the capacity to build. Still, the piece struck a chord and raised expectations for what might be possible if we set big goals and dare to act. The question is what to build: New software? New hardware? AI? Self-driving cars? Strong churches? Strong families? Art? Architecture? Strong towns? New and better towns? All of them?
There are two choices: better or worse, development or decay. There is no neutral. So, Andreessen is right. If we don’t like things the way they are—and surveys consistently show that supermajorities of Americans think the country is on the wrong track—then we need to build something better.
People with a bold vision and the drive to realize it are inspirational. Many find Elon Musk charismatic because he has big ideas, states them clearly, and then sets about achieving them. Musk founded a solar energy company (Solar City), an electric car company (Tesla), a space exploration company (SpaceX), and a company to build loop intercity transportation systems (The Boring Company). These companies are building game-changing technologies. For example, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was a huge improvement over every competitor when it was first launched in 2010. And its successor, the Falcon Heavy is even better. It can deliver payloads to low-earth orbit for around $1,400 per kilogram, about one-third the cost of its nearest competitor and far less than the $54,000 per kilogram cost for NASA’s Space Shuttle. The company’s new Starship rocket is even more efficient and will lower the cost to around $10 per kilogram, which permits a lot of applications that were previously cost-prohibitive. SpaceX’s Starlink, which will provide inexpensive satellite internet service worldwide would have been impossible without these low-cost launches. Combine that rocket technology with the tunneling technology being developed by The Boring Company and you have the possibility of mining mineral-rich meteors and the beginnings of the tools for colonizing Mars, which is one of Musk’s goals. He also has had seven children. He is creative in every sense.
Big projects create their own gravitational field and draw people to them, but we need more visionary, charismatic, energetic leadership to propel such projects. We have been training managers rather than builders for a long time, and it has led to a culture of risk aversion, of asking “How do I cover my ass?” rather than “How do we get this done?” That must change. We need an educational system and an incentive structure that better cultivates builders and creators.
Financialization has badly misallocated resources and left America poorer for it. Among other things it has led many of America’s smartest and most ambitious people to put their considerable talents into creating complex mechanisms for extracting money from the productive economy, rather than creating new products that generate wealth by improving lives. There is a significant difference between inventing penicillin or the automobile and creating a financial derivative for speculating on the mortgages taken out by people with shabby credit histories. In a financialized economy, the focus is on money. But as Elon Musk put it succinctly, “The thing we call money is just an information system for labor allocation. What actually matters is making goods & providing services.” It’s hard to look back at the past several decades and conclude anything other than that purported progress in notoriously difficult to measure categories like justice, equality, equity, respect, and self-esteem have been an intentional substitute to distract from the lack of improvement or even decay in easy to measure, real-world areas like physical health, longevity, family formation, fertility rate, real income, home ownership, debt levels, and so forth. We have also allowed a virtual world to dominate much of our lives. A decade ago, Marc Andreessen wrote that software was “eating the world,” and it’s even more true today. The world of bits has encouraged a radical, neognostic, self-referential and destructive interiority. We need to reengage our natural sociability and focus on projects that improve our physical lives and the natural world around us.
Everyone has a theory of what’s wrong with America. The sense of civilizational exhaustion is almost palpable. People have enough to eat—arguably too much. There’s no sense of meaning. There is a growing feeling of entropy.
To regain national vitality, what we need most is a sense of shared purpose—something that the country does in which everyone has a role, big or small. Lacking such a purpose, we’ve too often idolized our processes, such as the way we choose our political leaders, rather than judging the quality of the leaders the process produces. But we can change this by focusing on clear, tangible goals and then getting to work. When people know what they’re trying to achieve and work toward it together, subordinating parochial interests and rivalries to something bigger, a sense of comity and solidarity naturally forms between them. That’s true whether we’re building new cities or terraforming the Midwest.
As we move forward in a revitalizing project, the overall goals should include higher living standards, broadly shared prosperity, healthier people, longer lives, robust family formation, family stability, lower crime rates, more social trust, and greater trust in institutions. More specifically, here are four simple, measurable goals that should be at the heart of a revitalizing project:
- A family wage. It should be possible to raise a family of four, own a home, and pay for education and health care on a single median wage. This was possible in America until the middle of the 1980s. It should be so again.
- More children. At a minimum, the total fertility rate should be enough to sustain our existing population.
- Less disease. Reduce the prevalence of the chronic inflammatory diseases that have skyrocketed in recent decades, with a huge cost in lives.
- Longer lives. If Americans are healthier, they can live longer too.
These goals should form the nonnegotiable basis for evaluating every big project, including American politics itself.
How do we achieve these goals? Through science, decentralization, smaller institutions, lots of latitude for families, religion, space for innovation in governance, and room for visionaries to experiment. People must be able to think freely, speak freely, and try new ideas, some of which will be unorthodox, unsuccessful, dangerous, or just plain weird. And we must marry this to improvements in the real world.
We need to recapture the frontier mindset that pulled us forward as a nation for much of our history. A frontier is a challenging place full of unknown risks, a place where ingenuity and cooperation are necessary for survival. When the American frontier closed, we became more risk-averse as well as more fractious and self-interested. We can get our vitality back by opening new frontiers, if only metaphorical ones.
Chris Buskirk is the publisher and editor of American Greatness.
