My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

The human pursuit of progress stems from our desire for security and a higher quality of life. Yet, even as today’s advanced economies are the richest and most comfortable they’ve ever been, something is amiss. What explains the decline in R&D growth, mental health, and birth rates, just to name a few challenges?

In his new book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, author Brink Lindsey identifies the critical gap between material abundance and abundant human flourishing.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Brink and I chat about what constitutes a truly healthy society, beyond surface-level affluence. We identify the conditions for continual progress after our basic needs have been met and far exceeded.

Linsey is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center. He previously served as vice president for research at the Cato Institute and as a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation. He has authored and co-authored six books on economics and culture, and is the author of his own Substack, also titled The Permanent Problem.

In This Episode

* More of everything . . . !? (1:54)

* Falling fertility (7:31)

* What we’ve lost (10:20)

* Evaluating flourishing (13:13)

* A culture of growth (20:24)

* Future-world problems (28:04)

(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)

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