Who Builds the Future?
The uncompromising case for a new generation of American Abundance.
The COVID era was, for anyone paying attention, a massive wake-up call to our inability to provide people with basic necessities during a crisis.
First, we didn’t have enough hospital beds, enough PPE, enough doctors, enough tests, and enough vaccines. Shortages for everything from toilet paper to laptops, basic food to home gym equipment, rocked us for nearly two years. And these supply chain crises were representative of deep, pervasive problems with the structure of our economies: drastic housing crises, nationwide energy scarcity driving soaring prices, dangerous shortages of qualified workers across almost all essential industries…
California, by some metrics, could certainly be considered a “city on a hill” for capitalistic progress, home to some of the greatest minds and highest concentrations of wealth anywhere on the planet.
Yet, despite everything that’s now drawn me there, California serves us perhaps the most outstanding examples of how we’ve absolutely and unequivocally FUCKED IT as a society.
Example 1: Voters in California approved high-speed rail to connect LA to San Francisco for a cost of $33 billion in 2008. Seventeen years later, the total cost has ballooned to over $100 billion for a system that won’t even reach Los Angeles or San Francisco, but hopes to connect Bakersfield to Merced by 2033.
During that time, San Francisco did manage to build a $1.7 million public toilet (single toilet value) as other towns across the state have burned to ash because they didn’t (and still don’t) have enough fire trucks or firefighters, and California can’t maintain basic infrastructure built 50 years ago.
What happened to us?
This century, most of our lifetime, our politics and collective mindset have been defined by a pervasive and insidious myth of scarcity. America is the wealthiest and most knowledge-abundant country on earth, which is why I chose to live and raise my family here. Our possibilities are limitless if we can only break ourselves out of orbital decay!
I. The Engineer State vs. The Lawyer State
Compared to America and most other developed nations on earth, China builds violently.
At the end of last year, I read Breakneck by Dan Wang. The comparison he draws between our two nations is stark. In particular, his description of economic development in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces, is eye-opening.
In 2000, Guizhou had one major airport. Today they have 11. Guizhou has 45 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. Not China’s tallest bridges, the world’s. This is a region half the size of California with GDP per capita one-sixth of the United States. Most notably, Guizhou has high-speed rail connecting it to Shanghai.
Since 2008, China has built almost two-thirds of the world’s high-speed rail, totaling over 30,000 miles. Their average cost of construction is over one-third lower than the global average, but compared to projected costs in California, they’re pushing close to one-thirtieth the cost. To be clear, they can build around 30 miles for what it costs us to build one... Cheap labor cannot even closely account for this, and over the last few decades, China’s labor has gotten a lot less cheap.
Wang’s core argument is simple: China is an engineering state, and America has become a lawyer state.
In China’s government, nine of the top Politburo Standing Committee members have engineering degrees. The Premier was a geologist. The General Secretary studied hydraulic engineering and helped build the Three Gorges Dam. These people think in terms of steel, concrete, and throughput.
In the West, and particularly in America, we think in terms of litigation, process, environmental impact, and worst of all, soundbites. America has more lawyers per capita than any country on Earth. Our elite schools churn out lawyers and consultants who’ve never built anything.
Yet only a few generations ago, America built the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building (in 13 months), the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, ARPANET (eventually the internet). America’s pre-70’s ingenuity was unfathomable, literal god like.
What changed?
The problem isn’t resources because we’ve found trillions for bank bailouts and overseas wars. The problem isn’t technical knowledge, as we’re still home to the world’s most brilliant engineering minds. The problem is we’ve developed an institutional bias toward preventing things rather than building them. We’ve made “no” easier than “yes”.
Where Dan Wang offers a great comparison of USA vs. China, Ezra Klein goes deeper on our domestic policy flaws in his book Abundance.
He calls it “process over outcomes.” Add every good intention, every review process, every stakeholder input session, every environmental study, every equity consideration, every accessibility requirement, and you get fucked. His book is filled with many prime examples of absolute lunatic policy, often from well-meaning democrats that end up hurting the people they’re trying to help. He presents well that ultimately, the problem isn’t that we don’t want to build or can’t build. The problem is we’ve made it functionally impossible to build.And so, we just stopped.
II. What’s At Stake
This problem is existential yet it’s been made partisan. The left is so overly focused on leaving a better ‘world’, we’ve overlooked the neighborhood. Particularly when it comes to national security.
America no longer has the capacity to enrich uranium. The United States of America, the country that invented nuclear technology, that built the atomic bomb, that once enriched 90% of the world’s uranium, now produces less than 0.1% of global enrichment capacity. We can’t fuel our own nuclear reactors without buying from foreign governments. Including Russia.
During the Ukraine war, we’ve been buying enriched uranium from Russia. We technically banned it in 2024, but there are carveouts, so we’re still buying it.
This isn’t just embarrassing. It’s a national security crisis. We can’t fuel the microreactors we want to put on military bases. And even if you know nothing about energy demand, cost, and the brilliant abundance nuclear energy can provide, you must agree it is absolutely ludicrous to be funding both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war, relying on one of our greatest adversaries for a large portion of the fuel that powers 20% of our domestic electricity grid.
This isn’t about one industry. It’s about production itself. We stopped building the factories, the systems, the capability to make what we need.
Before World War II, America had offshored critical industrial capacity, and when war came, had to rebuild frantically. But we don’t have that luxury anymore. The world is a lot smaller and moves a lot faster.
China produces 94% of the world’s high-performance rare earth magnets. We produce less than 1%. You need these magnets for everything: electric vehicles, wind turbines, weapons systems, guidance systems, and pretty much every advanced technology that matters. If there’s a conflict over Taiwan (which is frankly way likelier than most of the craziness we’ve encountered in the last five years) we wouldn’t be able to build the drones, ammunition, and ships we’d need.
Both Trump and Biden ran on re-industrializing America. How’s that going?
The Biden administration allocated billions through the CHIPS Act for semiconductor manufacturing and clean energy build-out. Great! Except we never saw the infrastructure materialize. The money was appropriated, the announcements were made, but the implementation simply wasn’t there.
Under Trump 2, the US has still lost over 80,000 manufacturing jobs (probably over 100,000, but I want to underestimate). We can’t sustain a technological superpower by slashing funding to the NSF and NIH, and, most worryingly, alienating the scientific community, particularly the research institutes and universities that underpin America’s position as the greatest platform for scientific innovation on earth.
America currently employs about 12 million people in manufacturing, never recovering from the 2008 highs. It’s interesting that this was the year we started our doom spiral of offshoring manufacturing in the pursuit of quick profits. Regardless of even the most positive of policy shifts in the near-term, we’re highly likely to lose another couple million jobs over the next five years, because the next shock is coming.
China initially captured low-value manufacturing of textiles and basic consumer goods. But now China is highly competitive in advanced technologies. “Made in China” used to signal shoddy quality. Today, it’s undoubtedly become a marker of excellence. Chinese automakers are eating Germany’s lunch, and soon their dinner too. German automotive exports have fallen substantially over the past year as Chinese manufacturers have dramatically outcompeted them on quality and cost.
The CEO of Ford put it bluntly: “We’re in a fight for our lives.” Western carmakers have been slower to develop competitive electric vehicles, and Chinese manufacturers like BYD and Chery are producing well-reviewed cars at a fraction of the cost.
I would strongly argue that, on average, most global consumers want to support their domestic markets. But if average Joe America has a choice between an end-to-end US-made pickup (which probs doesn’t currently exist), or an even slightly less-expensive import or build with internationally sourced parts, how could we blame them for buying the cheaper ride?
Cars in China are dirt cheap, but it’s not magic. The only way the United States can become competitive with China again is if we get our costs down. Their energy costs are lower, and their cost of resource extraction is lower. Making steel and aluminum is cheaper, and building a factory is WAY cheaper. That’s why you’re able to buy a decent car for $10,000 in China, but here you’re looking at least 50-100% more for a lower quality product.
Over the next decade, the production landscape across the developed world is going to be rocked by robotics. The robots are most definitely coming; the average person dramatically underestimates their impact, and China is way ahead of the game. In 2024, China installed 295,000 industrial robots. The United States installed 34,200, and I guarantee there was a similar gap in 2025.
If we lose the robotics race, we’ll lose a much larger share of the manufacturing market and ultimately our capacity to compete in the production systems of the future. The gap will widen exponentially, and we could see our economic strength deteriorate much more rapidly.
But this isn’t about beating China in some zero-sum competition. This is about building an economy that works for our own people.
A real economy makes physical things for the benefit of its people. Atoms, not bits. And we’ve outsourced our capacity to build to China while convincing ourselves that the “knowledge economy” is enough.
It isn’t. And just because American software companies have higher stock values than Chinese firms doesn’t mean our dominance in software and AI is guaranteed either, and I’m sure the robotics race will make this more evident.
Dan Wang put it perfectly: “I wouldn’t trade AI, the best algorithms, every genius you can get in a data center, for a robust manufacturing base. Because what you need for a military are drones, ammunition, and ships. And right now, China can make them, and the U.S. is not so good at making them.”
Climate change is real. It’s severe. It demands action.
But the left has spent the last decade using environmental law to block progress, even with essential infrastructure for the clean energy transition. Transmission lines sit in environmental review paralysis. Wind farms get blocked. Solar projects get litigated into oblivion. NIMBYs have weaponized environmental protection to prevent the very solutions we need.
The abundance agenda isn’t about growth for growth’s sake. It’s about building enough clean energy, enough resilient infrastructure, enough adaptive capacity to best handle whatever comes.
III. Building for The People
I’m a liberal in the classical sense of the word. I believe in climate action, social justice, labor rights, immigration, and robust public institutions.
But the Western left has developed a pathological relationship with itself.
Somewhere along the way, we started treating Western civilization and liberal democracy, individual rights, scientific progress, and material abundance as something to apologize for rather than defend. We teach our kids that growth is destruction, that capitalism is fundamentally oppressive, that prosperity came through injustice.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the average person in the Western world lived on the equivalent of $1 a day in today’s dollars. Kids worked down mines and crawled under machines in mills. Life expectancy was 40. Infant mortality was devastating.
Today, the vast majority of us have been lifted out of extreme poverty in just a few generations. And that story is unfolding globally. There has never been a better world to live in, and there has never been a better time to be alive than right now, and all this progress has been largely driven by wealth creation and liberties championed by the West.
Yet all of our stories of the future are dystopian.
It feels to me that most of my peer group who vote to the left have a doomsday view of the future, which heavily centers around total collapse driven by climate change. But the real threats are slower, more insidious, and solvable through building, not sacrifice.
Overwhelmingly, the poorest people in our society will suffer most if America loses its footing as the leader of the global economy, far more than they will from climate change, and they stand to benefit the most from radical economic development, infrastructure, and abundant energy, often blocked by environmental policy and “fair trade”.
If you believe it’s “bad” to want our society to prosper first and foremost, you probably need to do more research into the supply chain of your iPhone, your clothing, and the EV in your driveway.
Authoritarian regimes don’t stop building because of guilt about historical injustices. They build. And they’re going to define the future if we don’t.
This is about recognizing that liberal democracy requires physical capability to survive. You can’t defend freedom without the ability to defend yourself. You can’t spread prosperity without the ability to produce prosperity. You can’t champion human rights without the strength to enforce them.
The stakes are simple: if liberal democracies don’t build, illiberal regimes will define the future.
Scarcity is authoritarian.
It’s about rationing, control, and sacrifice. It’s about deciding who gets access and who doesn’t. It’s about managing decline instead of creating growth.
Abundance is liberty.
The things we mass-produce: electronics, software, consumer goods, etc., get cheaper every year. The things we fail to build enough of: housing, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure, become increasingly unaffordable.
The American Dream isn’t abstract. It’s tangible: owning a home, raising a family, being able to move to where opportunity exists, and having the economic security to take risks. None of that is possible when housing costs 10 times what it should, when energy prices are volatile, when infrastructure is crumbling, when good manufacturing jobs are disappearing.
Abundance isn’t a luxury. It’s how we make prosperity accessible to everyone.
For the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve acted out a myth of managed decline. We’ve told ourselves and our children that our best days are behind us. We’ve made dystopian futures feel inevitable. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I choose a different story: we can build a future of radical abundance for our own people. But only if we stop getting in our own way.
And that requires both sides to stop blocking and start building.
This isn’t about “winning”. It’s about building as a form of national therapy (corny, I know). But when we produce things and create meaningful jobs, resilient supply chains, cheap energy, and affordable housing, we create prosperity that lifts everyone up… In my mind, that’s the only thing that has a chance of bringing us back together.