Affordability Is Not Abundance
Walk through any American living room and you can read the last quarter-century of economic history in the furniture. The television, once a piece of luxury cabinetry, is now a thin sheet of glass cheaper in real terms than the books beside it. The phone in your pocket would have cost a small fortune to assemble from its constituent parts twenty years ago, if you could have assembled them at all. Toys, clothing, food—all of it has grown cheaper, year over year.
Yet most Americans tell pollsters they are living through an affordability crisis. They are not wrong. The same quarter-century that has made televisions vanish into wallpaper has made hospital bills, college tuition, and the median home price into objects of dread. Economist Mark Perry’s now-famous “Chart of the Century” plots the divergence: prices of things produced in genuinely competitive markets fall, often dramatically; the prices of things tangled in heavy regulation and labor-intensive service delivery rise, often catastrophically. The market giveth, and the regulator taketh away.
On the latest Acton Line, I sat down with the economist Anne Bradley to discuss what to make of it all and, more pointedly, to ask whether the word “affordability,” which now dominates our political conversation, is the right word for the work ahead.
Bradley is unsentimental about the chart. The things that have grown cheaper—produced by industries open to competition, free trade, and technological substitution—are also, not coincidentally, the things in which America has been most willing to let markets work. The things that have grown more expensive like healthcare, housing, and higher education are the things in which we have been least willing. We license the providers, restrict the supply, subsidize the demand, and then act surprised when the bill arrives.
Bradley presses past the standard economist’s lament toward a question I had not heard asked quite this way: What, exactly, are we after when we say we want things to be “affordable”?
Affordability, on closer examination, is a thin and rather sad word. To make a thing affordable is to make it just barely within reach. It is a politics of zero-sum tweaks: a subsidy here, a price control there, and a tax credit to soften the edge letting people just get by. The affordability frame accepts the basic cost structure of the world as given and tries to manage its sharpest blows. It is a politics of triage.
Abundance is something else entirely.
The older and richer word in the American tradition is not affordability but abundance, and that the difference between them is not merely rhetorical. Abundance does not ask how a family might just barely scrape together rent. It asks how a society might so multiply its productive capacities that rent becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of what a working life can buy. Affordability is content with a household that survives. Abundance imagines a household that flourishes.
It is here that the conversation took its most striking turn. Bradley does not defend abundance on narrowly material grounds. She insists, rather, that abundance has a moral dimension. The point of cheaper food, cheaper clothing, cheaper communication, cheaper medicine, is not the cheapness as such but what cheapness frees us to do.
When the basic conditions of life are secured efficiently, when feeding and clothing and sheltering a family no longer consume every waking hour and every available dollar, the surplus that opens up is not merely a surplus of consumption. It is a surplus of time, of attention, of moral agency. It is the surplus from which we invest in our marriages, raise our children, befriend our neighbors, attend our churches, and give to those who have less than we do. The fruits of abundance are not the new television and the new car. The fruits of abundance are the hours and the dollars that need not be spent on mere survival.
There is a strong echo here of Fr. James V. Schall’s reflections in On Christians and Prosperity. “The great numbers of the poor,” Schall writes, “are best helped to be what they initially strive to be, namely, not poor, when everyone prospers as a result of his own initiative and work.” The development that lifts the poor is not primarily the development of charity, indispensable as charity is. It is “the development of the means of production and distribution that made it possible for the poor to enter into more productive relationship with those who had already figured out how not to be poor.”
Affordability, in its modern political register, often forgets this distinction. It treats the household budget as a fixed pie to be redivided. Abundance remembers that the pie can grow, and that the growing of it is a profoundly humane vocation.
I came away from the conversation with Bradley more convinced than I had been that words matter, and that the recent shift in our political vocabulary from the open-horizon language of abundance to the budgetary language of affordability is a change for the worse. The first is a vision; the second is an accounting exercise. The first asks what human flourishing might look like in a society that has unshackled its capacity to produce. The second asks how to make the next month’s bills.
There is a place for the accounting exercise. Families have to eat this month, not in some glorious abundant future, but a political imagination that begins and ends with affordability has given up on the aspiration that produced the cheap televisions in the first place. It has accepted the cost curve of the most regulated sectors of American life as a permanent feature of the landscape.
Bradley invites us to refuse that resignation. The “Chart of the Century” is not a chart of fate. It is a chart of choices, sector by sector, decade by decade. Where we chose competition and openness, prices fell and the world grew larger. Where we chose protection and complexity, prices rose and the world grew smaller. The conversation worth having, she suggests, is not how to subsidize our way through the second half of that chart, but how to apply to it the lessons we already learned from the first.
It is a conversation about more than economics. It is, finally, a conversation about what we believe a free people are for.
Watch the full conversation with Anne Bradley on YouTube: