Restoring Trust
[2025 ended as a year many would just as soon forget, unless the U.S. stock market was your single benchmark. As the backlog of critical needs was building, I followed a series of authors in search of course corrections. One chain of thought that received some traction came to be known as the Abundance Movement. Starting with a book titled Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I followed how other authors responded to the book, and what history and current events had to say relevant to the debate. The result is a series of eight essays that will be posted to Fifty Year Perspective weekly through January and February. Here the sixth of eight parts.]
New processes for making decisions discussed in the previous blog post call for a restoration of trust. Who would be in charge? The timing of that question couldn’t be more pertinent. With an authoritarian occupying the White House, we are experiencing unregulated top-down authority. Polling attests to widespread dissatisfaction with the actions of that authority. Philip Howard wrote that major institutional changes are needed to inspire trust in decision-making supported by oversight and accountability. “The solution to infrastructure paralysis is a legal framework that empowers designated officials to make multiple trade-off judgments. Choices need to be made. This requires replacing balkanized approvals by multiple levels of government with one decision-making hierarchy…. The deciding agency… must have authority to make trade-offs that weigh benefits and harms.”
Marc Dunkelman wrote, “reformers need now to seek a more balanced approach, one that puts centralized power and individualized safeguards in proper harmony…. It will mean pursuing policies that give public officials more room to maneuver, even while guarding against unlimited mandates.” Dan Wang proposes that it will be necessary “to unwind the dominance of lawyers in the United States. That will require us to confront the proceduralism that exists inside government and broader society. And it will require us to renew our faith in government institutions to deliver essential services.”
Those are tall orders. The bottom line is Trust. Will a thorough and well-documented decision-making process overseen by experts in relevant fields of expertise give the public confidence in the decisions of the designated authority?
Then there is another question: Even if agreement is achieved on the infrastructure and public works to be implemented, can the U.S. fund the Abundance agenda?