2025 in review

Abundance and national security, Ecclesiastes, books

If 2025 was the year of anything, it was the year of Abundance. I won’t bore you by rehashing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s arguments here; if you’re online enough to be reading this blog, you’ve already heard about how a mixture of deregulation and state capacity can deliver a surfeit of the goods that the left wants: healthcare, infrastructure, and technological solutions to climate change, among others.

I reviewed the book for the Irish Independent here, but I’ve been reflecting on a couple of additional points since on the topic of national security.

Values and national security

The book largely ignores national security, and Hotelling’s law makes me think that there should be a similar book which leans more heavily into this theme.

Klein and Thompson correctly argue that abundance is an attractive, positive agenda that could unite a political movement. It has an additional attractive effect, however, on our enemies. During the Cold War, it was political freedoms and the material wealth of the West which helped undermine communist governments around the world. Many citizens of those countries, especially the most high-achieving and aspirational ones, fled to the West, directly undermining those regimes.

If the West pursues degrowth, it will lose ground to its political opponents. The citizens of geopolitical foes aren’t going to move to countries where living standards are going down. Degrowth is bad for national security because it shows we no longer believe in our own values.

Manufacturing and national security

And how important is manufacturing on national security grounds? If there is a serious war in future, Western countries need to be able to supply their militaries and societies with essential goods. Increased geopolitical turmoil has raised the salience of this question.

Almost immediately, this becomes a question of which goods in particular we should make ourselves. The British government took over British Steel this year. The US government has spent billions of dollars bringing TSMC’s semiconductor foundries to Arizona. Perhaps, as Dan Wang has suggested in another of the year’s most talked about books, manufacturing one good puts you in a stronger position to pivot into another, as needs arise.

Archie Hall suggests some premises behind the takeover of British Steel. Below I paraphrase them into a more general set of ordered gates that should be cleared to justify any national security-oriented industrial policy:

1. There are appreciable odds of Britain [or a given country] landing in a large-scale, protracted hot war in the near future.

2. This war would make “friendly” supply chains from allies inaccessible.

3. British production of the good would be at a sufficient scale to make a difference in such circumstances.

4. Britain wouldn’t be hamstrung by other dependencies anyway, e.g. for raw materials like iron ore, or finished goods like semiconductors.

5. Spending on this area is justified at the margin compared to other areas, e.g. drones, cyber.

6. We should do more than minimal hedges like a stockpile of steel, or a blueprint for how to scale production in future.

Of these, I’m the least convinced by #3. It might be easier to scale process knowledge once you have a bit of it, as opposed to completely losing it.

Chris Miller, author of Chip War, also wrote about manufacturing from an American perspective. His starting point is that there are some goods that we must have domestic production of, such as rare earth magnets. At the other end of the scale, we definitely don’t need to produce our own t-shirts. In between these two poles – where most goods sit – requires careful analysis. His proposed criteria are:

1. What’s the risk a given product can be monopolized and used for leverage, like China’s done with rare earth oxides and magnets this year?

2. How shiftable is manufacturing capacity in a crisis?

3. How tightly linked are today’s manufacturing ecosystems and tomorrow’s?

4. What’s the opportunity cost?

I don’t know the right answer to these questions yet, but I look forward to reading more serious analysis in 2026. In the meantime, though, I propose a few modest conclusions.

Consider the list of reasons why it’s more expensive to manufacture goods within Western countries: wages are higher, environmental standards are higher, energy is more expensive, planning permission is more difficult to attain. Some of these are more directly under our control than others (like wages), and the precise problem no doubt varies for different goods.

For factors that we do control, we should fix them. This will make it easier to produce goods in general, helping the economy, and will help with those goods important for national security as well.

This might include some manufacturing inputs like energy (we should enable more nuclear power in particular), as well as making it easier to get planning permission for factories which are important for national security. Here, material abundance is a natural complement – removing barriers to supply will make these goods cheaper to make.

Second, we should be willing to make some painful choices in order to ensure our national security is protected. Doing this would be bad for economic growth (at least in an immediate sense): it’s inefficient overall to produce goods where more expensive inputs are required.

Voters in Western countries do not seem particularly inclined to make hard choices at the moment. They’re going to be more affordable, though, if we seriously pursue growth in other areas. National security requires that we redirect wealth into some relatively unproductive activities as a kind of insurance policy in the case of war. Those activities are easier to afford when you’re richer overall – in other words, in a state of Abundance.

Abundance is Never Enough

Ultimately, however, there is a certain shallowness to the Abundance agenda. Important and useful though its policy recommendations may be, they don’t scratch the itch of the soul. Listen to the man who had abundance:

I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man.

So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity [hevel] and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. Ecclesiastes 2:4–11 (ESV)

Ecclesiastes is an unusual book of the Bible. Its author is Qohelet, the Teacher. He is unsettling and provocative, retelling his own explorations of the meaning of life. There are twists and turns as he takes you down a winding road of observations and reflections.

I read two books on Ecclesiastes, Bobby Jamieson’s Everything is Never Enough and Destiny by David Gibson. Jamieson’s analysis of the book was new to me. He suggests that Qohelet explains things from three different levels, like three different floors of a building.

On the ground floor, Qohelet observes all of human life: pleasure, toil, wealth, food, sex, power, and much more. He pronounces them wanting, declaring that human life is hevel; breath, air, or vapor. This is the word often translated as vanity. As Jamieson notes, “The modern West’s control complex catechizes you to think of yourself as the captain of a vessel cutting a razor-straight course through life’s succession of storms. But you’re not the captain; you’re not even on the boat. In the end, you’re a fish in the ship’s net.”

Then, at several points in the book, he takes you up a set of stairs to examine the same things from a second vantage point. He concludes that all of life is a gift; receive it as one and you will know lasting joy. Why? How? Qohelet shows that these gifts come from God, our creator: “everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man” (3:13). Or as Jamieson puts it: “All wealth is loaned from God’s library. What should you do with it? Enjoy it. Share it. Remember that it’s due soon.”

Lastly, there is a third level, like a special extension of the second. Having taken you up hundreds of metres in an elevator, Qohelet entreats us to “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (12:13). The rest of the Bible answers the question Qohelet leaves us with: how do you rightly fear God and keep his commandments?

Reading, listening, working

With Ecclesiastes 3:13 in mind, then, what did I work on, read, and listen to this year?

I’ll limit myself to two books in particular.

The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025. Gavin and Dwarkesh have done a stellar job of capturing the moment. I will revisit the book this year as I keep learning about AI. I have a couple of friends who are very critical of podcasts as a way of learning things. They have some valid points, but if ever there was an area where this isn’t true, it’s the-ever changing, cutting edge world of AI. Reading (or listening) to Dwarkesh’s interviews is to see the leading people in the field grappling with important questions in real time.

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. Dane Ortlund delivers a wonderful portrait of Jesus’s character. The prose is excellent. Ortlund gets across something of the beauty of Christ and the gospel, which is part of what makes it so attractive. Even better that it’s true.

I also read a lot of Robert Caro and Stephen Kotkin this year. What is it about these New Yorker historians that makes them so peerless?

On to essays. Tanner Greer wrote a fascinating analysis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American techno-nationalist elite. There was a lot less buzz around this piece than I think it deserved, possibly because it doesn’t touch on the hot button issues that play so well online. Instead it focuses on the efforts of the Eastern Establishment to build the United States into a modern and powerful nation:

The economic, social, and political activities of the Eastern Establishment were mutually reinforcing pillars of a larger program. Members of the Establishment used the wealth generated by new technologies to secure political influence, used that influence to sustain a national market and legal framework geared for yet more technological expansion, and then presided over a conscious effort to preserve and transmit the values of their class to future generations, ensuring that the unity and discipline they gained in shared struggle would not dissipate amid power and prosperity. Through these means, a techno-nationalist elite guided America’s development for more than seventy years. Under its stewardship, the United States became the world’s wealthiest, most industrially advanced, and most powerful nation: a true technological republic.

We face an equivalent question of similar import today: how do we build a new Western order that upholds our values and delivers for our citizens? Elites in Europe and the United States should be laser-focused on developing their own answers to this question.

If there’s one piece from earlier in the year whose thesis I keep coming back to, it’s Ross Douthat’s piece on the existential threat of modern technology. No, our phones are not going to kill us. But there is a real winnowing of much of our culture and practices as our marginal time gets spent on screens. We don’t yet know what’s going to survive on the other side. For my part, this makes me want to spend more time reading, going to church, and being with family and friends.

Speaking of Ross Douthat, his new podcast is one of the better ones of 2025. His tone is winsome, as Samuel James has articulated. I’ve also loved Stripe’s Cheeky Pint – I particularly recommend the Dan Sundheim and Dave Ricks interviews, about hedge funds and pharma respectively. Elsewhere, Works in Progress interviewed Jesus Fernandez Villaverde on the fertility crisis in their new podcast, which included some perspectives I’d never heard before.

If you want to listen to something different from all of those, why not learn about the Hutterites, a sixteenth century time capsule preserved in the Great Plains of North America today? A remarkable but sad tale.

Lastly, you can subscribe to the Progress Ireland Substack if you want to keep track of what I do in my job. After writing a paper on land readjustment earlier in the year, now I’m focused on EU policy. The EU produces a huge amount of legislation and policy each year, but there are few progress-oriented actors trying to analyse it. I’ve been focusing on environmental policy, but there are many other important areas which deserve more scrutiny. I want to encourage others to get involved here in 2026.

Travel

My most exciting trip this year was to Japan, which I already blogged about here. I loved the trip and would happily visit again. I also travelled to Brussels a couple of times, which, along with London, has some of the greatest variation between its districts, good to bad.

I’m not sure I’ll travel as much next year. China is still on my list of places to (re)visit, but I think that the UAE should be high on my list too, possibly even at the top. Japan – and to some extent Brussels – feels like a city from the past. The UAE is plausibly something newer. They are focused on AI. They are building new museums, complete with their particular historical emphasis. Rasheed says that Abu Dhabi “in a strange way, it felt more like a Western city than present day central London.” Tyler shares some observations here – don’t forget the influx of Russians.

Looking ahead

I already mentioned AI; it remains the most important game in town. I hope to read and learn more about it in 2026, a goal I partially achieved in 2025.

There was a lot of discussion of the so-called Quiet Revival this year. It’s undeniable that something is happening. Anecdotally, I know many people who are either going back to church, or more often starting to go for the first time. There might be a newfound focus on beauty and meaning in Silicon Valley, which, as I wrote earlier this year, could do with some more churches. I also touched on this a couple of years ago when discussing the trend that converts tend not to pick Protestantism (this feels less true to me now than it did then). I will blog more about these interrelated topics in 2026.

Bierstadt, California Spring (1875)