Welcome to Ten Blocks. I'm Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal.

My guest today is Eli Dorado, chief economist at the Abundance Institute, a new think tank focused on creating space

for emerging technologies to grow, thrive, and reach their full potential. Eli, thanks for coming on.

Great to be here, Jordan. Let's start with the name of your new shop, the Abundance Institute. Abundance is a concept that is so hot right now. I think I'd credit the Atlantic's Derek Thompson with really popularizing it in the last couple of years, but your group and a couple of others like the Institute for Progress are doing the real fundamental work here. How do you conceive of abundance and why is it having this moment? I think of it almost entirely in economic

terms. I think of it in terms of total factor productivity is kind of like my like North Star, right? And so

total factor productivity is basically how much output do you get for inputs that you put into the

production process. So for a given quantity of capital and labor,

how much output are you able to get? You know, so I think this is a better like North Star than like

GDP or GDP per capita. They have all kinds of perverse things. Like if we all worked twice as

many hours, we could probably get GDP to be higher than it is today.

But then we would have, you know, half as much leisure time. So I think TFP is a better metric of saying, okay, adjusting for how many hours of labor you put in how much capital you have, because we can always increase capital by saving more, which is no fun, right? We like to

consume. So, yeah, adjusting for how much capital and how much labor, how good is the economy able

to turn inputs into outputs? And, you know, you can think about this in a number of different

sectors of the economy, in housing, you know, like we've gotten worse at turning inputs

into output, right? In health, we're getting worse at turning inputs into outputs. So that's how I think

about it. You know, if we're kind of have good broad-based growth means that in every sector

of the economy or almost every sector of the economy, you're having rapid growth and the ability of the economy to turn and fits into the outputs.

The whole system is getting more productive.

That's what I think about in terms of, like, abundance.

And our system is not getting more productive is what's driving your motivation here.

Well, it's certainly getting productive more slowly than it used to.

So I just, you know, looked up these numbers and the Biden administration so far in three and a half years of data, total factor productivity grew about a little over half a percent a year in that time period. And, you know, we used to grow at 2 percent a year. You know, so the Biden administration has achieved about 2% cumulatively.

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