The Commons: ‘Progress Ought to Feel Beautiful’

Derek Thompson makes a number of insightful arguments about the decline in American progress. But in citing 1980 as the end of “building,” he glosses over an important point: 1980 is not a random year in U.S. history—it is the dawn of the Reagan era. The shift that began then—declaring a quest for personal advantage to be a driving force of progress, or, to use Ayn Rand’s phrasing, declaring selfishness to be a virtue—is central to the decline Thompson describes. Corporate strategies and business-school curricula rarely encourage thoughtful investments that yield reasonable returns for an extended period. Instead they emphasize strategic behavior that at times amounts to gaming the system rather than doing something useful.