Assessing Brink Lindsey's "the Permanent Problem"

The Enlightenment and modernity have, Brink Lindsey argues, led to mass society and mass affluence. But their overrun has also created a world where individuals are buffeted by strange alien and alienating systems—market, bureaucratic, ideological, algorithmic—that barely register them as people. The Permanent Problem traces a polycrisis: inclusion collapses as the educated meritocracy hardens into caste, dynamism slows in the “world of atoms,” and politics degenerates into multi‑elite culture war, while the attention economy corrodes the “constitution of knowledge.” Lindsey’s answer is an abundance agenda plus a connection agenda: more growth where it matters, and more human‑scale power over how we live together by nurturing a flourishing of intermediary institutions in which people can do things and live lives that matter. Far from succumbing to post‑liberal despair, Brink Lindsey proposes an attempt to make liberal modernity finally fit for human flourishing…

• Lindsey, Brink. 2026. The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. New York: Oxford University Press. <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/> <https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-permanent-problem/>.

My friend Brink Lindsey is unhappy: Two reviewers of his book—Michael Strain and Jonathan Rauch—seem not to have read his book with enough attention to understand it.

Rauch <https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/lets-not-grant-the-postliberal-critique> dismisses it with “had I stopped reading after Chapter 7, I would take the book for a postliberal screed that outdoes anything by Patrick Deneen….”, titles his harsh review “Let’s Not Grant the Postliberal Critique of Market Liberalism”, and grudgingly concludes “If you mentally dial down its excesses, you will find ideas that might measurably improve the quality of modern life” without every mentioning what those ideas are.

Strain <https://www.aei.org/op-eds/is-affluence-a-barrier-to-living-well/> dismisses Lindsey as a confused writer who falsely thinks that “affluence [is] a barrier to living well”, and classifies his argument as “consistent with post-liberal commentators’ arguments that democratic capitalism is exhausted, a failed experiment and an obstacle to human flourishing”. He ripostes that his complaints spring simply from the fact that “we are a fallen people in a fallen world” and that any special “anxiety… seems wildly misplaced in our current age of… GLP-1 [agonist] drugs for diabetes and weight loss… rapid progress on treatments for… Alzheimer’s and cancer… [and] generative AI, which even the most pessimistic… expect will increase trend productivity growth noticeably…. American society was much less affluent and in much worse shape in the 1850s”.

And so Brink protests:

Brink Lindsey: Links