One of the central themes of The End of the Nineteen-Nineties (by yours truly) is that a robust and widely shared economic growth is a prerequisite to Malaysia’s civic nationalism that comes in the form of Bangsa Malaysia. I argue that the loss of growth momentum caused by the late 1990s Asian Financial Crisis is the primary reason behind why civic nationalism is struggling to have itself centered in Malaysian politics. If you sympathize with the argument, then it is natural to buy into the overall abundance agenda.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are two champions that have popularized the idea of abundance through their recent 2025 book Abundance.
However, Abundance is a US-centric work. Some parts of the book sound like a boosterism for the Biden agenda: build, build, build. The support for the CHIPS Act is apparent throughout the book.
If you are living and working in Asia, problems raised by Klein and Thompson such as reluctance to build more housing, slow renewable energy progress and the general weakness in infrastructure spending might sound like an alien concept. In this part of the world, infrastructure spending is something we have learned to take for granted. Oversupply and overcapacity are more the buzzwords than scarcity is.
Nothing highlights this more by the differing reactions to a recent clip of the US President convoy driving along a Malaysian highway during the recently concluded Asean Summit in Kuala Lumpur: some US audience were amazed by various aspects of the highway while the Malaysian reactions included pride (thank you for noticing!), indifference (what’s the so special about the stretch road?) and smugness (welcome to the first world…). And this is just Malaysia, not China with its ultramodern out-of-this-world infrastructure and industrial might that is just hitting the ball out of the park.
Yet, the implications of Abundance have relevance to this part of the world too.
For one, policy priorities do change but change does not come easy. In fact, policy momentum often come in the way of new challenges. The authors go some length to explain why it is hard to build in the US: there was a time during the 1960s-1980s when development went too far that other concerns such as pollution, health and road safety were ignored. Since then, public pressures and court cases have put in place various legislations and bureaucracies to address these issues. These restrictions were relevant then, but they are now in the way of addressing new challenges. Example includes laws that used to restrict pollutions and preserve the environment are now preventing progress towards clean energy deployment that is necessary to combat climate change.
This can be true for Malaysia too in multiple areas. One area I can think of is Malaysia’s set of incentives, which a majority of them are geared towards the industries of the 1990s but not of the 2020s. Many of these incentives are now irrelevant but continued to be given by the government for various reasons, which is now taking resources for emerging concerns. Another policy is simply the petrol subsidy: we would like to push the country towards greater electrification but the subsidy is clearly in the way.
Another important lesson is that scarcity, oftentimes, is a choice. Sure, the physical world can only serves us so much but policies in many cases are the cause behind scarcity. Bringing the idea closer to home in Malaysia, our collective reluctance to raise taxes is the reason behind capacity and quality challenges we face in the health and education sectors. We choose the scarcity, and then we fight among ourselves to win stupid prize in that stupid games we created.
The greatest lesson perhaps is this: growth is not the only thing that matters but do not take it for granted. In fact, to put it more strongly, degrowth is not the way. This should be obvious with the various social pressures caused by deindustrialization faced by not just the US, but especially Europe. In Malaysia, for those still holding on to the idea of Bangsa Malaysia, growth is a must.
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