Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future is a rare thing: a serious book on public policy that has also launched a movement. In the US, senior Democratic politicians have taken to name-checking the book (and progressive activists to denouncing it). Abundance clubs have formed in cities across blue America.

I think the argument is sound as far as it goes (though others such as Brink Lindsey, Steven Teles, Marc Andreessen and Philip K Howard have been making a similar case for years). Progressive politicians have got in the way of progress by privileging interest groups over the common good and following procedure over achieving goals. The result is a shortage of desirable goods such as housing or infrastructure.

What Klein and Thompson say about the US is even more true of the UK, where the average house price is eight-and-a-bit times the median income compared with five-and-a-bit times in the US.

But I would add that the abundance agenda needs to be balanced by an anti-abundance agenda. For in many significant areas of life, we suffer from a crisis of overproduction rather than underproduction – too much stuff (or stimulation) rather than too little. This overproduction is bad for our physical and mental health. And the bizarre combination of too much bad abundance and too little good abundance (like too much bad cholesterol and too little good cholesterol) is at the root of our civilisational malaise.

The obvious physical manifestation of this problem is junk food: we suffer from an oversupply of fat, sugar, salt, and food additives piled high in supermarket shelves and served up in fast-food restaurants. The proportion of US citizens who are clinically obese has increased from 15 per cent in 1980 to about 40 per cent in 2023.

Obesity is linked to multiple health problems, including heart disease, depression, hypertension, cancer and diabetes.

But the problem is also evident in the profusion of stuff with which we surround ourselves. One in ten Americans have so much stuff that they rent storage units even though the average house has tripled in size over the past 50 years. British high streets are populated by charity shops that bulge with discarded clothes and knick-knacks.

But the abundance problem is at its most acute in the world of bytes rather than bites or bits and pieces. The lords of the digital universe compete for our attention, because they are in the business of selling that attention to advertisers. And they never leave us alone. E-mail notifications ping. News alerts flash. Exclusive offers tumble. Porn and gambling sites beckon. Children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable to this digital onslaught: the average US teenager spends six to eight hours a day looking at screens, particularly smartphones.

This torrent of content is taking a serious toll on our mental and intellectual health precisely because it is a torrent. In The Anxious Generation (2024), the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has documented that the mass arrival of both smart phones and social media coincided with a surge in mental health problems among the young, including anxiety, depression, self-harming and even suicide. A recent article in the Financial Times, headlined “Have humans passed peak brain power?”, marshals worrying evidence of declines in reading, mathematics, concentration and learning power. In 2022 the proportion of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half. The so-called “Flynn effect”, whereby average IQ has been rising for decades, is going into reverse.

Notably, many people close to Silicon Valley are now speaking out against the consequences of digital abundance. Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher for Google, warns that competition for attention creates a “race to the bottom of the brainstem”. Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired, says, speaking of internet addiction, that “on the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine”. Silicon Valley schools have led the way in banning smart phones.

Policymakers are already addressing particular manifestations of the “too much” problem – Hungary taxes unhealthy foods, Chile puts a black warning label on foods that contained added sugar, sodium or added fats, and, thanks to Haidt’s pioneering work, more and more schools are banning digital phones.

There are two reasons. The first is that building a better future depends as much on learning how to say “no” as learning how to say “yes”. The second is that learning how to say “no” is often more difficult in a commercial society than learning how to say “yes.” The abundance-related problems that I have listed all have something important in common: they represent the market working efficiently. Klein and Thompson focus on removing government-imposed restrictions that prevent the market from supplying demand. In a phrase, they want “a liberalism that builds”.

But when it comes to junk food or digital stimuli, companies are doing exactly what they are designed to do: creating and satisfying demand in almost limitless profusion.

Companies have been all too successful in preventing governments from preventing them from producing what they want – most tragically with the 1996 US Telecommunications Reform Act that exempted internet companies from the duty to police content originating with independent users or promoters, through what was to become Section 230 of the revised Communications Act, even if such content was obscene, hateful, false or incendiary. We need more regulation and taxation rather than less: in other words, an anti-abundance agenda preventing companies from doing what they will.

We need to recognise that the only way to prevent companies from producing too much schlock is to do the very opposite of stimulating yet further abundance: that is to tax them, regulate them, constrain them and remove get-out-of-jail free clauses such as Section 230.

Our problem is not that we have been regulating too much or too little; it is that we have been regulating the wrong things in the wrong way, and creating an abundance of digital trash, on the one hand, and a shortage of housing on the other.

What we need in the longer run is neither an abundance agenda nor an anti-abundance agenda but a dynamic combination of the two. Call it a maturity agenda. The progressive enemies of abundance encourage one sort of infantilisation by obliging more adults to live with their parents.

The high-tech priests of abundance encourage a different sort of infantilisation by encouraging self-indulgence and peddling brain rot.

The two combine to encourage over-investment in digital entertainment and low-quality stuff and underinvestment in the solider things such as housing, infrastructure, and civic virtue on which the long-term health of society depends.

• Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World