Fighting About Abundance

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Abundance politics

Nobody in left-of-center politics can shut up about Abundance.

If this is outside your particular internet bubble, Abundance is a book written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about the obstacles to building a more abundant society. The book’s thesis is that it would be really good if America could build a lot more green energy, housing, high speed rail, infrastructure, and do more research and innovation, and that’s it’s especially good if we can do it quickly and cheaply. Instead, they argue, our regulatory setup makes it harder, slower and more expensive to build. It would be good if we could fix this so we could have more of the nice things that make life better for everyone.

The book mostly concerns fairly wonky policy concerns - zoning rules, how the government funds scientific research, permitting processes, etc. So it’s a bit odd that it’s created what is essentially a civil war amongst Democratic talking heads online. The battles lines are not entirely neat, but they generally line up as a more moderate, technocratic and center-left pro-Abundance camp and a more progressive, leftist, activist anti-Abundance camp.¹

The pro-Abundance camp has won over a lot of Democratic and its backers are all-in on the need to untie complicated knots of regulation that make it hard to build things. They want to fix problems like how California spent tens of billions of dollars over the last 17 years and still hasn’t laid a single mile of track for its high-speed rail project, or how New York’s congestion pricing required a 3-year, 4,000 page environmental review. The anti-Abundance crowd sees the movement as a return to neoliberalism, Reaganism, and as contra progressive principles.

Now, look. I don’t want to just come out and say that the entire fight is stupid because pro-Abundance folks are so obviously correct on the merits. But in fact, yes, that is what I want to say. This whole conversation is deeply weird because Abundance is so obviously correct on the merits - and this makes for a very strange kind of debate.