"Abundance" and Its Discontents

Why did a book I largely came in agreeing with leave me cold?

The Roman goddess Abundantia with a cornucopia, depicted by Peter Paul Rubens

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I don’t, in general, read a lot of airport books. But I wanted to write something about the burgeoning concept of “Abundance,” as promoted by a variety of center-left types whom I follow and generally find sympathetic, and to do that I felt I really ought to read the hit book by that title, written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Which I have now done. I’m sorry to say that the book had the opposite of its intended effect, pushing me away from rather than fortifying my support for its core policy prescriptions. I think there are a number of related reasons for that.

The first is that it simply doesn’t have very many policy prescriptions, in part because the book is so diffuse. Abundance identifies multiple areas where America has turned deliberately away from abundance and toward scarcity. We don’t build enough housing, particularly in our most economically-successful cities, which has reduced economic and social mobility across the economy. We haven’t taken advantage of the dramatic improvements in renewables to make our energy system less carbon-intensive and to dramatically lower the price of electricity. We have hamstrung government generally by encumbering it with “everything bagel” requirements to satisfy every possible constituency, with the result that too little gets done and what does get done costs too much and takes too long. The returns to our investments in both basic science and technology have been less and less impressive as the structure of science itself has gotten more and more risk-averse. Finally, we have not prioritized turning our inventions into durable industrial advantage, but have frequently let other countries take the lead in industries we pioneered.

That’s an extraordinarily wide array of different policy areas, pulled together under the umbrella of “abundance,” and if you remove the umbrella they don’t obviously fit together in policy terms. Consider the second point, about energy, and the last, about industrial policy. Should the United States prioritize building domestic capacity in solar panel and battery production to compete with China? Or should we prioritize building out a renewable-focused grid even if that means buying its major components from China? Which approach would be more focused on “abundance?” In other cases, it’s not clear what the policy prescription really is—or, if there is an implicit prescription, it’s one that dare not speak its name. For example, Klein and Thompson have some tentative suggestions for how to get scientific and technological research to be more productive again, but they avoid the most controversial debates in this space—most notably, Peter Thiel’s contention that monopoly power is what makes radical innovation economically and institutionally possible. This is particularly notable since they cite Bell Labs as a precedent for the kind of research institution that no longer exists, and acknowledge that it only existed in the past because of AT&T’s monopoly power.

The book also doesn’t spend much time on the potential unintended consequences of abundant thinking. Consider housing. What would happen if we up-zoned San Francisco, Boston and New York to allow a lot more market-rate housing to be built? One possibility is that the price of housing in those markets would drop, and these cities would become more affordable. But part of the case for building more housing is that the relentless rise in prices in these cities is driving people and business away. So if policy changes removed that bottleneck, you’d expect that dynamic to reverse: the population of those “superstar” cities would grow, as more companies located more jobs in these cities to take advantage of their unique agglomeration effects. Demand, in other words, quickly snap up new supply. Less out-migration to Texas and Florida, Utah and Montana, Georgia and North Carolina, and more in-migration from Illinois and Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan would lead to a decline in housing prices in those states, rather than in the most expensive metros, where housing prices would, at best, plateau. I’m not saying that’s definitely what would happen—but it strikes me as at least as plausible as the scenario where New York becomes affordable for the first time in its history.

To be fair, Klein and Thompson admit early on that they aren’t really writing a detailed policy brief. Rather, they are calling for a change in mindset. But what exactly is that change in mindset? “Abundance” sounds like a consumerist perspective: we should all get “more” of whatever we might want, and the opening section of the book describes a consumerist utopia of a particular kind: the kind of automated, frictionless world reminiscent of Disney’s Epcot Center or an Apple Store. This is, to say the least, not an ideal that America has ever abandoned, but it’s ultimately an advertising concept, not an economic agenda. More to the point, though, it’s kind of a dispiriting political ideal, because it does not describe relations within a political community in any meaningful way.

And that, to me, is what I found most frustrating about the book. Klein and Thompson explicitly pitch their book at progressives and Democrats. But what they are telling them, in so many words, is that they should largely abandon their approach to politics—organized around advocacy and interest groups and trying to prevent either government or industry from doing “bad” things—in favor of . . . I’m not entirely sure what. I couldn’t get a fix on the social and organizational basis they imagine for their new politics. Its view of politics is fundamentally technocratic, which is just a very peculiar fit for an era when technocracy’s political appeal is collapsing everywhere that it faces democratic accountability. Or, perhaps more in tune with our increasingly autocratic age, it’s ultimately an expression of a longing for another—doubtless very different—Robert Moses, someone who is more willing to break things in the interests of moving faster, but toward a greener, more egalitarian destination.

All if this frustration on my part may just mean that I’m not the target audience. In many ways I’m already a convert who’s more interested in the difficult details than in the big picture. I already think New York needs to build more housing if it wants to sustain its own economic dynamism; I’ve moved on to worrying about other problems, both local ones, like whether we’re going to do build housing without improving our transportation infrastructure, thereby creating new congestion crises, and national ones, like whether cities are doomed to be fertility sinks no matter how much dense housing they build. (I’ve noticed that Japan, the YIMBY paradise, has consistently had a significantly lower total fertility rate than the UK, which has one of the developed world’s worst housing construction regimes, and suspect that one reason is that the UK, while overall extremely dense, is nonetheless not quite so urbanized as Japan is.) I already think that we need to take fuller advantage of developments in solar, wind, nuclear and geothermal energy, both to fight climate change and to remain competitive in both the civilian and military technologies of the future; I’ve moved on to worrying about tradeoffs between different goals of industrial policy (as noted above) and wondering what would be a more optimal environmental regulatory regime than our existing litigation-based system (something I really did expect Klein and Thompson’s book to talk about rather than largely skirt). I don’t need to be convinced of the concepts of deadweight loss or regulatory capture. Maybe there’s a big audience out there who does, and I’m just not it.

But even that audience, whether right-wing or left-wing, is probably going to want their small-c conservative perspective—the fear that empowering both government and industry to do more without asking permission will wind up hurting them or the things they value more than an abstract dynamism—addressed, both on a practical and on an emotional level. Risk-aversion and loss-aversion are entirely natural temperamental dispositions, and most people are less likely to be motivated by an abstract concept like abundance than by the promise that they, personally, will be able to stay ahead of their neighbors, or at least not fall behind them, and will see their children do better than they did, or at least not worse. At its heart, Abundance is an argument that these natural and personal goals cannot be achieved without a belief in and a commitment to that abstraction. It’s about the ultimately catastrophic consequences of a politics rooted in distrust: distrust in government, distrust in industry, distrust in the media and in science and in institutions generally—ultimately, distrust in the future. Klein and Thompson not wrong about those consequences, nor are they wrong that the only way to rebuild trust is by earning it. I wish I had come away from reading the book more inclined to place my trust—in the authors, at least. For whatever reason, I didn’t.