I just started reading it, but the housing part of it is spot on, something I know very well from years of working to try and make my city and state's housing situation better.
The effects of the housing shortage are very real and something that can absolutely be worked on at the local and state level.
Not enough housing means:
* Longer commutes, which means more CO2, less time with friends and family, more stress, and more sprawl.
* People don't move to where the opportunities are any more.
* People do move there, but age out when they want to have a family and there's no appropriate housing.
The 'Abundance' idea is kind of vague. It makes for a good slogan, but the housing part of it is sorely needed, and it's one of the very rare issues in this day and age in the US that's not completely partisan.
For people who don't want to live in density, the counter intuitive thing is that it'll be easier to buy a single detached house if you allow more condos, especially 2/3 bedroom units, because there will be less competition. It's the pigeon hole principle.
It's not the wannabe home owners who are protesting but the current home owners who are rightly afraid that it will immensely reduce value of their homes.
That's a common misconception. The most active NIMBYs have lived in their homes for years and intend to die there. They don't intend to ever sell and aren't particularly concerned with property values per se. What they do care about are quality of life issues: noise, traffic, privacy, parking, crime, litter, etc. The more neighbors you have, the greater the risk that some of them will be antisocial assholes who let their pit bulls run loose and have screaming arguments late at night (which I have experienced in person). This may seem selfish but if you want to promote more housing development then you need to understand their concerns.
That may be true in some places, but in the Village of Oak Park, where I live, it's definitely not. Places like Oak Park --- wealthy inner-ring suburbs of major American cities --- are defined by their school systems. Those schools drive property taxes, which ratchet down affordability. Housing is dominated by SFZ lots, and the houses built on those lots are rational acquisitions only for families of school-aged children, most of whom will sell when their youngest graduate.
If long-term homeowners want to age in place in their houses in Elgin and Buffalo Grove, free from the distractions of density and traffic, I don't have a problem with that. But inner-ring suburbs like Oak Park and Evanston exist primarily to divert school funding from the broader metro area into wealthy enclaves; they create, in effect, de facto private school systems. Homeowners there have no moral standing to resist density.
I know you dont want to hear this but the other person you responded to is right. The problem here is that Illinois uses property taxes to fund schools when basically every other blue state uses a more equitable income tax based funding method. We need to vote for a fairer funding system.
I don't care. The phenomenon repeats itself in states/MSAs with different school funding formulae, but obviously I agree that Illinois school funding is problematic; the Jesuits pounded that into me with "Savage Inequalities" back in the 1990s. I'm working within the system I am in, and I have no patience for people who resist immediate reform in the ostensible service of some greater future reform.
I don't understand why people keep harping on about morality. No one cares. What matters are votes.
As for where you live, Illinois in general is particularly badly governed among US states. The entire state is a corrupt fiscal train wreck and serves mainly as an example of what not to do. Some other states have mechanisms to roughly equalize school district funding independent from local property taxes. My advice is to move.
No. The states you prefer resolve this problem not by convincing people to vote against their interests, but by denying individual homeowners the right to vote down new housing. I would welcome that approach too, but in the meantime, I work within the system I have. And, sorry, but I'm really not interested in your take on where I should live.
Suit yourself, but when the captain has steered the ship into an iceberg it's smarter to jump into a lifeboat instead of going down with the ship. The math doesn't work for Illinois any more. They have unsustainable public debt and employee pension obligations, a declining population, and no more room to raise taxes. Minor tweaks to state housing development policy or school district funding formulas won't prevent the inevitable drastic austerity program that's going to hit when the state becomes unable to pay its bills.
Other US states have their share of problems but overall Illinois is in the worst fiscal shape.
A room full of angry, wealthy, older people who showed up at 11AM on a weekday to stop homes for people who doubtless earn less than they do. And in that case, they were successful, sadly.
I'm conflicted. Who should be allowed to say what gets built in an area: the neighbors, the neighborhood, the city, the county, the state, the federal government?
The property owner, unless what's being built is really smelly, loud, or dangerous. With perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.
I agree that a property owner should be able to do what they want as long as excess noise, smells, or shadow doesn't leave their property. I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.
> I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.
It's the other way around; HOA's are largely an outgrowth of the real estate industry stepping in to solve the problem of how racial discrimination in housing could be made formalized and still publicly enforced through the courts when explicit racial discrimination by local governments in racial zoning was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917; starting with racial restrictions, other busybody terms started getting adding to property covenants.
If you're going to have common use areas like clubhouses or private roads or even shared roofs on townhouse buildings then an HOA (or something equivalent) is a necessity to deal with maintenance, insurance, and usage rules enforcement.
> ith perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.
HOA's entire point is to using leveraging property covenants to create viral contracts attached to property that leverage contract to create a basis or public enforcement, that's the hammer behind any of their private enforcement, without which they would have no effect. "Voluntary...HOA type thing" is an oxymoron.
I thought zoning was supposed to provide predictability, stability. So if you buy a house in an area zoned for denser stuff, don't whine when a building starts to go up.
No, mostly what zoning was intended to do was to keep Black families (and, before that, Chinese families) out of white suburbs. The documentation on this point is extensive and convincing. That effect is less deliberate, overt, and intensive today than it was in, say, 1964. But "we've always done it this way" is a uniquely weak argument when it comes to single-family zoning.
(The problem, throughout most of America, is lack of multifamily zoning; it's not as much that people own single-family houses near multifamily lots, because their grandparents generally took care of that problem in the late 1940s when most major metro areas got rezoned to eliminate those multifamily lots).
It would, but I believe the cause and effect is roundabout.
The first thing to go down will be rental yields, because those are more directly and immediately impacted by real market forces (number of renters versus available housing stock on the rental market), instead of speculation or the wealth effect or chasing a store of value, which are factors that drive the price of housing ownership but don't drive rents.
After rental yields decline, housing as an asset class will be less lucrative and higher risk compared to the cost of capital, which then causes an unwind as investors move to other asset classes.
Its interesting to consider the effects. Assuming you must live in a house, you actually lose nothing in a devaluation.
If you own outright, all houses being cheaper means you can buy exactly as much house as you already owned if you sold.
If you don't own, houses being cheaper lets you buy more house.
Houses being cheaper relative to everything else means that if you sold your house you can buy less of other stuff with that money, but given you need a home anyway you've not actually lost anything in a fundamental sense. It's probably a bit too abstract to convince people to look at it this way though, and realistically you are losing value relative to everything but housing.
It's overall just a short-term mindset, sadly. Most people derive the majority of their income from things unrelated to property, so cheaper property lets them buy more house than otherwise regardless.
Your comment didn't deserve to be downvoted. This might not be the primary factor behind local opposition, but it is a factor in why it's difficult for state or federal politicians to enact real reform, even something like amending tax policy. Two thirds of the population don't see the housing crisis as a crisis, for them it's either a housing bonanza, or it's something that they don't want to see happen but are afraid of being personally injured if it's fixed due to their leverage being multiple times their annual income.
That paper compared entire metropolitan statistical areas, as if Oak Park Illinois was the same housing market as Gary Indiana, or Vallejo the same as Palo Alto.
Concerning zoning laws, when my father built his house, he really had to be clever in order to dodge the local county's regulations.
1. He had to hire a biologist to convince the county inspectors that the property was not wetlands.
2. The county claimed that he couldn't put in a driveway due to regulations, but my dad found an old satellite image archive, which showed there was a prexisting logging road from decades earlier. This was a loophole that allowed him to install the driveway.
So much of the housing crisis is caused by overregulation, at least in my home state of Washington.
> “One of the personally amusing aspects of reading Abundance is that it kept reminding me of a two-hour discussion I had with Ezra Klein in 2019 about Medicare for All. […] In our discussion, Klein balked at making Medicare for All the centerpiece of a Democratic health care agenda because he thought it was not politically practical. […] At one point in the discussion, he asks how would I overcome employer opposition to the change, and I responded that we will just have to beat it, which he clearly did not find persuasive.
> “It’s not hard to imagine having the same conversation about Abundance but with the roles reversed. Whatever the merits of their proposals, Klein and Thompson are pushing an agenda that requires direct confrontation with many powerful, entrenched constituencies.”
And I mean, again, here's the crux of the opposition Abundance gets from the left.
The project of the Progressive movement is a decisive takeover of the state and national Democratic parties, which is what they'd need in order to get single payer, their signature policy, passed.
The notion that there's an alternative long game for the Democrats to play, that instead of enacting a massive (and controversial) change to the health care system, the party can instead just build a track record of demonstrable competency, is a problem for their movement. Why pay attention to whether the party governs well where it holds power today (that is: in essentially every major population center in the country)? That's just a distraction from the real goal, which is reworking the entire system.
Breunig is saying the quiet part loud, which is pretty typical for him.
Except that Bruenig isn’t opposed to Abundance (neither am I). In the conclusion to the review he says the book is fine and that people who are upset about it are blowing things out of proportion. What quiet part is being said loud in this review, again?
The focus on "Medicare for All" or single payer healthcare in general is so misguided. Commercial insurers are like the smallest problem in the whole messed up US healthcare system. Putting everyone on Medicare wouldn't solve any of the more fundamental problems.
One of the most fundamental problems with the US healthcare system is the fee for service payment system. Another closely realted one is the abundance of bureaucrats and administrators. Obamacare created a pilot program to move medicare off fee for service and toward fee per patient, and m4a would likely expand that program. Combined with some sort of pharma reform and 3 of the biggest problems healthcare face could be solved. Then congress needed to expand residency funding and the next biggest problem(lack of physicians, they currently make 9% of healthcare spending in the US) would be easily solved as well.
Commercial insurers are also moving from fee-for-service to value-based care payment models (with capitation being one approach). That isn't something unique to Medicare.
Increasing residency funding is a good idea, but I'm skeptical that it would reduce overall costs. With an aging population, demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The shortage of physicians is, paradoxically, one of the factors holding costs down today. If you can't see your doctor because appointments are backlogged for months then no insurance claim will be generated.
Abundance's main thesis isnt about policy at all, as the OPs author points out. Their main thesis is that democrats have lost the trust of the voters because they are too focused on process instead of results. Klein and co call for incremental policy change but even beyond that they call for a reorganization of the bureaucratic state which would require no policy change at all.
> significant parts of our federal government have abandoned key precepts of outcome-driven problem-solving. (Just try navigating the IRS’ Free File tax return tool. I gave up and paid for H&R Block instead.)
It seems deeply weird to me to pick this example, of all things, where things are getting better because of outcome-driven problem-solving. (You might also want to consider that "I gave up on Free File" might score you anti-points with your audience.)
This is a downright weird review. The crux of the complaint against Klein's book is that it's about values and avoids specific policy prescriptions. The lack of those policy arguments leads the reviewer to question Klein's commitment. But there's nobody in all of American political discourse that complaint falls more flat on than Ezra Klein.
The review draws a comparison between Abundance and Marc Andreesen's "Time To Build" essay, for... no discernible reason. It then points out that pmarca was ultimately hypocritical about building (he opposed development in his own town, of Atherton). I don't understand what that has to do with anything. Klein is a YIMBY. So am I. I spent my spare time working to clear the way for multifamily housing to get built right next door to my own. What the fuck do I care what pmarca did?
I think that, to understand this review, you have to understand the internal dynamics of the Democratic coalition. Progressives (the left of the party) hate Klein, and, for reasons passing understanding, the YIMBY movement writ large. The progressives have a prescription for rehabilitating the national coalition: massive public spending programs and single-payer health care. Klein and Thompson advocate for a different strategy: building a track record of demonstrated competence, and stanching/reversing the outflow of residents from blue states to red states that actually build housing. That there might be a strategy that doesn't involve a progressive takeover of the state and national parties is a problem for the movement; hence: stuff like this.
You'll see the same thing happening with Matt Breunig and Malcolm Harris' reviews, posted upthread.
This is a weird response - that's not what the review says at all. (I should know. I wrote it.) I'm also a YIMBY - although, as a renter, it doesn't exactly take any moral courage.
As I state clearly in the review, I share Klein and Thompson's view of the housing issue and I called that part the strongest section of the book.
My point is that what the book calls "abundance" is an incoherent mishmash of ideologically incoherent anecdotes. It's not a policy framework and it's not an agenda. So what is it?
> that's not what the review says at all. (I should know. I wrote it.)
tptacek's summary seems spot on to me. It may be not what you meant to say, but it's an accurate summary of how at least 2 readers are interpreting what you're saying. You can try and blame the readers if you wish, but we're not mind readers and can only go by the words you've written on the page and the context in which you've written them.
What exactly does Marc Andreesen have to do with Klein and Thompson's advocacy for zoning reform?
The answer to your question is simple. In fact, you dance around it in your review! The politics of reform are about navigating the disagreements in the Democratic coalition. Indeed! The point of the book is to present a positive vision of what a Democratic coalition focused around an agenda of demonstrated competency would look like and accomplish. The book is about the persuasive effort.
It doesn't seem plausible that you'd be so unfamiliar with Klein that you didn't know he records one of the most popular policy-driven shows in the country.
What does his podcast have to do with anything? I'm reviewing his book, not his entire bibliography.
As I stated already, the vision is incoherent. It's fine to cherrypick specific anecdotes as examples of competent governance. But if, for example, one of the stories is about how outsourcing large infrastructure projects led to its demise while doing the same for a vaccine logistics project was the cause of its success, this isn't really much of a vision at all, is it?
You say the point is to show what "an agenda of demonstrated competency would look like and accomplish." So where is that agenda?
Why can't you answer the question I asked? It seems straightforward. And it's a point I made --- led off with, even --- in the original comment you replied to.
This is quite literally already explained in the review but I'll repeat it here. I used Andreessen's essay as a microcosm for the problem with Abundance: at the level of fuzzy, non-specific exhortations to "build," everyone can agree. Once you get into specifics, that's where the brass tacks are. In Andreessen's case, it means building is fine unless it's near his house. In Klein and Thompson's case, it's not even clear what they're proposing much of the time.
Is it your claim that Klein is unaware of the dynamic where people are sanguine about new housing being built anywhere but near their house? I feel like there's a name for that phenomenon. If that's not your claim, then I ask again, what was your point, other than to suggest that Klein's commitments are as artificial as Marc Andreesen's, someone who is in no way affiliated with Klein?
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
In this case, it might help to add some detail about what it is you think I may have missed.
I think the crux of the matter is, as the author states:
"even a positive-sum world contains winners and losers"
The core of the problem is that we don't want to trample the losers (lest those tools be used against us), but at the same time, someone is often going to come worse (from their perspective) from some very worthwhile changes. In some cases, it seems like we can just use money to compensate them, but inevitably it's going to be difficult to price that, or it'll get abused. I don't rightfully know how to address that.
It's easy enough to justify paying for compulsory acquisitions - but in more abstract circumstances it's unlikely we want to be paying existing homeowners to stop opposing removal of zoning regulations.
I don't know, its a complex topic. If one asked me I'd probably splash out a lot more money in direct compensation for aggrieved parties rather than the current status quo - it would not surprise me if people would accept even relatively token amounts relative to the theoretical benefits, given otherwise there's no difference to saying yes/no to them. Would be an interesting experiment.
“ Okay. So the abundance agenda calls for an expert-laden, big-government apparatus to build high-speed rail, and a lean skeleton crew that outsources all the key logistics and execution layers to the private sector for a mass vaccination campaign. It’s difficult to detect a usable framework here.”
Having read about 4 different critiques of the book, this maybe closest to a well thought out one. However, it still gives in to the hyper-partisan times looking for a straightforward template to apply in every situation when actually “it depends” is the right answer.
How to build quickly and efficiently while managing everyone’s expectation is tricky business and not every situation will fall neatly under left-right (big government or small government?!) dichotomies!
The core thesis is to optimize to build quick not for some consistent politics du jour.
The "Abundance Agenda" doesn't demand an "expert-laden big-government apparatus" or a harnessing of private enterprise; it demands that if we're going to spend tens of billions on an HSR project, that the project actually work. The review jazz-hands around the fact that Klein is obviously right about California HSR, and he's obviously right about Operation Warp Speed.
In fact most of the critiques I've read, go something like:
"He's obviously right, but I don't like it cuz it smells like something bad from the 80's".
It takes no effort at all to see that CA HSR is an unmitigated disaster. It takes much more effort to figure out a coherent policy common denominator that shames CA for outsourcing the project to consultants while praising OWS for doing the same.
Klein notes that one project is a dismal failure and the other a stunning success. Both are true statements, and there's really nothing you can say to make that not true. The idea that there's a single coherent set of policy prescriptions that gets you reliably to the successes and away from the failures is exactly the thing Klein doesn't claim to be offering --- in fact, you open your review by complaining about exactly that.
I've asked before and you didn't answer: can you identify anything in the book that Klein and Thompson are wrong about? Are we doing better deploying transportation than we think? Should we be more careful about where to site wind and solar, not less? Do we lean too heavily on private industry in the development of vaccines?
A positive vision of the outcomes of a Democratic coalition that focuses on demonstrating competence and a willingness to build to suit the needs of its constituents: housing affordability in blue states, clean energy, modern transportation systems, new vaccines, &c.
Supply side economics also known to economists as economics. But yes, this whole movement is basically just democrats who are also interested in economics.
The only people who say this are incredibly privileged trust fund leftists. Everyone else knows that more stuff=better life all else equal. Maybe someday that'll change but for now most people are still resource constrained. How did this become a popular take among the dem thought makers?
I think the point is that if stuff is energy then energy is flowing into the wrong things and is not equally distributed. So we have enough of "stuff" but a lot of it is the wrong kind and access to that is not democratic. Rephrased again - inefficient human organization and outdated systems of values are what is slowing us down.
Thats not what the subtitle of the review is though. It's "The last thing society needs is more stuff" which is completely different from "we have enough stuff but can distribute it better." The difference matters. Embracing growth can happen at the same time as equitable distribution.
I've only read maybe 30 pages of the book, but I think the article misses the point (I hope) the book is making: there are regulations that serve a purpose, and regulations that don't, and we can, to at least some extent, tell the difference based on the regulations themselves or their impact on past projects.
If that's true, then we can shed regulations, speed the process of government, and make it more effective at actually doing things.
It might be difficult to tell which regulations are causing problems, or which are needless, or maybe that's not the point of the book; but criticizing the book for not pre-identifying exactly which regulations need to end seems overly demanding: we first need to agree that there are needless regulations that slow progress. If the book helps us reach that conclusion, it's served a purpose.
Also, as a small nit: "even a positive-sum world contains winners and losers." That needs cites I think. I'm sure there's someone in the U.S. who is worse off than a 15th century peasant, but there are precious few of them, too few to use that phrase to describe them.
I've got the book on my reader but haven't started it yet.
I've heard a few interviews though with the authors and while I'd like to see their ideas succeed I am suspicious of the idea that we can just get rid of the regulations that don't work.
All regulations work. There's a reason they get codified; they're working for someone. People who own property are voting for things not to change. It's not that they mistakenly think that building more housing is against their interest - it is against their interest.
Look at housing prices in Texas and California. Which would rather own a house in? In California it's going to be expensive and get more expensive. There are no can't miss investments but a house in CA. is pretty close. Now if you're buying a house Texas might be a better bet but owners are the ones running the regulatory environment.
I think you'd get near-universal agreement that some regulations somewhere are ineffective and/or counterproductive. If that's all the book is attempting to achieve, it's an extremely modest goal IMO.
The problem is getting that same level of agreement about specific regulations - or, failing that, making a strong case for a specific reason why a regulation that many people think is necessary and good is actually bad. But Klein and Thompson, for the most part, avoid doing this.
The book identifies a problem that you yourself agree with: the Democratic coalition can't build anything, can't satisfy the needs of its constituents, is losing those constituents to Republican states that can, and is losing the faith of the electorate. It also offers a diagnosis (or rather, a set of them): the unintended consequences of localism, a legislative and regulatory system that oriented more than checking boxes with every faction of the coalition than having coherent goals like "house people" or "deploy clean energy", and an unwillingness of the coalition to revisit the decisions of previous generations in light of current challenges.
Do you think any of these diagnoses are wrong? Or are you just bored by them?
He's just asking what are the specific proposals that should be enacted... That's it...
Like know that you've read the book which exact law has to be passed / destroyed to increase housing supply... Without causing mass civil unrest... Which law has to be passed to get the high speed rail build in the next 3 years... Without destroying nature / being routed through poor people's home under eminent domain and not through some rich ass hole with the right connections...
He's coming at if from his pov that he's aware of the problem but is looking for solutions... Which the author's don't give...
The problem is that human made laws deal with... Human beings... And hence with game theory...
So the intent of the law != Outcome of the law.
If you just throw away the law without considering Chesterton's fence etc you are probably throwing away the baby with the bathwater... And to fix it perfectly is basically impossible as it always is in complex matters... (if it was possible ie there wouldn't be accountants who can save millions/billions for cooperations...)
The book is describing problems that a lot of people, especially on this forum, are well aware off. However instead of saying - we need to do this, or even proposing a wiki/forum/whatever to specifically fix all those individual problems/ laws it just repeats what a lot of people are already aware off in a long spun out book.
Best other book I can think of that is similar in a way (and a best seller) is thinking fast and slow with the end conclusion being ~~~ eeeuhm there is no actual way to fix your thinking but hey maybe being aware off the 2 systems might help even though we've said this whole time that it doesn't really work.
So yeah, what specific solutions have you found in this book?
If you agree that there aren't any... Maybe you just were looking for A and got A and he was hoping to get B and only got A ?
He's saying it's a problem book instead of a solution book and you are repeating but yes it's a great problem book... Why does there need to be a solution book.
So maybe the marketing is at fault ?
(Anyway written at night on a phone so sorry for the badly written reply, I just noticed how you repeated more or less the same message and felt like communication was not being achieved despite lots of words being exchanged - I will clarify with a clearer head tomorrow to any reply - Hanoi time zone)
There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword."
"...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining..."
This seems quite relevant to Klien & Thompson's new work, which is basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration; ideas that would be difficult to imagine anyone would else in the government class would be qualified to out-execute them on when the rubber actually meets the road, despite their reservations and the differences they have at the margin. End of the day, somehow they wish they owned the agenda, which is understandable: they are peddling an ideology and it is difficult to see the competitive one win on merits.
> which is basically advocating for and co-opting the core ideas of the current administration
How on earth do you come to this conclusion?
Trump is famously NIMBY, both in real estate and in infrastructure. He objects to solar and wind purely on the basis that "they ruin the view". He's anti-dense and pro-suburb, he hates zoning except when it actually comes to residential zoning, where he has pretty consistently tried to leverage it to destroy dense housing projects (other than his own presumably).
Aside from that "this administration" has no real consistent policy objectives other than kicking out immigrants. Not even cutting taxes, because tariffs are taxes.
DOGE barely even pretends to be a legitimate effort to make government more efficient as opposed to simply cutting things they don't like or understand without concern for the actual ROI. You don't slash the IRS if you care about government efficiency.
Both advocate deregulation and increasing economic growth.
Of course you can debate the difference at the margin ad nauseam, something the authors are doing more authoritatively than you and I could on every single podcast on the planet, trying hard to differentiate themselves from libertarians that preceded them decades ago. I remain unconvinced.
It was not me who characterized the respective ideologies with those simplified labels. I don't characterize either of them with those labels to sensibly debate the point.
You're calling a President hammering every nail with a Tariff hammer and who wants every neighborhood to use zoning to sue property rights out of existence but calling it "deregulation", who's using simplified labels here?
I gave a concrete example to the affirmative to a different commenter, so strictly speaking, yes. Arguably many European politicians don't say this but advocate for policies whose immediate logical conclusion is stagnation or decreasing growth. One example to demonstrate the point is banning fossil fuels (not debating the merits of it, but to demonstrate the point). In fact, the writing of Abundance is implicitly acknowledging such policies are in place.
But that was not the main point: there is a difference in basing your ideology on top of that pillar and betting the farm on it ala Abundance vs. just thinking economic growth is a nice to have blessing.
You're making a fantastic argument for why your earlier accusation that Ezra is advocating "the core ideas of the current administration" is completely ludicrous.
All of MAGA's most core policies are fundamentally degrowth. Tariffs, cancelling the CHIPS act, cutting funding for medical research, pushing expensive fossil fuels like coal above cheaper renewables or even natural gas, pushing resource extraction and commodity manufacturing and agriculture at the expense of advanced manufacturing.
The outcome of all of those policies will be degrowth, even if Trump isn't using that rhetoric.
> both advocate for ... increasing economic growth
Fucking everyone does. That's like saying my moral code is the same as Ted Cruz's because we both think murder is wrong.
Trump wants to throw out most environmental laws and drill baby drill, Ezra wants to prune the ones that prevent us from actually saving the environment, which he highly values. These are worlds apart, you can't just toss them both in the "deregulation" category and call it a day.
Fine, 98% of the population would like to see increased economic development. The point is that you would be very hard pressed to find any issue in American politics less controversial. Degrowth is incredibly fringe. You wouldn't even get 10% at a Bernie Sanders rally to agree.
Pointing to the unibomber is hardly a great way to prove the position is mainstream.
I started with your latter point because it was just so absurd. I didn't ignore "deregulation", that was what the entire rest of my comment was about.
It might be absurd to you, but clearly not absurd to the authors who have tried to address some of these explicitly. In any case, I leave it between you and the authors to hash out a left-accelerationist agenda—I am out of here as a simpleton reader.
Feel free to act outraged. I am not going to further debate this charged topic. The authors are literally on every podcast trying to contrast themselves from various aspects of DOGE or deregulation and ideas that came before from Peter Thiel et al. That proves the point is not as far-fetched and crazy to debate, even if you disagree with the conclusion.
Probably the most important part of the abundance platform is the positive vibes that we can make progress on these longstanding problems if we earnestly revaluate the situations.
Most common training of CCP membership: Engineering
Face it, we are a litigious nation that values due process (with one exception of course) over making things. An influential idea or book isn't changing this, it's in our DNA somehow
You’re not wrong, and that’s by design. Laws entrench power of those wealthy enough to afford competent lawyers, and thus build a system of rules that increases their advantage at the expense of others. Thus we have a society whose laws make it exceedingly easy to solely focus on profit per quarter, and impossibly difficult to plan or execute on a longer timeline (e.g., government policy). There’s always another election to campaign on, a scandal to dust up, a controversy to stir. Nothing gets done, apathy rises, and the empire wanes until - often suddenly - the floor falls out beneath it and the whole thing collapses.
Societies require vision of a future, something engineers are apt at creating. Empires require labyrinths of laws to entrench power, which lawyers excel at litigating. A thriving country requires both to be balanced, such that its benefits are distributed to all.
I think comparing US politicians and Chinese politicians in this way is very disingenuous. Our political systems are incredibly different on a foundational level.
And to further make the point, the US has been the center of innovation for decades. There’s a reason Silicon Valley is in the US. Other countries are catching up, but wasn’t that always to be expected?
But you compared two different things. CCP membership is like Republican Party affiliation: it is not reserved to politicians. The most common training of CCP politicians is... politics. The most common training of American members of the Republican Party is... whatever is trending and useful today in the US.
Your premises are so wrong that it is hard to argue with your conclusion. Ofc politicians, or policemen, or lawyers, train in law more than engineering. The US is more litigious than many countries because... it works better to litigate there, maybe ?
I gave this criticism to Peter Thiel a long time back that he complains about. We were promised flying cars but all we got is 140 characters and yet the startup that he has is basically a chartjs version of a database with an aggressive sales strategy like Oracle. Not exactly world changing now and that is the problem with most of these critics of society, just like movie critics. They can make a great argument over why movies or in this case society is bad but they cannot actually create a better society.
Same with Marc Andreessen who has never actually had a successful startup. Bizarre isn't it?
I’m somewhat with you in principle with the first paragraph, but the second paragraph is factually incorrect. Marc Andreessen was a web visionary/pioneer and successful founder and investor. IMO, to say otherwise only hurts your argument.
James Clark was the founder and the actual visionary. A lot of history has been rewritten about Marc Andreessen. Even most of the coding of the original Mosiac was done by Eric Bina.
Andreeson was also a Netscape founder. Andreeson was interesting in the web and involved in the development of a shipping web browser long before Clark got interested in the web and probably long before Clark even knew what the web was.
Clark however had money, connections and enterpreneurial and executive experience whereas Andreeson was just starting out in his career.
Really disagree with this author's take on robert moses. He is by far NYC's greatest hero. The abundance he created is now enjoyed by tens of millions of people every year, the poor and the wealthy. His singular vision is exactly the type of abundance this country needs. The pain brought onto a few by his plans was well worth the payoff.
The problem with Klein and Thompson's vision, as the author teases out, is that it is politically unpopular when you really dig into what theyre calling for. That's why theyre writing this book I suppose, to create support for their ideology.
I've come to loath Mark Andreessen as just an out-of-date reactionary who cannot take it that culture around him has moved on. Apparently he is also big hypocrite:
> Two years after Marc Andreessen published “It’s Time to Build,” The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas uncovered that Andreessen’s town of Atherton, CA had planned to do just that — build multifamily homes! — but was met with ferocious opposition from, well, a venture capitalist by the name of Marc Andreessen. As he and his wife wrote in a letter to the mayor and town council:
>> Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!
>> I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
Marc Andreessen also has nothing whatsoever to do with the book, except the reviewer's dubious assertion that it contains some of the "techno-utopianism of Marc Andreessen".
I like Ezra Klein a lot. But what’s odd about his Abundance theory is that he can’t bring himself to admit that nowhere in the U.S. comes closer to what he’s describing than Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon’s California.
The tragedy of muscular-government urbanism today is that it’s stuck in a political coalition with toxic empaths that will fill your nice public spaces with drug addicts, criminals, and illegal aliens. They won’t let you have nice public spaces until you first fix poverty, drug addiction, racism, and the economies of Latin American and Middle Eastern countries.
Ezra Klein will be the first to admit that housing policy in Austin, Texas is closer to his vision than anywhere in California. He has spent the last few years criticizing California for their terrible local governance and partly blames their terrible governance for the recent election loss at the federal level.
I just started reading it, but the housing part of it is spot on, something I know very well from years of working to try and make my city and state's housing situation better.
The effects of the housing shortage are very real and something that can absolutely be worked on at the local and state level.
Not enough housing means:
* Longer commutes, which means more CO2, less time with friends and family, more stress, and more sprawl.
* People don't move to where the opportunities are any more.
* People do move there, but age out when they want to have a family and there's no appropriate housing.
The 'Abundance' idea is kind of vague. It makes for a good slogan, but the housing part of it is sorely needed, and it's one of the very rare issues in this day and age in the US that's not completely partisan.
For people who don't want to live in density, the counter intuitive thing is that it'll be easier to buy a single detached house if you allow more condos, especially 2/3 bedroom units, because there will be less competition. It's the pigeon hole principle.
But this is exactly the issue.
It's not the wannabe home owners who are protesting but the current home owners who are rightly afraid that it will immensely reduce value of their homes.
That's a common misconception. The most active NIMBYs have lived in their homes for years and intend to die there. They don't intend to ever sell and aren't particularly concerned with property values per se. What they do care about are quality of life issues: noise, traffic, privacy, parking, crime, litter, etc. The more neighbors you have, the greater the risk that some of them will be antisocial assholes who let their pit bulls run loose and have screaming arguments late at night (which I have experienced in person). This may seem selfish but if you want to promote more housing development then you need to understand their concerns.
That may be true in some places, but in the Village of Oak Park, where I live, it's definitely not. Places like Oak Park --- wealthy inner-ring suburbs of major American cities --- are defined by their school systems. Those schools drive property taxes, which ratchet down affordability. Housing is dominated by SFZ lots, and the houses built on those lots are rational acquisitions only for families of school-aged children, most of whom will sell when their youngest graduate.
If long-term homeowners want to age in place in their houses in Elgin and Buffalo Grove, free from the distractions of density and traffic, I don't have a problem with that. But inner-ring suburbs like Oak Park and Evanston exist primarily to divert school funding from the broader metro area into wealthy enclaves; they create, in effect, de facto private school systems. Homeowners there have no moral standing to resist density.
I know you dont want to hear this but the other person you responded to is right. The problem here is that Illinois uses property taxes to fund schools when basically every other blue state uses a more equitable income tax based funding method. We need to vote for a fairer funding system.
I don't care. The phenomenon repeats itself in states/MSAs with different school funding formulae, but obviously I agree that Illinois school funding is problematic; the Jesuits pounded that into me with "Savage Inequalities" back in the 1990s. I'm working within the system I am in, and I have no patience for people who resist immediate reform in the ostensible service of some greater future reform.
I don't understand why people keep harping on about morality. No one cares. What matters are votes.
As for where you live, Illinois in general is particularly badly governed among US states. The entire state is a corrupt fiscal train wreck and serves mainly as an example of what not to do. Some other states have mechanisms to roughly equalize school district funding independent from local property taxes. My advice is to move.
No. The states you prefer resolve this problem not by convincing people to vote against their interests, but by denying individual homeowners the right to vote down new housing. I would welcome that approach too, but in the meantime, I work within the system I have. And, sorry, but I'm really not interested in your take on where I should live.
Suit yourself, but when the captain has steered the ship into an iceberg it's smarter to jump into a lifeboat instead of going down with the ship. The math doesn't work for Illinois any more. They have unsustainable public debt and employee pension obligations, a declining population, and no more room to raise taxes. Minor tweaks to state housing development policy or school district funding formulas won't prevent the inevitable drastic austerity program that's going to hit when the state becomes unable to pay its bills.
Other US states have their share of problems but overall Illinois is in the worst fiscal shape.
I'm really not interested in this kind of regional flamewar.
Here's a specific hearing that I attended where exactly that dynamic played out
https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
A room full of angry, wealthy, older people who showed up at 11AM on a weekday to stop homes for people who doubtless earn less than they do. And in that case, they were successful, sadly.
I'm conflicted. Who should be allowed to say what gets built in an area: the neighbors, the neighborhood, the city, the county, the state, the federal government?
The property owner, unless what's being built is really smelly, loud, or dangerous. With perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.
I think this take on it is pretty good: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines
I agree that a property owner should be able to do what they want as long as excess noise, smells, or shadow doesn't leave their property. I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.
> I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.
It's the other way around; HOA's are largely an outgrowth of the real estate industry stepping in to solve the problem of how racial discrimination in housing could be made formalized and still publicly enforced through the courts when explicit racial discrimination by local governments in racial zoning was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917; starting with racial restrictions, other busybody terms started getting adding to property covenants.
If you're going to have common use areas like clubhouses or private roads or even shared roofs on townhouse buildings then an HOA (or something equivalent) is a necessity to deal with maintenance, insurance, and usage rules enforcement.
> ith perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.
HOA's entire point is to using leveraging property covenants to create viral contracts attached to property that leverage contract to create a basis or public enforcement, that's the hammer behind any of their private enforcement, without which they would have no effect. "Voluntary...HOA type thing" is an oxymoron.
I thought zoning was supposed to provide predictability, stability. So if you buy a house in an area zoned for denser stuff, don't whine when a building starts to go up.
No, mostly what zoning was intended to do was to keep Black families (and, before that, Chinese families) out of white suburbs. The documentation on this point is extensive and convincing. That effect is less deliberate, overt, and intensive today than it was in, say, 1964. But "we've always done it this way" is a uniquely weak argument when it comes to single-family zoning.
(The problem, throughout most of America, is lack of multifamily zoning; it's not as much that people own single-family houses near multifamily lots, because their grandparents generally took care of that problem in the late 1940s when most major metro areas got rezoned to eliminate those multifamily lots).
The actual answer is the state in the US. What it should be probably doesnt matter because its not changing anytime soon
Just the state.
Would it reduce the value of their homes? My property would be a lot more if it were legal to tear it down and put up a 10 unit apartment building.
I think the complaint is more than they don't want their neighbors houses replaced by apartment buildings.
It would, but I believe the cause and effect is roundabout.
The first thing to go down will be rental yields, because those are more directly and immediately impacted by real market forces (number of renters versus available housing stock on the rental market), instead of speculation or the wealth effect or chasing a store of value, which are factors that drive the price of housing ownership but don't drive rents.
After rental yields decline, housing as an asset class will be less lucrative and higher risk compared to the cost of capital, which then causes an unwind as investors move to other asset classes.
It's weird, because some areas with the highest density also have the highest rents (e.g. New York City).
Its interesting to consider the effects. Assuming you must live in a house, you actually lose nothing in a devaluation.
If you own outright, all houses being cheaper means you can buy exactly as much house as you already owned if you sold.
If you don't own, houses being cheaper lets you buy more house.
Houses being cheaper relative to everything else means that if you sold your house you can buy less of other stuff with that money, but given you need a home anyway you've not actually lost anything in a fundamental sense. It's probably a bit too abstract to convince people to look at it this way though, and realistically you are losing value relative to everything but housing.
It's overall just a short-term mindset, sadly. Most people derive the majority of their income from things unrelated to property, so cheaper property lets them buy more house than otherwise regardless.
Your comment didn't deserve to be downvoted. This might not be the primary factor behind local opposition, but it is a factor in why it's difficult for state or federal politicians to enact real reform, even something like amending tax policy. Two thirds of the population don't see the housing crisis as a crisis, for them it's either a housing bonanza, or it's something that they don't want to see happen but are afraid of being personally injured if it's fixed due to their leverage being multiple times their annual income.
At the same time a recent NBER paper indicates that it’s not housing supply that’s causing house prices to rise, but geographic income levels.
My suspicion is that it’s a question of who has more control over asset classes and wealth.
Even in India, I see eye-wateringly expensive houses snapped up, with more being built. The same for london and any major city in the world.
It feels very much like the biggest participants in the economy, are the asset managers for yet richer people.
The economy feels like it’s retooling for the wealthy and above.
That paper compared entire metropolitan statistical areas, as if Oak Park Illinois was the same housing market as Gary Indiana, or Vallejo the same as Palo Alto.
> which means more CO2
If we genuinely cared about CO2, then RTO mandates would have been rare.
Home power and heating is a significant source of carbon emissions and single-family homes are extraordinarily inefficient.
Concerning zoning laws, when my father built his house, he really had to be clever in order to dodge the local county's regulations.
1. He had to hire a biologist to convince the county inspectors that the property was not wetlands.
2. The county claimed that he couldn't put in a driveway due to regulations, but my dad found an old satellite image archive, which showed there was a prexisting logging road from decades earlier. This was a loophole that allowed him to install the driveway.
So much of the housing crisis is caused by overregulation, at least in my home state of Washington.
I would be so, so happy if we returned to 18th or 19th century property rights. Euclid has been a century-long disaster.
From another good review of the book:
> “One of the personally amusing aspects of reading Abundance is that it kept reminding me of a two-hour discussion I had with Ezra Klein in 2019 about Medicare for All. […] In our discussion, Klein balked at making Medicare for All the centerpiece of a Democratic health care agenda because he thought it was not politically practical. […] At one point in the discussion, he asks how would I overcome employer opposition to the change, and I responded that we will just have to beat it, which he clearly did not find persuasive.
> “It’s not hard to imagine having the same conversation about Abundance but with the roles reversed. Whatever the merits of their proposals, Klein and Thompson are pushing an agenda that requires direct confrontation with many powerful, entrenched constituencies.”
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/03/24/the-abundanc...
And I mean, again, here's the crux of the opposition Abundance gets from the left.
The project of the Progressive movement is a decisive takeover of the state and national Democratic parties, which is what they'd need in order to get single payer, their signature policy, passed.
The notion that there's an alternative long game for the Democrats to play, that instead of enacting a massive (and controversial) change to the health care system, the party can instead just build a track record of demonstrable competency, is a problem for their movement. Why pay attention to whether the party governs well where it holds power today (that is: in essentially every major population center in the country)? That's just a distraction from the real goal, which is reworking the entire system.
Breunig is saying the quiet part loud, which is pretty typical for him.
Except that Bruenig isn’t opposed to Abundance (neither am I). In the conclusion to the review he says the book is fine and that people who are upset about it are blowing things out of proportion. What quiet part is being said loud in this review, again?
The focus on "Medicare for All" or single payer healthcare in general is so misguided. Commercial insurers are like the smallest problem in the whole messed up US healthcare system. Putting everyone on Medicare wouldn't solve any of the more fundamental problems.
https://www.sensible-med.com/p/the-entire-healthcare-system-...
One of the most fundamental problems with the US healthcare system is the fee for service payment system. Another closely realted one is the abundance of bureaucrats and administrators. Obamacare created a pilot program to move medicare off fee for service and toward fee per patient, and m4a would likely expand that program. Combined with some sort of pharma reform and 3 of the biggest problems healthcare face could be solved. Then congress needed to expand residency funding and the next biggest problem(lack of physicians, they currently make 9% of healthcare spending in the US) would be easily solved as well.
Commercial insurers are also moving from fee-for-service to value-based care payment models (with capitation being one approach). That isn't something unique to Medicare.
Increasing residency funding is a good idea, but I'm skeptical that it would reduce overall costs. With an aging population, demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The shortage of physicians is, paradoxically, one of the factors holding costs down today. If you can't see your doctor because appointments are backlogged for months then no insurance claim will be generated.
Abundance's main thesis isnt about policy at all, as the OPs author points out. Their main thesis is that democrats have lost the trust of the voters because they are too focused on process instead of results. Klein and co call for incremental policy change but even beyond that they call for a reorganization of the bureaucratic state which would require no policy change at all.
Also related, https://patrickcollison.com/fast ; a list of things that were built really quickly and cheaply in the past.
This is an extremely minor point, but:
> significant parts of our federal government have abandoned key precepts of outcome-driven problem-solving. (Just try navigating the IRS’ Free File tax return tool. I gave up and paid for H&R Block instead.)
It seems deeply weird to me to pick this example, of all things, where things are getting better because of outcome-driven problem-solving. (You might also want to consider that "I gave up on Free File" might score you anti-points with your audience.)
This is a downright weird review. The crux of the complaint against Klein's book is that it's about values and avoids specific policy prescriptions. The lack of those policy arguments leads the reviewer to question Klein's commitment. But there's nobody in all of American political discourse that complaint falls more flat on than Ezra Klein.
The review draws a comparison between Abundance and Marc Andreesen's "Time To Build" essay, for... no discernible reason. It then points out that pmarca was ultimately hypocritical about building (he opposed development in his own town, of Atherton). I don't understand what that has to do with anything. Klein is a YIMBY. So am I. I spent my spare time working to clear the way for multifamily housing to get built right next door to my own. What the fuck do I care what pmarca did?
I think that, to understand this review, you have to understand the internal dynamics of the Democratic coalition. Progressives (the left of the party) hate Klein, and, for reasons passing understanding, the YIMBY movement writ large. The progressives have a prescription for rehabilitating the national coalition: massive public spending programs and single-payer health care. Klein and Thompson advocate for a different strategy: building a track record of demonstrated competence, and stanching/reversing the outflow of residents from blue states to red states that actually build housing. That there might be a strategy that doesn't involve a progressive takeover of the state and national parties is a problem for the movement; hence: stuff like this.
You'll see the same thing happening with Matt Breunig and Malcolm Harris' reviews, posted upthread.
This is a weird response - that's not what the review says at all. (I should know. I wrote it.) I'm also a YIMBY - although, as a renter, it doesn't exactly take any moral courage.
As I state clearly in the review, I share Klein and Thompson's view of the housing issue and I called that part the strongest section of the book.
My point is that what the book calls "abundance" is an incoherent mishmash of ideologically incoherent anecdotes. It's not a policy framework and it's not an agenda. So what is it?
> that's not what the review says at all. (I should know. I wrote it.)
tptacek's summary seems spot on to me. It may be not what you meant to say, but it's an accurate summary of how at least 2 readers are interpreting what you're saying. You can try and blame the readers if you wish, but we're not mind readers and can only go by the words you've written on the page and the context in which you've written them.
What exactly does Marc Andreesen have to do with Klein and Thompson's advocacy for zoning reform?
The answer to your question is simple. In fact, you dance around it in your review! The politics of reform are about navigating the disagreements in the Democratic coalition. Indeed! The point of the book is to present a positive vision of what a Democratic coalition focused around an agenda of demonstrated competency would look like and accomplish. The book is about the persuasive effort.
It doesn't seem plausible that you'd be so unfamiliar with Klein that you didn't know he records one of the most popular policy-driven shows in the country.
What does his podcast have to do with anything? I'm reviewing his book, not his entire bibliography.
As I stated already, the vision is incoherent. It's fine to cherrypick specific anecdotes as examples of competent governance. But if, for example, one of the stories is about how outsourcing large infrastructure projects led to its demise while doing the same for a vaccine logistics project was the cause of its success, this isn't really much of a vision at all, is it?
You say the point is to show what "an agenda of demonstrated competency would look like and accomplish." So where is that agenda?
Why can't you answer the question I asked? It seems straightforward. And it's a point I made --- led off with, even --- in the original comment you replied to.
This is quite literally already explained in the review but I'll repeat it here. I used Andreessen's essay as a microcosm for the problem with Abundance: at the level of fuzzy, non-specific exhortations to "build," everyone can agree. Once you get into specifics, that's where the brass tacks are. In Andreessen's case, it means building is fine unless it's near his house. In Klein and Thompson's case, it's not even clear what they're proposing much of the time.
Is it your claim that Klein is unaware of the dynamic where people are sanguine about new housing being built anywhere but near their house? I feel like there's a name for that phenomenon. If that's not your claim, then I ask again, what was your point, other than to suggest that Klein's commitments are as artificial as Marc Andreesen's, someone who is in no way affiliated with Klein?
You know, you could always just read the review.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
In this case, it might help to add some detail about what it is you think I may have missed.
I think the crux of the matter is, as the author states: "even a positive-sum world contains winners and losers"
The core of the problem is that we don't want to trample the losers (lest those tools be used against us), but at the same time, someone is often going to come worse (from their perspective) from some very worthwhile changes. In some cases, it seems like we can just use money to compensate them, but inevitably it's going to be difficult to price that, or it'll get abused. I don't rightfully know how to address that.
It's easy enough to justify paying for compulsory acquisitions - but in more abstract circumstances it's unlikely we want to be paying existing homeowners to stop opposing removal of zoning regulations.
I don't know, its a complex topic. If one asked me I'd probably splash out a lot more money in direct compensation for aggrieved parties rather than the current status quo - it would not surprise me if people would accept even relatively token amounts relative to the theoretical benefits, given otherwise there's no difference to saying yes/no to them. Would be an interesting experiment.
[dead]
“ Okay. So the abundance agenda calls for an expert-laden, big-government apparatus to build high-speed rail, and a lean skeleton crew that outsources all the key logistics and execution layers to the private sector for a mass vaccination campaign. It’s difficult to detect a usable framework here.”
Having read about 4 different critiques of the book, this maybe closest to a well thought out one. However, it still gives in to the hyper-partisan times looking for a straightforward template to apply in every situation when actually “it depends” is the right answer.
How to build quickly and efficiently while managing everyone’s expectation is tricky business and not every situation will fall neatly under left-right (big government or small government?!) dichotomies!
The core thesis is to optimize to build quick not for some consistent politics du jour.
The "Abundance Agenda" doesn't demand an "expert-laden big-government apparatus" or a harnessing of private enterprise; it demands that if we're going to spend tens of billions on an HSR project, that the project actually work. The review jazz-hands around the fact that Klein is obviously right about California HSR, and he's obviously right about Operation Warp Speed.
In fact most of the critiques I've read, go something like: "He's obviously right, but I don't like it cuz it smells like something bad from the 80's".
It takes no effort at all to see that CA HSR is an unmitigated disaster. It takes much more effort to figure out a coherent policy common denominator that shames CA for outsourcing the project to consultants while praising OWS for doing the same.
Klein notes that one project is a dismal failure and the other a stunning success. Both are true statements, and there's really nothing you can say to make that not true. The idea that there's a single coherent set of policy prescriptions that gets you reliably to the successes and away from the failures is exactly the thing Klein doesn't claim to be offering --- in fact, you open your review by complaining about exactly that.
Right. So then what is he offering?
We have different definitions of "vision." My version implies some level of internal coherence.
I've asked before and you didn't answer: can you identify anything in the book that Klein and Thompson are wrong about? Are we doing better deploying transportation than we think? Should we be more careful about where to site wind and solar, not less? Do we lean too heavily on private industry in the development of vaccines?
A positive vision of the outcomes of a Democratic coalition that focuses on demonstrating competence and a willingness to build to suit the needs of its constituents: housing affordability in blue states, clean energy, modern transportation systems, new vaccines, &c.
The review on Chapo Trap House with Matt Bruenig was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w5rYhKL83E
Lex Fridman did a good show with the authors last week. It just sounds like supply side economics? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo
I was thinking of Milton Friedman the whole time I was listening to that episode :)
Supply side economics also known to economists as economics. But yes, this whole movement is basically just democrats who are also interested in economics.
Another review: https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundanc...
> he last thing society needs is more stuff
The only people who say this are incredibly privileged trust fund leftists. Everyone else knows that more stuff=better life all else equal. Maybe someday that'll change but for now most people are still resource constrained. How did this become a popular take among the dem thought makers?
I think the point is that if stuff is energy then energy is flowing into the wrong things and is not equally distributed. So we have enough of "stuff" but a lot of it is the wrong kind and access to that is not democratic. Rephrased again - inefficient human organization and outdated systems of values are what is slowing us down.
Thats not what the subtitle of the review is though. It's "The last thing society needs is more stuff" which is completely different from "we have enough stuff but can distribute it better." The difference matters. Embracing growth can happen at the same time as equitable distribution.
That's a phenomenal review! I really need to go read Solar Communism
I have not read it yet, I must admit, but I like Baffler and planning on subscribing. Thanks for reading and the feedback!
Read it. Love it.
I've only read maybe 30 pages of the book, but I think the article misses the point (I hope) the book is making: there are regulations that serve a purpose, and regulations that don't, and we can, to at least some extent, tell the difference based on the regulations themselves or their impact on past projects.
If that's true, then we can shed regulations, speed the process of government, and make it more effective at actually doing things.
It might be difficult to tell which regulations are causing problems, or which are needless, or maybe that's not the point of the book; but criticizing the book for not pre-identifying exactly which regulations need to end seems overly demanding: we first need to agree that there are needless regulations that slow progress. If the book helps us reach that conclusion, it's served a purpose.
Also, as a small nit: "even a positive-sum world contains winners and losers." That needs cites I think. I'm sure there's someone in the U.S. who is worse off than a 15th century peasant, but there are precious few of them, too few to use that phrase to describe them.
I've got the book on my reader but haven't started it yet.
I've heard a few interviews though with the authors and while I'd like to see their ideas succeed I am suspicious of the idea that we can just get rid of the regulations that don't work.
All regulations work. There's a reason they get codified; they're working for someone. People who own property are voting for things not to change. It's not that they mistakenly think that building more housing is against their interest - it is against their interest.
Look at housing prices in Texas and California. Which would rather own a house in? In California it's going to be expensive and get more expensive. There are no can't miss investments but a house in CA. is pretty close. Now if you're buying a house Texas might be a better bet but owners are the ones running the regulatory environment.
I think you'd get near-universal agreement that some regulations somewhere are ineffective and/or counterproductive. If that's all the book is attempting to achieve, it's an extremely modest goal IMO.
The problem is getting that same level of agreement about specific regulations - or, failing that, making a strong case for a specific reason why a regulation that many people think is necessary and good is actually bad. But Klein and Thompson, for the most part, avoid doing this.
The book identifies a problem that you yourself agree with: the Democratic coalition can't build anything, can't satisfy the needs of its constituents, is losing those constituents to Republican states that can, and is losing the faith of the electorate. It also offers a diagnosis (or rather, a set of them): the unintended consequences of localism, a legislative and regulatory system that oriented more than checking boxes with every faction of the coalition than having coherent goals like "house people" or "deploy clean energy", and an unwillingness of the coalition to revisit the decisions of previous generations in light of current challenges.
Do you think any of these diagnoses are wrong? Or are you just bored by them?
He's just asking what are the specific proposals that should be enacted... That's it... Like know that you've read the book which exact law has to be passed / destroyed to increase housing supply... Without causing mass civil unrest... Which law has to be passed to get the high speed rail build in the next 3 years... Without destroying nature / being routed through poor people's home under eminent domain and not through some rich ass hole with the right connections...
He's coming at if from his pov that he's aware of the problem but is looking for solutions... Which the author's don't give...
The problem is that human made laws deal with... Human beings... And hence with game theory...
So the intent of the law != Outcome of the law.
If you just throw away the law without considering Chesterton's fence etc you are probably throwing away the baby with the bathwater... And to fix it perfectly is basically impossible as it always is in complex matters... (if it was possible ie there wouldn't be accountants who can save millions/billions for cooperations...)
The book is describing problems that a lot of people, especially on this forum, are well aware off. However instead of saying - we need to do this, or even proposing a wiki/forum/whatever to specifically fix all those individual problems/ laws it just repeats what a lot of people are already aware off in a long spun out book.
Best other book I can think of that is similar in a way (and a best seller) is thinking fast and slow with the end conclusion being ~~~ eeeuhm there is no actual way to fix your thinking but hey maybe being aware off the 2 systems might help even though we've said this whole time that it doesn't really work.
So yeah, what specific solutions have you found in this book? If you agree that there aren't any... Maybe you just were looking for A and got A and he was hoping to get B and only got A ?
He's saying it's a problem book instead of a solution book and you are repeating but yes it's a great problem book... Why does there need to be a solution book. So maybe the marketing is at fault ?
(Anyway written at night on a phone so sorry for the badly written reply, I just noticed how you repeated more or less the same message and felt like communication was not being achieved despite lots of words being exchanged - I will clarify with a clearer head tomorrow to any reply - Hanoi time zone)
That's not the point of the book.
There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword."
"...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining..."
This seems quite relevant to Klien & Thompson's new work, which is basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration; ideas that would be difficult to imagine anyone would else in the government class would be qualified to out-execute them on when the rubber actually meets the road, despite their reservations and the differences they have at the margin. End of the day, somehow they wish they owned the agenda, which is understandable: they are peddling an ideology and it is difficult to see the competitive one win on merits.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/TheUnixHatersHandbook
My beard isn't long enough to understand any of this.
Is Sonic a reference to crass commercialism, the diminished attention span of young people, or the iteration speed of the platform?
> which is basically advocating for and co-opting the core ideas of the current administration
How on earth do you come to this conclusion?
Trump is famously NIMBY, both in real estate and in infrastructure. He objects to solar and wind purely on the basis that "they ruin the view". He's anti-dense and pro-suburb, he hates zoning except when it actually comes to residential zoning, where he has pretty consistently tried to leverage it to destroy dense housing projects (other than his own presumably).
Aside from that "this administration" has no real consistent policy objectives other than kicking out immigrants. Not even cutting taxes, because tariffs are taxes.
DOGE barely even pretends to be a legitimate effort to make government more efficient as opposed to simply cutting things they don't like or understand without concern for the actual ROI. You don't slash the IRS if you care about government efficiency.
Both advocate deregulation and increasing economic growth.
Of course you can debate the difference at the margin ad nauseam, something the authors are doing more authoritatively than you and I could on every single podcast on the planet, trying hard to differentiate themselves from libertarians that preceded them decades ago. I remain unconvinced.
NIMBY-ism vs YIMBY-ism isn't some margin difference. It's Klein's whole thesis.
It was not me who characterized the respective ideologies with those simplified labels. I don't characterize either of them with those labels to sensibly debate the point.
You're calling a President hammering every nail with a Tariff hammer and who wants every neighborhood to use zoning to sue property rights out of existence but calling it "deregulation", who's using simplified labels here?
> Both advocate ... increasing economic growth
Does anybody ever advocate economic decline?
I gave a concrete example to the affirmative to a different commenter, so strictly speaking, yes. Arguably many European politicians don't say this but advocate for policies whose immediate logical conclusion is stagnation or decreasing growth. One example to demonstrate the point is banning fossil fuels (not debating the merits of it, but to demonstrate the point). In fact, the writing of Abundance is implicitly acknowledging such policies are in place.
But that was not the main point: there is a difference in basing your ideology on top of that pillar and betting the farm on it ala Abundance vs. just thinking economic growth is a nice to have blessing.
You're making a fantastic argument for why your earlier accusation that Ezra is advocating "the core ideas of the current administration" is completely ludicrous.
All of MAGA's most core policies are fundamentally degrowth. Tariffs, cancelling the CHIPS act, cutting funding for medical research, pushing expensive fossil fuels like coal above cheaper renewables or even natural gas, pushing resource extraction and commodity manufacturing and agriculture at the expense of advanced manufacturing.
The outcome of all of those policies will be degrowth, even if Trump isn't using that rhetoric.
> both advocate for ... increasing economic growth
Fucking everyone does. That's like saying my moral code is the same as Ted Cruz's because we both think murder is wrong.
Trump wants to throw out most environmental laws and drill baby drill, Ezra wants to prune the ones that prevent us from actually saving the environment, which he highly values. These are worlds apart, you can't just toss them both in the "deregulation" category and call it a day.
> Fucking everyone does
No. Many people don't. Lots more don't have it as a priority. Ted Kaczynski and all the climate-change crowd come to mind.
Also you conveniently deleted my first word "deregulation."
Fine, 98% of the population would like to see increased economic development. The point is that you would be very hard pressed to find any issue in American politics less controversial. Degrowth is incredibly fringe. You wouldn't even get 10% at a Bernie Sanders rally to agree.
Pointing to the unibomber is hardly a great way to prove the position is mainstream.
I started with your latter point because it was just so absurd. I didn't ignore "deregulation", that was what the entire rest of my comment was about.
Agreed. Even the Greens (0.56% vote share in 2024) do not support either de-growth, no-growth, or low-growth in their platform.
As a non sequitur only tangentially related to the discussion, Kaczynski is dead.
Unintentionally, no modern administration may do more for degrowth than the current one.
Exactly
It might be absurd to you, but clearly not absurd to the authors who have tried to address some of these explicitly. In any case, I leave it between you and the authors to hash out a left-accelerationist agenda—I am out of here as a simpleton reader.
> basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration
That seems laughable. Which policies specifically are you talking about? Trust me, no one would more like this to be true than I. But... good grief.
Feel free to act outraged. I am not going to further debate this charged topic. The authors are literally on every podcast trying to contrast themselves from various aspects of DOGE or deregulation and ideas that came before from Peter Thiel et al. That proves the point is not as far-fetched and crazy to debate, even if you disagree with the conclusion.
> Feel free to act outraged. I am not going to further debate this charged topic.
I'd genuinely prefer to engage on specifics. What Trump administration policies do you think Klein is co-opting?
Genuinely interested people in debate would not start by calling the other party's statement "laughable" out of the gate and backtrack later.
Probably the most important part of the abundance platform is the positive vibes that we can make progress on these longstanding problems if we earnestly revaluate the situations.
Most common training of American politicians: Law
Most common training of CCP membership: Engineering
Face it, we are a litigious nation that values due process (with one exception of course) over making things. An influential idea or book isn't changing this, it's in our DNA somehow
You’re not wrong, and that’s by design. Laws entrench power of those wealthy enough to afford competent lawyers, and thus build a system of rules that increases their advantage at the expense of others. Thus we have a society whose laws make it exceedingly easy to solely focus on profit per quarter, and impossibly difficult to plan or execute on a longer timeline (e.g., government policy). There’s always another election to campaign on, a scandal to dust up, a controversy to stir. Nothing gets done, apathy rises, and the empire wanes until - often suddenly - the floor falls out beneath it and the whole thing collapses.
Societies require vision of a future, something engineers are apt at creating. Empires require labyrinths of laws to entrench power, which lawyers excel at litigating. A thriving country requires both to be balanced, such that its benefits are distributed to all.
I think comparing US politicians and Chinese politicians in this way is very disingenuous. Our political systems are incredibly different on a foundational level.
And to further make the point, the US has been the center of innovation for decades. There’s a reason Silicon Valley is in the US. Other countries are catching up, but wasn’t that always to be expected?
But you compared two different things. CCP membership is like Republican Party affiliation: it is not reserved to politicians. The most common training of CCP politicians is... politics. The most common training of American members of the Republican Party is... whatever is trending and useful today in the US.
Your premises are so wrong that it is hard to argue with your conclusion. Ofc politicians, or policemen, or lawyers, train in law more than engineering. The US is more litigious than many countries because... it works better to litigate there, maybe ?
Litigiousness is actually fine. We just need to prioritize building more courts, making smaller districts, etc . The law doesn't have to be slow.
Are tariffs going to lead towards that abundance and build revolution?
Taxes. Taxes and manpower solve most things.
This is also one of the things China has.
I gave this criticism to Peter Thiel a long time back that he complains about. We were promised flying cars but all we got is 140 characters and yet the startup that he has is basically a chartjs version of a database with an aggressive sales strategy like Oracle. Not exactly world changing now and that is the problem with most of these critics of society, just like movie critics. They can make a great argument over why movies or in this case society is bad but they cannot actually create a better society.
Same with Marc Andreessen who has never actually had a successful startup. Bizarre isn't it?
I’m somewhat with you in principle with the first paragraph, but the second paragraph is factually incorrect. Marc Andreessen was a web visionary/pioneer and successful founder and investor. IMO, to say otherwise only hurts your argument.
I know that story intimately. He and Eric Bina wrote Mosiac for three months.
Let's just say the Dotcom boom is how he and many others made their money.
Do you think that invalidates their contributions or success for some reason?
>Marc Andreessen who has never actually had a successful startup.
He was a founder of Netscape. But maybe you meant for your statement to apply only to his career as a VC.
James Clark was the founder and the actual visionary. A lot of history has been rewritten about Marc Andreessen. Even most of the coding of the original Mosiac was done by Eric Bina.
Andreeson was also a Netscape founder. Andreeson was interesting in the web and involved in the development of a shipping web browser long before Clark got interested in the web and probably long before Clark even knew what the web was.
Clark however had money, connections and enterpreneurial and executive experience whereas Andreeson was just starting out in his career.
Really disagree with this author's take on robert moses. He is by far NYC's greatest hero. The abundance he created is now enjoyed by tens of millions of people every year, the poor and the wealthy. His singular vision is exactly the type of abundance this country needs. The pain brought onto a few by his plans was well worth the payoff.
The problem with Klein and Thompson's vision, as the author teases out, is that it is politically unpopular when you really dig into what theyre calling for. That's why theyre writing this book I suppose, to create support for their ideology.
I've come to loath Mark Andreessen as just an out-of-date reactionary who cannot take it that culture around him has moved on. Apparently he is also big hypocrite:
> Two years after Marc Andreessen published “It’s Time to Build,” The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas uncovered that Andreessen’s town of Atherton, CA had planned to do just that — build multifamily homes! — but was met with ferocious opposition from, well, a venture capitalist by the name of Marc Andreessen. As he and his wife wrote in a letter to the mayor and town council:
>> Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development! >> I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
Marc Andreessen also has nothing whatsoever to do with the book, except the reviewer's dubious assertion that it contains some of the "techno-utopianism of Marc Andreessen".
Well he wrote the techno positivist manifesto and is one of the biggest voices in "growth" domain.
I like Ezra Klein a lot. But what’s odd about his Abundance theory is that he can’t bring himself to admit that nowhere in the U.S. comes closer to what he’s describing than Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon’s California.
The tragedy of muscular-government urbanism today is that it’s stuck in a political coalition with toxic empaths that will fill your nice public spaces with drug addicts, criminals, and illegal aliens. They won’t let you have nice public spaces until you first fix poverty, drug addiction, racism, and the economies of Latin American and Middle Eastern countries.
Ezra Klein will be the first to admit that housing policy in Austin, Texas is closer to his vision than anywhere in California. He has spent the last few years criticizing California for their terrible local governance and partly blames their terrible governance for the recent election loss at the federal level.
Have you read the book? This is not a point he avoids, at all.
I have not, just listened to him on some podcasts. I started to insert a parenthetical caveating that but it was unwieldy.
Even podcast Klein is open about this. It's a point he uses to motivate (or alarm) Democrats. I don't think your critique here is on point.