What are you even talking about? Democratic politicians are the exact people Klein is criticizing. They’re overly focused on spending and well intentioned regulations rather than efficient and effective outcomes. LA’s homeless housing debacle spending billions on nothing, CA’s HSR delayed forever with insane costs, blue cities and states driving out working class families by exploding the cost of housing with arcane zoning restrictions.
Every time I click on one of these anti-Abundance articles it’s clear none of you have bothered to actually address Klein’s critiques. You just call him mean names and claim that Democrats would sweep to glorious power if only they embraced fantastical policies that have lost at the ballot box time and time again.
Democratic politicians ARE the Abundance Movement. Klein might criticize CA high speed rail, but Gavin Newsom is championing the Abundance Agenda as the next big thing. Again, I am criticizing the Movement, not the book.
I would argue that it’s good to have a movement of any kind on the Democratic side. At least it’s not just “anti-Trump.” Put it (Abundance movement) out there and then let the intra-party opposition make a counterpoint. That’s healthy. The Democratic Party is an anemic organization right now. I don’t think it takes a genius to find a way to scale it up from local and state politics to a national level. Pete Buttigieg more or less makes this argument.
I think it’s issue is that the Democratic Party has become the old Republican Party. Perhaps we are in a phase where the MAGA party is over and the Democratic Party is the new right, leaving the actual democrats, too long referred to as leftists as being a bad word. I don’t disagree with the ideas in Klein’s book and the need to move quickly for our environment but reading the book there were things that didn’t settle right and being a democratic delegate, he’s not wrong that many democrats are using a abundance as a political movement and I think not going back to our roots is the problem. The democrats have moved farther and farther right. However, I think that the biggest problem is Citizens United AND not getting things done. It shouldn’t be a movement but acknowledgement.
I’m skeptical of the “movement “ but I like the book. What I’m opposed to is the anti oligarchs movement that Bernie and friends are pushing. Want is the solution? There must be a plan, maybe the plan should be “Abundance “ and not Socialism.
CA HSR for example wasn't derailed by regulations as much as unrealistic expectations. They wanted a train capable of reaching 220 mph, this makes it the fastest train in the world in a country with no expertise in high speed rail on top of picking a very difficult route in an earthquake prone state. They could have scaled this down to an achievable goal that extended their current train lines but they chose not to. This was a scope problem, not a regulation problem.
To be fair to you, Klein seems to be your only source and very few folks he's engaged with have done any degree of takedown on him because they've been generous with him rather than combative.
As for all of his NIMBY bullshit, the primary problem with affordable housing is that it's not profitable. This isn't due to regulations, but the fact that housing builders have the choice between affordable housing or turning 80k into 500k with a "luxury" home. It's economics. The real "regulatory" solution here is to ax the Faircloth Amendment and put government back in the game of building affordable housing. Privatization won't work here either because we'll just see abuse.
Give me a break. Japan built the Shinkansen throughout a mountainous nation, in a highly earthquake prone nation, with top speeds of 130mph (now 200mph), they started construction and five years later had an operational 300mph route, all that happened 60 years ago. Today the trains run on time to the minute. You really want to pretend the technology is the problem?
What is an example of an affordable government housing project you’d like to see at scale? Because the latest out of LA is coming in at $800k per unit.
It's not impossible to do but CA didn't listen to the advice they were given by the French firm who pulled out of the project. CA was supposed to build through the mountains themselves, but politicians caved to scope creep to include desert cities rather than expand later. Regulation isn't the issue, it's route/design and political will.
As for the housing cost issue you cherry picked the most expensive and to be fair to this particular case some of these overruns were due to COVID not regulation.
Was the cost higher in CA than it would be in TX for example? Sure, but is that due to regulation or factors such as price of land, tax structures, and simple popularity of the area?
Why does Klein seem to have a de-regulatory agenda rather than say rent controls or vacancy taxes, or a policy to decommodify housing? At this point, why are we even worried about cost since it only seems to matter when we talk about the less fortunate.
I’m still waiting for that example. Red states seem to have figured out low cost housing, why does it turn incredibly expensive every time blue city mayors try to build public housing?
Abundance speaks quite explicitly that the political issues were a huge part of the HSR debacle. At no point does the book say “its regulation and nothing else”. He goes on at length about the problem of democratic politicians bending over backwards to try and make everyone happy, and the result is that the project becomes so bloated, designed-by-committee, and weighed down ticking everyone’s boxes that nothing happens in the end.
Klein explains the regulatory issues at length. But if you think he’s arguing a purely “deregulatory agenda” then it’s obvious you didn’t read the book or any of his work. He has written at length about how veto points throughout the system cripple our ability to build. He has criticized everything-bagel liberalism at length, which is entirely intra-Dem politics and not regulation.
I wonder why no one ever talks about the high-speed rail project in Wisconsin between Milwaukee and Madison that was single-handedly killed off by a Republican governor, Scott Walker. According to Wikipedia:
>"Walker indicated he would refuse an $810 million award from the federal Department of Transportation to build a high speed railroad line from Madison to Milwaukee as he believed it would cost the state $7.5 million per year to operate and would not prove profitable. This was in spite of offers by the mayor of Madison and the Dane County executive to help absorb costs the state might have incurred. The award was later rescinded and split among other states. This cost the state at least $60 million for rail repairs federal funds would have covered."
Yet the blame for "not building stuff" is place exclusively on the Democrats, not the party that's been running against the very idea of government doing stuff for its citizens for the last forty years?
Who said that CA high speed rail was "derailed by regulations"?
It was derailed by unique interests like labor requiring unreasonable union standards, nimby property owners requiring protracted legal battles, towns demanding rail pass and stop in their locations, and so much more.
I don’t get it. How is this not the exact same thing they’ve been doing for 40 years? Wasn’t the whole deal about the new democrats that they were magically going to make everything better by deregulation and unleashing the private sector? And Blair saying he was very comfortable with people getting filthy rich?
Pardon me but didn’t deregulation cause the 2008 crash?
How on earth could you argue the left is even involved in the Democratic Party after the last few decades? Remind me about how a) the public and b) the party responded to sanders? You’ll note: much much stronger support outside the Democratic Party hierarchy than inside it.
Is this book an exercise in “2008 was a long time ago, people must have forgotten about it by now.”
Ok, I get what’s going on. You didn’t read the book. You didn’t read an honest article about the book. You read a headline and half the intro paragraph of an intellectually dishonest lefty critique and just bought into “Klein is a deregulatory corporate shill” is that about the size of it? At no point does he argue that we should mass deregulate banks’ lending policies, that’s a complete non-sequitur.
Because if you’d looked into his writings at all, you’d know that he is not pushing a mindless anti-regulation agenda. He has a litany of very specific examples of how well-meaning regulations, political compromises, and policy making are stifling progress.
- environmental laws being used to block renewable energy programs or mass transit, or environmental and historic preservation laws being used to preserve highways and parking lots.
- public hearings and veto points being used to obstruct affordable housing, bike lanes, public transit, etc.
- the complete neutering of eminent domain such that individual landlords can obstruct multibillion dollar infrastructure projects, drive up costs by tens of millions and delays by many months just to squeeze out a few extra bucks from a HSR project.
Actually read the book first, or at least an honest article about it, before you start trying to critique it. Ezra and Derek have done a dozen podcasts explaining these exact items.
Nah, I think we all listened to Ezra "fucking" Klein directly from his own granular "fucking" mouth. You peel back what he's saying, there's nothing new here but neoliberalism. Blame the government and regulations stepping in the way of progress which we all know will be outsourced projects ala public-private partnerships not public ownership.
When? You’re harking to the 70s for the last time a Democratic candidate lost an election by being too left wing. Whereas we only have to look back to November to see them losing by being too right wing. They managed to win with a conservative candidate in 2020 only because Trump was literally still in office and unavoidable; lost in 2016. So your argument would be stronger if the democrats had beaten any viable opposition in the last decade.
Are you going to say Obama lost by being too left wing?
Then beyond that, you’re kind of drawing attention back to the fact that the democrats have been in office for most of recent history as a result of running these conservative policies you like, in which case you need to address: how come the world’s so shit? Your boys have been in charge 12 of the last 16 years and 20 of the last 32. Can’t really deny that the world we’re living in is the fault of the democrats’ conservative policies.
Politics not like football, it’s not just about who wins the match, it’s also about what they do when they get elected. The world we’re living in is a consequence of centrist politics. For this reason, as well as the colossal electoral unpopularity of centrist politics, we urgently need more left, not less. Some left even.
Tell me, if these policies are so secretly popular why are people leaving large blue states like CA, MA, and NY, to move to big red states like TX, FL, NC, SC, AZ?
Also hilarious that you think I’m some kind of conservative. I canvassed for Obama, voted for Bernie and Warren. I’m just not interested in happy-sounding left-wing policies, I’m interested in effective left-wing outcomes. Happy-sounding policies have made blue states massively unaffordable, created mass homelessness, and resulted in sclerotic government.
He talks about how we have got to be able to build more affordable housing and cut the red tape.
I agree with him and he has been studying this for a while.
How liberals say they support affordable housing but become sketchy when the housing is anywhere near their homes.. I agree with that as well.
He knows and talks about how we all vote for fast trains but when it comes time to implement these great ideas liberal special interests groups litigate these great ideas into their graves which I also agree with.
Total joke of an article. The origins of abundance politics lie not in elite hands, but in planning commission and city council meetings.
Detached from what actually matters in favor of upping points for your preferred team on an imaginary scorecard—without realizing that there is nothing in abundance politics that prevents its combination with anti-monopolism. In fact, the two are well-suited together and prominent abundance folks frequently call for their combination.
When you say Abundance, do you mean the movement or the book? I agree that the book could take an anti-monopolist flavor. But the Movement has shown no interest in doing that.
Abundance "the movement" precedes the book, but is named by it (for popular political purposes). And yes, many urbanists, solar developers, and popular movement builders that support them are anti-monopolists as well. Again, they have been before any attempt at naming them was made.
Even so, there is a glaring hole in anti-monopoly as it is presented by popular democrats. It pretends to be all encompassing, but it focuses almost completely on corporate concentration of power. If you are serious, you have to also consider small-p private, nonprofit, and public sector concentrations of power. Academic Neo-brandeisism is concerned with all of these things, but in political practice it has expressed itself to the incredibly limited view of corporate and oligarchical criticism. For example, there is an astonishing moment in Klein's recent interview with Zephyr Teachout where she answers that housing is probably so expensive to build because of corporate concentration--I am in the process right now of entering real estate development, and this is simply not the case. Housing construction remains a startingly local and small-business job. The high costs come primarily from building codes and arbitrary aesthetic and historically "moral" restrictions that cities place first on the developers that build a home, and then on the people and businesses that would occupy it.
So, where you may say abundance the movement fails to address the concerns of anti-monopoly, even if it may theoretically account for them, I feel just as well happy saying this of anti-monopoly about the concerns of abundance. I will extend this further to say that I do not believe anti-monopoly will be a winning strategy, and neither will abundance. They are similarly motivated theoretical framings interested in mostly distinct policy mechanics that motivate different groups of voters to address different concerns. Both are useful and necessary, but neither is on its own a popular political movement capable of electing a president, or more importantly, an efficacious Congress.
In the end, I have no issue with anti-monopoly, but I do take issue with the incessant blog-style pieces taking misinformed and disingenuous pot-shots at abundance. If you see no theoretical issue between the two, write that. What you have here will not help build any coalition, and it certainly does not help in restoring truth and decency to public discourse.
This article is such a bad take. Classic example of motivated reasoning. Weak arguments. Zero research. Bleh.
“focusing on an issue 99.9% of Americans have never heard about is political suicide”. Really? The astronomical cost of housing? Energy prices? Environmental impact reviews? NIMBYism? No one has heard of these things?
U misread the book as being about a powerline. Something is deeply wrong in left-leaning cities (Im a liberal) when you can’t find a 2 bedroom dingy apartment for less than $6k.
If that’s not a popular rallying call I don’t know what is.
Lotta people in this thread need to understand that Klein and his co writer have already admitted much of their book is fan fiction rather than anything based in reality. Not to mention, this idea that cutting red tape is what’s holding up America is hilariously ridiculous. Tf were the 80s about then?
I reject the entire framing. There shouldn’t need to be a “choice” between, say, expediting permitting for new El tracks in Chicago and a robust social safety net. Or between next-Gen nuclear and a clean environment, for that matter. Maybe Dems should just be in favor of sh*t that makes sense and leave it at that?
I agree, and I think Klein would too. However, the real-life politicians claiming Abundance say we need to move to the right and get rid of those safety nets.
“Abundance say the opposite.” This is dead wrong. Getting rid of social safety nets? That is actually the complete opposite of what they say. Constantly. On literally every podcast and in just about every article. A person wouldbe hard-pressed to come up with a greater distortion of their actual positions. But I get it. Discourse of so much easier when you just lie about the people you disagree with
Yeah. I would love to find a thoughtful criticism of the abundance agenda generally or the abundance book specifically. But all the criticism I encounter is this sort of flagrant misrepresentation mixed with hand wavy dodging of the issues that Ezra Klein raises. Notice how Joe wrote “unspecified regulations"? "Unspecified”?! Klein loves nothing more than specifying specific regulations and policy choices and ineffective processes.
Joe is expressing an all-too-common “learned helplessness” on the left -- as if it is an absurd endeavor to try to understand why governments struggle to achieve their progressive goals and take concrete steps to improve actual results.
No, which is my point. I want Klein to clarify if he thinks the Abundance Movement, which IS dominated by voices trying to reduce social spending, should be the Democrats' national answer. Again, I'm not criticizing what Klein wrote in the book. I'm criticizing what came after it, and asking him to state what he thinks about it.
This is dishonest to the point of completely inverting the truth — Klein and the rest of the prominent Abundance figures have been consistent & clear in their support of a robust, expanded social safety net. In fact, they view the two as complementary: as just one example, if there’s not enough public housing, Section 8 vouchers will never house enough people. The claim that cutting social spending is central to the Abundance movement is so disconnected from reality that anyone making it must be far more interested in intra-party disputes than in serious policy making.
This is the first I've heard of 'abundance theory', but from the get-go it sounds like more pussyfooting. I'd love for the obscenely wealthy to finally get hearts and share their wealth in ways that actually benefited millions of people who need help. I don't hold my breath. They could have done it by now if they'd wanted to.
I'm an old-fashioned liberal in the JFK, West Wing sense, which some would say is way center of left, but my calls to the Democrats--MY Democrats, I've been a blue collar party member since I was born--are simple: support labor unequivocally, raise the minimum wage significantly, get rid of SS caps, work toward universal health care and don't stop until you get there, lower prescription drug prices, save public education, save our public lands, keep our air and water pure, keep lawlessness out of our courts, license guns like cars--at the very least, regulate when necessary, and only consider people for office and public sector jobs who understand the 'public' part and will be true to their oaths.
None of that is as hard as watching our entire society go up in flames. Honesty, integrity, honor, loyalty, and hearts big enough to see that real people are being harmed, real institutions are being damaged, real democracy is at stake--we need to choose wisely. Eyes on the prize.
This reminds me how much the Democrats have moved right over the last decade. All the things you mentioned were once standard liberalism. But now you only hear them from the 'left' wing of the party. I'd also add campaign finance. Obama was strong against Citizens United. Now many Democrats support it!
Yup. And now it's time to move back. We can only do it if we believe in what we're doing. The Democrats have the worst inferiority complexes in the world, brought on by trying but never succeeding at getting out of the 'underdog' status, even when they've won. It's our job to bring us back.
It's simple. Just do the right thing. Stop being distracted. We know what we have to do, and if our current leadership doesn't, we find new ones. They're out there. We're not alone in this.
Actually, the Dem party has been chasing steadily Republican voters since they lost to Reagan. They don't give a fig about the Democrats of that time and they'd just as soon have them drop dead then go after their votes. I guess they take them for granted since the system is rigged against a Party getting on the ticket that is real Democracts can call home.
I didn't leave the party, the party left me (a lie then by Reagan). This is more true of Democractic Democracts of today.
So why is this totally reasonable approach to democratic governance being constantly slapped away as though it were some kind of radical anarchist revolution? Particularly when other democracies receive high scores for happier populations when they implement those policies as a baseline?
My sweet summer child, the US has never been a democracy. It's a "country" on stolen land. The "founders" we're genocidal, British Lords. They also owned Black people when they wrote the "Declaration of Independence." Independence for WEALTHY, WHITE MEN only. Not for women, not for POC, and not for poor, white people.
Dear me, how could I not know those things?? We've always been striving toward democracy, and that's a mighty goal. Don't knock it. The alternatives are wicked and deadly. We'd rather not go there.
You go ahead and bow out, full of grievance and dismissal, and I'll go on fighting for my country, flawed but worth keeping. Those are our choices.
You're a sheep. You want to be ruled over. I don't. Governments are bad, mmmkay. And you're saying the US is legitimate, it isn't. It's a British colonial settlement just like Israel.
America is a fully fledged nation state, conquered centuries ago by European diaspora. There is no turning this around. It is not “stolen,” and conquest = legitimacy, not leftist philosophical perceptions. The native Americans all conquered the land from other native Americans, then lost it to more capable Europeans conquerers. This is the way of the world, not some unique injustice needing modern impossible reversal.
This is not about the legitimately of this government. It's about more attacks on those useless non-wealthy people that need to be cut loose from any help from the rest of this society.
I agree with a lot of this. As for guns I want guns regulated like cars also. I want to be able to carry my gun in all 50 states like I can drive in all 50 states, I want no restrictions on ammo capacity like no fuel capacity restrictions on cars, and I want no restrictions on caliber like there is no restriction on horsepower.
There are all manner of restrictions on how you can build or drive a car and the world would be a much better place if all guns were flat out banned, including in most circumstances for the police. Works in every other country.
You're being disingenuous. What Klein is proposing won't lower rent and electricity to the point Americans are comfortable with. On energy, we need to remove the profit motive. Power lines are centrally planned by the government but run by private companies. They charge more to make a profit. Eliminating that will drastically lower costs.
On energy, environmental laws need to be redone so that any utility, public or private, can build the transmission lines needed to decarbonize. On energy, laws need to change so that a utility, public or private, has an easier time building more power plants.
On housing, rent is cheaper in Texas than it is in Washington. I would love to hear you explain how people are more motivated by profit in the Pacific Northwest than they are in Texas.
I wrote about this already in another post, but I’m happy to do here as well. Texas as whole isn’t cheaper than Washington as a whole. Dallas and Houston are relatively on par with Seattle, for example, when accounted for income. Destroying environmental regulations for the sake of “the economy” or “cheap housing and energy” is a poorly thought out argument that fails to account for economic externalities, economic cost, and the troubles with housing in the US.
The obsession with SFH (single family homes) across the US for historical and also monetary reasons, has cause a burden on the major cities across the US. Suburbs are overwhelmingly a burden for cities, and yet zoning laws mixed with NIMBYs have made it hard for re-zoning cities to be done. Like I mentioned in another comment, eliminating zoning laws won’t fix the issue. Houston doesn’t have zoning laws, yet it still has housing problems.
If you want to double check my claims, the national zoning atlas has the land distribution of a lot of US cities.
That’s all to say, just in housing alone, the solution whilst simple at first sight (build more housing) is also more complex than just “regulations bad. Red state geniuses. Ezra also a genius.” There needs to be a coordinated plan from public and private investment plus re-zoning as well as myriad of other things to effectively provide housing that won’t cost close to 30% of a person’s yearly income for purchase on average.
I'd love to read anything you suggest on housing policy. As you said, I find Abundance (both the book and the movement) to point to Houston as a solution to be overly simplistic. I just don't think you can compare a city like LA or Boston, which have been developed for centuries, to cities with ample land and new population booms.
I haven’t finished reading your piece yet, but I’m so simultaneously enraged and excited by it that I can’t resist the urge to make a preliminary point: any and all ordinary Americans of Good Will can determine whether a pundit, analyst or politician is being authentic or bullshitting simply by identifying whether they equivocate on the meaning of “woke” and/or “the Left.”
These Neoliberal bullshitters always try to act like the Sanders/AoC wing of the party is totally out of touch by being “too woke,” when the fact of the matter is, the material/economic policies advocated by Sanders/AoC are overwhelmingly popular. It’s true (sadly) that many Americans are not (yet) on board with certain important issues of what has been called “social liberalism,” but to treat this discrepancy in popular sentiment and avowed ideology as if it exhaustively captures the views of self-described Leftists is a flat-out lie.
I’m so fucking sick of Klein, Thompson, et. al. I confess that I’m beginning to find it difficult not to hate them with a similar passion to my contempt for the MAGAts. Sigh. I’m a work in progress.
Bernie and AOC are the two most popular elected politicians in the country. It's Washington group think that their ideas are unreasonable or unpopular.
What evidence do you have that the "Abundance Movement ...IS dominated by voices trying to reduce social spending? I did no get that from his book. Read "Why Nothing Works" for a more historical take on this issue of over regulation and the century long debate between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian liberals.
You wrote that the left-of-center divide is between those inclined to capital and those inclined to labor. If that's true, then it's sure weird that when you look at the actual issues the left position is often closer to the preferences of the top-half than to the policies working class voters prefer.
For example, Joe is upset that Colorado Governor Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would have streamlined workplace unionization, because “unions are proven to help raise wages, and Polis is beholden to his anti-union corporate donors.” Maybe. Or, it could be that unions are a lot more popular among the left than they are among working class voters. Just 9.9% of U.S. workers belong to a labor union. Maybe Polis realizes that the Democratic Party has lost and must win back working voters, who don’t see shrinking labor unions as a big problem for the economy or their economic well-being. Nor do they place labor unions near the top of what’s most likely to help working people get ahead. https://www.progressivepolicy.org/campaign-for-working-america-a-ppi-yougov-survey-of-working-class-voters/https://www.thirdway.org/report/renewing-the-democratic-party
So few workers belong to unions because of corporate-controlled politicians like Polis. I'm hesitant to trust a source that calls itself 'radically pragmatic,' so let's use Gallup. According to them, labor unions are at a 70% approval rating. https://x.com/Gallup/status/1828793176754409957
Also, I'm a labor organizer, and unions are popular no matter the workers' political affiliation. I've certainly organized more rural Trump voters than urban progressives.
Working class workers distrust unions because the union leadership always comes to realize that A) union leaders have more in common with management than they do with the workers and B) union leaders' views and compensation are more important than workers' safety, benefits, views, etc.
A good approach would be to regulate unions to make leadership accountable to members, with frequent well-run elections, term limits on union officials, a prohibition on movement between management and union leadership, and so on.
And then again, should there even be people who think of themselves as labour organizers? You'll say that without professional direction, labour would be at the mercy of management; but isn't that paternalistic? Labour would be better represented if union admin headcount were small with a hard cap, and organizers were current or recent workers with hard term limits. Insofar as bargaining expertise is required, union leaders can hire in lawyers - who can and should be let go once a bargaining session is over.
It's a natural property of all human organizations that they evolve to put their own wants and needs ahead of their ostensible purpose. A union starts filled with zeal, achieves things for the workers, and then over the years the leadership's growing sense of its own identity pits its own wellbeing and beliefs against those of the workers. This is why you see unions putting more energy into BLM protests and trans rights than they do into the workers' quite different priorities.
For one thing, it doesn't matter where support for Abundance as an idea comes from-- the question is whether it is correct as a policy idea. Every single critique from the left completely ignores the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter if moneyed interests of some kind support an agenda, or if it's top down-- if it results in good outcomes, then it's good. That's the case for a lot of policies. Fact is, lots of (in fact, a significant majority) of ostensibly popular policies are, in practice, terrible actual policy. Price controls, for instance, are very popular on their face. They're also terrible policy that reduces housing affordability. And congestion pricing was deeply unpopular until it kicked in and New Yorkers recognized that... actually less congestion is great. Who supports a policy is an objection if powerful people are pushing bad policies. And we want to remove concentrated power from society for process-related reasons. But that's entirely beside the point as to whether supply-side liberalism is good policy (spoiler: it is), and hijacking every discussion to focus on that is deeply unproductive.
And there's also a fundamental missing of the point in the Sam Seder podcast. I listened to it. It was a miserable showing by Seder. He fundamentally wasn't intellectually capable of addressing the argument. He sounded like a chatbot programmed to repeat "oligarchy" on loop. Just an embarrassing and intellectually vapid person. And the objection here completely missed or didn't grasp Klein's answer. Which is that POWER IS DIFFERENT IN EACH CIRCUMSTANCE. His book is FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT POWER. There is power on each side of just about every issue. The question, as referenced earlier, is whether the power is on the side of good or bad policy, and, if the former, how to harness that power to get to good policy. Here, builders have some power and want to build. Simultaneously, rich and upper middle class people have some power and want to keep density and "those people" out of their neighborhoods. So the political task is to weaponize the former against the latter to get to an outcome that experts understand to be good. That's why this is an intensely local issue, as Klein said-- because the power that is aligned for and against a project in a given scenario is different in EVERY SINGLE CASE. So standing up on a soapbox and bloviating about corporations and millionaires and billionaires is done solely by people who lack and interest and/or the capacity to actually dive into the policy issues, and instead rant and rave and degrade any real policy discussion.
So the next self proclaimed leftist whose critique actually addresses the crux of this issue or says anything remotely thoughtful that engages with the policy idea will be the first that I'll have seen. Instead, across, the board, they go out and ignore the argument and rant like malfunctioning chatbots programmed to repeat "oligarch" on loop.
It is selling the already sold Neoliberalism which is destroying the country and the world. Trump is following that ideology as we text. This book was published and proclaimed by influencers to drown out the sensible book "The Invisible Doctrine of Neoliberism" by George Monbiot and Hutchison. This is an attempt to put the holdouts to sleep or shut them down.
What in the world are you talking about….? If you want to make a point, try engaging with the argument they it makes. This idiotic buzzword bingo where doofuses substitute “neoliberal” for having to try to grapple with an argument is so brain dead.
Either try to actually address the argument, or just stay quiet. When you lack the intellectual capacity to address the argument, all you’re doing is cluttering space where the adults are trying to have a conversation.
I am not interested in getting into arguments about whether Ezra Klein is or isn’t a disingenuous third way corporate shill (which seems to be the author’s point) or whether left-wing Dems are out of touch, know-nothings (which appears to be the point of many of the posters and abundance agenda supporters). I will also add that I have not read the book, but I have listened to Klein and Thompson discuss it on their podcasts as well as podcasts of others numerous times. Based on those interviews, it appears that the underlying premise/purpose of the abundance agenda is to make Blue States more affordable so that more people can move to, or stop leaving, those areas. I think this is doomed to failure for two major reasons: first it assumes that those who are leaving Blue States are doing it solely for COL issues, and second, that it is a good thing it prosperity in America is concentrated in a few major U.S. metro areas in Blue States. I think both are wrong. I live in GA, which has been a boon for in-migration from places like CA, NY and IL. Most people moving here are well off; they are not the sort of people who would necessarily feel the brunt of an increase in COL. Instead, based on my discussions with many of them (during PTA meetings, scouts, LLBB, football etc) most of their move was due to social policies, particularly COVID restrictions and declining schools. Abundance won’t fix that. As for the second premise, I don’t see what is good about continuing to increase the concentration of economic activity in the top 10 to 15 metro areas of the U.S. Any abundance agenda must focus on diverting and rebuilding areas that have been in decline. People don’t want to have to abandon their areas for economic survival. Yes that may be silly and naive, but they don’t want to and those people vote. Also, just on its face, it would seem counterproductive to build a bunch of housing to reduce COL in order to attract more people. If that were to happen, then economics teaches us that demand would increase and if supply did not increase as well, COL would increase again. It would just be a vicious, never ending cycle.
A better route would be to both build more housing, and allow more builders of housing, including the government, while also allowing more types of housing. However this must be combined with increasing wages and reducing the costs of education and health care.
For me the crux of the issue is that it sounds like the exact same stuff the democrats have been doing for the last 50 years, and look at the world we’re in as a result.
Empowering oligarchs? Well they’ve been doing that. Deregulation? Something about the 2008 crash is ringing a bell. It sounds a lot like “we’re gonna do the exact same stuff we’ve been doing for the last half century but this time it’s magically going to work!”
For this to work, wealth creators would have to be real. The trickle-down effect would have to be real. Privatising things would genuinely have to make them more efficient. Deregulation would have to have generally beneficial effects. All of these things can be seen to be false, by observing reality, over the last 50 years. So the problem with abundance is that it’s every bit as much of a fantasy as the rest of neoliberalism. We’ve known that neoliberalism doesn’t work economically since 2008.
Abundantly will work politically, if it ever works, which I doubt, at most in one election. After it’s been in office we’ll all watch the economic miracles fail to occur while even more power and money is given to the already rich and powerful, then vote it out, and the Democratic Party will be permanently and finally destroyed.
You’re not going to read a book you purport to criticize… and proceed to completely miss anything resembling what’s written in the book.
What a smart person would do in their shoes is… acknowledge that they haven’t read the book. Instead you proceed to spew buzzwords and make a fool of yourself.
It’s easier to literally do nothing and keep your mouth shut and preserve the illusion that you’re not a fool than open it and remove any doubt.
Tell me then, in a couple of sentences, what is the ultimate conclusion of this book? What do they recommend? Do they think more state ownership, higher income tax, more constraints on huge corporations? Or more privatisation, lower taxes on the rich, more empowerment of corporations? If everything I’ve read about it is wrong, tell me what it does say. In a couple of sentences.
It is in no way about any of these things. What it pushes for is streamlining of processes that allows for the economy to create more supply, whether by the public or private sectors.
Your question has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the book is about. If you want to have a discussion, perhaps you should try actually reading the book. Or, if you did read the book and this is your takeaway, perhaps refrain from having an opinion, because you literally didn’t come close to processing a single thing that they said.
We all know what's wrong with the Democrats. They don't listen to their constituents. Get out of DC, go buy groceries like an average American, shop at Walmart or Target and ask questions. Then STFU AND LISTEN. REALLY LISTEN.
Not a town hall. Not a letter writing campaign. An actual week or two on the streets of your district.
We need professors, teachers, union members (auto, service industry, anything), scientists, people who needed SNAP and Medicaid, workers workers workers LABOR, to run for office. DNC pays for it. They pissed away $1 billion war chest and lost to a candidate that proved his inability to be president from 2017-2021. Consider this the “Robin Hood” strategy, taking from the rich to give to the poor. Money doesn’t take, it swears.
My congressional district, Nevada District 2, Congressman Mark E. Amodei (the worst kind of lap dog) ran last year with no Democratic opponent. There was an independent candidate. But NO DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE. Show up! Make noise. Raise a stink! SHOW THE FUCK UP!
There must be more than just my district where the incumbent is running unopposed. Take $150,000 and run a candidate. No flyers, no mailers, no advertising. $150k to get the message out on social media, on YouTube, in the local papers and on the local stations.
I’m so sick of this inability to have a message. It’s a malaise with Democrats. Entropy.
I come from a background where we marched, we knocked on doors, we did grassroots fundraising, we made coalitions, we canvassed. We didn’t rely on spin doctors, cable news networks, pundits, analysts, and polls. We relied on the sincerity and righteousness of our cause. We fought for justice.
MAGA and Trump call Democrats “the enemy.” START ACTING LIKE IT.
While a graduate student in philosophy, I took symbolic logic and computability. I also taught logic.101 to undergrads; the text I taught from used Venn diagrams to visualize the logic of Aristotle's syllogisms.
It seems to me that the only logical argument you employ is "truth by vigorous assertion"
That's a logic nerd joke and an insult.
And actually, I think worse of you, since I believe you know full well that you are being deceptive
This Abundance Movement makes me think it's the secular version of Prosperity Gospel, both, IMHO, looking for a slick way to cover the underlying, and baseless, claim that "them that have, deserve it, and them that don't, don't. Or maybe I'm missing something in making what might be a too fast conclusion?
In my opinion, the Abundance Movement (if coming from the ideology in the Abundance book) isn’t about protecting those with capital and reinforcing low-redistribution systems, it’s about encouraging supply of housing, infrastructure, medicine, and innovation (in the form of effective research funding). The idea is to remove limitations of supply/improve efficiency of production that’s artificially hamstrung in order to lower costs for things: houses in the private market or public investment in infrastructure and R&D (lower cost in that the average person’s taxes goes back to them in greater public utility).
Thanks for this information. My impression came from the vibes coming off the name. It has that same feeling that appeals to the well-off, or those wanting to be in the upper circles. My bad.
Yes, that has always been one of the NeoLiberal talking points according to George Monbiot in his book on the ways the many NeoLiberal Think Tanks have converted the population and people of influence to their way.
In fact their are many ringing the warning bells about the "Abundance Movement". I just did a search with Ezra Klein and NeoLiberal as the two key words and got back many publications on the dangers of his and his cohorts selling of this movement... many.
[Over the past few years, a cohort of neoliberal pundits from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to Matt Yglesias and Eric Levitz have increasingly problematized the modern regulatory state. They frame the government’s many environmental and labor standards as an impediment to “abundance.” Multiple books advancing this argument are slated to be published in the first months of 2025, from Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
“Supply-side liberals” take aim at the procedures that environmental and labor laws require the federal and state governments to follow as they assess the impacts of new infrastructure projects. They decry the tools that the left has wielded since the mid-twentieth century to hold government accountable when it fails to adequately do so. They frame the “need for speed” in the urgent terms of the energy transition. But they have tended to back legislative concessions to the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests in the name of greater expediency.]
I appreciate this perspective. I have just started reading Abundance, after hearing a compelling talk with the authors and Michael Pollan on the Long Now podcast. That venue, by design, takes a longer view. It’s worth a listen.
“My theory is that Ezra Klein knows Abundance was never meant to be what it became.” I think this is an important point that is getting lost in the larger discussion. Why are we giving so much agency to the authors over how the Dems respond? The Democratic Party does not have an Ezra Klein problem. It has a zero unified vision problem. If they glom onto this idea and rebrand it because it is neatly packaged for them, merits aside, that just shows a general lack of creativity and leadership on the party’s part that they need to wait for a policy reporter to coin their platform for them. We know that the party is divided. No one is getting the job done of unifying -- AOC/Bernie or the center-lefties. And that has shot them in the foot. I don’t think it’s necessary, or even causal, to pin that on two reporters who have some decent ideas about getting the country unstuck. Maybe this shouldn’t be a partisan concept? That would be the dream. I think the book speaks to that possibility.
Also, I do not have the knowledge of union politics that you clearly do. But as a 30 year Coloradan, Polis is not a panacea governor. No one politician can be. Just as no one book can solve all the problems, no matter how compelling. Polis has done some good things, and some shifty things. That is disappointing about the unions. But I don’t think we can give the Abundance movement that much credit. It is conceptually new. Naming things retroactively seems unwise.
What I am interested in is whether the salient points in the book have legs, party bastardization aside. We need more housing now, we need flourishing cities and rural areas now, we need clean energy now. Our main problem is dickering over nuance in getting any of that done. Thanks for the thoughts.
Thanks for reading! I agree with what you say about Polis. He's certainly not Abundance-only. I used that example to point out that the Movement (mostly centrist, already-elected Democrats) has no interest in the 'left Abundance' Klein talks about in his book. So when he says that in interviews, he's talking about an imaginary option, not what Abundance has become.
It’s interesting to me how the “abundance” tribe and the “anti-abundance” tribe, when they fight, completely talk past each other. The Seder-Klein debate was a really good example of this. Each side seems to have came away from it thinking their guy so completely trounced the other. Those inclined to support Klein thought that Seder was completely non-rigorous, unable to deal in anything except generalities. Joe seemed to sum up the opposite position well, the idea that Klein’s points were sleight of hand to distract from the big questions.
People are talking about completely different things, and seem confused by this because each side wants to fight on the ground they want to fight on. There seems to be some general disbelief in the conversation that the other side genuinely cares about the things they say they care about.
I agree, but I think Klein was changing the conversation on purpose, for the reasons I stated. Seder would ask him a question about national-level politics, which is valid given the Abundance Movement, and Klein would change the conversation to a specific issue. It was disingenuous.
I really see no reason why the Bernie/AOC economic justice agenda and the Abundance agenda couldn't be combined into a robust platform that addresses a wide range of concerns and builds a broad coalition. The main reason it can't is due to the fact that the oligarchs are trying to use abundance as an alternative to economic justice instead of a supplement.
It also doesn't help that abundance is being interpreted as deregulation, rather than a holistic rethinking of how various regulations interplay in the market and how they could be streamlined without sacrificing their goals. I thought the book was clear that it was not proposing another "throw the baby out with the bathwater" approach to deregulation that we usually see.
If you pair abundance with universal health care, you can counter the whole "tax and spend liberal" characterization while still pushing for important new programs. I'm fully annoyed that the power brokers are turning this into a false dichotomy instead of a winning partnership.
You're hitting on another divide between how Klein talks, saying there's a 'left abundance,' and the Abundance Movement which is actively fighting the left. It's another reason I'd like him to clarify his thoughts on the larger project.
"The main reason it can't is due to the fact that the oligarchs are trying to use abundance as an alternative to economic justice instead of a supplement."
Or perhaps it's party elites who know that flimflam like "economic justice" doesn't poll well with the voters that the Democrats need to attract?
You guys keep talking about how critical it is to resist fascism. Maybe that means that we need to actually win elections and put controversial ideas like "economic justice" on the back burner?
"I'm fully annoyed that the power brokers are turning this into a false dichotomy instead of a winning partnership."
The Democratic Party's net favorability is currently at -22. I think making a clean and visible break with the past is not a ridiculous idea.
Having a platform that presents bold solutions is much more likely to get them out of the hole than continuing to be "Republican Light" in order to appeal to the center. I think you would be surprised how popular a "tax the rich, use the money to make sure everyone has basic healthcare, and streamline regulations so we can build stuff" would be. How do you know it wouldn't be popular? When has the Democratic party actually united behind such a platform? Or any cohesive platform?
I honestly have a hard time believing this is what you got from the Seder:Klein interview. Seder was like a Twitter bot. He only had one response to every question, never supported by more than sanctimonious assertion.
Also, neither author is claiming their book is some genius political strategy. They're hoping to shape priorities for future legislators. Which as we know are not the same thing.
Fair enough. I haven't heard that from them other than it will be good long term politically if blue states and cities aren't badly run and unaffordable for most.
Regardless, Seder wasn't capable of engaging on the merits with anything Ezra said. He just looked sanctimonious and said corporate power and commodification over and over like a mantra. Posing isn't an argument. If someone isn't capable of defending their position at all, you should consider why you support them so vociferously.
That's because they were having two different conversations. Seder was trying to talk about Abundance the Movement, while Klein kept turning to Abundance the book. Klein knew what he was doing.
That doesn't make any sense. Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, corporate power. Klein would say, why does it cost many times more to build in blue states, and many times more than that to build government built affordable housing. Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, commodification. Klein would say, can you explain why rental prices have come down in Austin and not in SF or NYC? Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, commodification. Klein would say okay, we agree there should be better public transit. Why can't California build high speed rail? Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, commodification.
That's not two different conversations. That's one person trying to have a conversation and one person chanting tribal affinity mantras.
To be clear, I couldn't be more in favor of fighting concentrated power. But you have to argue for real things. Triple down on Lina Khan. Pack/reform the courts so we're not forced into minoritarian plutocrat friendly rules on everything. Adopt Piketty's favored tax and capital endowment plan to encourage equity and cycling of capital while keeping the benefits of a market economy and ownership incentives. Code word chants make everyone dumber and poison the advocacy.
I don't think you're fairly characterizing Seder's points, but I digress. But you did mention Austin, so I'll say Klein wasn't given the whole picture. Austin rents have been falling, but only from their extraordinary height (https://www.kut.org/austin/2024-06-13/austin-texas-rent-prices-falling-2024). He took a snapshot of a much bigger picture to falsely imply his point was right.
The point is the comparative one. Austin has implemented a bunch of YIMBY style policies -- many of which are decried by folks like Seder with chants of corporate power and commodification -- and have successfully turned the tide. Meanwhile other cities have stayed on policy trajectory and have totally failed to change the trend. You're grasping at straws and I'm not even sure what you're trying to defend against?
Yeah that's simply false. I don't know Denver, but Austin policy changes directly led to increased building. And I'll pose the same question to you that Klein posed to Seder. What the hell does "max-filled" mean? Do you you not know that denser construction is either straight banned or almost always blocked in more or less the entire bay area? As in, there's shit tons of builders and potential residents who very much disagree and would love to build or live in a denser bay area.
What is your proposal to enable people to live where they want? Where they can get a good job without 2 hour commutes? Remember, big corporations own round to zero of the rental market. And it costs the city more than a million dollars to build a single toilet.
Short answer is single family zoning turned into no-application 3 units allowed. And minimum lot size for single family building was reduced by just under 2/3. In other words, the zoned density limit was at least tripled across most of the city.
Also, you dodged my question. There's a large amount of research, as well as basic intuition, that shows zoning changes that lead to increased housing construction reduce both rents and pushing out of existing residents. You seem to really not want that to be true. What alternatives do you propose that would yield as good or better results?
Again, I don't disagree with the idea that building reduces rent. That's good and should be encouraged. What I DO disagree with is that this deregulatory Abundance mindset is the key to decreasing the cost of living, which is evident in the article:
'Though rents have dipped, the Austin region’s housing costs remain high. It’s unclear how long the downward trend in Austin rents will last. While nearly 17,000 apartments are under construction, according to MRI data, builders have pulled back on new projects amid the glut.
Austin rents sit about 17% above pre-pandemic levels, Zillow figures show. Nearly half of the Austin-Round Rock region’s renters are “cost-burdened,” according to a report last year published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, leaving less money in their pockets to spend on other essential needs like groceries, clothes and transportation.'
This is my point. Did the Abundance mindset decrease rent? Yes. But it is enough to solve the problem of the high cost of living nation wide? As your source states, no. HALF of Austin residents are burdened by high cost. Simply saying 'let's deregulate some building codes' is woefully inaccurate. People say 'Well, Klein said you have to do more,' which is true. But the Abundance Movement is championing this as the be-all-end-all, which it can never be.
Well first, this all started in Austin less than 3 years ago, after 50 years of erecting barriers to ever building anything in the name of a weird combo of racism and what was appropriate for the environmental movement in the mid-20th century. So I wouldn't take the fact that 3 years hasn't fixed 50 years of problems as a particularly strong signal. I'll also note that you seem to want it to be true that it's impossible to structure a housing market that doesn't make desirable places to live unaffordable to the bottom 4 quintiles. Again look internationally. We can see clearly that's false. There are different ways to do it. The government builds apartments and sells them to first time homeowners for preset, affordable prices. Japan does something closer to what YIMBYs tend to advocate as far as I understand, working on the regulatory and market structure side, and have also succeeded in making Tokyo quite affordable despite being insanely dense, while also walkable!
On the broader point, I don't think anyone involved would claim that what they're championing in their book is the end all of solving our problems. I mean, in Klein's recent show with Zephyr Teachout (who was disappointing for similar reasons as Seder) and Saikat Chakrabarti, while having a similar exchange with Teachout, he noted that he couldn't agree more that our reactionary supreme court making buying elections a constitutional right is a fundamental challenge to democracy. He just tried to make the point that it's simply not true that every single problem we have is unfixable without revolutionary change to our entire social and economic construct. Teachout was only willing to concede that curbing the power of capital probably wouldn't solve racism. I mean WTF?!
We, and political movements, contain, and **should contain**, multitudes! Why can't we agree that money in politics and concentration of wealth are major threats to our democracy and that we could do a LOT of good by changing the conversation left of center so Democrat run cities and states reverse 50 years of government being the primary cause of skyrocketing housing costs and gentrification? And reverse 50 years of process and regulatory buildup that means when the federal government does succeed in passing legislation with lots to like about it such as CHIPS and IRA, the new manufacturing plants with what would be good *union* jobs if they were in blue states all get built in red states? Or of being incapable of constructing the power infrastructure needed to actually achieve the decarbonization goals those same politicians espouse?
This entire conversation was you pointing to Austin as proof that Abundance was key. When I pointed out your own source describes that Abundance alone is not the be-all solution, you dodged to 'well it's much longer and complicated than that.' I think you can understand why I'm not going to continue this conversation.
Just noting you stopped responding when confronted with facts and a request for something other than platitudes. The comment section version of Seder's falling back to his corporate power chant. You should consider what this illustrates about your approach.
Cut the flow of dark money into politics and that alone will solve one third of the problems and corruption in government. Tax at 75% and remove subsidies (welfare) for corporations, agribusiness, churches and billionaires and we’ve solve another third of the problem in government. Lastly, reform the constitution to include the lessons we’ve learned in the past 250 years. This country will not be of the people, by the people and for the people until the people take it over and run it.
I’m sorry, but it sounds like a cult to me. I don’t want anything to do with it! I prefer the vision of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s the word “abundance.” Gives me the heebie jeebies. Don’t want anything to do with it.
I used to listen to Ezra Klein on Vox. Eventually I got tired of the verbosity. If Ezra can use ten multi syllable words to describe something that could otherwise be described in five short syllables, he will. His tone of voice is so soft it’s almost a somnambulant. Puts me right under. Listening to him is like watching a beehive. Lots of buzzing, but no honey.
I have listened to him many times. That was kind of the point to what I said! Puts me to sleep. I’m sure he’s a very nice fellow, but I can’t keep my attention on what he’s saying over the long haul. And my point had more to do with the idea of “abundance,” which had always had a negative connotation to me. I think because there’s a branch of evangelical Christianity that follows an “abundance” philosophy, which allows them to become very rich and ignore the poverty all around them. “Jesus doesn’t really hate the money changers in the temple; he wants everyone to share in the abundance of material goods,” which is not what Jesus’ own words say in the Bible. So talking about abundance has those echoes for me. It’s code for being selfish and that being okay.
I don't care if you dislike Klein. I do care if fighting Trump is not your priority.
Trump threatens to turn our country into a dictatorship. We need a big tent resistance, with the only membership rule being willingness to fight Trump.
One can't be a lifelong 'Centrist' Democract. The center has been moving steadily to the Right,v pegging nearly far right in these days. Possible to say life long 'Conservative' Democract.
I cannot stand Donald Trump. I wish he would die, right now. I don’t even dislike Klein. I just find him long-winded. But I have ADHD and listening to some people is difficult for me.
> I’m sure the experts who ran Joe Biden in 2024 know better than I do!
Had to stop reading here. Couldn't be more factually incorrect than to lump Ezra Klein in with the people who supported running Joe Biden in 2024.
It was a reference to the Democratic politicians promoting the Abundance agenda.
What are you even talking about? Democratic politicians are the exact people Klein is criticizing. They’re overly focused on spending and well intentioned regulations rather than efficient and effective outcomes. LA’s homeless housing debacle spending billions on nothing, CA’s HSR delayed forever with insane costs, blue cities and states driving out working class families by exploding the cost of housing with arcane zoning restrictions.
Every time I click on one of these anti-Abundance articles it’s clear none of you have bothered to actually address Klein’s critiques. You just call him mean names and claim that Democrats would sweep to glorious power if only they embraced fantastical policies that have lost at the ballot box time and time again.
Democratic politicians ARE the Abundance Movement. Klein might criticize CA high speed rail, but Gavin Newsom is championing the Abundance Agenda as the next big thing. Again, I am criticizing the Movement, not the book.
I would argue that it’s good to have a movement of any kind on the Democratic side. At least it’s not just “anti-Trump.” Put it (Abundance movement) out there and then let the intra-party opposition make a counterpoint. That’s healthy. The Democratic Party is an anemic organization right now. I don’t think it takes a genius to find a way to scale it up from local and state politics to a national level. Pete Buttigieg more or less makes this argument.
I think it’s issue is that the Democratic Party has become the old Republican Party. Perhaps we are in a phase where the MAGA party is over and the Democratic Party is the new right, leaving the actual democrats, too long referred to as leftists as being a bad word. I don’t disagree with the ideas in Klein’s book and the need to move quickly for our environment but reading the book there were things that didn’t settle right and being a democratic delegate, he’s not wrong that many democrats are using a abundance as a political movement and I think not going back to our roots is the problem. The democrats have moved farther and farther right. However, I think that the biggest problem is Citizens United AND not getting things done. It shouldn’t be a movement but acknowledgement.
I’m skeptical of the “movement “ but I like the book. What I’m opposed to is the anti oligarchs movement that Bernie and friends are pushing. Want is the solution? There must be a plan, maybe the plan should be “Abundance “ and not Socialism.
Because the lovely oligarchs have benefitted your life so much!
The socialist, Bernie and friends don’t like oligarchs but have nothing to offer me either. They want to be the new oligarchs
CA HSR for example wasn't derailed by regulations as much as unrealistic expectations. They wanted a train capable of reaching 220 mph, this makes it the fastest train in the world in a country with no expertise in high speed rail on top of picking a very difficult route in an earthquake prone state. They could have scaled this down to an achievable goal that extended their current train lines but they chose not to. This was a scope problem, not a regulation problem.
To be fair to you, Klein seems to be your only source and very few folks he's engaged with have done any degree of takedown on him because they've been generous with him rather than combative.
As for all of his NIMBY bullshit, the primary problem with affordable housing is that it's not profitable. This isn't due to regulations, but the fact that housing builders have the choice between affordable housing or turning 80k into 500k with a "luxury" home. It's economics. The real "regulatory" solution here is to ax the Faircloth Amendment and put government back in the game of building affordable housing. Privatization won't work here either because we'll just see abuse.
Give me a break. Japan built the Shinkansen throughout a mountainous nation, in a highly earthquake prone nation, with top speeds of 130mph (now 200mph), they started construction and five years later had an operational 300mph route, all that happened 60 years ago. Today the trains run on time to the minute. You really want to pretend the technology is the problem?
What is an example of an affordable government housing project you’d like to see at scale? Because the latest out of LA is coming in at $800k per unit.
It's not impossible to do but CA didn't listen to the advice they were given by the French firm who pulled out of the project. CA was supposed to build through the mountains themselves, but politicians caved to scope creep to include desert cities rather than expand later. Regulation isn't the issue, it's route/design and political will.
As for the housing cost issue you cherry picked the most expensive and to be fair to this particular case some of these overruns were due to COVID not regulation.
Was the cost higher in CA than it would be in TX for example? Sure, but is that due to regulation or factors such as price of land, tax structures, and simple popularity of the area?
Why does Klein seem to have a de-regulatory agenda rather than say rent controls or vacancy taxes, or a policy to decommodify housing? At this point, why are we even worried about cost since it only seems to matter when we talk about the less fortunate.
I’m still waiting for that example. Red states seem to have figured out low cost housing, why does it turn incredibly expensive every time blue city mayors try to build public housing?
Abundance speaks quite explicitly that the political issues were a huge part of the HSR debacle. At no point does the book say “its regulation and nothing else”. He goes on at length about the problem of democratic politicians bending over backwards to try and make everyone happy, and the result is that the project becomes so bloated, designed-by-committee, and weighed down ticking everyone’s boxes that nothing happens in the end.
Klein explains the regulatory issues at length. But if you think he’s arguing a purely “deregulatory agenda” then it’s obvious you didn’t read the book or any of his work. He has written at length about how veto points throughout the system cripple our ability to build. He has criticized everything-bagel liberalism at length, which is entirely intra-Dem politics and not regulation.
I wonder why no one ever talks about the high-speed rail project in Wisconsin between Milwaukee and Madison that was single-handedly killed off by a Republican governor, Scott Walker. According to Wikipedia:
>"Walker indicated he would refuse an $810 million award from the federal Department of Transportation to build a high speed railroad line from Madison to Milwaukee as he believed it would cost the state $7.5 million per year to operate and would not prove profitable. This was in spite of offers by the mayor of Madison and the Dane County executive to help absorb costs the state might have incurred. The award was later rescinded and split among other states. This cost the state at least $60 million for rail repairs federal funds would have covered."
Yet the blame for "not building stuff" is place exclusively on the Democrats, not the party that's been running against the very idea of government doing stuff for its citizens for the last forty years?
Who said that CA high speed rail was "derailed by regulations"?
It was derailed by unique interests like labor requiring unreasonable union standards, nimby property owners requiring protracted legal battles, towns demanding rail pass and stop in their locations, and so much more.
I don’t get it. How is this not the exact same thing they’ve been doing for 40 years? Wasn’t the whole deal about the new democrats that they were magically going to make everything better by deregulation and unleashing the private sector? And Blair saying he was very comfortable with people getting filthy rich?
Pardon me but didn’t deregulation cause the 2008 crash?
How on earth could you argue the left is even involved in the Democratic Party after the last few decades? Remind me about how a) the public and b) the party responded to sanders? You’ll note: much much stronger support outside the Democratic Party hierarchy than inside it.
Is this book an exercise in “2008 was a long time ago, people must have forgotten about it by now.”
Ok, I get what’s going on. You didn’t read the book. You didn’t read an honest article about the book. You read a headline and half the intro paragraph of an intellectually dishonest lefty critique and just bought into “Klein is a deregulatory corporate shill” is that about the size of it? At no point does he argue that we should mass deregulate banks’ lending policies, that’s a complete non-sequitur.
Because if you’d looked into his writings at all, you’d know that he is not pushing a mindless anti-regulation agenda. He has a litany of very specific examples of how well-meaning regulations, political compromises, and policy making are stifling progress.
- environmental laws being used to block renewable energy programs or mass transit, or environmental and historic preservation laws being used to preserve highways and parking lots.
- public hearings and veto points being used to obstruct affordable housing, bike lanes, public transit, etc.
- the complete neutering of eminent domain such that individual landlords can obstruct multibillion dollar infrastructure projects, drive up costs by tens of millions and delays by many months just to squeeze out a few extra bucks from a HSR project.
Actually read the book first, or at least an honest article about it, before you start trying to critique it. Ezra and Derek have done a dozen podcasts explaining these exact items.
Nah, I think we all listened to Ezra "fucking" Klein directly from his own granular "fucking" mouth. You peel back what he's saying, there's nothing new here but neoliberalism. Blame the government and regulations stepping in the way of progress which we all know will be outsourced projects ala public-private partnerships not public ownership.
When? You’re harking to the 70s for the last time a Democratic candidate lost an election by being too left wing. Whereas we only have to look back to November to see them losing by being too right wing. They managed to win with a conservative candidate in 2020 only because Trump was literally still in office and unavoidable; lost in 2016. So your argument would be stronger if the democrats had beaten any viable opposition in the last decade.
Are you going to say Obama lost by being too left wing?
Then beyond that, you’re kind of drawing attention back to the fact that the democrats have been in office for most of recent history as a result of running these conservative policies you like, in which case you need to address: how come the world’s so shit? Your boys have been in charge 12 of the last 16 years and 20 of the last 32. Can’t really deny that the world we’re living in is the fault of the democrats’ conservative policies.
Politics not like football, it’s not just about who wins the match, it’s also about what they do when they get elected. The world we’re living in is a consequence of centrist politics. For this reason, as well as the colossal electoral unpopularity of centrist politics, we urgently need more left, not less. Some left even.
Tell me, if these policies are so secretly popular why are people leaving large blue states like CA, MA, and NY, to move to big red states like TX, FL, NC, SC, AZ?
Also hilarious that you think I’m some kind of conservative. I canvassed for Obama, voted for Bernie and Warren. I’m just not interested in happy-sounding left-wing policies, I’m interested in effective left-wing outcomes. Happy-sounding policies have made blue states massively unaffordable, created mass homelessness, and resulted in sclerotic government.
The dem establishment is exactly what this book is deriding lol
He talks about how we have got to be able to build more affordable housing and cut the red tape.
I agree with him and he has been studying this for a while.
How liberals say they support affordable housing but become sketchy when the housing is anywhere near their homes.. I agree with that as well.
He knows and talks about how we all vote for fast trains but when it comes time to implement these great ideas liberal special interests groups litigate these great ideas into their graves which I also agree with.
All I hear are establishment Dems complaining about the abundance agenda.
You didn't miss much. He spends the article caricaturing Klein and Thompson without engaging in any substantive points they make.
Yeah that was a dead giveaway that the author is full of shit
Not mistaken just not buying the socialist BS
Total joke of an article. The origins of abundance politics lie not in elite hands, but in planning commission and city council meetings.
Detached from what actually matters in favor of upping points for your preferred team on an imaginary scorecard—without realizing that there is nothing in abundance politics that prevents its combination with anti-monopolism. In fact, the two are well-suited together and prominent abundance folks frequently call for their combination.
When you say Abundance, do you mean the movement or the book? I agree that the book could take an anti-monopolist flavor. But the Movement has shown no interest in doing that.
Abundance "the movement" precedes the book, but is named by it (for popular political purposes). And yes, many urbanists, solar developers, and popular movement builders that support them are anti-monopolists as well. Again, they have been before any attempt at naming them was made.
Even so, there is a glaring hole in anti-monopoly as it is presented by popular democrats. It pretends to be all encompassing, but it focuses almost completely on corporate concentration of power. If you are serious, you have to also consider small-p private, nonprofit, and public sector concentrations of power. Academic Neo-brandeisism is concerned with all of these things, but in political practice it has expressed itself to the incredibly limited view of corporate and oligarchical criticism. For example, there is an astonishing moment in Klein's recent interview with Zephyr Teachout where she answers that housing is probably so expensive to build because of corporate concentration--I am in the process right now of entering real estate development, and this is simply not the case. Housing construction remains a startingly local and small-business job. The high costs come primarily from building codes and arbitrary aesthetic and historically "moral" restrictions that cities place first on the developers that build a home, and then on the people and businesses that would occupy it.
So, where you may say abundance the movement fails to address the concerns of anti-monopoly, even if it may theoretically account for them, I feel just as well happy saying this of anti-monopoly about the concerns of abundance. I will extend this further to say that I do not believe anti-monopoly will be a winning strategy, and neither will abundance. They are similarly motivated theoretical framings interested in mostly distinct policy mechanics that motivate different groups of voters to address different concerns. Both are useful and necessary, but neither is on its own a popular political movement capable of electing a president, or more importantly, an efficacious Congress.
In the end, I have no issue with anti-monopoly, but I do take issue with the incessant blog-style pieces taking misinformed and disingenuous pot-shots at abundance. If you see no theoretical issue between the two, write that. What you have here will not help build any coalition, and it certainly does not help in restoring truth and decency to public discourse.
This article is such a bad take. Classic example of motivated reasoning. Weak arguments. Zero research. Bleh.
“focusing on an issue 99.9% of Americans have never heard about is political suicide”. Really? The astronomical cost of housing? Energy prices? Environmental impact reviews? NIMBYism? No one has heard of these things?
Proud member of the .1% I guess…
You misunderstood. 99.9% of Americans have never heard of Klein's example of a particular power line construction.
U misread the book as being about a powerline. Something is deeply wrong in left-leaning cities (Im a liberal) when you can’t find a 2 bedroom dingy apartment for less than $6k.
If that’s not a popular rallying call I don’t know what is.
Lotta people in this thread need to understand that Klein and his co writer have already admitted much of their book is fan fiction rather than anything based in reality. Not to mention, this idea that cutting red tape is what’s holding up America is hilariously ridiculous. Tf were the 80s about then?
Unserious troll
Oh sure! I’m the unserious one. I too write books and then admit good portions of it are bullshit.
Homies got an Animoji as a damn profile picture lol
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-real-path-to-abundance/
I reject the entire framing. There shouldn’t need to be a “choice” between, say, expediting permitting for new El tracks in Chicago and a robust social safety net. Or between next-Gen nuclear and a clean environment, for that matter. Maybe Dems should just be in favor of sh*t that makes sense and leave it at that?
I agree, and I think Klein would too. However, the real-life politicians claiming Abundance say we need to move to the right and get rid of those safety nets.
“Abundance say the opposite.” This is dead wrong. Getting rid of social safety nets? That is actually the complete opposite of what they say. Constantly. On literally every podcast and in just about every article. A person wouldbe hard-pressed to come up with a greater distortion of their actual positions. But I get it. Discourse of so much easier when you just lie about the people you disagree with
Yeah. I would love to find a thoughtful criticism of the abundance agenda generally or the abundance book specifically. But all the criticism I encounter is this sort of flagrant misrepresentation mixed with hand wavy dodging of the issues that Ezra Klein raises. Notice how Joe wrote “unspecified regulations"? "Unspecified”?! Klein loves nothing more than specifying specific regulations and policy choices and ineffective processes.
Joe is expressing an all-too-common “learned helplessness” on the left -- as if it is an absurd endeavor to try to understand why governments struggle to achieve their progressive goals and take concrete steps to improve actual results.
Does Klein say that, at any point?
No, which is my point. I want Klein to clarify if he thinks the Abundance Movement, which IS dominated by voices trying to reduce social spending, should be the Democrats' national answer. Again, I'm not criticizing what Klein wrote in the book. I'm criticizing what came after it, and asking him to state what he thinks about it.
This is dishonest to the point of completely inverting the truth — Klein and the rest of the prominent Abundance figures have been consistent & clear in their support of a robust, expanded social safety net. In fact, they view the two as complementary: as just one example, if there’s not enough public housing, Section 8 vouchers will never house enough people. The claim that cutting social spending is central to the Abundance movement is so disconnected from reality that anyone making it must be far more interested in intra-party disputes than in serious policy making.
To borrow from the meme, it’s a classic “oh so you hate waffles?” type response
This is the first I've heard of 'abundance theory', but from the get-go it sounds like more pussyfooting. I'd love for the obscenely wealthy to finally get hearts and share their wealth in ways that actually benefited millions of people who need help. I don't hold my breath. They could have done it by now if they'd wanted to.
I'm an old-fashioned liberal in the JFK, West Wing sense, which some would say is way center of left, but my calls to the Democrats--MY Democrats, I've been a blue collar party member since I was born--are simple: support labor unequivocally, raise the minimum wage significantly, get rid of SS caps, work toward universal health care and don't stop until you get there, lower prescription drug prices, save public education, save our public lands, keep our air and water pure, keep lawlessness out of our courts, license guns like cars--at the very least, regulate when necessary, and only consider people for office and public sector jobs who understand the 'public' part and will be true to their oaths.
None of that is as hard as watching our entire society go up in flames. Honesty, integrity, honor, loyalty, and hearts big enough to see that real people are being harmed, real institutions are being damaged, real democracy is at stake--we need to choose wisely. Eyes on the prize.
This reminds me how much the Democrats have moved right over the last decade. All the things you mentioned were once standard liberalism. But now you only hear them from the 'left' wing of the party. I'd also add campaign finance. Obama was strong against Citizens United. Now many Democrats support it!
Yup. And now it's time to move back. We can only do it if we believe in what we're doing. The Democrats have the worst inferiority complexes in the world, brought on by trying but never succeeding at getting out of the 'underdog' status, even when they've won. It's our job to bring us back.
It's simple. Just do the right thing. Stop being distracted. We know what we have to do, and if our current leadership doesn't, we find new ones. They're out there. We're not alone in this.
Actually, the Dem party has been chasing steadily Republican voters since they lost to Reagan. They don't give a fig about the Democrats of that time and they'd just as soon have them drop dead then go after their votes. I guess they take them for granted since the system is rigged against a Party getting on the ticket that is real Democracts can call home.
I didn't leave the party, the party left me (a lie then by Reagan). This is more true of Democractic Democracts of today.
Wrong. How old are you, 12?
Amen to that!
So why is this totally reasonable approach to democratic governance being constantly slapped away as though it were some kind of radical anarchist revolution? Particularly when other democracies receive high scores for happier populations when they implement those policies as a baseline?
My sweet summer child, the US has never been a democracy. It's a "country" on stolen land. The "founders" we're genocidal, British Lords. They also owned Black people when they wrote the "Declaration of Independence." Independence for WEALTHY, WHITE MEN only. Not for women, not for POC, and not for poor, white people.
Dear me, how could I not know those things?? We've always been striving toward democracy, and that's a mighty goal. Don't knock it. The alternatives are wicked and deadly. We'd rather not go there.
You go ahead and bow out, full of grievance and dismissal, and I'll go on fighting for my country, flawed but worth keeping. Those are our choices.
You're a sheep. You want to be ruled over. I don't. Governments are bad, mmmkay. And you're saying the US is legitimate, it isn't. It's a British colonial settlement just like Israel.
LOL. I’ll bet you’ve got a plan to fix everything.
Any day now…
America is a fully fledged nation state, conquered centuries ago by European diaspora. There is no turning this around. It is not “stolen,” and conquest = legitimacy, not leftist philosophical perceptions. The native Americans all conquered the land from other native Americans, then lost it to more capable Europeans conquerers. This is the way of the world, not some unique injustice needing modern impossible reversal.
This is not about the legitimately of this government. It's about more attacks on those useless non-wealthy people that need to be cut loose from any help from the rest of this society.
I agree with a lot of this. As for guns I want guns regulated like cars also. I want to be able to carry my gun in all 50 states like I can drive in all 50 states, I want no restrictions on ammo capacity like no fuel capacity restrictions on cars, and I want no restrictions on caliber like there is no restriction on horsepower.
There are all manner of restrictions on how you can build or drive a car and the world would be a much better place if all guns were flat out banned, including in most circumstances for the police. Works in every other country.
You’re living in fantasy land.
Im living in Britain. The rest of the world really exists you know.
Agree with this, minus the licensing. Armament is a first class, constitutionally protected RIGHT, not a privilege subjected to state policy.
You got all this in the blue states and they are shitholes that everyone e is leaving.
Wait, so lowering the cost of living doesn’t uplift people?
Of course it does! But Abundance alone can't lower it enough.
So lowering rent and electricity costs isn’t enough?
You're being disingenuous. What Klein is proposing won't lower rent and electricity to the point Americans are comfortable with. On energy, we need to remove the profit motive. Power lines are centrally planned by the government but run by private companies. They charge more to make a profit. Eliminating that will drastically lower costs.
On energy, environmental laws need to be redone so that any utility, public or private, can build the transmission lines needed to decarbonize. On energy, laws need to change so that a utility, public or private, has an easier time building more power plants.
On housing, rent is cheaper in Texas than it is in Washington. I would love to hear you explain how people are more motivated by profit in the Pacific Northwest than they are in Texas.
I wrote about this already in another post, but I’m happy to do here as well. Texas as whole isn’t cheaper than Washington as a whole. Dallas and Houston are relatively on par with Seattle, for example, when accounted for income. Destroying environmental regulations for the sake of “the economy” or “cheap housing and energy” is a poorly thought out argument that fails to account for economic externalities, economic cost, and the troubles with housing in the US.
The obsession with SFH (single family homes) across the US for historical and also monetary reasons, has cause a burden on the major cities across the US. Suburbs are overwhelmingly a burden for cities, and yet zoning laws mixed with NIMBYs have made it hard for re-zoning cities to be done. Like I mentioned in another comment, eliminating zoning laws won’t fix the issue. Houston doesn’t have zoning laws, yet it still has housing problems.
If you want to double check my claims, the national zoning atlas has the land distribution of a lot of US cities.
That’s all to say, just in housing alone, the solution whilst simple at first sight (build more housing) is also more complex than just “regulations bad. Red state geniuses. Ezra also a genius.” There needs to be a coordinated plan from public and private investment plus re-zoning as well as myriad of other things to effectively provide housing that won’t cost close to 30% of a person’s yearly income for purchase on average.
I'd love to read anything you suggest on housing policy. As you said, I find Abundance (both the book and the movement) to point to Houston as a solution to be overly simplistic. I just don't think you can compare a city like LA or Boston, which have been developed for centuries, to cities with ample land and new population booms.
Environmental regulations like studying whether it’s bad for the environment to remove a freeway aren’t an economic externality or an economic cost?
I haven’t finished reading your piece yet, but I’m so simultaneously enraged and excited by it that I can’t resist the urge to make a preliminary point: any and all ordinary Americans of Good Will can determine whether a pundit, analyst or politician is being authentic or bullshitting simply by identifying whether they equivocate on the meaning of “woke” and/or “the Left.”
These Neoliberal bullshitters always try to act like the Sanders/AoC wing of the party is totally out of touch by being “too woke,” when the fact of the matter is, the material/economic policies advocated by Sanders/AoC are overwhelmingly popular. It’s true (sadly) that many Americans are not (yet) on board with certain important issues of what has been called “social liberalism,” but to treat this discrepancy in popular sentiment and avowed ideology as if it exhaustively captures the views of self-described Leftists is a flat-out lie.
I’m so fucking sick of Klein, Thompson, et. al. I confess that I’m beginning to find it difficult not to hate them with a similar passion to my contempt for the MAGAts. Sigh. I’m a work in progress.
Bernie and AOC are the two most popular elected politicians in the country. It's Washington group think that their ideas are unreasonable or unpopular.
Any American of Good Will can determine that anyone throwing out terms like "neoliberal" is a fucking moron
Found the neoliberal ^^^
Oooooo how scary
What evidence do you have that the "Abundance Movement ...IS dominated by voices trying to reduce social spending? I did no get that from his book. Read "Why Nothing Works" for a more historical take on this issue of over regulation and the century long debate between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian liberals.
I’m sick of dysfunctional cities
You wrote that the left-of-center divide is between those inclined to capital and those inclined to labor. If that's true, then it's sure weird that when you look at the actual issues the left position is often closer to the preferences of the top-half than to the policies working class voters prefer.
For example, Joe is upset that Colorado Governor Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would have streamlined workplace unionization, because “unions are proven to help raise wages, and Polis is beholden to his anti-union corporate donors.” Maybe. Or, it could be that unions are a lot more popular among the left than they are among working class voters. Just 9.9% of U.S. workers belong to a labor union. Maybe Polis realizes that the Democratic Party has lost and must win back working voters, who don’t see shrinking labor unions as a big problem for the economy or their economic well-being. Nor do they place labor unions near the top of what’s most likely to help working people get ahead. https://www.progressivepolicy.org/campaign-for-working-america-a-ppi-yougov-survey-of-working-class-voters/ https://www.thirdway.org/report/renewing-the-democratic-party
So few workers belong to unions because of corporate-controlled politicians like Polis. I'm hesitant to trust a source that calls itself 'radically pragmatic,' so let's use Gallup. According to them, labor unions are at a 70% approval rating. https://x.com/Gallup/status/1828793176754409957
Also, I'm a labor organizer, and unions are popular no matter the workers' political affiliation. I've certainly organized more rural Trump voters than urban progressives.
"Actually the working class hates unions [posts thirdway.org link]"
Is this a parody account
Working class workers distrust unions because the union leadership always comes to realize that A) union leaders have more in common with management than they do with the workers and B) union leaders' views and compensation are more important than workers' safety, benefits, views, etc.
A good approach would be to regulate unions to make leadership accountable to members, with frequent well-run elections, term limits on union officials, a prohibition on movement between management and union leadership, and so on.
I’m a labor organizer and this is 100% wrong based on my experience. What’s your source for this claim?
And then again, should there even be people who think of themselves as labour organizers? You'll say that without professional direction, labour would be at the mercy of management; but isn't that paternalistic? Labour would be better represented if union admin headcount were small with a hard cap, and organizers were current or recent workers with hard term limits. Insofar as bargaining expertise is required, union leaders can hire in lawyers - who can and should be let go once a bargaining session is over.
It's a natural property of all human organizations that they evolve to put their own wants and needs ahead of their ostensible purpose. A union starts filled with zeal, achieves things for the workers, and then over the years the leadership's growing sense of its own identity pits its own wellbeing and beliefs against those of the workers. This is why you see unions putting more energy into BLM protests and trans rights than they do into the workers' quite different priorities.
There are a number of issues here.
For one thing, it doesn't matter where support for Abundance as an idea comes from-- the question is whether it is correct as a policy idea. Every single critique from the left completely ignores the crux of the argument. It doesn't matter if moneyed interests of some kind support an agenda, or if it's top down-- if it results in good outcomes, then it's good. That's the case for a lot of policies. Fact is, lots of (in fact, a significant majority) of ostensibly popular policies are, in practice, terrible actual policy. Price controls, for instance, are very popular on their face. They're also terrible policy that reduces housing affordability. And congestion pricing was deeply unpopular until it kicked in and New Yorkers recognized that... actually less congestion is great. Who supports a policy is an objection if powerful people are pushing bad policies. And we want to remove concentrated power from society for process-related reasons. But that's entirely beside the point as to whether supply-side liberalism is good policy (spoiler: it is), and hijacking every discussion to focus on that is deeply unproductive.
And there's also a fundamental missing of the point in the Sam Seder podcast. I listened to it. It was a miserable showing by Seder. He fundamentally wasn't intellectually capable of addressing the argument. He sounded like a chatbot programmed to repeat "oligarchy" on loop. Just an embarrassing and intellectually vapid person. And the objection here completely missed or didn't grasp Klein's answer. Which is that POWER IS DIFFERENT IN EACH CIRCUMSTANCE. His book is FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT POWER. There is power on each side of just about every issue. The question, as referenced earlier, is whether the power is on the side of good or bad policy, and, if the former, how to harness that power to get to good policy. Here, builders have some power and want to build. Simultaneously, rich and upper middle class people have some power and want to keep density and "those people" out of their neighborhoods. So the political task is to weaponize the former against the latter to get to an outcome that experts understand to be good. That's why this is an intensely local issue, as Klein said-- because the power that is aligned for and against a project in a given scenario is different in EVERY SINGLE CASE. So standing up on a soapbox and bloviating about corporations and millionaires and billionaires is done solely by people who lack and interest and/or the capacity to actually dive into the policy issues, and instead rant and rave and degrade any real policy discussion.
So the next self proclaimed leftist whose critique actually addresses the crux of this issue or says anything remotely thoughtful that engages with the policy idea will be the first that I'll have seen. Instead, across, the board, they go out and ignore the argument and rant like malfunctioning chatbots programmed to repeat "oligarch" on loop.
It is selling the already sold Neoliberalism which is destroying the country and the world. Trump is following that ideology as we text. This book was published and proclaimed by influencers to drown out the sensible book "The Invisible Doctrine of Neoliberism" by George Monbiot and Hutchison. This is an attempt to put the holdouts to sleep or shut them down.
What in the world are you talking about….? If you want to make a point, try engaging with the argument they it makes. This idiotic buzzword bingo where doofuses substitute “neoliberal” for having to try to grapple with an argument is so brain dead.
Either try to actually address the argument, or just stay quiet. When you lack the intellectual capacity to address the argument, all you’re doing is cluttering space where the adults are trying to have a conversation.
I am not interested in getting into arguments about whether Ezra Klein is or isn’t a disingenuous third way corporate shill (which seems to be the author’s point) or whether left-wing Dems are out of touch, know-nothings (which appears to be the point of many of the posters and abundance agenda supporters). I will also add that I have not read the book, but I have listened to Klein and Thompson discuss it on their podcasts as well as podcasts of others numerous times. Based on those interviews, it appears that the underlying premise/purpose of the abundance agenda is to make Blue States more affordable so that more people can move to, or stop leaving, those areas. I think this is doomed to failure for two major reasons: first it assumes that those who are leaving Blue States are doing it solely for COL issues, and second, that it is a good thing it prosperity in America is concentrated in a few major U.S. metro areas in Blue States. I think both are wrong. I live in GA, which has been a boon for in-migration from places like CA, NY and IL. Most people moving here are well off; they are not the sort of people who would necessarily feel the brunt of an increase in COL. Instead, based on my discussions with many of them (during PTA meetings, scouts, LLBB, football etc) most of their move was due to social policies, particularly COVID restrictions and declining schools. Abundance won’t fix that. As for the second premise, I don’t see what is good about continuing to increase the concentration of economic activity in the top 10 to 15 metro areas of the U.S. Any abundance agenda must focus on diverting and rebuilding areas that have been in decline. People don’t want to have to abandon their areas for economic survival. Yes that may be silly and naive, but they don’t want to and those people vote. Also, just on its face, it would seem counterproductive to build a bunch of housing to reduce COL in order to attract more people. If that were to happen, then economics teaches us that demand would increase and if supply did not increase as well, COL would increase again. It would just be a vicious, never ending cycle.
A better route would be to both build more housing, and allow more builders of housing, including the government, while also allowing more types of housing. However this must be combined with increasing wages and reducing the costs of education and health care.
For me the crux of the issue is that it sounds like the exact same stuff the democrats have been doing for the last 50 years, and look at the world we’re in as a result.
Empowering oligarchs? Well they’ve been doing that. Deregulation? Something about the 2008 crash is ringing a bell. It sounds a lot like “we’re gonna do the exact same stuff we’ve been doing for the last half century but this time it’s magically going to work!”
For this to work, wealth creators would have to be real. The trickle-down effect would have to be real. Privatising things would genuinely have to make them more efficient. Deregulation would have to have generally beneficial effects. All of these things can be seen to be false, by observing reality, over the last 50 years. So the problem with abundance is that it’s every bit as much of a fantasy as the rest of neoliberalism. We’ve known that neoliberalism doesn’t work economically since 2008.
Abundantly will work politically, if it ever works, which I doubt, at most in one election. After it’s been in office we’ll all watch the economic miracles fail to occur while even more power and money is given to the already rich and powerful, then vote it out, and the Democratic Party will be permanently and finally destroyed.
You either didn’t read the book or didn’t grasp literally anything about it. Try again.
Look, I’m not going to read that crap, I’ve heard it lots of times before over the last forty years. Try again, with something new.
You’re not going to read a book you purport to criticize… and proceed to completely miss anything resembling what’s written in the book.
What a smart person would do in their shoes is… acknowledge that they haven’t read the book. Instead you proceed to spew buzzwords and make a fool of yourself.
It’s easier to literally do nothing and keep your mouth shut and preserve the illusion that you’re not a fool than open it and remove any doubt.
Tell me then, in a couple of sentences, what is the ultimate conclusion of this book? What do they recommend? Do they think more state ownership, higher income tax, more constraints on huge corporations? Or more privatisation, lower taxes on the rich, more empowerment of corporations? If everything I’ve read about it is wrong, tell me what it does say. In a couple of sentences.
It is in no way about any of these things. What it pushes for is streamlining of processes that allows for the economy to create more supply, whether by the public or private sectors.
Your question has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the book is about. If you want to have a discussion, perhaps you should try actually reading the book. Or, if you did read the book and this is your takeaway, perhaps refrain from having an opinion, because you literally didn’t come close to processing a single thing that they said.
We all know what's wrong with the Democrats. They don't listen to their constituents. Get out of DC, go buy groceries like an average American, shop at Walmart or Target and ask questions. Then STFU AND LISTEN. REALLY LISTEN.
Not a town hall. Not a letter writing campaign. An actual week or two on the streets of your district.
Then you can abundance the shit out of me.
They're so far from reality. It's incredible and shocking to watch.
We need professors, teachers, union members (auto, service industry, anything), scientists, people who needed SNAP and Medicaid, workers workers workers LABOR, to run for office. DNC pays for it. They pissed away $1 billion war chest and lost to a candidate that proved his inability to be president from 2017-2021. Consider this the “Robin Hood” strategy, taking from the rich to give to the poor. Money doesn’t take, it swears.
My congressional district, Nevada District 2, Congressman Mark E. Amodei (the worst kind of lap dog) ran last year with no Democratic opponent. There was an independent candidate. But NO DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE. Show up! Make noise. Raise a stink! SHOW THE FUCK UP!
There must be more than just my district where the incumbent is running unopposed. Take $150,000 and run a candidate. No flyers, no mailers, no advertising. $150k to get the message out on social media, on YouTube, in the local papers and on the local stations.
I’m so sick of this inability to have a message. It’s a malaise with Democrats. Entropy.
I come from a background where we marched, we knocked on doors, we did grassroots fundraising, we made coalitions, we canvassed. We didn’t rely on spin doctors, cable news networks, pundits, analysts, and polls. We relied on the sincerity and righteousness of our cause. We fought for justice.
MAGA and Trump call Democrats “the enemy.” START ACTING LIKE IT.
While a graduate student in philosophy, I took symbolic logic and computability. I also taught logic.101 to undergrads; the text I taught from used Venn diagrams to visualize the logic of Aristotle's syllogisms.
It seems to me that the only logical argument you employ is "truth by vigorous assertion"
That's a logic nerd joke and an insult.
And actually, I think worse of you, since I believe you know full well that you are being deceptive
This Abundance Movement makes me think it's the secular version of Prosperity Gospel, both, IMHO, looking for a slick way to cover the underlying, and baseless, claim that "them that have, deserve it, and them that don't, don't. Or maybe I'm missing something in making what might be a too fast conclusion?
That's a great observation.
In my opinion, the Abundance Movement (if coming from the ideology in the Abundance book) isn’t about protecting those with capital and reinforcing low-redistribution systems, it’s about encouraging supply of housing, infrastructure, medicine, and innovation (in the form of effective research funding). The idea is to remove limitations of supply/improve efficiency of production that’s artificially hamstrung in order to lower costs for things: houses in the private market or public investment in infrastructure and R&D (lower cost in that the average person’s taxes goes back to them in greater public utility).
Thanks for this information. My impression came from the vibes coming off the name. It has that same feeling that appeals to the well-off, or those wanting to be in the upper circles. My bad.
No worries, I think that there is some misinformation/misrepresentation swirling around it.
Yes, that has always been one of the NeoLiberal talking points according to George Monbiot in his book on the ways the many NeoLiberal Think Tanks have converted the population and people of influence to their way.
In fact their are many ringing the warning bells about the "Abundance Movement". I just did a search with Ezra Klein and NeoLiberal as the two key words and got back many publications on the dangers of his and his cohorts selling of this movement... many.
This is just one of them.
[https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/abundance-agenda/
This is a snippet from the above publication.:
[Over the past few years, a cohort of neoliberal pundits from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to Matt Yglesias and Eric Levitz have increasingly problematized the modern regulatory state. They frame the government’s many environmental and labor standards as an impediment to “abundance.” Multiple books advancing this argument are slated to be published in the first months of 2025, from Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
“Supply-side liberals” take aim at the procedures that environmental and labor laws require the federal and state governments to follow as they assess the impacts of new infrastructure projects. They decry the tools that the left has wielded since the mid-twentieth century to hold government accountable when it fails to adequately do so. They frame the “need for speed” in the urgent terms of the energy transition. But they have tended to back legislative concessions to the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests in the name of greater expediency.]
I appreciate this perspective. I have just started reading Abundance, after hearing a compelling talk with the authors and Michael Pollan on the Long Now podcast. That venue, by design, takes a longer view. It’s worth a listen.
“My theory is that Ezra Klein knows Abundance was never meant to be what it became.” I think this is an important point that is getting lost in the larger discussion. Why are we giving so much agency to the authors over how the Dems respond? The Democratic Party does not have an Ezra Klein problem. It has a zero unified vision problem. If they glom onto this idea and rebrand it because it is neatly packaged for them, merits aside, that just shows a general lack of creativity and leadership on the party’s part that they need to wait for a policy reporter to coin their platform for them. We know that the party is divided. No one is getting the job done of unifying -- AOC/Bernie or the center-lefties. And that has shot them in the foot. I don’t think it’s necessary, or even causal, to pin that on two reporters who have some decent ideas about getting the country unstuck. Maybe this shouldn’t be a partisan concept? That would be the dream. I think the book speaks to that possibility.
Also, I do not have the knowledge of union politics that you clearly do. But as a 30 year Coloradan, Polis is not a panacea governor. No one politician can be. Just as no one book can solve all the problems, no matter how compelling. Polis has done some good things, and some shifty things. That is disappointing about the unions. But I don’t think we can give the Abundance movement that much credit. It is conceptually new. Naming things retroactively seems unwise.
What I am interested in is whether the salient points in the book have legs, party bastardization aside. We need more housing now, we need flourishing cities and rural areas now, we need clean energy now. Our main problem is dickering over nuance in getting any of that done. Thanks for the thoughts.
Thanks for reading! I agree with what you say about Polis. He's certainly not Abundance-only. I used that example to point out that the Movement (mostly centrist, already-elected Democrats) has no interest in the 'left Abundance' Klein talks about in his book. So when he says that in interviews, he's talking about an imaginary option, not what Abundance has become.
It’s interesting to me how the “abundance” tribe and the “anti-abundance” tribe, when they fight, completely talk past each other. The Seder-Klein debate was a really good example of this. Each side seems to have came away from it thinking their guy so completely trounced the other. Those inclined to support Klein thought that Seder was completely non-rigorous, unable to deal in anything except generalities. Joe seemed to sum up the opposite position well, the idea that Klein’s points were sleight of hand to distract from the big questions.
People are talking about completely different things, and seem confused by this because each side wants to fight on the ground they want to fight on. There seems to be some general disbelief in the conversation that the other side genuinely cares about the things they say they care about.
I agree, but I think Klein was changing the conversation on purpose, for the reasons I stated. Seder would ask him a question about national-level politics, which is valid given the Abundance Movement, and Klein would change the conversation to a specific issue. It was disingenuous.
I greatly respect the views of Pollan (the Omnivore's Dilemma) as well as Klein (everything I have read or heard by him)
I really see no reason why the Bernie/AOC economic justice agenda and the Abundance agenda couldn't be combined into a robust platform that addresses a wide range of concerns and builds a broad coalition. The main reason it can't is due to the fact that the oligarchs are trying to use abundance as an alternative to economic justice instead of a supplement.
It also doesn't help that abundance is being interpreted as deregulation, rather than a holistic rethinking of how various regulations interplay in the market and how they could be streamlined without sacrificing their goals. I thought the book was clear that it was not proposing another "throw the baby out with the bathwater" approach to deregulation that we usually see.
If you pair abundance with universal health care, you can counter the whole "tax and spend liberal" characterization while still pushing for important new programs. I'm fully annoyed that the power brokers are turning this into a false dichotomy instead of a winning partnership.
You're hitting on another divide between how Klein talks, saying there's a 'left abundance,' and the Abundance Movement which is actively fighting the left. It's another reason I'd like him to clarify his thoughts on the larger project.
"The main reason it can't is due to the fact that the oligarchs are trying to use abundance as an alternative to economic justice instead of a supplement."
Or perhaps it's party elites who know that flimflam like "economic justice" doesn't poll well with the voters that the Democrats need to attract?
You guys keep talking about how critical it is to resist fascism. Maybe that means that we need to actually win elections and put controversial ideas like "economic justice" on the back burner?
"I'm fully annoyed that the power brokers are turning this into a false dichotomy instead of a winning partnership."
The Democratic Party's net favorability is currently at -22. I think making a clean and visible break with the past is not a ridiculous idea.
Having a platform that presents bold solutions is much more likely to get them out of the hole than continuing to be "Republican Light" in order to appeal to the center. I think you would be surprised how popular a "tax the rich, use the money to make sure everyone has basic healthcare, and streamline regulations so we can build stuff" would be. How do you know it wouldn't be popular? When has the Democratic party actually united behind such a platform? Or any cohesive platform?
I honestly have a hard time believing this is what you got from the Seder:Klein interview. Seder was like a Twitter bot. He only had one response to every question, never supported by more than sanctimonious assertion.
Also, neither author is claiming their book is some genius political strategy. They're hoping to shape priorities for future legislators. Which as we know are not the same thing.
Derek Thompson has claimed it's a political strategy.
Fair enough. I haven't heard that from them other than it will be good long term politically if blue states and cities aren't badly run and unaffordable for most.
Regardless, Seder wasn't capable of engaging on the merits with anything Ezra said. He just looked sanctimonious and said corporate power and commodification over and over like a mantra. Posing isn't an argument. If someone isn't capable of defending their position at all, you should consider why you support them so vociferously.
That's because they were having two different conversations. Seder was trying to talk about Abundance the Movement, while Klein kept turning to Abundance the book. Klein knew what he was doing.
That doesn't make any sense. Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, corporate power. Klein would say, why does it cost many times more to build in blue states, and many times more than that to build government built affordable housing. Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, commodification. Klein would say, can you explain why rental prices have come down in Austin and not in SF or NYC? Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, commodification. Klein would say okay, we agree there should be better public transit. Why can't California build high speed rail? Seder would say corporate power, corporate power, commodification.
That's not two different conversations. That's one person trying to have a conversation and one person chanting tribal affinity mantras.
To be clear, I couldn't be more in favor of fighting concentrated power. But you have to argue for real things. Triple down on Lina Khan. Pack/reform the courts so we're not forced into minoritarian plutocrat friendly rules on everything. Adopt Piketty's favored tax and capital endowment plan to encourage equity and cycling of capital while keeping the benefits of a market economy and ownership incentives. Code word chants make everyone dumber and poison the advocacy.
I don't think you're fairly characterizing Seder's points, but I digress. But you did mention Austin, so I'll say Klein wasn't given the whole picture. Austin rents have been falling, but only from their extraordinary height (https://www.kut.org/austin/2024-06-13/austin-texas-rent-prices-falling-2024). He took a snapshot of a much bigger picture to falsely imply his point was right.
The point is the comparative one. Austin has implemented a bunch of YIMBY style policies -- many of which are decried by folks like Seder with chants of corporate power and commodification -- and have successfully turned the tide. Meanwhile other cities have stayed on policy trajectory and have totally failed to change the trend. You're grasping at straws and I'm not even sure what you're trying to defend against?
Yeah that's simply false. I don't know Denver, but Austin policy changes directly led to increased building. And I'll pose the same question to you that Klein posed to Seder. What the hell does "max-filled" mean? Do you you not know that denser construction is either straight banned or almost always blocked in more or less the entire bay area? As in, there's shit tons of builders and potential residents who very much disagree and would love to build or live in a denser bay area.
What is your proposal to enable people to live where they want? Where they can get a good job without 2 hour commutes? Remember, big corporations own round to zero of the rental market. And it costs the city more than a million dollars to build a single toilet.
Which Austin policy changes led to the decrease in rent prices?
This podcast was a nice deep round up: https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-yimbys-are-learning-from-their
Decent coverage of the highlights here: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/
Short answer is single family zoning turned into no-application 3 units allowed. And minimum lot size for single family building was reduced by just under 2/3. In other words, the zoned density limit was at least tripled across most of the city.
Also, you dodged my question. There's a large amount of research, as well as basic intuition, that shows zoning changes that lead to increased housing construction reduce both rents and pushing out of existing residents. You seem to really not want that to be true. What alternatives do you propose that would yield as good or better results?
Again, I don't disagree with the idea that building reduces rent. That's good and should be encouraged. What I DO disagree with is that this deregulatory Abundance mindset is the key to decreasing the cost of living, which is evident in the article:
'Though rents have dipped, the Austin region’s housing costs remain high. It’s unclear how long the downward trend in Austin rents will last. While nearly 17,000 apartments are under construction, according to MRI data, builders have pulled back on new projects amid the glut.
Austin rents sit about 17% above pre-pandemic levels, Zillow figures show. Nearly half of the Austin-Round Rock region’s renters are “cost-burdened,” according to a report last year published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, leaving less money in their pockets to spend on other essential needs like groceries, clothes and transportation.'
This is my point. Did the Abundance mindset decrease rent? Yes. But it is enough to solve the problem of the high cost of living nation wide? As your source states, no. HALF of Austin residents are burdened by high cost. Simply saying 'let's deregulate some building codes' is woefully inaccurate. People say 'Well, Klein said you have to do more,' which is true. But the Abundance Movement is championing this as the be-all-end-all, which it can never be.
Well first, this all started in Austin less than 3 years ago, after 50 years of erecting barriers to ever building anything in the name of a weird combo of racism and what was appropriate for the environmental movement in the mid-20th century. So I wouldn't take the fact that 3 years hasn't fixed 50 years of problems as a particularly strong signal. I'll also note that you seem to want it to be true that it's impossible to structure a housing market that doesn't make desirable places to live unaffordable to the bottom 4 quintiles. Again look internationally. We can see clearly that's false. There are different ways to do it. The government builds apartments and sells them to first time homeowners for preset, affordable prices. Japan does something closer to what YIMBYs tend to advocate as far as I understand, working on the regulatory and market structure side, and have also succeeded in making Tokyo quite affordable despite being insanely dense, while also walkable!
On the broader point, I don't think anyone involved would claim that what they're championing in their book is the end all of solving our problems. I mean, in Klein's recent show with Zephyr Teachout (who was disappointing for similar reasons as Seder) and Saikat Chakrabarti, while having a similar exchange with Teachout, he noted that he couldn't agree more that our reactionary supreme court making buying elections a constitutional right is a fundamental challenge to democracy. He just tried to make the point that it's simply not true that every single problem we have is unfixable without revolutionary change to our entire social and economic construct. Teachout was only willing to concede that curbing the power of capital probably wouldn't solve racism. I mean WTF?!
We, and political movements, contain, and **should contain**, multitudes! Why can't we agree that money in politics and concentration of wealth are major threats to our democracy and that we could do a LOT of good by changing the conversation left of center so Democrat run cities and states reverse 50 years of government being the primary cause of skyrocketing housing costs and gentrification? And reverse 50 years of process and regulatory buildup that means when the federal government does succeed in passing legislation with lots to like about it such as CHIPS and IRA, the new manufacturing plants with what would be good *union* jobs if they were in blue states all get built in red states? Or of being incapable of constructing the power infrastructure needed to actually achieve the decarbonization goals those same politicians espouse?
This entire conversation was you pointing to Austin as proof that Abundance was key. When I pointed out your own source describes that Abundance alone is not the be-all solution, you dodged to 'well it's much longer and complicated than that.' I think you can understand why I'm not going to continue this conversation.
Just noting you stopped responding when confronted with facts and a request for something other than platitudes. The comment section version of Seder's falling back to his corporate power chant. You should consider what this illustrates about your approach.
Hey man, I didn't see your response. I'll take a look.
Cut the flow of dark money into politics and that alone will solve one third of the problems and corruption in government. Tax at 75% and remove subsidies (welfare) for corporations, agribusiness, churches and billionaires and we’ve solve another third of the problem in government. Lastly, reform the constitution to include the lessons we’ve learned in the past 250 years. This country will not be of the people, by the people and for the people until the people take it over and run it.
I’m sorry, but it sounds like a cult to me. I don’t want anything to do with it! I prefer the vision of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s the word “abundance.” Gives me the heebie jeebies. Don’t want anything to do with it.
I used to listen to Ezra Klein on Vox. Eventually I got tired of the verbosity. If Ezra can use ten multi syllable words to describe something that could otherwise be described in five short syllables, he will. His tone of voice is so soft it’s almost a somnambulant. Puts me right under. Listening to him is like watching a beehive. Lots of buzzing, but no honey.
'Listening to him is like watching a beehive. Lots of buzzing, but no honey.'
OMG, that's a perfect analogy!
So you have never listened to him. In fact, there is lots of "honey" in his essays.
Physician, heal thyself!
I have listened to him many times. That was kind of the point to what I said! Puts me to sleep. I’m sure he’s a very nice fellow, but I can’t keep my attention on what he’s saying over the long haul. And my point had more to do with the idea of “abundance,” which had always had a negative connotation to me. I think because there’s a branch of evangelical Christianity that follows an “abundance” philosophy, which allows them to become very rich and ignore the poverty all around them. “Jesus doesn’t really hate the money changers in the temple; he wants everyone to share in the abundance of material goods,” which is not what Jesus’ own words say in the Bible. So talking about abundance has those echoes for me. It’s code for being selfish and that being okay.
But maybe I misjudge Ezra Klein?
I don't care if you dislike Klein. I do care if fighting Trump is not your priority.
Trump threatens to turn our country into a dictatorship. We need a big tent resistance, with the only membership rule being willingness to fight Trump.
If we beat Trump, then we can go back to arguing about the size of the economic safety net, flag burning, racial quotas, etc.
I know the US has always been a flawed democracy. But life would be safer if we were straight up fascist.
Fight Vance, fight Trump, not Klein
Why are those mutually exclusive?
See below
Fighting Klein helps Trump and weakens democracy in the US. If you think those are good things, we are not friends
This is a child's understanding of politics.
One can't be a lifelong 'Centrist' Democract. The center has been moving steadily to the Right,v pegging nearly far right in these days. Possible to say life long 'Conservative' Democract.
If you fight Trump, I don't care what you think about Klein, even though I disagree about Klein
I cannot stand Donald Trump. I wish he would die, right now. I don’t even dislike Klein. I just find him long-winded. But I have ADHD and listening to some people is difficult for me.