Abundance

by Ezra Klein

This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.

One generation’s solutions can become the next generation’s problems. After World War II, an explosion of housing and infrastructure enriched the country. But without regulations for clean air and water, the era’s builders despoiled the environment. In response, the US passed a slew of environmental regulations. But these well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first.

Tax cuts are a useful tool, and it is true that high taxes can discourage work. But the idea that tax cuts routinely lead to higher revenues is, as George H. W. Bush said, “voodoo economics.” It has been tried. It has failed.

Supply-side economics was about getting the government out of the private sector’s way. Cutting taxes so people would work more. Cutting regulations so companies would produce more. But what of the places where society needed a supply of something that the market could not, or would not, provide on its own? This is where you might have expected Democrats to step in.

should. Democrats and Republicans passed policies into law that, collectively, spend trillions of dollars helping people afford them. But giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.

“If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions,” Biden said. “You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer. That’s the choice.”10

The fear that we did not or would not have enough of what we needed settled heavily on politics.

The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.

Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! California has spent decades trying and failing to build high-speed rail. It has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living.21 As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.22 What has gone wrong?

But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance. Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump,24 with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP.

Voting is a cheap way to express anger.

There is a word that describes the future we want: abundance. We imagine a future not of less but of more.

We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life. We call for a correction. We are interested in production more than consumption. We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy.

Abundance, as we define it, is a state. It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had.

“More Americans have changed their status by moving to the city than have done so by moving to the frontier.”2 But this is not the story America told itself.

In 1950, the US Census Bureau reported that America had added 8.5 million units in the previous decade, even with the interruption of a world war.

Wow

the average number of dwellings per thousand people in the developed world is about 470,

The result is a housing crisis of staggering proportions. Almost 30 percent of American adults are “house poor”—spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing.

“the central paradox of the modern metropolis—proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen.”11

It’s the firms that locate outside these cities that struggle. The money you save in rent doesn’t make up for the talent and knowledge that dissipate over distance.

This resolves the paradox of the metropolis: We vanquished distance for shipping and sales. But innovation thrives amid closeness. Which is to say: it thrives in cities. And because it thrives in cities, so does much else. It’s in missing how much else that we made a terrible mistake.

There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically” conservative but “operationally” liberal.30 Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. The Tea Party–era sign saying “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is perhaps the most famous example of this divided soul. Americans like both the rhetoric and reality of low taxes, but they also like the programs that taxes fund. They thrill to politicians who talk of personal responsibility but want a safety net tightened if they, or those they know and love, fall.

The Austin metro area led the nation in housing permits in 2022, permitting 18 new homes for every 1,000 residents. Los Angeles’s and San Francisco’s metro areas permitted only 2.5 units per 1,000 residents.31 In our political typologies, it is liberals who embrace change and conservatives who cling to stasis. But that is not how things work when you compare red-state and blue-state housing policies.

Today, California is more Petaluma than Lakewood. In the 1950s and 1960s, California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year.38 Since 2007, California has never once permitted more than 150,000 new homes.

even as the city’s overall population grew,”

Since 2015, the state has authorized construction on about half as many housing units as Texas, despite it now having 9 million more residents.42

what Colburn and Aldern wanted to understand is why homelessness varies so much across cities and regions.

As the cost of rent rises, so too does the number of homeless. As the vacancy rate plummets—meaning that the housing market is tight, with too many buyers and too few sellers—homelessness rises.

If homelessness is a housing problem, it is also a policy choice—or, more accurately, the result of many, many, many small policy choices.

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“It took a while, but over the generations, the planners have been very successful at mostly eliminating the accommodations for down-and-outers with the consequence that if you are down and out in a city where real estate is expensive, you end up on the street,”

You can insure a home against fire, but you can’t insure it against rising crime rates or local schools slipping in quality or a public housing complex being built down the block. To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing. You do it through restricting how many homes and what kinds of homes can be built near you. You do it by making the minimum allowable lot sizes bigger and the parking requirements more expansive because both those rules ensure that only wealthier people will be able to buy into your community. You do it through organizing at planning meetings to defeat proposals for apartment buildings—they’ll change the character

and refusing to expand sewer systems to areas where developers might want to build new homes.

To him, the core of the story is home prices, and the desire of homeowners to keep those prices rising, and everything else was more or less a rationalization. “Economic advantage is a powerful private motivator, but it plays poorly in public discourse,” he writes. “It is considered gauche (I have tried it) to mention in a public meeting that a particular public policy will raise or lower home values, even though what is acceptable to mention—traffic, crime, walkable streets, local pollution—pretty clearly maps onto home values.

In Sri Lanka—a country that Hickel holds out as a model for degrowth development—those

The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity. It is to discredit parties that care about climate change and empower strongmen who will give people what they have always wanted: the gift of abundant energy.

“Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy,” writes Hannah Ritchie in Not the End of the World. “It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong.”

The cost of solar energy fell by about 90 percent from 2010 to 2020. The cost of wind power fell by nearly 70 percent.

One of Olson’s insights is that a complex society begins to reward those who can best navigate complexity. That creates an incentive for its best and brightest to become navigators of complexity and perhaps creators of further complexity.

Nader didn’t just criticize the government. He launched a movement to tame it. His Raiders contributed to some of the most important environmental laws in history, including the Clean Water Act. With each win, they made it easier for more citizens and groups to sue the government for wrongdoing. But what they were building was an arm of liberalism—with associated institutions, laws, and leaders—designed to relentlessly sue the government itself, and that would go on to fight for more bills and rules that would widen the opportunities to sue the government.

he noticed that Republicans were consistent in the way they tried to weaken the government. They would bury it in paperwork and procedure and hearings and disclosure demands and lawsuits. It was as if the right had studied the tactics of Nader’s Raiders

Or as Bagley asked, “If new administrative procedures can be used to advance a libertarian agenda, might not relaxing existing administrative constraints advance progressive ones?”

“The Procedure Fetish” argued that something had gone wrong inside government, inside liberalism, inside Bagley’s own profession. Liberal legalism—and through it, liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.

adversarial legalism. “It is only a slight oversimplification to say that in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe,” he writes.84

Adversarial legalism was a way of reconciling the government we wanted with the suspicions we harbored.

The prevalence of lawyers in American life is unusual. But their dominance at the top of American politics is startling. “Though they make up less than 1 percent of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half the Senate. Fully half of the last ten presidents were lawyers, as are more than a third of the officials now serving in the states as governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state,”

When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language

New problems and new solutions require new laws. Ruhl and Salzman favor past models by which certain kinds of projects have been fast-tracked past environmental and legal challenges. A 1996 law offered this favoritism to border security, and the Trump administration used it to great effect in constructing parts of their border wall.

Something similar could be created for green infrastructure, Ruhl and Salzman suggest, with projects deemed important to our climate goals fast-tracked past a slew of normal hurdles.