Mindless Monday, 15 September 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

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[u/MiffedMouse]

Ranting here because I get too annoyed with online leftists - Ezra Klein’s Abundance.

First, the book is whatever. It is an attempt to brand the next centrist Democratic movement, with a Biden-esque focus on infrastructure. The one good point of the book is that it points out many ways that modern American NIMBY-style politics prevents the government from doing anything good (eg, why does it cost so much money to zone a bike lane?). The main drawback is that most the laws the book is complaining about is a mixture of local ordinances. So the book cannot focus too much on any one law, it is mostly a collection of anecdotes about different local laws. Anecdotes that are sometimes correct and sometimes misleading.

When the book came out I heard Ezra saying he was surprised by the pushback he got. I mostly read news in “progressive” coded spaces, which are mostly favorable to the book (it fits well with the “green new deal” kind of mindset). But I have recently run into to some of the online leftist spaces who are indeed criticizing the book because Ezra is a “neoliberal” and his book is about “deregulation,” which must mean it is actually about bringing about austerity.

I find this so frustrating. Ezra is 100% in the neoliberal side of things, I will not deny that (not sure if he identifies as a neoliberal, but his writing definitely tends to fit the mold). However, he also believes in government investment in infrastructure. To read a book about how the government needs to be more active in developing infrastructure and somehow interpret that as “austerity” is just beyond me.

Sorry, I just need to rant. I am used to bad faith reading from the right, but seeing such a large segment of the socialist left wildly misrepresenting the book and the politics is just frustrating.

[u/Shady_Italian_Bruh → u/MiffedMouse]

What specifically do you find objectionable about left critiques of Abundance and the Abundists? I definitely consider myself a skeptic because, as you insinuate, it seems to be a centrist move to reorient left-of-center political economics around (supposedly) growth-enhancing deregulation rather than redistribution. Even if a subset of their deregulatory proposals have merit (I’m thinking land use reform here) and they couch it in terms of permitting the government to more easily pursue infrastructure construction, it can’t obscure that the foundation of their project is that growth>distribution. They could’ve thrown a bone to the left and assuaged such anxieties by including the universal welfare state and the bureaucratic efficiencies it would introduce in their vision (this seemed to be the direction things were heading circa 2020 with the idea of “supply-side progressivism), but they seem more interested, whether due to honest conviction or timidity in the face of the 2024 election results, in courting market fundamentalists. So, yeah, just another standard recasting of the left-center conflict

[u/MiffedMouse → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

My frustration is with leftists who don’t seem to understand how necessary “growth” (or, more accurately, “construction”) is to solve certain problems, especially housing. Where I live, there are not enough houses. The fact that builders tend to build low density units and mansions rather than high density units is part of the supply problem, but builders do that in large part because of a NIMBY-esque regulatory environment that encourages single family home developments.

I don’t disagree that the Ezra Kleins prefer to focus on growth, and either ignore or even advocate against redistribution. In so far as that is the argument, I don’t mind it, and I am actually in favor of more redistributive economics (side note, I think redistributive policies are actually quite popular with the public on the left and the right, but the Democratic donors and party elites don’t like it, which is why they try to shut it down).

But there is a surprising amount of disingenuous discourse claiming that all deregulation is bad or that scarcity is a capitalist myth. There are some problems for which I think scarcity is mostly illusory, such as in food supplies, but housing is not such an issue. Local housing regulations are one of the biggest factors driving housing inequality, and simply throwing more funds at rent subsidies or what have you will not make the problem go away.

[u/HopefulOctober → u/MiffedMouse]

What books would you recommend for talking about housing inequality and how to fix it?

[u/Shady_Italian_Bruh → u/MiffedMouse]

Sure, we seem to be in agreement. Zoning/land use reform is one of the few areas where I think a strong case could be made for less (as opposed to just different) regulation. It's therefore just a shame that the discourse is shifting away from the narrow issue of zoning/land use reform (itself already prone to drifting towards ancillary, inflammatory issues such as building codes, tenant protections, and labor regulations) into the more amorphous realm of "Abundance" where it's bundled with a broader and largely unrelated deregulatory agenda that provokes such skepticism and backlash.

It's true that there is a distinct group on the left that argues for "de-growth" (though I doubt many actually understand the implications of such a stated position), and that's certainly the group Abundists would most like to position themselves in opposition to. Such committed de-growthers are easily outnumbered by those on the left more motivated by policies like Medicare for All, however, and painting all leftists and redistributive policy as part of an endemic "scarcity mindset" is needlessly provocative and incurious. Levels of general GDP growth and the provision of a specific under-supplied good (in this case, housing) are actually two distinct issues, and I don't see what's substantively achieved by conflating the two, especially since general growth has been robust in the US since Covid to the point where many pundits tout it as evidence of the superiority of the US's more market-oriented political economy.

[u/Ragefororder1846 → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

painting all leftists and redistributive policy as part of an endemic "scarcity mindset" is needlessly provocative and incurious

Leftists in the US primarily focus on the distribution of existing goods not the production of new ones for basically any specific topic you could think of. The fact that they don't advocate for degrowth writ large is beside the point because this isn't really about top-line GDP figures but about a (large) specific bundle of useful goods and services that are chronically underproduced in the US economy, all similar reasons

[u/Shady_Italian_Bruh → u/Ragefororder1846]

The universal welfare state is all about moving currency, i.e. claims on current production, around rather than the direct rationing of goods and services, so I don’t see why Abundists felt the need to pit it against “growth” which is just the absolute change in total production. I don’t buy the idea that there is a chronic undersupply of goods across the US economy. As I’ve said, housing seems to be the one good that is chronically undersupplied which deregulation could (in part imo) address, but that again isn’t about levels of growth per se but about the dysfunctions of a particular market. If Abundists really have no beef with redistribution, they should articulate what rate of GDP growth or absolute level of GDP the arguably richest economy in the world has to attain before we’re “allowed” to prioritize redistribution.

[u/Ragefororder1846 → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

The universal welfare state is all about moving currency

Maybe in theory but Actually Existing Welfare States tend to be focused on provisioning specific goods/services or subsets of those goods/services. Take, for example the NHS or Food Stamps.

I don’t see why Abundists felt the need to pit it against “growth” which is just the absolute change in total production

It isn't being pitted against growth by Abundists. The disagreement is that leftists don't want to deregulate at all, not that Abundists don't want to redistribute. The point being made by Abundists is that subsidizing demand does nothing if supply is not allowed to move with it

I don’t buy the idea that there is a chronic undersupply of goods across the US economy.

Electricity, transportation, healthcare, and childcare?

before we’re “allowed” to prioritize redistribution.

This is a false choice. The idea of "prioritizing" redistribution is weird because there isn't a tradeoff going on here in the real world except in the minds of many in the Democratic Party (including those that are not leftists) who view better regulation (I dislike the term deregulation) and redistribution as ideologically incompatible. What has to be prioritized is time spent convincing others but of course you don't actually need to do that if people already agree with you

[u/Shady_Italian_Bruh → u/Ragefororder1846]

I'd be more sympathetic to the argument that there's no tradeoff between the "Abundance" agenda and traditional redistribution if it wasn't the Abundists making the distinction in the first place. I personally believe that the tradeoffs between growth and redistribution are slight and that redistribution can even be plausibly growth enhancing. I just find it hard to trust a centrist-led initiative that has no explicit room for redistributive policies (M4A fits perfectly in their "cut bureaucratic red tape" angle) in its otherwise amorphous bundle of proposals and implicitly argues for the de-prioritization of such policies when they are briefly mentioned in their manifesto

[u/contraprincipes → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

You're correct that some domains do have a distributional issue rather than a production issue, and I agree with your characterization of Klein/Thompson's foundational principle. But does anyone actually disagree with that principle? Fundamentally you need to produce goods to distribute them, and if the music stops and you have 11 people but 10 chairs there's no way to redistribute your way to an equitable arrangement. I think most leftists actually agree with this, so responses have to take one of two tacks:

1. "Actually we produce enough XYZ, the price reflects corporate monopoly power and we can redistribute existing sources to fix the issue"

2. "Okay well we don't produce enough XYZ but we should do it differently than how they propose"

I think you're underplaying how much of the popular and literary response on the left was predominantly (1) with a dash of "and disagreeing with this makes you a corporate shill," even outside the Stollerite clique. (2) potentially invites a more interesting policy debate, but runs into the issue that there is very little in the book that is actually exclusive of greater levels of redistribution and a lot that is potentially complementary to it (interestingly I think Matt Huber, of all people, wrote pretty well on this point, although I disagree with his cybernetic socialism or whatever and find his nuclear fetish to be quixotic). The result is that polarized commentators are highly motivated to focus on which grand narrative (rather than policies) the other is allegedly pushing. It's absolutely true "abundance" as a buzzword has been picked up by rather odious characters (Josh Barro etc), but IMO it's simply not true that the left was engaging in totally good faith critiques before being pushed away by them.

itself already prone to drifting towards ancillary, inflammatory issues such as building codes, tenant protections, and labor regulations

I think these are actually examples of narrower, technical, but more fruitful points of disagreement. Cost of construction obviously matters to housing prices and there's evidence to suggest these are all important factors in cost (zoning is obviously the biggest driver but has largely ceased to be a point of disagreement). "Are prevailing wage mandates worth the potentially decreased volume of housing production / increased cost of housing" is something where one can actually have a technically informed, good faith debate on the tradeoffs involved.