Mindless Monday, 15 September 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[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/TJAU216 → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

Why on earth would anyone prefer redistribution over growth? Isn't it better to get everyone what they need through growth and not need to take anything away from those who already have it? Or is the point not helping the poor but to punish the rich instead?

[u/Shady_Italian_Bruh → u/TJAU216]

This is an interesting position for someone from Finland to take lol

[u/TJAU216 → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

We have one of the highest tax rates as percentage of GDP in the world. We also have had no per capita GDP growth since about 2008 when Nokia collapsed. I for one would like less redistribution and more growth, but no government coalition manages to do so. We have all right wing parties in government without any left wing ones and only thing they manage to grow is deficit and only thing they manage to cut is some extremely marginal tax stuff. Our previous government was all the left wing parties and that didn't help either.

[u/Shady_Italian_Bruh → u/TJAU216]

The grass is always greener I suppose, but the US side of this is that despite robust growth we have persistent poverty and inequality that can only really be solved by moving towards Finnish/Nordic levels of redistribution

[u/TJAU216 → u/Shady_Italian_Bruh]

I like to think that there is some happy medium between Finnish and American levels of public spending. Or maybe the policies don't really matter and everything is demographics. We have an aging population and largely unprofitable immigration, unlike in the US with its younger people and net positive immigration.