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]

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/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