Episode 69: Abundance
In the face of what is inarguably bad governance and fake—but spectacular!—technocracy (the list goes on and on, but we’ll stop at AI-generated tariffs), we thought we’d take a moment to join the conversation about what good governance looks like. A couple of weeks ago, one of us reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, for the New York Times, and then the other one of us reviewed the review. So we figured: let’s work it out on the pod? No guests on this episode, just the two of us in a brass-tacks, brass-knuckles discussion of the abundance agenda and the goals of twenty-first century economic policy.
We dive right into what the abundance agenda is and who its enemies are: innovators and builders against NIMBYs and environmentalists on David’s account; techno-utopians who discount the environment and politics on Sam’s. We agree that housing policy, at least, has helped the better-off create a cycle of entrenching their position through stymieing construction and production. We find another point of agreement on how Klein and Thomson’s abundance agenda attempts to harness the power of the state to build, and that certain left-wing critiques are off base, but disagree about whether their proposal is a break from the neoliberal era of governance and what that even was. In some ways, we end up right where we started, disagreeing about whether the abundance agenda seeks to unleash a dammed-up tide that can lift all boats, or whether the abundance agenda leaves behind everyone but a vanguard of “innovators” in the technology and finance sectors. Let us know if you’ve got a convincing answer.
This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.
Referenced Readings
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back by Marc Dunkelman
Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum
On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy by Jerusalem Demsas
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
“Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy” by Steven Teles
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle
Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin
“The State Capacity Crisis” by Nicholas Bagley and David Schleicher
Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States by Matt Grossmann
The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles
“Why has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” by Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag
“Exclusionary Zoning’s Confused Defenders” by David Schleicher
“Cost Disease Socialism: How Subsidizing Costs While Restricting Supply Drives America’s Fiscal Imbalance” by Steven Teles, Samuel Hammond, and Daniel Takash
”On Productivism” by Dani Rodrik
What are Sam & David reading?
Sam is reading Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come - great book, great historian of ideas.
David is reading James Q. Wilson’s The Amateur Democrat: Club Politics in Three Cities, again.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] David: This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review. For more information about Themis, check out themisbar.com. Thank you very much, and now back to the show.
[00:00:30] David: Welcome to Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast. On this podcast, my co-host, colleague, and friend Sam Moyn, and I talk about legal theory and wherever else is on our mind. To start off, apologies for the long delay. It’s entirely my fault between episodes. Sam has been raring to go, and I’ve been a bit of a slacker, so apologies to the listeners. Sam, how you doing?
[00:01:03] Sam: I’m doing great. The semester has its end in sight, which is always a good feeling.
[00:01:09] David: And Sam, it’s the day before Liberation Day. Are you singing the Marseillaise? What’s going on?
[00:01:14] Sam: It’s really every day, David. You know, I wake up, I hum it in the shower.
[00:01:20] David: There you go.
[00:01:21] Sam: If you ever want to join, you’re always welcome. Not in the shower, but...
[00:01:27] David: We have to do a, we’ve been planning a collective listener watch of Metropolitan, but maybe we need to do one of Casablanca.
[00:01:34] Sam: That’s right.
[00:01:36] David: I would have thought you were excited about the coming of import substitution to America. I mean, you’ve been a long-time endorser of 1980s era Latin American trade policy, and now we have it. Are you just excited about American Peronism?
[00:01:50] Sam: No. No. I don’t think that’s the answer. I mean, I think we’re going to get in today to whether there was neoliberalism, what it was, what the way out is, and I think at least we’re now in the thick of a debate in which it can be named and in which we’re debating alternatives. But no, no. Trade war is not it. I never claimed it was. I don’t know what that’s about.
[00:02:20] David: I’m just joshing. A little bit. I’m a little bit joshing. There’s a grain of truth, but a little bit of joshing
[00:02:26] Sam: Okay. We’ll have to come back to that.
[00:02:28] David: So we’ll come back to Sam’s dirigiste ideas about trade policy on some other episodes. But today we’re talking about another element of markets and policy. So those of you who have not been asleep may have noticed that there is a kind of very prominent set of debates that go around, that have come on, surrounding the release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. Also at the same time a bunch of other books were released, like Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back, Yoni Appelbaum’s book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, and some previous popular books like Jerusalem Demsas’s On the Housing Problem [ed. note: On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy], and a few years earlier Matt Yglesias’s One Billion Americans. And this has led to a big discussion of whether, the kind of future of ideas around abundance. And I care a lot about these issues. I’m kind of ur-abundance in a lot of ways in my scholarship. I’m in a bunch of these books, so I care a lot about it. And Sam wrote a review of the main Abundance book, the Klein and Thompson book, and I wrote a response to critics, obliquely responding to Sam, but directly responding to Paul Glastris and a few other people. And so I thought we would just have a simple two-man pod where we talk about these things. So Sam, what is abundance?
[00:03:59] Sam: Well, I’m going to start by saying I only have read the master text, and of course the guru of the movement, David Schleicher, over the years. And I should mention our colleague Zach Liscow is also in the footnotes of Abundance and kind of fishing in the same waters--
[00:04:25] David: Anika Singh Lemar, too.
[00:04:26] Sam: and complaining about the price. Okay. So, well, it’s hard to say because if we take the book as a book rather than a media op, it has certain topics, and it’s sort of a pastiche. They have like your obsession with housing, but they have a bunch of other concerns, energy. They have Zach’s concerns with transport. And then the back half of the book, written clearly by Derek Thompson, is about, you know, science, science policy, R&D. The general gist of the Abundance agenda, as far as I can tell, seems to be to give the state a new role in making innovation, and the growth that goes along with it, and the new stuff that will come with innovation, more available and getting the state out of the business of obstructing progress.
[00:05:24] David: Yeah. So the way I’ve put it, I think that’s all right, is that America, in a paper about American property law policy, but it relates to all these other issues, which is that American property law policy always differentiated itself from British property law policy by being in favor of more. And by, what I meant, this is that it was not so concerned about externalities, rates of change, or localism, but was always about allowing--and this sometimes involved deregulation, sometimes involved greater regulation, greater state support--in terms of kind of pushing forward growth, even if it comes at the cost of localized efficiency, localized harms, or localized preferences for rates of change. And so America was, at least before the 1970s, notable in its difference from other Anglo countries, particularly England, in its deep embrace of kind of aggressive pro-growth policies, which came with costs, but came with the benefit of growth. And that this shifted very substantially in the 1970s. And the Abundance book, and you can see this very clearly, for instance, in the Marc Dunkelman book, who has slightly different attitudes about housing policy, but kind of frames it as a debate between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian themes. And obviously there are other themes going on, but he has a very straightforward narrative of that, and he says that, like, America had adopted Hamiltonian themes in lots of ways of kind of active state support during the New Deal, of growth, but then that broke with the highway revolts and a whole variety, and rise of environmental movement, and that in, for the last 50 years, we’ve been, we’ve handicapped the state and also large actors from achieving big changes. And you can see that again, the same idea in the Yoni Appelbaum book, which again hits on some, I have a paper called “Stuck” that hits on some pretty similar themes about how, it’s mostly focused on land use policy, how America used to be, Appelbaum has this wonderful, used to be a country of movers that led to, had all sorts of other positive outcomes. People would join groups and other things, but also they’d move to opportunity, and then the kind of rise of land use controls limited that rate of change in favor of protecting what we had. And so abundance is an effort to increase both the amount of stuff, even if it comes at localized harm, but also the amount of movement and the kind of rate of change of the economy. It’s a pro-change rather than kind of, and its opposition is conservatism.
[00:08:08] Sam: Exactly, exactly. And I’m for all that. I’m for many aspects of this. I mean, we can get into the details, but unlike many others on the left, and in spite of maybe some greater skepticism I have of like the techno-utopian elements of this, you know, the emphasis on growth, but especially creativity and innovation seems to me exactly right. And it’s where liberalism also began and really needs to, needs to return. So there have been a lot of critics of this agenda, but I’m going to be less brutal. And so we’re kind of on the same side to an extent. I think we do have some points of difference both in general and about this agenda worth exploring.
[00:08:58] David: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll get into some of the differences, but the one thing that you review was, it was very powerful on the, that like it was anti-procedural. And so one of the big themes in a bunch is that like we’ve built in a kind of lawyer-state that has given both powerful groups, but also just kind of general what Steve Teles calls kludge, like gummed up the system in order to solve specific and real problems, but have led to what Zach [Liscow] talks about in terms of highway costs or have led to slow housing growth and what have you. And your review, I thought was quite supportive of the idea that like the lawyer brain of the early 1970s was a, created some really substantial economic harms. And it’s not obviously, even though it was pushed by people who understood themselves to be on the left, not really good for the cause of the left, whatever that is.
[00:09:54] Sam: Right. Right. I mean, I think we should come back to this, but you know, there, there is a kind of like complacency about the environment in this school of thought.
[00:10:06] David: Which school? The abundance school or the critique of abundance school?
[00:10:08] Sam: In the abundance school, in the abundance school, just because, and we can talk about that now. I mean, just because it’s just true. And it’s the reason I started out my review with someone referenced in our favorite film, Metropolitan, Charles Fourier, who just really was like one of the first techno-utopians who thought that we would have abundant energy and if there were problems, we’d, if we ran out of coal, which they already thought was happening in the early 19th century, we’d find new stuff. And this pro-growth, pro-innovative agenda just did wreck the planet. And it seems like if you don’t have a solution to that beyond like leaning into growth and innovation as if that will just take care of the very sources of environmental degradation, then you’re not going to get a lot of takers among current defenders of NEPA or the various laws that were well-intentioned but of course do gum up the works. And so--
[00:11:12] David: I’d say that there’s a real conflict between some of the environmental concerns that dominated that moment and the environmental concerns that dominate this moment. Because those very laws that block that limit the ability of the government to build a highway, similarly limit the ability of both private and public things to build solar panels and green energy. And there is a real conflict between what one may think of as localized environmental harms, the ability of people to say not here because you’re cutting down my beloved local tree, and between the kind of global concerns that dominate modern environmentalism and the idea that we can solve the problems of, address climate change with anything other than innovation, strikes me as, it’s, you’re asking people to impoverish themselves, which will never be politically sustainable nor would it be attractive.
[00:12:09] Sam: I think that’s persuasive. It’s just a big ask for those who are concerned about conservation to sort of say, well, what you did created new problems and we’ll solve this our way because now we know we need green energy and so the cement we’ll use to build all the buildings won’t wreck the planet in the way the old cement did, even though we haven’t exactly found a solution.
[00:12:36] David: Yeah. I guess I would say--
[00:12:36] Sam: So it’s kind of de-prioritizing their concerns--
[00:12:38] David: It’s 100% de-prioritizing their concerns.
[00:12:38] Sam: in a way that like is going to be tough if you’re really building a coalition behind them. Because you’re saying trust us.
[00:12:48] David: I’m not saying, I’m saying, but it is that, of the concerns, it’s saying that some environment, some environmental concerns, are more important than others. And it helps that the people who are in these movements also say those things are more important. Right? So that if you say climate change is an existential crisis for the globe, then addressing climate change through green energy and through subsidies for innovation and through whatever is just more important than local conservation. And again, it’s plausible to say, in fact, many people do say, that preserving local is the, is the central thing behind their environmentalism. I would just say like their rhetoric is at least somewhat inconsistent and it’s also just extremely normatively unattractive, particularly because, as we’ll get into a little bit, it’s about preserving wealth in the richest parts of the world and the country. And so it’s like, preserving the views of people on Cape Cod from seeing a windmill is a concern. You know, people have a preference for not seeing windmills. That can be real. But to me, that strikes me as a debate that I’m more, that I think that they and I would be more than willing to have, which is like, if your main emotional and political commitment are environmental, and you say climate change is an existential threat to the globe and species, then like, I don’t know, man, if you want to get a strong view in favor of the views of people in Nantucket, I’m like happy to have that discussion.
[00:14:27] Sam: I’m down. I mean, I’m not in kind of in this debate on this front. But really, this topic allows us to pivot to something that’s genuinely powerful about the abundance school, which is that they rightly see that a lot of the arguments made in favor of policies since the 1970s weren’t really about what they are allegedly about. They’re about preserving a certain way of life for those who already have it. And that’s so totally clear in housing, and not just because of environmental regs. And so, and it’s related to your arguments about what happened to property law, the rise of the so-called gentry especially in certain urban settings. So it’s just to point that if you’re going to say, growth and innovation are the answer, will they actually cause the problem that the environmental movement arose to address and that it needs to address it in a new way through growth and innovation, you have to provide optimism that that can actually be done. And I’m not sure how much we actually have empirically, given like where our innovation is.
[00:15:41] David: We can go back into that. But one of the things you get in some of these discussions, you certainly see it in the Klein and Thompson book, but also really dramatically in the Dunkelman book is the idea that like, that there’s some kind of like a sine wave to this, which is that there were real problems associated with the kind of late-New Deal period of, associated with like the type of growth that was being pushed, creating real local harms, whether it was putting highways through poor neighborhoods or whether it was environmental degradation of one sort or another, but that the reaction may have either not be responsive to current needs, or may have been, and this is what I think, and it’s like probably not good even at the time. That you could imagine, so like this, we have this in environmental law, you have this debate about like, are direct regulations or carbon taxes or taxes a better tool and one of the like, the solutions that came up in the 1970s were of a particular type, and they may not have even been the best tool given the concerns of the time, but given contemporary concerns are like, but the Dunkelman book is like, it is true that you can have excesses of being too pro-anything, pro-growth and like, but that like we may have gone too far in the other books. And I, you know, ideologically I think like I maybe think that what they think was too far in the 1970s was perfectly fine, but that’s a separate, the idea in these books, not me, but the idea in these books is very much like there were real things to be concerned about, but that we went too far and that today’s politics and needs create a different set of needs. I will note by the way, just to think that like growth of course is extraordinarily important for the future also, right, so that, Robert Lucas famously said once you start thinking about economic growth you can’t think about anything else, and notably American economic growth slows very dramatically starting in the 1970s that is, this is the Robert Gordon point that like American growth, the American Century had been this period from 1870 to 1970 of quite fast economic growth and then growth really decreases after that point and what’s causal in which direction is an interesting question, but it’s surely it’s multi, you know, both ways in some ways, but it is a real social problem because growth increases living standards and it does so across. So one theme that shows up in your review that people, other people who reviewed the book have taken a different attitude about, but your view I think is quite clear and I think correct in this point, is the relationship of the book to neoliberalism, the idea of neoliberalism. And so what how would you say abundance is similar or different from the idea of neoliberalism?
[00:18:28] Sam: So if you wanted to be snarky about it, I guess you would say that Klein and Thompson want to save neoliberalism from itself or parts of it. They want, if you like, fully automated luxury neoliberalism and they understand that that requires breaking with what many people take to be the kind of core goals of neoliberalism which is abolishing the state or reducing its significance, hemming it in. Now they argue, I think correctly, that the period since the 1970s are in a sense not neoliberal insofar as the state took on a new guise as a regulator empowered, and welcomed the empowerment of a lot of private actors to gum up the works but also public regulators to kind of obstruct innovation. And so what Klein and Thompson want to do is to empower the state for new ends. It’s just I think those ends are actually the core of the neoliberal project and I think this shows, and that they don’t seem to care that much about, let’s say, anyone but actually existing innovators or vanguards, and they basic, like if you read the book, it kind of gives the sense, I think I even say this in the review, that they’re kind of finance masters of the universe and Silicon Valley tech bros upset about obstructions in their way. So they want government efficiency, they want government to do something new which is like help them.
[00:20:29] David: Yeah, so I want to get back to that because I disagree with that latter point quite vigorously, but I want to get back to the first point which is about the relationship--which is that the real difference between this and what kind of people call neoliberalism is that there’s a real, there are deregulatory aspects of this, particularly in housing, but one of the critiques is that the period of the 1970s and 1980s really hamstrung the state itself. And that what we, and this came in both by reducing the planning capacity of the state, so this is like we don’t have enough good civil servants that we get cheaper trains in Spain and Italy because they can plan things that aren’t so reliant on contractors, which is a big finding in the research literature. But also that like the same legal rules that, the legal rules were designed in many ways to limit the state from doing bad things. And so the like, NEPA directly applies to state projects and puts, and so the real difference is that it’s not an anti-state project in any meaningful way, it’s a pro-growth project, but it is not a get the government out of the way and let the market work project. It’s, in some aspects it is; so with respect to housing, it says we could probably achieve housing through the private market if we had fewer regulations. I think some support for public housing, but like it’s mostly a project about, they don’t spend a lot of time for instance on the financing aspects of housing which have a pretty heavy government role involved in them, but the fundamental dynamic is not about state versus not state and it is not, so it’s very different in a lot of it. Now I will say the thing that it is not, and I think the Klein book makes a mistake in this regard, is that it has a weird relationship to the literature on neoliberalism, which we had Gary Gerstle on the pod and Gary Gerstle has an idea of breaking the 20th century into your ideas of political orders and he describes the political order post-1980 as the neoliberal moment. And this book has a very different relationship to that period. So what do you think? You know like I think it’s much more like Paul Sabin.
[00:22:56] Sam: I think that’s true. You know, Gary Gerstle, although he’s treated as a guru, you know not just in the book but in various podcasts by Klein and Thompson, has I think a very different idea about what neoliberalism was than they do and they’re right. So you know Gerstle’s ideas that neoliberalism is market fundamentalism. Now we challenged him about this on the podcast but if you look at the neoliberalism literature that even precedes Gerstle and certainly that you know others like Quinn Slobodian have contributed to, it’s really about assigning new tasks to the state and we can debate what those are. Klein and Thompson understand that the neoliberal era, whatever else was going on and we’ll get into that, is about a change in the nature of how the state interacts with private enterprise and like a large rise in regulation, a large rise in lawsuits, a new governance style that has to do with rule-following and lawyer brain as you called it. So all of that is much more consistent with I think Paul Sabin’s book, same chronology, basically Nader comes along in Paul Sabin’s book and leads to a lot of liberals who believe that they should get the state to allow them to challenge it, and of course that’s what happens in the rise of public interest litigation. I think that’s, it’s really important that Klein and Thompson. leaving aside what they think they’re doing actually, are taking a side in the debates about what neoliberalism was with Sabin and others.
[00:24:50] David: Yeah, so I think one thing that really is a attractive quality of the book, of the books, but also the specific Klein and Thompson book, is that it is not so federal government focused. And given, I have a recent piece called “The State Capacity Crisis” that talks about this at great length, but it’s the, that the American state has never been largely federal. The old joke about the federal government is that it is a insurance company with an army, but it’s a insurance company and a regulator with an army. But they’re equally focused on the policy choices made at the sub-federal level, at the state and local level, and when you look at that you the picture of what happened in the 70s and 80s looks very very different. State governments increase, you know this is Matt Grossmann saying even under conservative leadership their size increases, their regulatory ambitions increase quite dramatically, particularly in some of the issues they’re talking about. And similarly you see the same type of thing you see at the federal level in terms of shackling the state with greater ability to challenge it, So the book is not, the theory is not neoliberal in the sense that academics use the term I don’t think, but it is a substantial critique of the idea the way in which neoliberalism is employed in some academic disputes both in this one, but also we had Mehrsa Baradaran on the podcast and her version of it is also--it’s very hard to believe both of these things.
[00:26:28] Sam: Oh completely yeah, I would agree with that. I really like your point that and I would take it further, that Klein and Thompson are concerned with all levels of government, because of course on housing you’re dealing substantially with local governments. And then at the state level Klein is just absolutely obsessed with Californian rail and these are stories that are occurring like at every level of government, with government doing things, getting in its own way, and stymieing growth no matter where you’re attempting to start it, locally or nationally.
[00:27:05] David: Yeah on this point one thing that I do think is a point of difference between some of the books, and you can see this much more dramatically in the Jerusalem Demsas book, is a focus on the effect of level of government choice, where they are treating the issue mostly ideologically, which is that there was an ideological shift in the 70s, but the Demsas book is very, and this is where, it’s very heavily focused on the levels of government problem, and that there’s policy implications of the levels of government problem, that the delegation to local and sub-local is a method of, it’s itself an ideological move that entrenches certain policy forces and so like giving lots more discretion to local and sub-local entities to decide housing things has implications for how much housing gets built that persist past the ideological moment. And their book is kind of, it’s like again it’s too much to ask of a book that is really a gestalt as much as it is, but the broader idea set is, and you can see this in the reform--like kind of YIMBYs and other people are like obsessed with the level of government problem in a way that neither the neoliberals nor the actual text really is.
[00:28:22] Sam: So let me just make a kind of comment about that and some things you said up to now about what changed in the 70s because Klein and Thompson are writing a vibes book, and enormously successfully. Like I told you offline, I was asked to review the book and in part because like you just have to turn in a straight-up book review I did, but what I guess I should have understood but was nonetheless shocked by, is the day it came out like 18 other reviews came out, they were on a thousand podcasts within days, and it really was a kind of cultural moment more than, I don’t know how many people actually have read the book--a lot, and certainly a lot bought it.
[00:29:09] David: There’s a joke that was someone said online which is that it’s becoming the new Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the in the sense that it’s a book bought but not read, but of course it’s like really short and very easy to read--
[00:29:22] Sam: It’s really fun, it’s really well-written.
[00:29:24] David: so it’s a real sign, if it’s true that people are not reading it, I don’t know whether people are not reading it or not, but if it is true the way that they bought but didn’t read Capital, then it’s a real sign of the declining American attention span.
[00:29:36] Sam: It is totally true. All right the substance is, I wanted to add, like everyone can agree that we entered a slow growth era in the early 70s, and I guess the worry would be we don’t have a total account of that development and seemingly the shift away from the Bretton Woods system and the global economic crisis and stagflation and all of this created a certain environment. What maybe is a little frustrating about the abundance literature is it’s concentrating its pot shots on certain culprits that may have a pretty small role in our inability to exit a slow-growth era. Like the idea that lawyers and people defending their backyards are kind of the main problems, it’s a little much because we really don’t have an account of what the main drivers were and how everything fits together in this neoliberal era.
[00:30:50] David: Yeah so I’d say that like it’s certainly the case that neither it nor I have a like a full account of the economic changes of the 1970s and 80s. And I don’t think that, like there are obviously a lot of different things going on and some of them are non-governmental at all. So if you take the Robert Gordon book like it’s just like, ideas come up when they do and it’s like there are real trends in like society that are different from policy and so there’s a lot of things--I will say that I wouldn’t underrate the issue set that they take on here, the importance of it, the estimates of housing are extraordinarily large in terms of their effects on output and similarly infrastructure has a pretty big role to play in the economy. I mean we’ve built out a lot of the infrastructure that we might need but it, relatedly energy has a huge role on economic because it’s everything, and so all of those things together are real issues. But it is definitely the case this is not a full agenda or a full explanation of what happened in over the last 50 years. It is a partial, but again, to be fair, so are the other stories that people tell right and so, I put it in my review of reviews, which is like people accuse this of being a hammer to hit all nails but it only talks about some issues; it’s a hammer to hit some nails, and nails go into houses. It’s like if you were to develop a full governing agenda that was growth-oriented these would be part of your issue agenda, but it certainly wouldn’t be the whole thing. You’d have to have answers to trade and bank regulation and a million other things as well, and like there’s in some of the related literature there’s some things on some of these elements, so like if you take the Steve Teles and Brink Lindsey book The Captured Economy, it has a whole section on finance--I don’t 100% agree with all of it, I love Steven and Brink but it’s, that’s the part of the book I’m not as quite on--but like there are people with a finance story that has a similar, you know, but it is by no means central to the story here. One thing I will say that I think is attractive about it as a both as a politics and a policy agenda that it is related to, these things are deeply related to the kind of middle-class affordability problems that exist throughout the economy, so like you talk about what the kind of, the people what people spend money on their lives, it’s you know housing, education, transportation--
[00:33:28] Sam: Of course. Well that’s Klein’s wife who coined the term the “affordability crisis” and they’re sensitive to that but sort of not really, because I would say the fact that he collaborated not with his wife but Thompson at least on this book, kind of does drive it very far in the direction of like the techno-utopian. The last half of the book which we haven’t substantially discussed is really about kind of R&D, what is the government’s exact role now and what is it desirable role in prompting scientific and technological change and implementing those changes across the economy, and the way they open the book kind of redoubles this sense that they’ve got a kind of narrow agenda that’s not about everyone. It’s really does come closer to a kind of vanguardist project about why we’re not living the cool lives we were promised which you find in the tech bro precincts of Peter Thiel and so forth.
[00:34:33] David: So this is where I disagree with you 100%. So I want to say two things. One of the things is that the types of things they are critiquing are themselves the sources of regional inequality at the per capita level. So this is a regular finding in literature which is that if you bar housing from a rich area, that area won’t get less, it will have fewer people in it but it’s per capita will be richer. So by limiting access to Greenwich, Connecticut you get a richer set of people in Greenwich, Connecticut and they’re more unequal from the rest of the country and so the issue here is not, it’s not vanguardist in the sense that it is deciding to promote the needs of the very richest in society who very much often are themselves NIMBY about many of these things, right, so that they are, so and you see that one of the things that has really changed, so there’s a, they spend a lot of time, actually all these books spend a lot of time with a paper by Ganong and Shoag on how the rise in land use restrictions led to a slowing of ordinary people moving to the, our hottest job markets.
[00:35:46] Sam: Yes. Clearly they’re concerned about that, yeah.
[00:35:50] David: And this creates more inequality across places because there are people who are simply excluded from working in Silicon Valley, whether working as a technologist or as a barber, right, wages for barbers are also higher in Silicon Valley than they are in Detroit or whatever, and so the claim that this is only designed to make life easier for the vanguard, like it turns out that the very richest can still afford to live in the areas that are the highest growth. So like AI firms are still locating in San Francisco, it’s just that, the benefits of them are accruing to a narrower rather than broader group of people. The second thing I’d say about this is related to how I started, and this is a situation where, it’s like the alternative is stasis. It’s fundamentally conservative. One thing I put in a critique of a paper by Ganesh Sitaraman, Morgan Ricks, and Chris Serkin, is that like they have an idea that we should re-regulate the airline industry in order to preserve regional hubs. And I said well look, if the same cities were, if you saw an economy and the same 500 companies were in the Fortune 500 50 years later or a hundred years later, you’d say, God how sclerotic that that is. That’s a place where you’re not seeing enough change, you’re not giving enough opportunity, there’s no ability to change your lot in life, your, you know, things are, it’s a sclerotic economy. But we should feel the same way about places too, that things change. Like we develop air conditioning and so suddenly the South and West become much more attractive and that is a good thing. People like being warm. I don’t know, I don’t like it there, but other people like it there and more power to them. And this is the, if you want to take seriously middle-class people’s attitudes, the policies you should be looking at are the places that accommodate them. So Houston is accommodating of middle-class desires and you can tell that because middle-class people move to Houston in huge huge huge numbers. San Francisco is not accommodating of ordinary Americans’ desires, and so I would say that it’s almost, in at least on the housing elements and some of the other things I think may be a little different this, are like almost anti-vanguardist in that way, or at least anti-elite place in that way. They’re aiming their fire and, you can see this in some of the policy proposals, which are like we should condition federal spending on you relaxing your land use regulations--well that’s a way to get money to Texas and out of New York City. And you even saw this in the CHIPS bill. I’m ranting here but I’m going to go one for like one more minute here which is like that the money the federal government was spending on advanced technological manufacturing is going to Arizona. Like that’s where it goes. It’s not going to, one last thing I do have to say is that the shackling of the state stuff has like a really dramatic implications for left-behind places as well, and so you can see this in one of the examples they spend an extraordinary amount of time on in the Klein and Thompson book, which is rural broadband. The Biden administration promised this roll-out of rural broadband and I, for what’s worth I’m not a fan of this program, but if you are you’d like it to actually produce rural broadband and not just--so all that to say is I thought that that part of your critique was not well placed.
[00:39:18] Sam: Yeah so much of that is fair and I would say this point now is not, wasn’t really my main critique, which we should get to. What I said that set you off just now really was more about the kind gestalt impression you get of the book reading it and it’s like what they’re choosing to do, what they’re choosing to talk about and not talk about. I totally agree with you that they’re, they most definitely want to impose new problems on elites, who are the very people who, in your terms, are have become gentry and are trying to lock down their communities against disturbance. And totally the abundance agenda would challenge them and then in the series of ways you mentioned, like maybe some of their actual policies are actually about spreading the abundance and the state’s concern and so all of that is totally fair. It’s really like when you join the chapters that are more Klein’s to those that are more Thompson’s you really get the sense that the people who matter are the innovators and of course if San Francisco is going to survive it needs to be affordable for the barbers, even as like Houston becomes a much greater paradise because it’s just more affordable for the little people to move there. What’s kind of unresolved in their vision, I think, and this is not just about vibes, is what’s the exact kind of relation between these, the kind of innovative class and everyone else. Now the main critique--should we turn to that?--is really about in what ways they’ve faced down neoliberalism and in what ways they haven’t. In case you were curious, I’ve taken two econ courses in life. I took micro as an undergrad and then I took Dani Rodrik’s class and he’s, what is sort of interesting about this abundance debate is that it’s just about one country. Maybe there are corresponding crews everywhere, but Rodrik has a paper about the new productivism which is basically the abundance agenda, and he says things that were very familiar to me from having taken his class, which is about the way in which economies like ours have developed features that were once thought to be endemic to Global South economies. Arthur Lewis wrote about them and the basic feature is so-called dualism. That there are like vanguardist sectors and then there’s the rearguard of the economy that’s stagnating and the basic argument is that neoliberalism was all about exacerbating this dualistic feature that has been emergent in this slow-growth period in the United States too. And there I think Klein and Thompson have really nothing to say about that because if you care about that, it’s not just about like making Cleveland, which they do reference as affordable, more attractive in the way that Houston is, it’s about like broadening the vanguard and making that their own declared goal of creativity and innovation more accessible to more people in more ways. And they just have nothing to say about that. And if you think that the Trump era is really about like the stagnant versus the innovative, and like you get a massive protest vote against those who may be NIMBYs, but just are enjoying like lives in the vanguard, however obstructed, then you really want someone to focus on that feature of neoliberalism and they don’t.
[00:43:23] David: Yeah I’d say that there are some things in the kind of broader space that are dedicated to this but on some level the there is an idea that like the solution is growth and redistribution rather than a planned economy on some level, and the technology just does what it does and so--you do see some ideas about education, so in an essay in this campaign called “Cost Disease Socialism” about, this is the well-known idea of the cost disease that education is an example of, something that doesn’t, that as productivity increases in other areas you need, that like it becomes ever more expensive to do education, and this, there are ideas about how we could improve education in a technological era and similarly how we can improve diffusion of skills more broadly. But it is a, really, I think that is a real challenge, though I don’t know that it’s a challenge for them any more than it is a challenge for lots of other people, which is that like, there’s no answer to like that problem exists in, as I put it is broadly speaking a product of kind of skill-biased technological change, which is kind of the way that economists often talk about this--
[00:44:36] Sam: Yeah the rise of the knowledge economy just makes it makes things different than when you could participate as a burly man in the like center of production in the auto field--
[00:44:49] David: I will say that these are like in a lot of ways responsive, the same way that you might think about in the climate change debate, we talked about the about addressing the problem and about resilience, that these are politics, like construction is an industry that is you know necessarily local and necessarily and, is your kind of classic big burly whatever type of, and that these policies by doing more to accommodate have this kind of resilience to technological change in a way that the policies they attack are exacerbating of it. So that if there are huge gains from being a captain of industry or a financial captain and you can then further at those benefits through using the state to regulate housing markets or whatever else, you can kind of further un-entrench the gains to get through the technological change, whereas these are policies that are designed to react to that. They’re not like saying we need to come up with a solution that would, like we need to fundamentally sure right get rid of Google or whatever, in order to equalize things, but it does say it is a policy response in that way, which is that like it’s about both affordability but also about removing some capacity, that the beneficiaries of this have used their economic power to achieve political power than and further entrench their economic power.
[00:46:12] Sam: All fair. I mean so now we kind of agree. It’s just the question is how far should one, including Klein and Thompson, set the bar, and they’re giving a state task and their book is a statist book and it’s true it breaks with neoliberalism as an anti-statist you know, POV, but then--
[00:46:34] David: I wouldn’t call it a state book as much as it’s, kind of has mixed attitudes, but yeah, keeping going.
[00:46:39] Sam: Mixed, relative to before. Their account is liberalism was anti-statist and we need it to be statist but then what are the things the state’s doing, and it’s not, the planning state including in the United States’s account of it responsible for the most rapid growth ever in this country. If you’re going back to Robert Gordon, we need to talk about the war economy when the state literally owned half the factories and told the rest what to do and that was like a what? Doubling of the GDP in three years? But leaving that example aside, it’s kind of like their theory of what the state does is not about spreading productive opportunity and the kind of innovation that’s at the heart of their vision and your, I think your reply is, well no one knows how to do that and maybe we shouldn’t, let’s just unleash the innovation wherever private actors are going to conduct it, and then if there’s an inequity, let’s spread it.
[00:47:48] David: This is where some of the like other critiques, the non-newer critiques I think really come up. Which is that, there’s a line that’s like why aren’t they more concerned about redistribution, and this is 100% false, which is that like they’re unbelievably concerned about redistribution because that is their the way they address that problem, right?
[00:48:10] Sam: I would say they mention it and they say that’s obvious that that’s what we would do to the extent that there are inequities. We just, we can’t harp on it, because we need to talk about making more innovation and growth available for the sake of re-distribution. So that’s a very neoliberal POV, I think, to say well you know, it’s the kind of progressive version of neoliberalism that was ascendant, that insofar as there are inequities, the tax system will take care of it, or some other redistributionist tactic. So I totally agree with you that the critique of them for omitting redistribution is laughable because actually they just presuppose it. They presuppose redistribution. I’m saying something different, which is that they’re not interested in the redistribution of the very thing they say is most important in our lives, which is creativity and innovation. And then that’s going to exacerbate this vanguard, rearguard--
[00:49:13] David: I would say to that, which is that--two things. One is that I don’t, that there are a whole variety of pre-distribution ideas that you see, this is kind of Jacob Hacker and the challenge of course is that there’s not any evidence that any of them work at all. And so the, this is like, has the benefits of being a tractable set of policy concerns rather than a, you’re looking at me skeptically, but like--
[00:49:40] Sam: Well there’s not a lot of evidence a lot of things will work but a lot of things haven’t been tried so--
[00:49:43] David: That’s true. I would say though, I would say that like taking some of these examples, they’re quite practical, right, so like, it’s like allowing more housing construction, we know produces more housing in Houston and Tokyo right, and similarly like it is not the case that Spain is some kind of technological vanguard that has some magic powers or anything but you can produce trains at 30 orders of magnitude less. And similarly like some of the government reform stuff is like, you know like Operation Warp Speed achieved real ends and so--for a book that is so futuristic in its like opening pages, it’s like remarkably, a lot of the actual policy things are quite brass-tacksy in a lot of ways.
[00:50:33] Sam: That’s right. I think that’s a really good observation that they are conservative in the sense that whatever radical outcomes will be achieved through like workable solutions that are available politically, but at least have worked elsewhere, and it’s more like rearranging the chessboard.
[00:50:53] David: A story I told when we had Tracy Meares on the podcast about being confronted by a radical libertarian [unintelligible] zoning reform and he says you’re an ameliorationist. They are decidedly ameliorationists--
[00:51:06] Sam: Right. Oh, totally, totally. I think that’s right.
[00:51:06] David: and not like radicals in that way. And I, like this highlights a little bit of the like kind of maybe political--and so there’s a, one of the lines of critique that is been extremely strange in my mind is the critique coming from kind of antitrust types. And a lot of these issues pull together in a lot of ways which is like more stuff means more competition and you can see this in the work on like land concentration and rents. So like that, what the fight is about is not about like are you in favor of increased land use controls, that doesn’t make any sense on some level, but rather like does this make sense as a political project for the moment in which we are in. And like the challenges it has and the attractions it has as a political project are a little distinct from the challenge like, is it a good idea, which I obviously think and you’re a little more skeptical of but also not entirely hostile to, and one of the real benefits it has is that it is, again, it is a cross-government. In an era when Democrats, who they are specifically talking to, who are not in control of Washington but are in control of California, like it provides a mechanism, and they have a political theory of that as well, which is that like it’s embarrassing, if you’re trying to sell liberal governance to America, that California can’t build a train. Like that creates like a real-world example of political failure and so one of the attractions is it’s like, these are things we can do, and things we have to do, if we’re going, and we here being kind of liberal jurisdictions, if we’re going to achieve certain things. Now, there are a lot of other things they could have talked about. Like crime control would have been one, but like that’s not part of their issue set, but like it is a project that has like a political vision as well as a policy one.
[00:53:15] Sam: I think that’s right. I also found the antitrust critiques of the book underwhelming. I think that testifies more to the fact that certain commentators on the left have this idée fixe about antitrust as if it’s a panacea that will solve all of our problems, which is ridiculous. And I think Klein and Thompson, by focusing on production, I mean it is in in in thinking about economics and our situation like a really bold and important move that the left should embrace and make it on its own terms, but the one thing, one area I would push back is that, in part because they published it late on their own account, like I think it was supposed to be like a Kamala Harris campaign book but for whatever reason it got delayed and now it’s a kind of you know doom, like alternative-to-doom book, is that if you’re if your basic problem is that the majority is not voting for liberalism anymore, well that’s for a lot of reasons. But one very big reason, in my opinion is this vanguard-rearguard thing. And so to the extent you say, oh well, we won’t fix that in fact, we might exacerbate it, but we’ll just remember that liberals stand for redistributing when they haven’t been doing that, they’ve been very neoliberal on those points, lowering taxes, destroying the welfare state etc. It is supposed to be an actionable book, as you say, but on the very important context it now is addressing, which is populism or Trumpism or whatever, I think it’s still really important to make the critique that I want to make rather than the antitrust or redistribution--
[00:55:27] David: Yeah I see what you’re saying though the one thing I’d say is that like the politics of rich areas hiving themselves off is so awful along exactly the dimension you’re talking about that it’s, it seems like it is not the solution you would choose, but it is a quite both tractable and attractive solution both as a policy matter but in addition is a political one, to say like you know what, our politics can’t be defined by the woo-woo NIMBYism of Marin County, right that is I think central throughline but also like that is a direct response to the type of inequality issue that you’re harping on, in a way that I think that other responses of which you’re gesturing towards, are not dealing. And so I’d say that like, and further, but another thing I’d say is like you should, really really shouldn’t underrate the importance of construction to exactly these issues. So like we’ve seen almost no productivity increases in the construction industry in about 50 years. It’s really, we build houses the same way we used to, and this has led to construction industry being both a source of a lot of jobs but also a like a slow-growth area of the economy in a way that is exactly these vanguard issues--and particularly by the way, it is the ones that are, assuming we don’t destroy the global economy in the next 45 seconds, that are like useful in a globalized economy. So like it’s, a people think plumbers jobs are never going away, well you have to have a lot of construction to have a lot of plumbers jobs, and those type of things are, so again I think it is much more responsive to these concern, these political concerns than you’re having because I think it’s much more responsive to the economic concerns, and I think that other ideas are like--
[00:57:40] Sam: Even worse.
[00:57:40] David: Well they’re just like way worse both on the politics and on the economics.
[00:57:49] Sam: So let me just reformulate so I just understand exactly where we’ve ended up. So this program might actually not address the urban-rural divide, it might just deny that’s a problem because how many people even live outside cities and if we’re creating like many urban hubs across the country where there’s innovation, we’ll at least have moderated regionalized inequality, and there’ll be a lot more inclusion of more people. All of that is exactly right, I mean it makes it makes sense. There’s still this residual issue you know which is you would have within each city a kind of master class and servant class, and maybe the servants would be better off. They wouldn’t be innovating, they’d be serving. And the question is that what we should be going for. I’m not saying that that like residual issue is the reason that Trump is winning, but it does reveal this kind of, to me, a bit of inconsistency in the abundance agenda, at least the techno-utopian version of it, because the whole point is to say we shouldn’t just benefit from innovation, we should engage in it. But who? And it’s actually in the service of like a pretty narrow slice of people, seemingly.
[00:59:15] David: Yeah so I don’t agree with that, that it’s in service of--I think the innovation benefits go to the consumers of innovation as much as they go to the producers of innovation and--
[00:59:26] Sam: Oh sure, like everyone gets an iPhone.
[00:59:28] David: Everyone gets an iPhone, right, and that’s really good. It’s really good to have an iPhone. It’s also really good to have--and secondarily there are other policy tools that are just not here, that are like, so like we have a variety of debates about education policy that aren’t in any of these books but are real response to that type of question.
[00:59:49] Sam: It would be if that would be the center core of it, I agree.
[00:59:50] David: Right and so like it is a critique to say they’re not talking about these other issues, and that’s fine. It is true that there are a million things that they’re not talking about but they are talking about, among other things, like education debates are pretty stagnant, right, so I don’t know that we have a great set of solutions where it’s here we can have some things we can do that would be good. Anyway, this was super fun, Sam!
[01:00:18] Sam: Yeah, I enjoyed it.
[01:00:19] David: We should, we should talk more often.
[01:00:22] Sam: We should, yeah, no, exactly. Let’s critique other people’s books without them being present on this podcast as well as with them being present.
[01:00:30] David: There you go, it’s really good. The Dworkin-Nagel workshop always used to start with Dworkin or Nagel presenting the work and then critiquing again and you’d always, but the thing they would do is they’d have the person sitting there, and it was just like this horrifying experience of watching two of the smartest people who’ve ever lived like completely demolish a human being, and while they sit there and like slowly melt. So Ezra, Derek, or Mark or Yoni, if you ever want to come on the show we’re more than happy to have you. But this has been a real, a real clambake, so thank you so much Sam. This was really fun.
[01:01:07] Sam: Thank you, David.