The entire Abundance Versus conversation has seemed really silly to me. It's like seeing a room full of dentists fighting because one camp thinks you should brush your teeth more and another thinks you should eat fewer sweets, but both agree that dental health is an important priority. Like, you actually can do both. When I read Abundance, I was pretty underwhelmed -- like, yes, we should want to build more and, also, a regulatory audit probably makes sense to discern whether their stated policies are working together in concert or creating crazy incentives that ultimately undermine both the progressive goals and distorting markets to the point of white-knuckled scarcity.
The problem is that, if you don't kick the beehive, your book will be well-received and then not receive any attention, which is what you need to make sure that it gets into podcasts, angry twitter threads, Substacks: the Zeitgeist writ large. On the card-carrying progressive point, if Klein and Thompson had genuinely no progressive bona-fides, this book would again have had the same problem of being ignored. There are plenty of libertarian leaning authors who have written books with similar themes, but they haven't made the stir this one has, not because the content is much different, but because of the identity of the authors.
This is simply the centrist's version of what Mamdani with "Freeze the Rent," when no other candidates were willing to sign on, and Castro did in 2020 with the idea of making illegal immigration a civil violation instead of a criminal act, again when no other candidates were willing to sign on. If you want attention (which you need to change minds), then find a relevant intra-party fault line, and throw dynamite into that hole.
To me, "Abundance" seemed to be framed to appear at the beginning of a second Biden (or first Harris) administration. It would have been a liberal call to arms for focusing on building state capacity in a Democratic-controlled administration. Instead, it's come out in the time of Trump and DOGE and it reads like some future world scenario if and when Democrats regain power, but it's not speaking to the onslaught we currently face.
Housing policy (and to a certain extent high-speed rail, which Klein and Thompson also wrote about) is mostly controlled by municipal, county and state governments, however, which makes it such a tractable issue to advocate for. The only federal level issue in that book, really, is scientific research.
Yes, I lead a local pro-housing group so I'm focusing on the local. But I still think the book was originally written as a call to arms, so to speak, for a Democrat-controlled or at least Democrat-led Federal administration, to not just fund, but to get things built. They write, for example, about the massive funding for energy infrastructure that's now gone. Our city and state anticipated Federal support for building wind farms to supply new net zero housing, as well as for the Federal transportation funding that would help deal with the mobility needs of lots of new housing (our Re-Connecting Communities funding just got rescinded). And funding for income-restricted housing is looking bleak. That funding was available under Biden, and still, we were still dragging our feet where I live, just as Klein and Thompson describe in their book. So I think they were gearing up for a new Democratic Presidential term, to at least make leaders look at what's actually happening on the ground in cities and states as you say. I just think it might have been a different framing if they were writing for America under a Trump administration. But I guess we could ask them!
An insightful post. Abundance pairs very well with progressivism and progressive goals, so I'm disheartened by a lot of the infighting, which seems largely unnecessary. I will say a fair number of critics of Abundance clearly didn't read the book. David Austin Walsh admitted he only "read bits and pieces", though I'd wager he didn't read it at all.
My area of interest is medical research targeting aging biology to treat/prevent age-related diseases and increase healthy lifespan. While there has been talk of abundance related to healthcare, especially from the Niskanen Center, medically targeting the biology of aging to fundamentally change 21st-century medicine is still largely unknown, despite fast-growing support; examples includes ARPA-H programs PROSPR to develop aging biomarkers and run FDA clinical trials against them and FRONT to realize functional repair of neocortical tissue. PROSPR is run by a researcher who was a mentor in Longevity Biotech Fellowship, and FRONT is managed by the author of "Replacing Aging."
Your post was a good review right up until you chose to attack Hanania with the ad hominem—“scientific racist”. At least produce some evidence, but it really doesn’t matter whether Hanania is a “scientific racist” or not, as long as he is making intelligent comments—bad people can still be correct. If you object to his point of view then attack it, not him. You lose any credibility as a thoughtful person when you stoop to name calling.
“I attack ideas, I don't attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job…” (Antonin Scalia)
I agree with you that the point being made about progressives rested on their attitudes towards any association with “wrong” thinking pundits like Hanania and even the status of both authors—as the “wrong” messengers of these ideas.
Having said that, I am still in disagreement with labeling Hanania a racist for the purposes of this post. Mind you, I am making no claim as to his character. If progressives and left leaning democrats are unable to evaluate better ideas about how to create abundance (as discussed by the authors) because Hanania and conservatives may actually find some common ground with those same progressives and left leaning democrats, they should be viewed as dishonest and ignored.
If you, as Hanania has repeatedly stated in writing, believe that humanity exists on a hierarchy organized by race, with some groups less intelligent than others, then you are a) a scientific racist and b) not entitled to a presumption of insight or good faith because c) scientific racism is itself evidence of catastrophically deficient cognitive ability.
No one should be “entitled to a presumption of insight or good faith”. Thinking about what someone writes or says should never be optional.
I don’t know if Richard Hanania is a person who holds bad ideas about race and intelligence. A lot of people don’t like Charles Murray for writing The Bell Curve either. You’re free to take whatever position you like on Hanania, but my point still stands: an ad hominem is not a winning argument. It’s not an argument at all. Its value is zero.
This comment(s) doesn't really make any sense as it appears to have missed why Richard Hanania was brought up and why him being a 'scientific racist' is an important piece of data to the argument being made.
The author wasn't pointing out Hanania's racism to distract from some other fact or argument being made.....Hanania's racism was a key fact to prove the argument that the author was proposing.
Daniel didn't understand the argument being made. Daniel is actually the one slipping in a logical fallacy to try to distract from the point being made. Whether or not the racist science guy has some intelligent thoughts is irrelevant to the discussion.
“Thompson did Abundance no favors by promoting it on the podcast of Richard Hanania, who despite recent and occasional anti-MAGA leanings remains a notorious scientific racist. In sum, Abundance does very little to offer progressive intellectuals a spoonful of sugar—indeed, it embraces shibboleths and cultural signifiers almost guaranteed to put progressives off their supposed medicine.”
I have provided the full quote above for you (or anyone else) to make sense of.
My read is that if you choose to discuss a subject with an imperfect person who can be challenged with irrelevant ad hominem attacks, rather than reasoned arguments your audience must be excused for failing to understand your points. This does not make any sense to me.
I am happy to entertain your thoughts on this topic. If I’m missing something please spell it out.
Clearly the author was talking about the impact on or approach towards progressives. That Hanania is a racist has a very clear and very obvious impact in this regard no matter how many other bright ideas or correct statements Hanania might have. Making the case for or against the scientific merits of Hanania's various utterings or arguing whether or not progressives should feel this way about Hanania isn't relevant to the point the author made. You aren't refuting the authors point or making any coherent argument about it and there is just more ad hominem here. You don't seem to understand the authors argument or are purposefully misconstruing it. You want to argue over the scientific chops of some podcaster guy, the author however wanted only to point out the impact on progressives.
Your logical fallacy is common in comment threads and commonly used in defense of racists (but they aren't wrong are they!?), and perhaps calling a racist a racist offends you in some way.....but it is good journalism to identify racism and how it impacts people as opposed to your suggestion that we ignore this and deal strictly with the science arguments (but not the racism within the science arguments).
This comment(s) doesn't really make any sense as it appears to have missed why Richard Hanania was brought up and why him being a 'scientific racist' is an important piece of data to the argument being made.
The author wasn't pointing out Hanania's racism to distract from some other fact or argument being made.....Hanania's racism was a key fact to prove the argument that the author was proposing.
Daniel didn't understand the argument being made. Daniel is actually the one slipping in a logical fallacy to try to distract from the point being made. Whether or not the racist science guy has some intelligent thoughts is irrelevant to the discussion.
It's an essay that simultaneously both contains sentences such as "Nothing annoys me more than listening to American leftists fantasizing about socialism", and highlights various considerations that Klein and Thompson have, if not ignored, then at least downplayed, to a degree that this constitutes a potentially fatal flaw, if not for their entire analysis, then at least for the YIMBY part of it.
I don't think Abundance ignores this stuff, exactly, it's just that the book is meant to be more of a manifesto.
Thompson and Klein can get deep into the weeds on specific structural problems and recommendations on how to fix them -- I've heard them do deep dives on these issues for years before the book came out. But if they tried to cram it all into a book it would be 800 pages.
Years ago when I worked at what was then the world’s largest financial services company, our chairman would enjoin us to own “a share of mind” of our customers. It was not as clunky as it sounds. How often and how quickly will our clients turn to us when they have a particular need to be met?
Democrats, in their present parlous state, are looking to increase their share of mind among the electorate. All this supply-side progressivism talk is to make voters associate the Democrats with being the party that most efficiently provides the enabling conditions (now called state capacity) for Americans to pursue the American Dream that neoliberalism has promised them. In that sense, abundance progressivism is the handmaiden of neoliberalism.
But can we do anything about it? Sadly, no. Looking back at the great sweep of American history since it began its industrialization, it’s seems clear to me, albeit belatedly, that a feral kind of capitalism is embedded in the identity of this nation. The state exists to rescue a business and financial sector fuelled by animal spirits when it runs amuck. Only when there is a catastrophic economic crisis that discredits that economic model is there a shift in the relationship between state and society more broadly.
And one could argue that the Great Depression too in the end rolled out a safety net for businesses. In return it asked for a semblance of a welfare state. That side of the bargain had been progressively (sic) shredded since the 1980s. The hubris of the private sector is now so great that it wants to perform its high wire act with no safety net.
The entire Abundance Versus conversation has seemed really silly to me. It's like seeing a room full of dentists fighting because one camp thinks you should brush your teeth more and another thinks you should eat fewer sweets, but both agree that dental health is an important priority. Like, you actually can do both. When I read Abundance, I was pretty underwhelmed -- like, yes, we should want to build more and, also, a regulatory audit probably makes sense to discern whether their stated policies are working together in concert or creating crazy incentives that ultimately undermine both the progressive goals and distorting markets to the point of white-knuckled scarcity.
I wrote down some of the problems I have with Abundance based on my environmental activist background.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/169675774?r=os772&showWelcomeOnShare=true&triedRedirect=true
I guess it depends on your audience, as I just finished a brilliant book on degrowth communism, and I'm all in. If you're interested in my write-up, you can read it here: https://cryn.substack.com/p/the-case-for-degrowth-communism-kohei
The problem is that, if you don't kick the beehive, your book will be well-received and then not receive any attention, which is what you need to make sure that it gets into podcasts, angry twitter threads, Substacks: the Zeitgeist writ large. On the card-carrying progressive point, if Klein and Thompson had genuinely no progressive bona-fides, this book would again have had the same problem of being ignored. There are plenty of libertarian leaning authors who have written books with similar themes, but they haven't made the stir this one has, not because the content is much different, but because of the identity of the authors.
This is simply the centrist's version of what Mamdani with "Freeze the Rent," when no other candidates were willing to sign on, and Castro did in 2020 with the idea of making illegal immigration a civil violation instead of a criminal act, again when no other candidates were willing to sign on. If you want attention (which you need to change minds), then find a relevant intra-party fault line, and throw dynamite into that hole.
To me, "Abundance" seemed to be framed to appear at the beginning of a second Biden (or first Harris) administration. It would have been a liberal call to arms for focusing on building state capacity in a Democratic-controlled administration. Instead, it's come out in the time of Trump and DOGE and it reads like some future world scenario if and when Democrats regain power, but it's not speaking to the onslaught we currently face.
Housing policy (and to a certain extent high-speed rail, which Klein and Thompson also wrote about) is mostly controlled by municipal, county and state governments, however, which makes it such a tractable issue to advocate for. The only federal level issue in that book, really, is scientific research.
Yes, I lead a local pro-housing group so I'm focusing on the local. But I still think the book was originally written as a call to arms, so to speak, for a Democrat-controlled or at least Democrat-led Federal administration, to not just fund, but to get things built. They write, for example, about the massive funding for energy infrastructure that's now gone. Our city and state anticipated Federal support for building wind farms to supply new net zero housing, as well as for the Federal transportation funding that would help deal with the mobility needs of lots of new housing (our Re-Connecting Communities funding just got rescinded). And funding for income-restricted housing is looking bleak. That funding was available under Biden, and still, we were still dragging our feet where I live, just as Klein and Thompson describe in their book. So I think they were gearing up for a new Democratic Presidential term, to at least make leaders look at what's actually happening on the ground in cities and states as you say. I just think it might have been a different framing if they were writing for America under a Trump administration. But I guess we could ask them!
An insightful post. Abundance pairs very well with progressivism and progressive goals, so I'm disheartened by a lot of the infighting, which seems largely unnecessary. I will say a fair number of critics of Abundance clearly didn't read the book. David Austin Walsh admitted he only "read bits and pieces", though I'd wager he didn't read it at all.
My area of interest is medical research targeting aging biology to treat/prevent age-related diseases and increase healthy lifespan. While there has been talk of abundance related to healthcare, especially from the Niskanen Center, medically targeting the biology of aging to fundamentally change 21st-century medicine is still largely unknown, despite fast-growing support; examples includes ARPA-H programs PROSPR to develop aging biomarkers and run FDA clinical trials against them and FRONT to realize functional repair of neocortical tissue. PROSPR is run by a researcher who was a mentor in Longevity Biotech Fellowship, and FRONT is managed by the author of "Replacing Aging."
Your post was a good review right up until you chose to attack Hanania with the ad hominem—“scientific racist”. At least produce some evidence, but it really doesn’t matter whether Hanania is a “scientific racist” or not, as long as he is making intelligent comments—bad people can still be correct. If you object to his point of view then attack it, not him. You lose any credibility as a thoughtful person when you stoop to name calling.
“I attack ideas, I don't attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job…” (Antonin Scalia)
I agree with you that the point being made about progressives rested on their attitudes towards any association with “wrong” thinking pundits like Hanania and even the status of both authors—as the “wrong” messengers of these ideas.
Having said that, I am still in disagreement with labeling Hanania a racist for the purposes of this post. Mind you, I am making no claim as to his character. If progressives and left leaning democrats are unable to evaluate better ideas about how to create abundance (as discussed by the authors) because Hanania and conservatives may actually find some common ground with those same progressives and left leaning democrats, they should be viewed as dishonest and ignored.
If you, as Hanania has repeatedly stated in writing, believe that humanity exists on a hierarchy organized by race, with some groups less intelligent than others, then you are a) a scientific racist and b) not entitled to a presumption of insight or good faith because c) scientific racism is itself evidence of catastrophically deficient cognitive ability.
No one should be “entitled to a presumption of insight or good faith”. Thinking about what someone writes or says should never be optional.
I don’t know if Richard Hanania is a person who holds bad ideas about race and intelligence. A lot of people don’t like Charles Murray for writing The Bell Curve either. You’re free to take whatever position you like on Hanania, but my point still stands: an ad hominem is not a winning argument. It’s not an argument at all. Its value is zero.
This comment(s) doesn't really make any sense as it appears to have missed why Richard Hanania was brought up and why him being a 'scientific racist' is an important piece of data to the argument being made.
The author wasn't pointing out Hanania's racism to distract from some other fact or argument being made.....Hanania's racism was a key fact to prove the argument that the author was proposing.
Daniel didn't understand the argument being made. Daniel is actually the one slipping in a logical fallacy to try to distract from the point being made. Whether or not the racist science guy has some intelligent thoughts is irrelevant to the discussion.
“Thompson did Abundance no favors by promoting it on the podcast of Richard Hanania, who despite recent and occasional anti-MAGA leanings remains a notorious scientific racist. In sum, Abundance does very little to offer progressive intellectuals a spoonful of sugar—indeed, it embraces shibboleths and cultural signifiers almost guaranteed to put progressives off their supposed medicine.”
I have provided the full quote above for you (or anyone else) to make sense of.
My read is that if you choose to discuss a subject with an imperfect person who can be challenged with irrelevant ad hominem attacks, rather than reasoned arguments your audience must be excused for failing to understand your points. This does not make any sense to me.
I am happy to entertain your thoughts on this topic. If I’m missing something please spell it out.
Thank you.
Clearly the author was talking about the impact on or approach towards progressives. That Hanania is a racist has a very clear and very obvious impact in this regard no matter how many other bright ideas or correct statements Hanania might have. Making the case for or against the scientific merits of Hanania's various utterings or arguing whether or not progressives should feel this way about Hanania isn't relevant to the point the author made. You aren't refuting the authors point or making any coherent argument about it and there is just more ad hominem here. You don't seem to understand the authors argument or are purposefully misconstruing it. You want to argue over the scientific chops of some podcaster guy, the author however wanted only to point out the impact on progressives.
Your logical fallacy is common in comment threads and commonly used in defense of racists (but they aren't wrong are they!?), and perhaps calling a racist a racist offends you in some way.....but it is good journalism to identify racism and how it impacts people as opposed to your suggestion that we ignore this and deal strictly with the science arguments (but not the racism within the science arguments).
This comment(s) doesn't really make any sense as it appears to have missed why Richard Hanania was brought up and why him being a 'scientific racist' is an important piece of data to the argument being made.
The author wasn't pointing out Hanania's racism to distract from some other fact or argument being made.....Hanania's racism was a key fact to prove the argument that the author was proposing.
Daniel didn't understand the argument being made. Daniel is actually the one slipping in a logical fallacy to try to distract from the point being made. Whether or not the racist science guy has some intelligent thoughts is irrelevant to the discussion.
Worth reading is Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath's 2024 "A critical theory of (or for) America": https://josephheath.substack.com/p/a-critical-theory-of-or-for-america
It's an essay that simultaneously both contains sentences such as "Nothing annoys me more than listening to American leftists fantasizing about socialism", and highlights various considerations that Klein and Thompson have, if not ignored, then at least downplayed, to a degree that this constitutes a potentially fatal flaw, if not for their entire analysis, then at least for the YIMBY part of it.
Heath continues in the same vein in his recent post on Abundance: https://josephheath.substack.com/p/my-two-cents-on-abundance
Both of those links are great.
I don't think Abundance ignores this stuff, exactly, it's just that the book is meant to be more of a manifesto.
Thompson and Klein can get deep into the weeds on specific structural problems and recommendations on how to fix them -- I've heard them do deep dives on these issues for years before the book came out. But if they tried to cram it all into a book it would be 800 pages.
Years ago when I worked at what was then the world’s largest financial services company, our chairman would enjoin us to own “a share of mind” of our customers. It was not as clunky as it sounds. How often and how quickly will our clients turn to us when they have a particular need to be met?
Democrats, in their present parlous state, are looking to increase their share of mind among the electorate. All this supply-side progressivism talk is to make voters associate the Democrats with being the party that most efficiently provides the enabling conditions (now called state capacity) for Americans to pursue the American Dream that neoliberalism has promised them. In that sense, abundance progressivism is the handmaiden of neoliberalism.
But can we do anything about it? Sadly, no. Looking back at the great sweep of American history since it began its industrialization, it’s seems clear to me, albeit belatedly, that a feral kind of capitalism is embedded in the identity of this nation. The state exists to rescue a business and financial sector fuelled by animal spirits when it runs amuck. Only when there is a catastrophic economic crisis that discredits that economic model is there a shift in the relationship between state and society more broadly.
And one could argue that the Great Depression too in the end rolled out a safety net for businesses. In return it asked for a semblance of a welfare state. That side of the bargain had been progressively (sic) shredded since the 1980s. The hubris of the private sector is now so great that it wants to perform its high wire act with no safety net.