Move fast and break things

The trouble with 'everything-bagel' Abundance is the gaping hole right in the center of it.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shelby County v. Holder

Abundance, the buzzy new political call to arms by New York Times writer/podcaster Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is less a book than a manifesto.

The primary thrust of Abundance is to ask what we need more of in American society — housing! clean energy! high-speed rail! — and to maniacally reorient our democratic government around providing it as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s an intoxicating vision, and one whose central complaint rings agonizingly true.

In the U.S., governments at all levels — but particularly the national one — are all too often plodding, rigid, and anachronistic. They focus on procedures and rules rather than outcomes. (Or to put it in product management terms, they’re not focused on the end user.)

Just one example that’s not even mentioned in the book: anyone who has ever had the distinct displeasure of interacting with most U.S. government web sites — or, I should add as a former London resident, the comparative delight of experiencing their British counterparts — understands on some primal level that significant parts of our federal government have abandoned key precepts of outcome-driven problem-solving. (Just try navigating the IRS’ Free File tax return tool. I gave up and paid for H&R Block instead.)

Abundance is at its best in the first major section, on housing, which weaves a convincing tale of how zoning regulations and environmental protection laws were twisted beyond recognition to facilitate an outcome its original proponents had never intended: homeowners using the pretense of environmental concerns to block additional housing from being built in their neighborhoods.

But Abundance falls flat in trying to jumpstart a movement so ‘capacious’ that it’s hard to discern a throughline other than a concerted attempt to roll back government accountability. In example after example of governmental success and failure, Klein and Thompson struggle to tie together common strands that could plausibly comprise a reform agenda. They claim to offer “a lens, not a list” of policy ideas, in the hopes that every reader will populate the whitespace with their own initiatives. But Abundance is ultimately too skeletal of a foundation on which to construct a cohesive body of policy.

Stylistically, Abundance is a mélange — marrying Malcolm Gladwell’s breezy pop aesthetic with the rhetorical vagueness of Obama-era politics and the techno-utopianism of Marc Andreessen. In a recent podcast episode promoting the book, Klein notes that progressives “have lost most of the people who are the big, futuristic influencers — your Elon Musks, your Marc Andreessens,” before joking, “And it's not exactly that I want them back at the moment.”

Methinks Klein doth protest too much. Abundance is a de facto book-length companion piece to Andreessen’s pandemic-era essay “It’s Time to Build.” In it, Andreessen wrote:

In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

Five years later, Klein and Thompson strike a similar note in closing Abundance:

We seek a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world. We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction. This is a story that must be built out of bricks and steel and solar panels and transmission lines, not just words. But it is a story, and we believe it is truer to the American character and experience, truer to both what we have done and what we will do, than the narrow narrative of scarcity that has taken hold.

So how do we achieve this future, exactly? Alas, the answer to this question turns out to be the chief scarcity in Abundance. “It is easy to unfurl a policy wish list,” Klein and Thompson conclude. “But what is ultimately at stake here are our values.”

But if (as they write mere pages earlier) “policy is downstream of values,” why are the authors singularly unwilling to articulate the package of policies they value? The irony is that it’s actually not that easy to unfurl a policy wish list. To do so is to embrace a specific politics, and strategic ambiguity is all too abundant in Abundance — the better to avoid all the attendant opposition that detailed policy prescriptions invite.

Unfortunately, politics — especially the politics of reform — is entirely about navigating these disagreements. But that is a universe Abundance is steadfastly uninterested in acknowledging. And its omission transforms large swathes of the book from what could have been the foundation of a bold policy suite into hollow sloganeering instead.

Here’s a microcosmic example of the dynamic I’m referring to, one that’s so absurdly on the nose it’s hard to believe it’s real. Two years after Marc Andreessen published “It’s Time to Build,” The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas uncovered that Andreessen’s town of Atherton, CA had planned to do just that — build multifamily homes! — but was met with ferocious opposition from, well, a venture capitalist by the name of Marc Andreessen. As he and his wife wrote in a letter to the mayor and town council:

Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!

I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.

Betwixt the airy “It’s Time to Build” and the concrete “It’s Time to Build Near My House” stretches a vast, yawning NIMBY chasm. Here lies The Messy Real World.

One can see why Abundance is reluctant to travel there. For every Marc Andreessen exhorting us to build in the abstract, there exists someone else (or even perchance the very same person!) furiously obstructing its real-world manifestation.

And this is the problem with Abundance: Klein and Thompson never make clear whose abundance must retain primacy in a democracy. Which critiques of, say, building multifamily housing, or constructing nuclear power plants, or establishing solar farms are good-faith arguments worth grappling with, and which are red herrings? Which are the products of shadowy interest groups at odds with societal betterment, and which represent the vox populi?

Disentangling these questions is the art of policymaking and governance. The authors are right to decry the zero-sum mercantilism of Donald Trump’s economic platform. But plenty of policies — constructing more housing very much included — promise nebulous positive-sum outcomes in the aggregate paired with near-certain negative-sum outcomes for substantial subgroups.

Stated more simply, even a positive-sum world contains winners and losers. To quote The Atlantic’s Demsas again: “How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.”

So let’s take housing then. Who is right: Marc Andreessen of ‘It’s Time to Build’ or Marc Andreessen of ‘IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!’

There’s an obvious answer. The one clearly implied by Klein and Thompson (and with which I largely agree) pits homeowners as a narrowly self-interested activist group whose opposition to building more housing pits them against the greater good of society.

But one can easily make the opposite case. Seen differently, homeowner households — who, it should be noted, comprise two-thirds of all Americans, a very large interest group indeed — would be the victims of proposed new homebuilding policies that would decimate by far the largest single source of their wealth¹ in favor of a minoritarian interest group (current non-homeowners).

You see? Politics, once again. Abundance refuses to adjudicate these questions. Indeed, on the same podcast episode mentioned earlier, Klein hand-wavily dismissed his and Thompson’s responsibility to introduce any villains at all:

And I sort of want to see different people come up with their versions of the villains and their versions of the allies and so on. I have my own version of this because I have my own politics, but we are trying to create in the book a framework capacious enough for different kinds of people to think in and generate insights out of.

It's not supposed to be one narrow politics, right? The different flavors of the politics of redistribution are vast. Bernie Sanders's version is different than Jared Golden's version, which is different than Barack Obama's version, which is different than where Kamala Harris's version was, right?

This is an oddly laissez-faire stance for the coauthor of a book decrying “The Problem with Everything-Bagel Liberalism.” At some point, a big enough tent collapses under its own weight. What definition of abundance — to say nothing of the policy framework balanced atop it — is “capacious enough” to encompass both Jared Golden and Bernie Sanders?² Each of these political figures assuredly has goals to make various things abundant. But an abundance of what, exactly?

Take California, for example. Abundance subjects the state to a well-deserved bollocking for its decades-long botching of its high-speed rail project. The state, Klein and Thompson write, “did not hire the best rail designers and engineers to provide in-house expertise and manage the project. California was financing and overseeing a program it did not have the capacity to plan, manage, or truly even understand.”

In 2008, when California began building its high-speed rail system in earnest, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority had just ten workers. One of them was responsible for designing graphics for social media. The job was turned over to a vast assemblage of consultancies…The outsourcing “proved to be a foundational error in the project’s execution — a miscalculation that has resulted in the California High-Speed Rail Authority being overly reliant on a network of high-cost consultants who have consistently underestimated the difficulty of the task,” reported Ralph Vartabedian in the Los Angeles Times.

To further drive the point home, the authors contrast this boondoggle with San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)’s successful and cost-effective purchase of hundreds of new train cars:

One major source of savings, reported trains.com, was “BART’s decision to have its own staff do more of the engineering work in house. The project team has included engineers who have successfully completed new rail car projects at other agencies.” Nor is this an isolated anecdote. Zachary Liscow’s research found that increasing employment in state departments of transportation by 1 employee per 1,000 residents reduced the cost-per-mile of highway construction by 26 percent.

Taken together, these two public transit anecdotes paint a compelling picture of the need for muscular state capacity as, if not quite a panacea, at the very least a prerequisite for effective governance.

But this story is considerably muddled by the authors’ takeaways from Operation Warp Speed (OWS) — the whole-of-government effort to create, approve, and distribute COVID-19 vaccines in record time (and an extraordinarily rare instance of unmitigated policy success from the first Trump administration).

“OWS,” explain Klein and Thompson, “solved problems by enabling the private sector rather than commanding it.”

With few exceptions, such as the Veterans Administration, “no federal employee was directly involved in manufacturing, packaging, shipping, or injecting a single dose of any Warp Speed COVID vaccine,” Mango wrote in his book on the program. “We let one of the biggest pharmaceutical distributors in the world (McKesson) handle the vaccines, let the most successful delivery companies in the world (UPS and FedEx) deliver the vaccines, let those entities who knew best how to vaccinate millions of Americans (CVS and Walgreens) conduct vaccinations.”

Okay. So the abundance agenda calls for an expert-laden, big-government apparatus to build high-speed rail, and a lean skeleton crew that outsources all the key logistics and execution layers to the private sector for a mass vaccination campaign. It’s difficult to detect a usable framework here.

In fact, a thought experiment I couldn’t help but fixate on the more I pondered Abundance is this: who is the archetypal builder the authors have in mind? Is it Robert Moses? At first blush this struck me as obviously incorrect, given his infamy to good government types especially: Moses — whose terrifying specter haunts any discussion on the need to restrain the public bureaucracy and whose near-total absence in Abundance is all the more glaring for that reason — is practically a byword for unaccountability in government.

Here was an unelected bureaucrat run amok, dislocating hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and working-class residents and cleaving their communities to pave new highways and parks conceived to his every whimsy. In New York, Moses created an abundance — of parks, highways, pools, and much else besides. But for whom? And to whom was he accountable?

What I gradually concluded is that very little in Abundance betrays any unease with the Robert Moses bull-in-a-china-shop model. To the contrary, a careful reading reveals numerous fleeting glimpses of just what flavor of governance Abundance implicitly favors. Democratic accountability is very far down the priority list.

A few examples:

In recounting Pennsylvania’s near-miraculous speedy repair of the I-95 bridge after a truck fire led to its collapse in 2023, Klein and Thompson approvingly draw attention to Governor Josh Shapiro’s declaration of emergency, which allowed him to bypass a broad swathe of safeguards:

Speed was the priority here. There would be no environmental impact statement. There would be no lengthy bidding process. The procurement rules were shunted aside.

Along similar lines, Klein and Thompson lament the painstaking delays that the government encountered while appropriating private land needed for the California high-speed rail project:

In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land and then gives you some money and takes it from you. In reality, it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession, and two and a half years of legal wrangling, to get the land.

Elsewhere, Abundance takes note of an academic paper investigating the cause of declining productivity in the construction sector. Despite the paper’s authors (both well-credentialed economists) finding only a weak relationship between “regulatory burden” and construction productivity, Abundance — which is liberally peppered with academic and statistical citations throughout — summarily dismisses their findings in favor of a pet theory instead:

But Goolsbee and Syverson are economists. Maybe the cause is obvious to industry insiders…

[Construction Analytics head Ed Zarenski]: “The safety features on jobs when I started in the industry were not even noticeable. Safety on a job today is incredibly different. You don’t walk across a beam; you walk around on a pathway marked for you to stay safe so you don’t fall off the side of the building. By the time I retired, one thing that took place every day, on every job site, was a mandatory 15 minutes of calisthenics before you start your workday. That’s totally nonproductive, but it led to fewer work site injuries during the day.”

Perhaps most unintentionally revealing, however, is a throwaway line about the United States’ primary global competitor. “China does not need to spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility,” the authors explain at one point. “That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.”

Abuse and imperiousness, sure. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

So abundance is…more emergency declarations. It’s making it easier for the government to seize private citizens’ land. It’s cutting out workplace safety regulations. It’s maybe even a light smattering of “abuse and imperiousness.”

What sort of chameleon is this abundance, exactly?

I must stress again that I am fully the target audience for the core idea of Abundance: government can work better, smarter, faster. It can be more responsive to its citizens. It can — it must! — serve as a real-world counter to decades of Republican and libertarian propaganda, and its failure to do is a tragedy not just for liberals but for all Americans.

And yet. With the exception of the opening exploration of how laws meant to prevent environmental catastrophe were coopted by the likes of Marc Andreessen to block developers from housing his less fortunate neighbors, Abundance nearly entirely neglects to grapple with the possibility that the at-times painstaking slowness of government is itself a product of democratic responsiveness, of accountability.

Stripping away each of these various built-in frictions comes with a cost. Streamlining eminent domain runs into citizens’ property rights. Rolling back workplace safety regulations will likely, you know, reduce workplace safety. Abuse and imperiousness…well, it goes without saying. The tradeoffs inherent in making government faster are no less real for being largely ignored in Abundance.

This was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s exact point in Shelby County v. Holder, a case that centered around Southern states’ desire to eliminate the attorney general’s “preclearance” oversight that had safeguarded their elections from racial discrimination ever since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the case, which Shelby County, Alabama won at the Supreme Court, freeing them from the shackles of federal oversight, Ginsburg issued her instantly axiomatic warning in a fiery dissent: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Klein and Thompson stand together under the umbrella of decades of successive government reforms and ask all of us to step out from under it and into the rainstorm. Is this abundance? Perhaps. But whose, exactly?

1. Pew Research Center, 2023: “Among U.S. homeowners overall – that is, households that own their primary residence – home equity accounted for a median of 45% of their net worth in 2021.”

2. Maybe this big-tent paralysis is just a New York Times thing.