Abundance Makes the Case for 'Supply-Side Progressivism'
Progressives used to believe in building more stuff. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson want to do that again.

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30
At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of "what labor wants" added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. "We want more," Gompers said in an 1890 speech. "We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more."
More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride "little boxes made of ticky-tacky," but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more.
In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible.
With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn't expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. "Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward," write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance.
Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in 2021. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of "a liberalism that builds." The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause.
Klein and Thompson take on the "lawn-sign liberalism," endemic in California, where signs declaring that "Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal…sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality."
***
Although Abundance doesn't question the many environmental laws passed in the early 1970s, it does challenge the expansive interpretations that let activists block projects ranging from new apartments to wind farms. Klein and Thompson explain how a single court decision turned the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into a procedural barrier against new construction.
Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, CEQA required substantial government projects to file environmental impact reports before proceeding. Neither the governor nor the legislature saw it as a sweeping measure. In 1972, however, the state Supreme Court ruled that a private developer's plans to build condominiums and shops fell under the law merely because the project needed a permit. Regulation, in other words, became an excuse to treat private projects as the equivalent of freeways and dams. In the words of a Sierra Club lobbyist quoted in the book, CEQA had come to cover "anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together." The ruling produced an enormous industry of lawyers and consultants while choking off construction. It was a prime example of lawn-sign liberalism: Affluent professionals benefited, while the general public got much less for its tax money and its housing dollar.
Within the abundance movement, Klein and Thompson fall into the "eco-modernist" camp, embracing technology and prosperity as solutions to environmental problems. "This book is motivated," they write, "in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change." They worry that regulation and litigation are blocking green infrastructure. They want to make it easier to build solar arrays, wind farms, and the transmission lines to connect them to a new smart grid.
And they support nuclear energy. "By some counts, nuclear power is safer than wind and cleaner than solar," they note. "It is inarguably safer than burning coal and petrol."
Klein and Thompson also want political authorities to have more discretion. They recount how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro used an emergency declaration to speed repairs after a tanker truck exploded and destroyed a bridge on Interstate 95, a crucial artery through the northeast. After he waived the normal procedures for taking bids, drawing up environmental reports, and halting construction at the first sign of rain, rebuilding took 12 days rather than months.
"The process Shapiro used would typically be illegal," Klein and Thompson write. "Yet national Democrats and Pennsylvania voters alike loved it. What does that say about the typical process?" Government, they conclude, "needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers."
That prescription sounds like common sense: Deliver the goods. Give the public what it wants. Make taxpayers feel they're getting their money's worth. But rules matter. A strongman unhampered by picayune restrictions may seem efficient at first, but even a wise and virtuous abundance czar will make serious mistakes when left unchecked by either rules or competition. Such mistakes are why rules accumulate in the first place.
***
By their nature, manifestos are not deep. Abundance is more thorough than most, but in rallying progressives to the cause of more it avoids hard questions. More what? Who decides and how? Where does feedback come from?
Klein and Thompson isolate much of their abundance agenda from the valuable information conveyed by prices, preferring central direction even to market-based mechanisms like carbon taxes. "The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can," Klein and Thompson write. "The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must."
So the book doesn't make the case that California should have a high-speed rail system, for instance. It simply assumes that high-speed rail would be good and uses California's disastrous project to exemplify the absurdities of procedural progressivism. "In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail," the authors note. But China has also built whole cities that no one wants to live in. It has more steel capacity than it can profitably sell. China has more but not necessarily more of what people want. Who decides and how?
Or take the national network of electric vehicle charging stations authorized in the Biden administration's infrastructure bill. Out of the 500,000 stations promised, Klein and Thompson lament, "by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running." Assuming that electric charging stations are politically popular, they fear the delay will give the Trump administration credit for their construction.
They misread public sentiment. At a conference put on last summer by the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake gave a presentation on climate-related messages that do and do not move voters to support Democrats. The worst message touted the 500,000 charging stations. While most unsuccessful messages had tiny positive effects, this one actually moved people toward Republicans. Women in particular hate electric cars, Lake said, because they're terrified of being stranded.
But women love hybrids. In the automotive marketplace, hybrids are a success. Yet the technocratic vision Abundance offers doesn't have a place for them.
In 2022, I served on a Breakthrough Institute conference panel moderated by Klein. As we assembled, he made a point of noting how much we disagree, citing my 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies. "I am a technocrat," he said, a term I use in the book to describe people who "promise to manage change, centrally directing 'progress' according to a predictable plan." They aren't the good guys. I argue instead for a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism.
What we share are the convictions that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum. These days those beliefs make us allies. We can fight about the rest later.
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"The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can,"
Pretty easy actually. Burning coal makes money, bettering battery storage doesn't without subsidy.
Yeah, it's pretty basic. Supply/Demand, price signals. But these are things regressive illiberals ignore.
Bold talk from the part of the market that can't distinguish whether this book is going to save humanity or needs to be defaced and burned until Elon weighs in for or against it.
The market sorting engine comes to a conclusion about what is more economically efficient different from what the elites desired is proof that the market cannot judge such things.
Klein and Thompson are such tremendous imbeciles that someone like trump can take and hold the intellectual high ground on economics.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/contributor-the-high-cost-of-californias-green-energy-policies/ar-AA1EjZEl
Government can...Government must.
Yet somehow, in the eyes of a progressive, Trump is the tyrant.
He's doing it wrong. Totally (D)ifferent.
yo mean “Somehow, in the eyes of Reasonistas….”
Somehow, in the eyes of Reasonistas….
Yeah, progressives ;-).
Progressive 'Guns' (Gov-Guns) against the people =/= MORE stuff.
It actually = LESS stuff.
...because 'Guns' don't make sh*t.
Wrong tool for the job.
The only way to get more stuff is to CREATE/*EARN* it in a Fair and Just environment where 'Guns' serve the purpose of ensuring Liberty and Justice for all. That is how the USA got so prosperous in the first place. STEALING and ENSLAVING is a ZERO-Sum resources game.
*The New Deal and the Great Society were about more.*
Um, more GOVERNMENT. I'm pretty sure you lose your libertarian card for writing a sentence like that.
Yup
"The New Deal and the Great Depression"
It's amazing how leftards try to sugar-coat their crap.
"Progressives used to believe in building more stuff."
The very first paragraphs work against that "building" nonsense.
Even that bolded statement is bullshit according to politicaldictonary.com:
Postrel is clearly stating the progressive/Democratic line as they sold it to our ancestors, and the position of the authors of "Abundance" as you can tell from her next sentence
where she writes "In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk." It's obviously not Postrel's position to have more government. You are right the authors of "Abundance" are not libertarians
But I can see how you might feel that way given the other Reason staff/authors that have TDS (the "Reasonistas"), which these days is most of them. Postrel used to be Reason's editor in chief from 1989-2000, during its more libertarian days. And I'd like to see more articles like this, that actually explain the libertarian position, rather than ignore it.
IMHO, she deserves some of our love for her work rather than daggers.
""Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward," write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance."
"This passive voice metaphor is like this surrealist analogy!"
If the rest of this book has tortured writing like this, I take great pleasure in knowing I will never read it, and have great sympathy for those who have.
Just look at this silly statement:
"Building a ladder to try and reach an elevator that is racing ever upward" has got to be the stupidest, most economically illiterate description of subsidizing shortages that you can come up with. In one line, they show how obsessed with seen benefits progressives are, while simultaneously clueless about unseen costs.
I mean, let's start with the fact that elevators can't race "ever upward", so it is a stupid analogy. But the problem with subsidizing a good is that it CREATES the shortage. It isn't that you are trying to access some closed system with its own power. No, the problem is that your act of giving money to people causes those additional people to demand the good, pushing up prices. You are creating the problem you tried to solve.
But this should be considered par for the course for people like Klein.
No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus you ignorant commie. Why is a screed to central planning and control featured here?
Reason libertarianism.
Te article is a critique.
The affiliate links with the publisher and price information make it seem an awful lot more like a commercial masquerading as a critique.
"This book is motivated," they write, "in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change."
So still based on a 20th century variation of idea that fairies and daemons cause illness and they can be placated by sacrificing a goat.
Why does Reason even give a shit about promoting what a pair of corporatist socialists want. It's still got nothing to do with libertarianism.
Oh, right. Nevermind.
Because there are more of them than us, so we should join forces with them.
Haven't they done several pieces where they show general support for this book? I swear this magazine loves hyping communists who use one free market slogan to sell their central command economic preferences.
...
I don't think we can even agree on that. There are lots of things I'd like less of rather than more, even when it comes to material goods and services, if I have to pay for them and accept their consequences.
More floor space? More cleaning and maintenance. More music? Less quiet. More light? Less astronomy.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
I guess if you're the product of a political ideology and education system that's been bankrupt for 20 yrs. and whose chickens are coming home to roost, you've got to publish and cash in your chips while the getting's good.
Otherwise, I can't imagine why anyone would take national-level political advice from Team Blue has-been internet clowns.
"What we share are the convictions that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum. These days those beliefs make us allies. We can fight about the rest later."
Yeah, that's "liberalitarianism" in a nutshell. The problem is that the left, the "progressives", are REALLY good at subverting institutions. It's nearly the only thing they are any good at.
Allying with them really does end badly, unless you're insanely cautious. By the time "later" comes you discover they're already in control.
I'd love to see Klein explain his economic theory to a room full of farmers, construction workers, and roughnecks.
If you follow the link in the article you will see how everything Klein wants and describes is completely under governmental control - everything. Charitably, this is just another attempt by a blind man trying to describe an elephant, and another top-down scheme to seize the means of production. Uncharitably, Klein's "Abundance" is a Cuckoo Bird. Disguising his ideas as something other than Marxism.
The Left is now so far removed from How Shit Gets Made, that they think they can just conjure up market forces like magic spells. Economic Policies are by their very nature Post Hoc, and in that nature they will never be supply-side. Also in that nature they are taxonomic and descriptive, not generative.
They never will be.
Reducing regulation will result in increased disparities in outcome, which progressives hate. Therefore, all their attempts as loosening regulation will fail because their own side will demand the regulation returns.