Freddie de Boer takes the new “abundance” debate for a spin through the education discourse that winds up in Connecticut.
It’s Freddie, just go with it. From his Substack:
For the record, I think a lot of the abundance stuff makes sense. In particular, it’s true that the zoning regime in the United States has become a massive impediment to building housing where it’s desperately needed. We are starting to see some green shoots in that direction. And in general it’s true that regulation is no more generically good than generically bad. I do hate many of the annoying tics of the YIMBY and abundance crowd; for various cultural reasons, no faction in contemporary political life is more dedicated to in-group signaling than that cohort, probably something to do with the inherent loneliness of the policy nerd. Whatever the reason, they have their foibles, such as trafficking in blatantly false characterizations of their enemies, like the notion that all NIMBYs are affluent white people. (I invite you to get acquainted with the highly-active anti-gentrification movements in Inwood or Crown Heights, if you’d like to disabuse yourself of this notion.) They also relentlessly inflate the scope of the housing cost problem, projecting it across the entire country, when the problem has always been primarily defined by a relatively small number of chic urban enclaves – precisely the kind of place go-getting young policy types congregate. (Coincidence!) They also tend to be rhetorical maximalists about opposing all forms of local control, which is precisely the refusal to compromise they love to mock among the socialist left. But would I like to see the elimination of all parking minimums, a dramatically less onerous zoning reality, liberalization of rules regarding ADUs, an end to subsidizing single-family suburbs? Yes! Of course. And I think those things could help economically. Up to a point.
It’s what “up to a point” really means that constitutes the second of two big problems with the abundance agenda. The first is just what the lefties say it is: this is a program that seems wildly naive about the influence of the right wing and what exactly is most likely to shake out of an effort like this. The trouble with the “let’s deregulate but redistribute” tendency in the American left-of-center is that the right will say “Agreed, let’s deregulate,” and not bother to help with that whole redistribution part. A large-scale deregulation effort, even if launched by people with generally progressive politics, might very well end up with a return to child labor and no reduction in housing prices to show for it. As for that second big problem, well, I believe in failure, I believe in entropy, I believe in unintended consequences. The history of public policy is the history of dreams that didn’t come true, of dogs that didn’t bark. (Obamacare didn’t really bend the cost curve.) Because life is complicated.
I do think that an abundance agenda could ultimately be beneficial, if we’re very vigorous in not allowing such a movement to serve as a useful idiot for the right. But the effects would probably be modest. There would be an initial set of metrics pointing in the right direction and a lot of spiking the football, and then that growth would slow, the benefits would attenuate, the outlook would get cloudier. Why? Because of path dependence, because of insider capture, because of coalitional breakdowns, because of the profit motive, because of unintended consequences, because things fall apart. Of course I can’t tell you how well it will work, exactly. And maybe the path from ending local control of zoning to Star Trek is just as frictionless as the zealots believe. But I doubt it, and I can tell you for sure that wonk’s disease means that the overall public conversation will always err on the side of irrational optimism.
Thompson and Klein have both become fairly passionate AI evangelists lately. And I think their zeal there comes from a similar place: the enthusiasm for the cool thing that might happen, and the tendency to ignore the humble human reality that failure is always an option. They’re excitable and they’re excited. There are certainly worse failings! But somebody has to be the asshole and point out that, usually, the world does not have much respect for our best laid plans. With AI, the problem is that the voices with platforms are almost universally guys who grew up reading cyberpunk novels, who filter their perception of possibility through their adolescent sci fi dreams. They point to graphs and projections and talk in studious tones but every word of their wild predictions is pregnant with the many hours they spent dreaming of jacking into the Matrix when they were 12. With abundance, the perspective is a little more grounded, but the yearning for another, more inspiring world has the same potentially deluding effect. Yes, I too dream of a shinier, hipper, greener, cooler future where we take silent electric bullet trams to walkable mixed-used developments in the heart of urban cores. But I also understand that there’s no getting there without the ordinary, ugly, grinding work of politics, which means fighting with people who want to protect their own best interest – and that means opposition from the wealthy and powerful, who the abundance crowd are usually so unwilling to target.
Read the whole thing on Substack here, and discuss.
I do think that an abundance agenda could ultimately be beneficial, if we’re very vigorous in not allowing such a movement to serve as a useful idiot for the right. But the effects would probably be modest.
While I, too, prefer silver bullets that solve everything, modest beneficial effects are not bad.
Yes, there will be trade-offs. Yes, there will be costs in addition to the benefits.
But I have never been in a place where I wouldn’t have enjoyed some modest beneficial effects.Report
That bit about “a useful idiot for the right” is the reason so much stuff proposed by the left never goes anywhere, because they’re worried about giving any impression of any kind that The Right was correct about literally anything, even in the tiniest imaginable way.Report
What pray tell do you think the Right in the US is correct about? I mean Democrats borrowed the right’s ideas on health insurance reform and STILL to this day get pilloried for implementing what no less then the Heritage Foundation said should be done. So it’s not like we haven’t tried.Report
Red states build a lot more infrastructure, housing and such development compared to their Blue state compatriots. There’s not much getting around that fact. Part of it, assuredly, is that Red states are less developed and have more space to grow but the other part is Red states do not let people fish up development in the quixotic and self defeating ways that Blue states do.Report
There are bad ideas on both sides, both sides can correctly point to the others’ and say that they’re wrong.
The Right also suffers from Trump. He over shadows what they stand for and even overshadows what the Left is wrong about.
So big picture there is a big political realignment going on to the point where I’m not even sure what the various parties stand for.Report
That essay has rather more than most of Freddie’s work of “thinking that he can justify his aesthetic distaste for Centrist Liberals as Actually Objective Moral Judgement if he throws enough words at the problem”.
Saying “abundance” in a nose-wrinkled tone has become very popular among the Online Left, and it’s very clear that it’s not really about any problem they have with the idea and more about a new way to…well, to signal ingroup allegiance, as it were.
I mean, the only place they might find to criticize it is that it suggests you can get Capitalism to produce desirable results, versus smashing Capitalism And Also The State.Report
Like,
” that means opposition from the wealthy and powerful, who the abundance crowd are usually so unwilling to target.”
buddy, the “wealthy and powerful” are the people the abundance message is specifically targeting, saying to them “it’s possible for you to make more money by building houses than by not building them”, “new power plants and refurbished infrastructure will require large construction contracts and you can make money from that”.Report
Something very weird is going on. The comments have things like this:
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I doubt it’s just me.Report
I think it just got fixed.
Thank you!Report
It’s always a safe bet to do the exact opposite of Freddie’s advice.Report
Fred is weird here because he’s pointing to the problems, admitting that the policies he doesn’t like are solutions, then says it’s important that we don’t use them too much because [the rich].Report
Freddie has always had this squeamishness about YIMBY’s that I think stems from the fact that he, intellectually, knows that the YIMBY position is right but he personally and emotionally identifies with the NIMBY coalition, the regulators, the restrictionists and, especially, the minority filled communities that NIMBY’s in New York use as the Baptist part of their Baptist/Bootlegger coalition against development. He knows, on some level, they’re flat out wrong- ludicrously wrong, on the merits but he really really doesn’t want the developers/deregulators/abundance folks to be right.
His analysis on this one strains badly for both this reason and because he hasn’t actually read the book in question. He leaps on the education debate as a parallel both because it’s a subject is both very informed on (and largely right about) and because it’s virtually the opposite situation from the NIMBY/YIMBY debate. The deregulators, neolibs and privatizers in education have enacted lots of policies and failed to produce durable improvement both because the problem is extremely hard and also because the goal is logically impossible. No Child Left behind demands that no child be below average which is, of course, impossible unless every child produces perfectly equal results. The disaster of that whole line of thinking is hard to over state.
But the Abundance debate doesn’t fall into those traps or quandaries. Unlike education we’re talking, here, about the construction of material, measurable “real’ things. Manufactured educated children is incredibly complex and the goal- no subaverage child, is mathematically impossible. In contrast the development of infrastructure, housing etc is, fundamentally, a material thing. Education advocates scream “Education isn’t like manufacturing widgets” and they’re right but housing and infrastructure is near EXACTLY like measuring widgets. Our laws , economics and regulations make it easier or harder and the output is not difficult to measure. Moreover no one anywhere has really “cracked’ the education question (certainly not on NCLB terms) whereas many other societies both liberal (Japan, parts of continental Europe) and illiberal (red states, China) have enormous and obvious successes on the Abundance question.
In short, Freddie hasn’t read the book, he is tired and hazy from his new blessing (and good for him for it!) and he really really doesn’t like the nerds who push the abundance agenda and wants them to be wrong even though he knows they’re largely right.Report