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The Abundance Agenda
May. 28th, 2025 06:36 amI've heard bits and pieces about "the abundance agenda" in reading Ezra Klein's NY Times opinion pieces over recent months. He recently co-authored (with Derek Thompson) a book entitled Abundance (review here)on the subject, and this Atlantic article sums up the split in the Democratic party caused by this and two other similar books (Yoni Appelbaum's Stuck and Marc Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works). I haven't read any of the three books yet, but I'm intrigued.
We can all see that the current administration is intentionally destroying the Constitutional Republic and the rule of law in favor of a klepto-autocracy. The only way it's likely to stop doing that is if it loses badly in free and fair elections, and the only likely candidate to beat it is the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party doesn't have a great reputation with the public either: it can run on "stopping the steal" and restoring the rule of law, but to seriously win, it needs to be in favor of something. What is it in favor of?
For most of my (sixty-year) life, the most consistent difference between Democrats and Republicans has been that Democrats believed government could and should work to make ordinary people's lives better, while (starting with Regan) Republicans believed government couldn't work, and shouldn't work, and that any time government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, it must be sabotaged to prevent it from doing that. Since it's always easier to break something than to fix it, Republican governments have had an unfair advantage over Democratic ones in proving their respective points.
But even where and when Democrats are firmly in control, whether local, state, or Federal, they haven't done a great job in recent decades of demonstrating that government can work. Public projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built a hundred years ago, on schedule and under budget, but anything a government tries to build now takes much longer, costs much more, and accomplishes much less, than initial estimates -- think of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan, or inter-city high-speed rail in California. Trump likes to criticize "Democrat-led hellholes" like San Francisco for their homelessness, and he's not entirely wrong: Democratic-led large cities do have more homelessness than smaller cities or than the few Republican-led large cities. Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" (which was mostly an environmental-policy bill) promised vast increases in solar and wind power, widespread broadband Internet in rural areas, and thousands of new electric-car charging stations so one could actually travel across the country in an electric-only car without fear of getting stranded; in fact, most of the solar-and-wind and broadband projects are still going through permitting and approval, and only dozens of new electric-car charging stations were actually built by the time Trump took office and slammed the brakes on all of that in a fit of pique. By comparison, I think China builds more public transit, solar and wind generation, and so on every year than the US has built in its entire history.
I gather (from the summaries I've read) that in the 1930's and 1940's, liberals in government were successful at using it to build things to improve ordinary people's lives. In the 1960's, liberals started viewing government as the enemy, became more concerned about stopping it from making ordinary people's lives worse, and enacted lots of procedural rules to ensure that all conceivable stakeholders are heard before a shovel goes into the ground. Which is laudable, but in practice it often prevents government from accomplishing anything, even things that would clearly improve most people's lives. The Chinese government, of course, goes to the opposite extreme that Trump would like to emulate: what the President says is what will happen, and other stakeholders might as well not exist.
I don't lose a lot of sleep over the Trump administration demonstrating overwhelming competence at getting good things done, or even overwhelming competence at getting things-I-think-are-bad done. Very simply, Xi Jinping is better at being a dictator than Donald Trump will ever be, and he heads a system of top-down control that's already worked out a lot of the bugs over the past eighty years. But the "abundance" movement within the "liberal-ish" half of the US says "we need to demonstrate that we can make government actually work, largely through reducing procedural obstacles, simplifying and optimizing operations." Sorta what DOGE would be doing if it actually aimed to make things work better rather than just destroying them, if it took the time to understand what current systems aim to achieve and how they currently work before burning them to the ground. Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative was a related effort; see also this look back at its successes and failures twenty years later.
At the same time, I have libertarian friends I respect who would argue that anything government does to help ordinary people is inherently susceptible to corruption, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture, and we're all better off in general if government doesn’t try to do so many things.
I'm reminded that Frank Herbert wrote a couple of SF novels (and short stories, I think) on the premise that "efficiency in government" proponents had actually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, to the point that a Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow down the rest of the government; the protagonist is a vaguely James-Bond-ish (and quite efficient) Saboteur Extraordinaire named Jorj X. McKie.
Comments? Suggestions? Have you actually read any of the recent books on the subject?
We can all see that the current administration is intentionally destroying the Constitutional Republic and the rule of law in favor of a klepto-autocracy. The only way it's likely to stop doing that is if it loses badly in free and fair elections, and the only likely candidate to beat it is the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party doesn't have a great reputation with the public either: it can run on "stopping the steal" and restoring the rule of law, but to seriously win, it needs to be in favor of something. What is it in favor of?
For most of my (sixty-year) life, the most consistent difference between Democrats and Republicans has been that Democrats believed government could and should work to make ordinary people's lives better, while (starting with Regan) Republicans believed government couldn't work, and shouldn't work, and that any time government threatened to make ordinary people's lives better, it must be sabotaged to prevent it from doing that. Since it's always easier to break something than to fix it, Republican governments have had an unfair advantage over Democratic ones in proving their respective points.
But even where and when Democrats are firmly in control, whether local, state, or Federal, they haven't done a great job in recent decades of demonstrating that government can work. Public projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built a hundred years ago, on schedule and under budget, but anything a government tries to build now takes much longer, costs much more, and accomplishes much less, than initial estimates -- think of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan, or inter-city high-speed rail in California. Trump likes to criticize "Democrat-led hellholes" like San Francisco for their homelessness, and he's not entirely wrong: Democratic-led large cities do have more homelessness than smaller cities or than the few Republican-led large cities. Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" (which was mostly an environmental-policy bill) promised vast increases in solar and wind power, widespread broadband Internet in rural areas, and thousands of new electric-car charging stations so one could actually travel across the country in an electric-only car without fear of getting stranded; in fact, most of the solar-and-wind and broadband projects are still going through permitting and approval, and only dozens of new electric-car charging stations were actually built by the time Trump took office and slammed the brakes on all of that in a fit of pique. By comparison, I think China builds more public transit, solar and wind generation, and so on every year than the US has built in its entire history.
I gather (from the summaries I've read) that in the 1930's and 1940's, liberals in government were successful at using it to build things to improve ordinary people's lives. In the 1960's, liberals started viewing government as the enemy, became more concerned about stopping it from making ordinary people's lives worse, and enacted lots of procedural rules to ensure that all conceivable stakeholders are heard before a shovel goes into the ground. Which is laudable, but in practice it often prevents government from accomplishing anything, even things that would clearly improve most people's lives. The Chinese government, of course, goes to the opposite extreme that Trump would like to emulate: what the President says is what will happen, and other stakeholders might as well not exist.
I don't lose a lot of sleep over the Trump administration demonstrating overwhelming competence at getting good things done, or even overwhelming competence at getting things-I-think-are-bad done. Very simply, Xi Jinping is better at being a dictator than Donald Trump will ever be, and he heads a system of top-down control that's already worked out a lot of the bugs over the past eighty years. But the "abundance" movement within the "liberal-ish" half of the US says "we need to demonstrate that we can make government actually work, largely through reducing procedural obstacles, simplifying and optimizing operations." Sorta what DOGE would be doing if it actually aimed to make things work better rather than just destroying them, if it took the time to understand what current systems aim to achieve and how they currently work before burning them to the ground. Al Gore's Reinventing Government initiative was a related effort; see also this look back at its successes and failures twenty years later.
At the same time, I have libertarian friends I respect who would argue that anything government does to help ordinary people is inherently susceptible to corruption, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture, and we're all better off in general if government doesn’t try to do so many things.
I'm reminded that Frank Herbert wrote a couple of SF novels (and short stories, I think) on the premise that "efficiency in government" proponents had actually succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, to the point that a Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow down the rest of the government; the protagonist is a vaguely James-Bond-ish (and quite efficient) Saboteur Extraordinaire named Jorj X. McKie.
Comments? Suggestions? Have you actually read any of the recent books on the subject?
