Another review: https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundanc...
Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#22Concerning zoning laws, when my father built his house, he really had to be clever in order to dodge the local county's regulations.
1. He had to hire a biologist to convince the county inspectors that the property was not wetlands.
2. The county claimed that he couldn't put in a driveway due to regulations, but my dad found an old satellite image archive, which showed there was a prexisting logging road from decades earlier. This was a loophole that allowed him to install the driveway.
So much of the housing crisis is caused by overregulation, at least in my home state of Washington.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#23I've only read maybe 30 pages of the book, but I think the article misses the point (I hope) the book is making: there are regulations that serve a purpose, and regulations that don't, and we can, to at least some extent, tell the difference based on the regulations themselves or their impact on past projects.
If that's true, then we can shed regulations, speed the process of government, and make it more effective at actually doing things.
It might be difficult to tell which regulations are causing problems, or which are needless, or maybe that's not the point of the book; but criticizing the book for not pre-identifying exactly which regulations need to end seems overly demanding: we first need to agree that there are needless regulations that slow progress. If the book helps us reach that conclusion, it's served a purpose.
Also, as a small nit: "even a positive-sum world contains winners and losers." That needs cites I think. I'm sure there's someone in the U.S. who is worse off than a 15th century peasant, but there are precious few of them, too few to use that phrase to describe them.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which is basically advocating for and co-opting the core ideas of the current administration How on earth do you come to this conclusion? Trump is famously NIMBY, both in real estate and in infrastructure. He objects to solar and wind purely on the basis that "they ruin the view". He's anti-dense and pro-suburb, he hates zoning except when it actually comes to residential zoning, where he has pretty consistently tr…
Both advocate deregulation and increasing economic growth. Of course you can debate the difference at the margin ad nauseam, something the authors are doing more authoritatively than you and I could on every single podcast on the planet, trying hard to differentiate themselves from libertarians that preceded them decades ago. I remain unconvinced.
NIMBY-ism vs YIMBY-ism isn't some margin difference. It's Klein's whole thesis.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#25There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword." "...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Wind…
> basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration That seems laughable. Which policies specifically are you talking about? Trust me, no one would more like this to be true than I. But... good grief.
Feel free to act outraged. I am not going to further debate this charged topic. The authors are literally on every podcast trying to contrast themselves from various aspects of DOGE or deregulation and ideas that came before from Peter Thiel et al. That proves the point is not as far-fetched and crazy to debate, even if you disagree with the conclusion.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#26“ 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.” Having read about 4 different critiques of the book, this maybe closest to a well thought out one. However, it still giv…
The "Abundance Agenda" doesn't demand an "expert-laden big-government apparatus" or a harnessing of private enterprise; it demands that if we're going to spend tens of billions on an HSR project, that the project actually work. The review jazz-hands around the fact that Klein is obviously right about California HSR, and he's obviously right about Operation Warp Speed.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#27Concerning zoning laws, when my father built his house, he really had to be clever in order to dodge the local county's regulations. 1. He had to hire a biologist to convince the county inspectors that the property was not wetlands. 2. The county claimed that he couldn't put in a driveway due to regulations, but my dad found an old satellite image archive, which showed there was a prexisting logging road from decades…
I would be so, so happy if we returned to 18th or 19th century property rights. Euclid has been a century-long disaster.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#28I like Ezra Klein a lot. But what’s odd about his Abundance theory is that he can’t bring himself to admit that nowhere in the U.S. comes closer to what he’s describing than Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon’s California. The tragedy of muscular-government urbanism today is that it’s stuck in a political coalition with toxic empaths that will fill your nice public spaces with drug addicts, criminals, and illegal aliens.…
Have you read the book? This is not a point he avoids, at all.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#29“ 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.” Having read about 4 different critiques of the book, this maybe closest to a well thought out one. However, it still giv…
The "Abundance Agenda" doesn't demand an "expert-laden big-government apparatus" or a harnessing of private enterprise; it demands that if we're going to spend tens of billions on an HSR project, that the project actually work. The review jazz-hands around the fact that Klein is obviously right about California HSR, and he's obviously right about Operation Warp Speed.
In fact most of the critiques I've read, go something like:
"He's obviously right, but I don't like it cuz it smells like something bad from the 80's".
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which is basically advocating for and co-opting the core ideas of the current administration How on earth do you come to this conclusion? Trump is famously NIMBY, both in real estate and in infrastructure. He objects to solar and wind purely on the basis that "they ruin the view". He's anti-dense and pro-suburb, he hates zoning except when it actually comes to residential zoning, where he has pretty consistently tr…
Both advocate deregulation and increasing economic growth. Of course you can debate the difference at the margin ad nauseam, something the authors are doing more authoritatively than you and I could on every single podcast on the planet, trying hard to differentiate themselves from libertarians that preceded them decades ago. I remain unconvinced.
> both advocate for ... increasing economic growth
Fucking everyone does. That's like saying my moral code is the same as Ted Cruz's because we both think murder is wrong.
Trump wants to throw out most environmental laws and drill baby drill, Ezra wants to prune the ones that prevent us from actually saving the environment, which he highly values. These are worlds apart, you can't just toss them both in the "deregulation" category and call it a day.