Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

>Democratic politicians do prioritize "housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds."

Have they (notably and visibly in the public consciousness) managed to get results regarding such issues such as housing in areas where they are uncontested?

As an outsider looking in i'd say if i had to imagine a democrat voting area i'd imagine an urbanised area, more progressive but also consistently more expensive.

This is just neoliberalism and it doesn't surprise me given the pedigree of the people involved. The author Laura Foote went to Georgetown Day, a DC private school (2025 tuition ~$50k/year) that counts the Obama daughters among its alumni, and Hamilton College, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York (2025 tuition ~$60k/year). "Abundance" co-author Derek Thompson went the Potomac School, a prep-school in the shadow of Langely (2025 tuition ~$50k/year), and Northwestern, a well-known Chicago private university (2025 tuition ~$65k/year). At last Ezra Klein went to public school before getting on that grind.

Meanwhile, on the subject of "state capacity" the author immediately cites "the Niskanen Center". What the heck is the Niskanen Center? Evidently, it's "the most interesting think tank in American politics" according to Time magazine's Molly Ball (Yale, 2025 tuition ~$65k/year), with "roots on the libertarian right". The Niskanen Center says of itself that it "promotes policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent." So, what does the most interesting think tank in American politics say about state capacity? Surprise surprise, it says both the traditional Right and the traditional Left are to blame for the decline in state capacity, the latter owing to what else but stifling and "sclerotic" over-regulation. Who exactly at the Center says that? That "research" comes from Brick Lindsey (Yale, Harvard), former senior vice president at the Cato institute where he focused on free trade. Who else is on the masthead for the Niskanen Center? It seems like it's mostly right-leaning Republicans, ex-military, and ex-Cato people.

Is all of this as clear to you as it is to me? To me, this is just the usual prep-school to Ivy League Acela Corridor and Silicon Valley wealthy neoliberal elite making yet another bipartisan "blame both sides" bid to roll back regulations that stand in the way of them making even more money. If that's what you want to read, go for it. It's a free country. Just please don't have any illusions that there's anything new here.

> As soon as you get into "different laws apply to different people" you run into problems.

But when you don't do that, you run into different problems, which is what we have run into already.

The reflex to make complex laws/tax structures more complex usually accrues benefits to the bigger players more able to parse, navigate and arbitrage those structures.

Every time US tax code gets more complicated, it usually doesn't help the bottom 50%.

(author)

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, the polling says that members of every district are substantially more pro-housing than politicians believe they are. That's one of the points that I'm trying to make in this article: people in your district will reward pro-housing work and economic growth more than incubants believe they will.

On the other hand, 80% of the work we do at YIMBY Action is organizing visible constituencies in districts to incentivize politicians taking pro-housing positions. The phrase I always say is "politicians get to the heads of parades; we are building a parade."

And on a third hand, I do think we can build an ever-bigger parade by getting people who think they benefit from the status quo to realize they don't actually. Small businesses benefit from housing. Suburbanites complain that teachers can't afford to live in the school district and they're loosing people. etc etc etc. I think those arguments are permeating and softening a lot of housing-resistant districts.