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

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

#61

Post by pcthrowaway »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #40
avidiax wrote: post #9

I think the author has it quite backwards, at least as it comes to housing. Politicians are beholden to the members of their district, not would-be members. Sure, more affordable housing would benefit many people, but it wouldn't benefit the members of the district, particularly the wealthy and powerful, since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as pe…

> Since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as perceived by voters) Wrong!! Please get this right, because telling people they need to loose wealth to fix society is a horrible place to be in. They own the land and the land will appreciate in value (unless your house as a shit location, but then you area poor-ass republican anyways, statistically spea…

> Please get this right, because telling people they need to loose wealth to fix society is a horrible place to be in.

This is often the reality. Massive wealth inequality won't be fixed by making everyone billionaires, it'll be fixed by getting rid of billionaires

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

#62

Post by CabSauce »

These two gentlemen have been making the rounds on late night and political shows. They seem nice enough and I appreciate their efforts. However, I haven't heard them suggest a single functional/practical change to move toward "abundance".

We have to overturn Citizens United and get unlimited corporate money out of politics. This is far and away the most important barrier to having a government that works for people.

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

#63

Post by mullingitover »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Instead of getting tangled up in social issues, liberal politicians should be prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.

> Instead of getting tangled up in social issues

It's not that they're getting 'tangled up', it's that reactionary activists (whose ultimate goal is repealing the Civil Rights Act entirely) use strawman social issues as a wedge and the press is led around by the nose parroting these controversies that are brazenly ginned up.

Liberal politicians don't really have a great strategy for this because the majority of media (and I'm talking about the real media: influencers with more following than all legacy media combined) is right-wing these days.

Progressives end up barely treading water while reactionaries run circles around them, and then are blamed when reactionaries make everything worse.

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

#64

Post by wormlord »

shadowgovt wrote: post #41
wormlord wrote: post #31

Probably gonna get downvoted for quoting Lenin on this site -- but he nailed this 120 years ago in "What is to be done?". We are witnessing the collapse of Liberalism in real-time. Liberalism has outlived its usefulness as a tool of containing class conflict. The US ruling class has nearly consolidated absolute power and is disposing of Liberalism because it was only ever a tool used for their benefit . This is not j…

A heliocentric model isn't necessary for solar eclipse explanation. "The moon and the sun revolve around the Earth, the moon is closer, and sometimes it is interposed between the sun and the Earth" is a story that works if the coordinate frame is Earth-centric or sun-centric. (I know this wasn't the point of this comment, but identifying the problem while missing key details that end up mattering in the long run is,…

> but attempts to reconcile it just moved the class barriers around instead of breaking them

Sure and we have made many advancements in theory since then. But the issue still remains that you have to admit the root cause even exists before you can think about how to solve it.

I will edit my parent comment to remove the heliocentric example.

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

#65

Post by TulliusCicero »

huijzer wrote: post #25

Noah Smith also wrote a IMO nice review of the Abundance book [1]. I'm very happy that problems like this are discussed: > This is only one way that Klein and Thompson would have us focus on outputs instead of on inputs. Progressives love to focus on the number of dollars the government spends on high speed rail or green energy; Klein and Thompson would have us focus instead on how much actually gets built as a resul…

Unfortunately, we have one party that wants the government to get some stuff done but doesn't really care about how much it costs, and another party that cares about costs but doesn't really want the government to get stuff done. So we end up either getting things done for an exorbitant price, or not getting anything done.

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

#66

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

tasspeed wrote: post #38
avidiax wrote: post #9

I think the author has it quite backwards, at least as it comes to housing. Politicians are beholden to the members of their district, not would-be members. Sure, more affordable housing would benefit many people, but it wouldn't benefit the members of the district, particularly the wealthy and powerful, since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as pe…

So the simple answer here seems to be removing our focus from satisfying property owners, no? It's okay to abandon a system when it no longer works for the community. Constituents having to move to capture the improvement in pricing is not the ideal outcome, the ideal outcome is protecting constituents and meeting them where they are. In the worst case scenario, constituents might end up homeless rather than stable i…

Perhaps politicians and property owners both needs to fear the status quo.

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

#67

Post by tsimionescu »

knowknow wrote: post #47
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Instead of getting tangled up in social issues, liberal politicians should be prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

Where exactly did you get the idea that Kamala was running on this? Where was she advocating for, say, Medicare for all? Or fighting vested interests by running on campaign finance reform, to get money out of politics?

She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.

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

#68

Post by crooked-v »

cortesoft wrote: post #52
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Instead of getting tangled up in social issues, liberal politicians should be prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.

“Delivering better lives for people” is already an inherently social issue, though. There are many people who don’t WANT to improve certain people’s lives, and if your proposed policies help them, they will be against it even if it makes everyone’s life better; they are willing to forgo improving their own life to make sure the people they hate won’t see any improvement. Unless your policies go out of their way to ex…

See, for an example, that "he's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting" quote that made the rounds from an unhappy 2019 Trump voter.

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

#69

Post by eddythompson80 »

knowknow wrote: post #47
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #4

Instead of getting tangled up in social issues, liberal politicians should be prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

> This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work.

It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue.

Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.

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

#70

Post by matthest »

legitster wrote: post #46

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing. I have lots of friends and family in the area with property. But not a single one has added an ADU. It seems like it…

YIMBYism is having a much greater impact in red states.

Noah Smith (left wing blogger) has a fascinating article on it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta...

In Austin, TX, rent has been falling for 2 years because they've been building so much new supply: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

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