Posts Tagged ‘abundance’
“Enough is abundance to the wise”*…
The “new” idea of Abundance is having a moment. The estimable David Karpf worries that the folks behind it are blowing their opportunity…
I guess I would call myself “Abundance-curious.”
There is a version of the Abundance agenda that I quite vocally agree with. My interpretation of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s central argument was something along these lines:
- Government should have a strong hand in establishing, directing, and funding social priorities.
- In the course of setting these priorities, government should endeavor to get out of its own way.
Klein and Thompson are pretty firmly in favor of government intervention and industrial policy. They aren’t just saying “growth is good and we should all cheer for developers!” They are instead saying something more along the lines of, if the government thinks something – housing, clean energy, etc – is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal. Put money behind it. Don’t leave everything to the “will of the markets.” And, oh yeah, if the government wants to build high-speed rail or housing (etc etc) then the government should get out of its own damn way and make it can actually fulfill those promises.
I pretty enthusiastically agree with all of these points. We ought to rebuild administrative capacity and get back into having government make governance decisions. Government ought to be both proactive and responsive. And often the best way to make a better future possible is to devote public money towards promoting public goods.
I also quite like several of the people operating under that banner, and quite like some of their ideas as well. (Specifically: government should fund more things, we should have more administrative capacity, and the accretion of procedural checks-with-no-balance has had plenty of regrettable consequences.)
And hey, they’re having a moment. Good for them.The term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier, though. Tesla’s new master plan boasts of “sustainable abundance.” The Silicon Valley variant of the abundance agenda is just warmed-over techno-optimism — less “let’s rebuild the administrative state and make government work again!” and more “the government should hand big sacks of money to tech startups and exempt them from taxes and regulations. Let our genius builders build!”
The Abundance 2025 conference [happened] in DC [last] week, and the speakers range from pro-housing YIMBYs to a guy arguing for “deportation abundance.”
Yikes.
Steve Teles has taken a good-faith shot at sorting through the mess:
It would not be hard to conclude that the emergence of these various flavors of abundance betrays the inherent squishiness and incoherence of the concept. And it is true that abundance is not a systematic ideology attached to a specific political coalition, as are conservatism or democratic socialism. But that doesn’t mean that it is ideological vaporware. As someone who has been working on many of these ideas for a decade or more, I think it is time to nail down just what sort of idea abundance is.
Abundance stirs confusion in part because, unlike contemporary conservatism and progressivism, it is not an idea that emerged to justify a specific party-political, coalitional, material, or cultural project. Given that abundance has been embraced by post-colonial socialists, techno-futurist capitalists, and Democratic centrists, it is best conceptualized as an alternative dimension that cuts across existing ideologies without entirely superseding them, defined by a new set of problems and tools for addressing them.
Abundance is fundamentally “syncretic,” spreading by attaching itself to a variety of different cultural practices and political projects, rather than by preserving its doctrinal purity.
He goes on to define the central unifying idea:
At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Abundance says “we should solve problems by creating more,” and invites the competing political coalitions to draw their own conclusions on what constitutes a problem. (And, also, more of what, exactly?)
Syncretic terms like this run the risk of falling apart though. If DOGE is part of the Abundance movement, and the people DOGE is illegally firing is also part of the Abundance movement… If the Green New Deal is Abundance but oh hey also the Claremont Institute is Abundance too, then Abundance ceases to mean anything at all. The term is already washed.
(Q: Are Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and the other Network State neomonarchists part of the Abundance movement? A: yes, that’s “dark abundance.”)
I can empathize with the instinct to try to build the broadest possible coalition. I can see why making your new “movement” seem like the one big cross-partisan idea right now feels like a win. But it is a temporary, pyrrhic victory.
Strategy is a verb. The act of strategizing involves making choices that help you accomplish goals and wield power. The Abundance movement does not appear to be making any choices whatsoever. That’s the fast track to irrelevance.
Just saying, if *I* was part of the Abundance movement, I would be cautioning people that it sure would be nice to accomplish something, anything at all, before the idea gets entirely co-opted and loses all meaning. If the Abundance folks insist on advancing a syncretic proposal so broad that it pointedly has nothing to say about what problems ought to be solved, then they are quickly going to find that their clever-new-phrase means nothing at all.
The fate of every successful political movement is that they eventually face co-optation and counteraction. But usually you want to rack up some actual victories before it happens…
“What *Isn’t* Abundance?” from @davekarpf.bsky.social (in his valuable newsletter, The Future, Now and Then).
See also: “Varieties of Abundance” from @niskanencenter.bsky.social, and “How to Blow Up a Planet” from @nybooks.com.
[Edit: late add of a piece from the ever-insightful Rusty Foster that dropped just after this was first posted: “Abundance of What.”]
* Euripides
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As we muse on more, we might send abundant bountiful greetings to William Bligh; he was born on this date in 1754. A British naval officer, over a 50 year career, he rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral and served as colonial governor of New South Wales. But he is remembered for his role in the most famous mutiny in history: in 1879, the first officer and crew “removed” Bligh from his command of (and set him and his few supporters adrift from) HMAV Bounty.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”*…
Your correspondent is headed onto the road again; so, with apologies, regular service will be suspended until on or about May 17…
… In the meantime, the remarkable Henry Farrell offers sage advice…
Last Thursday, Combinations (a publication of the RadicalxChange foundation), published a review essay that I wrote on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. I’m not going to repeat here what I say there; it’s available for free, so if you want to read it, just click on the link! [and one should read it]. Instead, I want to make the implicit argument explicit.
One of the big problems of American politics – and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere – is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause.
Because I am weird, I think that the most immediately useful aspect of Klein and Thompson’s book is not its specific argument about how to get to the future. It is that the book has the promise to reorient the presentists around the prospect of an attractive future, and the different paths you might take to get there. On the one hand, as Dan Davies says (riffing on post-punk philosophizing), if you don’t have a dream then how’re ya gonna have a dream come true? On the other, no single dream is capable of foretelling the One True Path To Abundance (or, for that matter, any other desirable goal) so you want to have useful arguments between people with different dreams, and different plausible paths…
[Farrell discusses the book and its reception– the myriad reactions it has occasioned– puts the debate into an intellectualy historical context, then pivots to his advice…]
… One terrifying prospect for the U.S. is that the Trump faction wins again in 2028. Another is that the Democrats regain power – but that like Keir Starmer’s government, they trap themselves in a vicious cycle where universal expectations of less generate factionalism and political stasis, which further deepen those universal expectations.
That is why I think that abundance is important as a goal. We need to aim towards some version of abundance to escape the trap we’re in. That too, is why I think that disagreement about how to reach that goal over the next couple of years is valuable in two ways.
First, no faction on the left or right has any monopoly on the wisdom about how to get there. It is only through argument – and experimentation in those bits of the federal system and local politics where experimentation is possible – that we can figure out what to do when we can do it. Second, if we can get to a place where the major argument is about how to get towards abundance, not just between center left and centrists, but across the political spectrum, we – for a very broad value of we – will be halfway towards winning the fight we need to win. Far more is politically possible when we are disagreeing over how to get to an attractive future, than when we are struggling to ensure that we are as close to the top of the pile as possible in a horrible one.
We need usable futures that can orient current politics in fruitful ways. Abundance – in the broadest sense of that term – is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of…
Abundance not as an agenda but a goal: “We need usable futures,” from @himself.bsky.social.
For contrast, pair with: “Trump’s futurism: Elon’s rockets and fewer dolls for ‘baby girl’” (and Part 2) from @adamtooze.bsky.social.
* Franklin D. Roosevelt
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As we opt for optimism, we might send cautious birthday greetings to an example of what less-inclusive abundance can yield: John Warne “Bet-a-Million” Gates; he was born on this date in 1855. A Gilded Age industrialist and gambler, Gates was among the first salesmen of barbed wire. He parlayed his success into the manufacture of of the fencing; and success at that, into the manufacture fo steel. (He was instrumental in changing the steel industry’s production methods from the Bessemer process to the open hearth process.) He was the president of Republic Steel and later, of the Texas Company (an oil concern later known as Texaco) and of the Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Gulf Railroad.
Gates developed a taste– and a talent– for gambling at a young age. In his prime, he was known to host raucous, days-long poker games in his permanent suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. His nickname derived from a 1900 horserace in England on which he wagered $70,000 and was widely-reported to have won $1,000,000 (though it seems likely he won “only” $600,000).
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