Tag Archives: Ezra Klein

Klein 4: What Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda doesn’t contend with

The answer is trade-offs, Ezra Klein doesn’t contend with trade-offs. But I also wrote the title of this post to reference an old song I heard by a group called “The Klein Four,” check it out, it’s a good song if you like jokes about math and love.

I’ve discussed a lot about Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda before. To remind us, Ezra Klein says the reasons for America’s economic malaise is that we have made it impossible to build the houses, jobs, and infrastructure that we need to bring down costs and bring up wages. Housing costs will go down if we build more houses, so the government should write laws to ensure we can build more houses.

This agenda can seem very “ivory tower,” but has come into sharp focus with the creation of the bipartisan Abundance Caucus, as well as the likely next mayor of New York City coming out in support of the abundance agenda.

But the question that I want to raise is: what political group will be thrown under the bus in pursuit of abundance?

I mean this question honestly. This is not a gotcha, this is not an attack. This is my assertion that abundance *will* require trade-offs, and certain political groups *will oppose* those trade-offs no matter what. In order to enact Abundance then, you will have to choose your trade-offs, and therefore choose who goes under the bus.

Klein is not a politician, and he and his co-author have tried to assert that there really aren’t any trade-offs with abundance. We can keep *all the good things* that he and his co-partisans support without any negative side affects. And likewise the new laws we write to ensure that housing, factories, and infrastructure get built faster and more efficiently will not harm his co-partisan’s priorities whatsoever.

But I think Klein does this because he makes the classic mistake of thinking everyone has the same priorities as he does, they just don’t have the knowledge he does to realize he’s right.

So to start: will Abundance throw unions under the bus, or will it continue to allow them to have veto power over housing projects they don’t like? Josh Barro wrote about this extensively. He points out that unions in blue cities have consistently held up building projects in order to increase their own power. Unions make demands that increase the cost and time-line of a project, and if they don’t get it they use every possible veto point (such as the need to get community approval or the need to do environmental review) to prevent a project from happening.

This creates a trade-off, unions vs abundance. Klein side-steps this and tries to claim that no, there really isn’t a trade-off, and he actually wants to make it radically easier to form a union. But that isn’t important. It’s quite easy to form a union in America, it’s very difficult to exercise union power. Unions are exercising what little power they have when they hold up projects, and they do so in order to ensure the project enriches their members and not non-unionized laborers. Established unions don’t care about forming unions, they’re already established. They care about enriching their members.

So there *is* a trade-off between unions and abundance. Klein tries to handwave that somehow we remove the union veto and give them some other power and that they would accept this as a fair trade. But they simple would not. So if you remove the unions’ ability to veto infrastructure projects, then you throw the unions under the bus. If you don’t remove their veto, you walk back the abundance agenda, because you are failing to make it easier to build housing, infrastructure and jobs.

Or what about environmentalism? Energy is expensive, and it’s a huge barrier to economic growth and the abundance agenda. Right now America pays a lot less for energy than much of Europe because we allow our oil companies to frack oil out of the rocks to release it. But this is an environmental double-whammy, all that fracking harms the environment and burning all that oil accelerates global warming.

Klein’s environmental co-partisans will want to ban fracking and restrict oil, while abundance for consumers may require continued fracking so Americans can use their cars and so America’s economy can continue to use that energy. Germany and the EU have shrinking or stagnating economies in part because the price of energy there is so high.

Again Klein handwaves this by saying that we can make solar panels and solar power so cheap that energy will be cheaper that way. But this ignores present reality. Texas currently is the American leader in energy abundance, with an incredibly permissive permitting regime. It indeed leads America in the installation of solar panels. It also leads America in the fracking of oil.

If solar power were such a sure bet, then Texas energy barons would stop investing in oil and move all their money into solar panels. No company would ever willingly leave money on the table like that. But solar power *is not* a sure bet, and it still has massive difficulties that make oil viable. Battery technology is not sufficient to make solar+batteries cheaper than oil or gas for night-time power. And electric cars still aren’t cheap enough to make American switch over their ICE cars.

You can’t just “abundance” your way into ignoring economics, if you make it easy to permit *any* energy, then you will permit a lot of fossil fuel-based energy solution and piss off environmentalists. If you restrict fossil fuels, you undermine abundance by raising America’s energy prices and making it harder for Americans to drive and making it harder for American companies to operate.

I wanted to write more but I’m a bit tired and this post is very late, it should have been finished two weeks ago. But let me finish with this, every single group that supports abundance has their own group policy that they see as sacrosanct. They will support the removal of *other groups’ policies* but not their own. Abundance will therefore require finding which group is weakest, and removing their policies, or finding some compromise that pleases no one but at least gets things done.

The unions will happily undermine environmentalism and local democracy, but will never support a reduction in union power. Environmentalists will not allow environmental laws to be degraded, but may allow for a reduction in union power and local democracy. And you know what local groups think.

So when you want to build new housing or a new train line through a city, each group will block it until you make the expensive concessions necessary for their support. Abundance is all about removing those expensive concessions so it’s cheaper and easier for America to build. So the question is then clear: which group will be thrown under the bus. Until the Abundance Agenda has an answer, it will largely remain a performative slogan more than a real ideology.

What exactly *isn’t* Ezra Klein’s “Abundance Agenda?”

Answer: It isn’t neoliberalism.

Unfortunately, Klein killed my joke. Because between my last post and this one, he made his own post in the New York Times where he clarified that “Abundance” is *not* about neoliberalism. Be warned, I’m writing at night again so this post will be more streamsofconsciousness-y than the last.

First, an intro paragraph: Ezra Klein says the problem with America (and especially Blue States) is that they are Unable To Build. They can’t build rail, or houses, or energy infrastructure. And while nowhere in America can build these well, Blue States are doing *especially badly*. This inability to build means our transport is expensive, our houses are expensive, our energy bills are expensive, and we need to embrace Abundance (aka “build more stuff”) in order to fix our economy. Abundance means building lots of stuff to bring down prices and make everyone happier.

I’ve been amused to see “Abundance” described as some form of rebranded “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is a slippery term, but the shackling of the state was a thoroughly neoliberal project.

The above is a quote from Klein, but here he himself falls into the trap of “neoliberalism is whatever I don’t like.” No wonder neoliberalism been described as an “ideological trashbin,” neoliberalism is the political equivalent of a wastebasket taxon.

He describes this “shackling of the state” as the reason we Can’t Have Nice Things in this country, or rather it’s the reason all of our government building projects are way over-time and way over-budget. He does think that some deregulation should be done to allow the free market to build things (like houses), but he is still a partisan Democrat and believes that the government should always take the first step in transportation and energy. Secretly I also think he wants to flex his left-of-center bonafides so he can quell accusations that he’s a secret Reganite, but regardless, he says we cannot have Abundance simply by deregulating, we also have to “unshackle the state.” But what does it mean to “unshackle the state?”

See, the “shackling of the state” as he calls it was really a reaction to the post-World War 2 economic consensus. It was common consensus after World War 2 the State should be allowed to buy up land and invest in infrastructure whenever it wanted, which is exactly what Klein says they should do now, and exactly what Biden said he would do from 2020 to 2024. But the authority of the state is unchecked, it has a “monopoly on the use of force” as they say in poli-sci. So eminent domain aka *forcing people to sell their land* was the common way for the state to build infrastructure, since forced sales (rather than negotiations) are always the best way to make a project happen on-time and under-budget.

We can debate whether or not eminent domain was a bad thing, but in my experience it’s basic Democratic Party orthodoxy that it was *really really bad*. You may recall former Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg talking about how the highways were racist by design. This quote was wildly taken out of context, but what he meant was that the government eminent domain’d poor neighborhoods in order to build our highways. Now, in American, eminent domain still requires you to pay a “fair value” to the people whose house or land you buy up. So when using eminent domain, the government buys poor neighborhoods instead of rich ones because poor ones are cheaper to buy, this is obvious. But since minorities are more likely to be poor, this means the poor neighborhoods that were bought up and paved over to build highways were more likely to be minority ones. Hence eminent domain = bad.

In reaction to eminent domain, America “shackled the state.” The power to use eminent domain was massively curtailed, and demands were placed on the state and elected leaders to find other ways to complete infrastructure without this kind of forced-sale.

But unshackling the state is exactly what Klein wants to do to enact the “Abundance Agenda,” and that would mean allowing minority neighborhoods to be bought up and their residents displaced so the government can build infrastructure. It would also mean the government can do other things it did under the pre-shackled consensus, like flooding native tribal land to build the Hoover Dam, floodiung rural Tennessee to build the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, and in many many cases of displacing people who would rather have stayed where they were.

This unshackled state was seen as an injustice by the socially-minded on the left, and so they pushed for strong laws that would prevent the government OR ANYONE ELSE from being able to do this again. The so-called “shackling of the state” was done in the name of Social Justice, not neoliberalism.

And here is a point I would like to make: Klein routinely fails to grapple with the trade-offs that his “Abundance Agenda” would create. He says that we need to “unshackle the state” in order to build lots of good things and bring about Abundance. He says that we *used* to be a country that could do this, and points to the New Deal and the Eisenhower Interstate System as proof of this, and as a model Democrats (and America) should follow. But he doesn’t realize or fails to mention that this unshackling would cause all the problems that are still complained about to this day, bulldozed neighborhoods and displaced people.

Ezra Klein wants to build railroads in the way Eisenhower built interstates, but that’s going to mean blasting through poor neighborhoods in order to get a rail line into the city, just as Eisenhower did. That’s going to mean building across Native land because that’s the shortest way to build a line between many of our Western cities. And since minorities in America are still more likely to be poor, that means the neighborhoods you’ll be blasting through will be minority ones, and you’ll be fought every step of the way by the groups who worked to “shackled the state” in the first place.

Klein is very clearly interested in social justice, but he paints a picture in which the shackling of the state was just caused by misguided leftists and hairbrained libertarians, not his social justice co-partisans. He refuses to grapple with the question of “is it just to bulldoze a poor, black neighborhood to build infrastructure that will be used by millions?” Unless he has an answer for that, then he doesn’t actually have an answer for how to “unshackle” the state.

This refusal to grapple with trade-offs runs rampant through Klein’s Abundance Agenda. He frequently makes the claim that we just need to cut red tape and *get building* and that this will allow us to achieve our every dream. But what exactly is stopping us from building, and who demanded that red tape in the first place?

The sources of Red Tape can be discussed, but I want to keep in mind a few things:

  • Every source of Red Tape *agrees that we need to cut Red Tape*
  • Every source of Red Tape thinks that *their objectives are the most important*
  • Every source of Red Tape just thinks *someone else’s objectives are the ones that should be cut* in order to cut the Red Tape and achieve Abundance
  • Klein falls into the trap of imagining a sort of Red Tape “Legion of Doom” who just stop government projects because they’re evil and don’t like government. But in fact Red Tape is always put there at the behest of some interest group that is trying to protect its members wherever possible

The sources of red tape I’d like to discuss are, in order:

  • Local democracy
  • Environmentalism
  • Taxpayers
  • Unions

Local Democracy is the one that Klein and the Abundance folks feel the strongest in attacking. Everyone hates NIMBYs, but local democracy is more than just them. As I said in the previous post, there are usually listening sessions for any new building project to get neighbor buy-in. These sessions are a great way for NIMBYs to stop projects by demanding so many listening sessions that the project becomes too expensive to be profitable, but any other interest group can also use the demand for listening sessions in order to hamstring an unwanted project.

When framed as “NIMBYs vs infrastructure,” I’m sure it’s easy to get online consensus that local democracy should be crushed beneath the Federal boot. But your political opponents will always try to frame the argument in their way, and supporters of local democracy will frame it in terms of democracy (duh) but also minority rights (why should their minority neighborhoods and native land be forced to bear the burden of all this construction?), social justice (why are these things always built in poor neighborhoods?) and local knowledge (the DC bureaucrats need to listen to the locals because they don’t understand the needs of this area).

If you don’t have a response for these framings, then you won’t be able to bulldoze the NIMBYs and build your railroads. The problem for Klein is that this is a trade-off, are we willing to sacrifice social justice and build our railroads through a poor minority neighborhood, just like we built our highways? It’s easy to attack NIMBYs in the abstract, much harder when we have actual history telling us what happens when we *do* let the Federal Boot stamp on local democracy. And while the Interstate System is widely loved, it has seen a lot of pushback by Ezra’s ideological allies, and Ezra himself is pretending that their concerns over local democracy won’t affect his Abundance Agenda.

Next let’s discuss environmentalism, which is another soft target for the Abundance folks. Abundance folks like Klein laments that “surely we shouldn’t have years of environmental review slowing down our *wind farms*. Surely we shouldn’t allow people to block solar panels in *the dessert*”. But reframed in terms of unknown environmental risks and biodiversity and it gets a lot thornier.

The Abundance Agenda seems to argue we should be fine with building a new railroad/wind farm/solar farm without the years of environmental review demanded by environmentalists. Environmentalists will hit back that we don’t know 100% what chemicals might seep into the water lines, or how many species will go extinct due to habitat destruction, or how much deforestation and de-greening the new construction will cause. I trust the engineers to do their due diligence, and I trust the EPA to monitor situations as they come up. But can Ezra really sell that to America and the environmental movement at large?

The whole point of environmental review is preventing those kinds of “chemicals in the water/mass deforestation” catastrophes, even if the review takes years or decades (in the case of California High Speed Rail). It only takes one research paper to assert that a new train *may* lead to elevated Lithium levels in the rivers of southern California, and then you’ve lost public buy-in for the project at large. And of course if the railroad *does* lead to Lithium in the water, what then? It’s easy for Klein to talk about “cutting environmental review” but he never grapples with how to respond to the claims *within his own coalition* that doing so will make America more sick.

Abundance is an ideology that to some extent wants to be bipartisan. Klein uses Red States as his model to harangue Blue states, and congress recently created a bipartisan Abundance Caucus to champion Klein’s ideas. Although this bipartisan group still voted overwelmingly for the exact kind of anti-abundance legislation that Klein laments, so whatever. But still, I’ve used this post to discuss the conflicts between the Abundance agenda and some parts of Klein’s otherwise partisan orthodoxy, I’d like to use the next post to discuss some of its conflicts with other orthodoxies.

I’d meant these to all be one post, but couldn’t get my thoughts out in time. See you again soon.

What exactly is Ezra Klein’s “Abundance Agenda?”

Answer: it’s neoliberalism. But if that answer fills you with disgust, fear, or just confusion, please read on as I promise the explanation will be worth it.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Ezra Klein and buddies published a book called “Abundance,” and in talks and interviews they have been trying to sell it as a way forward for the defeated Democrats. The key question of the book is this: if liberal policies are so great, why do blue states have the most homelessness? Why do they have the highest overruns on their infrastructure projects? Why do they have the most difficulty building renewable energy?

These are difficult questions because they cut at the heart of the liberal/progressive promise for America. There was a half-century long political touchstone (within the American media sphere) that the Democrats were who you voted for if you cared about social issues, but you voted Republican if you cared about economics. Never mind that this misses the many socially conservative/economically re-distributive voters who saw things the opposite way, this “vote Republican for the economy” belief was one that Democrats wanted to push back on.

For my entire adult life, Democrats have been making the argument that no, “Republicans are actually bad for the economy, vote Democrat if you care about economics.” In the wake of the Financial Crisis, this message resonated, but after 4 years of inflation it seems voters no longer bought it.

Worse still, Ezra Klein’s “Abundance Agenda” argues that *you can’t blame voters for coming to this conclusion*. Blue states may be the *richest states*, but it is the Red states that are *growing*. They are building housing, they are building infrastructure, and in the next census it is predicted that Blue States (California and New York especially) will lose electoral votes to Red states (such as Florida and Texas). People are literally voting with their feet, moving from Blue states to Red states when every part of the liberal mindshare says that’s insane, and that all migration should be happening in the *other direction*. The only explanation is that people believe they’ll have higher quality of life in these Red states than what they have in the Blue states, how can that be?

Ezra Klein’s answer is that Democrats haven’t lived up to their economic promise, and they need to embrace Abundance if they are going to do so.

Much of his suggestions are things I myself have blogged about, land use should be deregulated, housing and energy should be made easier to build, and the free market should at times be deferred to to bring down prices for consumers. Government bureaucrats can’t run markets.

In this sense, Ezra Klein is making a (small) break with Bidenism. Tariffs on solar panels make it more expensive to build clean energy, tariffs on lumber make it more expensive to build houses.

When it’s more expensive to build things, then the supply is lower. When the supply is lower, the price is higher. If we want consumers to enjoy low prices, we should encourage higher supply by making it less expensive to build, this is the core of the Abundance Agenda. “Build what?” you ask? Everything. Housing needs houses to be built, energy needs power plants to be built, jobs need companies and factories to be built, and the Abundance Agenda encourages policies that make it cheaper to build all those things.

In essence, the Abundance Agenda is deregulation.

See, Biden is actually a pre-Carter Democrat, recall that he was elected to the Senate in 1972. The New Deal consensus at that time included a lot of skepticism of markets, and a certain degree of autarky in which the government should step in to ensure the economy is making the things it “needs” to make. So if car companies are struggling, we need to give them subsidies or protect them with tariffs, because cars are so important. Same with solar panels, microchips, and steel.

Biden’s economic record is actually reminding me a lot of Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber, who you may remember from previous posts. Like JJSS, Biden seemed to be trying to use government power to “direct” the economy, and my criticisms of JJSS apply just as well here: governments can’t predict the future and so don’t actually know what the best investments are. Companies can’t predict either, but at least companies have price signals and the profit motive directing them towards the best bets, governments are immune from both by their sovereign nature.

JJSS wanted the Europe of the 1960s to invest heavily in supersonic planes, but we now know that those bets were quite wasteful as the fruits of their labor (Concorde) were outcompeted by the private sector (Boeing) who had already abandoned supersonic travel entirely. Will Biden’s chip foundries built in Arizona stand the test of time? Or will they be like Concorde, an unprofitable venture held up solely by the demands of national prestige, until such time as prestige becomes to expensive to maintain?

While Ezra still sees a need for government “leadership” (which I don’t, but more on that later), he is more comfortable in the post-Carter consensus, stating that governments should cut back the regulations which prevent companies from giving us cheap goods and services. Housing is expensive because governments don’t let us build houses. Energy and infrastructure are expensive because solar farms and railroads get blocked by environmental review. Even healthcare and education are burdened by over-regulation which prevents competition and protects the current megacorporations that dominate the market.

So Ezra Klein could be most accurately described as a “left-capitalist.” He is solidly on the left with regards to all social and moral issues, but does not have the skepticism of profit and corporations that Bernie and Biden do. In other words, he’s a neoliberal.

Now that is a *very* loaded term, because my time around the Internet has shown me that many people define neoliberalism as “anything I don’t like.” But philosophically neoliberalism *was* a thing, and in many ways did represent a real ideology. It was a break with the New Deal consensus on governments directing the economy, while still accepting a government role in social welfare and poverty reduction. Carter and Clinton both governed this way, and so are usually considered “neoliberals” by people who don’t consider it a slur.

Ezra Klein is therefore arguing that this “neoliberalism” should be part of the way forward for Democrats and America at large. California and New York should take more cues from Texas and Florida, at least economically. But to do so means touching a lot of third rails within the liberal coalition:

  • To deregulate housing, you need to remove the ability of local residents to block new housing. This can easily be reframed as “removing local control” and “overturning democracy” if the neighborhood votes against a new house and you let it be built anyway. This deference to localism is hard to overcome politically when it’s framed in terms of gentrification and “Residents vs Corporate Developers”
  • To deregulate energy and infrastructure, you need to end a lot of environmental regulations. You need to get acceptance from the coalition that sometimes we’ll have to cut down a meadow to build a solar farm, or pave over a creek to build a railroad. And if there’s a species of animal or plant that *only lives* in that meadow or creek, then you have to get buy-in that biodiversity is less important that fighting climate change.
  • Energy and infrastructure also touch on “local control” and activist veto. Ezra Klein wants to make it easier for companies to get environmental lawsuits dismissed, and would likely applaud the recent supreme court decision on NEPA. But in any fight between “corporations” and “climate activists,” the coalition is inclined to side with the activists, and that will be hard to overcome
  • To deregulate schools and childcare, you need to remove laws that were put there in the name of “safety.” Many states have very low caps on child-to-adult ratio in daycares, as low as 1:3, as well regulations that the workers must have a degree in childcare and training in a wide variety of emergency medical scenarios. When a certain democrat suggested raising the child-to-adult ratio to 1:4 in one city, I saw comments that “this change will kill babies,” which is a thought-terminating incitement intended to protect regulations by force of emotion, rather than reason. If 1:4 will kill babies, then isn’t 1:3 already killing babies, since we could instead be having a 1:2 ratio? Or 1:1? At some point you have to weigh up the costs and benefits, even in cases of life and death.
  • And to deregulate any of these things, you need to overcome the cries that “every regulation is written in blood,” ie no deregulation should ever happen. This is yet another thought-terminating cliche but it’s one that has a lot of power on the left-side of the political spectrum.

So will Abundance succeed? Will Ezra Klein and the new “Abundance Caucus” make New York and California as affordable as Texas and Florida? Will they reverse the migration trends and made New York lose so many of its electoral votes? I don’t know, but I have more to say on this later. Now that I’ve defined what abundance is, I’d like my next post to discuss what it isn’t. Stay tuned…