Tag Archives: Finance

Why European Capital Markets remain fragmented

Someone on twitter posted this clearly AI-generated image of burning money. See how many mistakes you can spot in the Euros. I think the one on the left is even an upside-down Bennie Franklin, although these are all supposed to be Euros.

I blogged a while ago about how Mario Draghi wants Europe’s capital markets to be more unified to spur growth. I outlined how this was not just a matter of putting ink to paper, unifying the capital markets means unifying EU investment laws. And since those laws involve things like property rights, worker’s rights, bankruptcy rights etc, some people are going to win or lose out if everyone suddenly has to have the same investment laws. Workers whose jobs were once guaranteed even during a bankruptcy won’t appreciate that protection being removed. Companies in jurisdictions which don’t guarantee workers’ jobs like that won’t appreciate the added costs and may even close up shop, leading to no jobs for those workers at all.

But I wanted to write more on this topic as it’s a subject that interests me. And rather than last time where I went deep into the weeds outlining how one specific regulation (bankruptcy) differed across the EU’s many member states, this time I’d like to take a more broad approach to the many ways the EU’s capital markets are fragmented. And I’d like to point out that overcoming this fragmentation and unifying the markets will involve some nations winning or losing out, which is why the markets haven’t unified yet, no one wants to be the loser.

First, let’s talk Central Securities Depositories. A Central Securities Depository (CSD) is responsible for making sure that when a buyer and seller trade a financial asset, whether that’s a stock or a bond or what have you, the buyer gets the asset and the seller gets the money. Ensuring that an agreed-upon trade actually *happens* is fundamental to a working financial market. You wouldn’t go to the store if there was a chance you’d pay your money and the cashier would keep your groceries, same thing with financial markets.

The USA has a single CSD. It’s a private company but with heavy government oversight. The EU has dozens of CSDs, structured very similarly. But with dozens of CSDs to work with rather than just one, buying and selling of assets becomes a hassle. “Settlement” is the term used in finance for when the buyer and seller actually exchange money for assets, and there is a small cost associated with settlement to make sure everything is legal and on-the-level. The EU having dozens of CSDs instead of just one raises those settlement costs substantially, that in turn increases friction in the financial markets and decreases investment.

The EU wants to unify their capital markets and have just one single CSD. But will it be the French CSD, thus bringing more jobs to France? Or the Italian CSD, bringing jobs to Italy? Everyone wants their CSD to be the European CSD, and no one wants their country to lose all the high-paying jobs and high-status institutions that a CSD brings with it.

Now let’s talk about IPOs. European financial leaders have bemoaned that America has way more high-valued startups than Europe, and that European startups often flee to America rather than staying home. IPOs have at least something to do with this.

When a startup IPOs, they sell ownership of their company in exchange for investors’ money. This is a powerful way for the startup to get needed cash, and for investors to get in on the ground floor. But while Europe may have almost as much money floating around as America does, that money is in dozens of different national silos split up by regulation. You need to just adhere to 1 set of regulations to get access to all of America’s investment money, you need to adhere to dozens of sets of European regulations to get access to European money. Is it any wonder then that companies IPO in America?

But say you purchase stock in an IPO, only to lose everything because the executives were overpromising and hiding the company’s problems. Can you sue the company to recover your lost investment? Well, it heavily depends on which country you bought the stock in. Countries with strict investor protections won’t enjoy losing those protections if the EU unifies its capital markets. Countries with more lax protections generally want to prevent frivolous lawsuits from investors, who may have been well aware of the risks of a stock but still want to blame the company for their investment going south. Those countries won’t appreciate new investor protections that encourage ever more investor lawsuits.

Then thinking about IPOs, there are a lot more rules about how the shares must be structured. If you are the CEO and founder of a company, you want to IPO to get money, but you may want to keep holding all the power and control over your company. How can you sell off ownership of your company without losing any of the power and control that ownership brings?

One way is to only sell a small portion of your company’s value. You can sell off 10% or 15% or 25% of it to raise money but keep the rest for yourself. This makes you a huge majority shareholder who can never be outvoted in matters of corporate governance.

This structure poses risks to the minority shareholders, both in terms of shareholder rights and in terms of stock value. This structure, where one person owns a large part of the companies, is part of why the Adani companies collapsed so spectacularly in value back in 2023. Adani owned 75% of his companies outright. Some shareholders though this protected them “Adani will never sell, so the value cannot drop.” But actually it didn’t protect them at all, Adani would never sell, but he could also never buy.

The value of the companies wasn’t based on what Adani himself would do, his 75% ownership was locked in and unchanging. Rather the value was based on what a small minority of investors thought, the other 25% owners. If some of those investors started selling, and if no other participants in the market were willing to buy, then the price would collapse *fast* because there’s a lot less buyers and sellers available than what it may seems. Adani and his 75% ownership could not be a buyer or seller, so the market for Adani shares was 1/4 as large as it seemed to be based on the listed value of his companies.

So anyway, minority shareholders can get washed by a majority shareholder keeping all the shares to himself and ignoring their rights. Different EU companies have different rules about how much of a company a majority shareholder can retain, and what the rights of minority shareholders are. Someone is going to lose out if those rules are unified across the EU. Some companies will find their ownership structure is no longer legal, and their majority shareholders will be forced to sell. Or if majority shareholders end up being able to have a *larger* stake, some market watchers will decry that this keeps too much power in the hands of rich majority shareholders, rather than in the hands of the small minority shareholders (aka “the people”).

Then there’s taxes. Say you are a German living in Germany, but you own shares in France’s Francis Frances (FFF), incorporated in the Netherlands. Your shares in FFF pay a dividend to you, which you receive as income.

Now, the Netherlands wants you to pay tax on that income, so they tax your dividend as the money leaves their country. Germany also wants you to pay tax on that income, so they tax your dividend as the money comes into Germany. You pay dividend taxes twice, while if you’d just invested in a Germany company and ignored the Netherlands entirely, you’d have only been taxes once.

But OK, there are EU rules that are supposed to prevent this double-taxation, which should encourage cross-border investment and help unify the capital markets. But those rules are often a mess of red-tape and delays. In theory, either Germany or the Netherlands or both should give you a tax credit to pay you back for what they took out of their dividend. In practice, they may hold your money for years, or require you to jump through arbitrary hoops to get it back.

And so in the end many investors *don’t invest outside their own country,* not because they are small-minded or don’t want to, but because they’d pay twice as much tax as if they just invested in their own country. This again fragments capital markets, but governments are loath to unify the tax code like this because they still want to maintain full sovereignty over their taxes and budgets. And besides, if they unified the tax code, what would the rate of dividend tax be? 30-40%, like in Denmark and France? Or 0%, like in Slovakia and Slovenia? Everyone has arguments on what the rate should be, and no one wants to budge because there are good reasons for each argument.

In the end, I think a lot of online commentators undersell the difficulty of unifying Europe. Unification of the capital markets isn’t held back by small-minded nationalists, or sclerotic bureaucrats, it’s held back by the need for trade-offs which no government wants to make. No government wants to come to the people and say “we’re changing the laws on stocks and taxes, and we’re moving all the CSD jobs across the border.”

Leftists in France would revolt at any fall in capital gains tax, rightists and investors would do likewise for any rise in such tax in the EU’s many many low-tax jurisdictions. Emerging economies like Slovakia and Slovenia would cry foul at having to remove their competitive advantage in taxes to appease Denmark and the developed economies, Slovakia might think the only way they can attract investment is by having lower taxes than the more advanced economies of Europe.

So once again, trade-offs *exist*, and they are the reason Europe still hasn’t unified its capital markets.

Everyone’s a reactionary in their own backyard

I’ve blogged before about Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda. To recap: Ezra Klein asks the following questions:

  • Why are so many people moving out of blue states and into red states?
  • Why do red states grow faster than blue states?
  • Why do blue states have so many problems with homelessness?
  • Why can’t blue states build train lines and green infrastructure on time and on budget?

Klein concludes that liberals being maligned as “bad on the economy,” is not entirely unfair, and that Blue State policies have in many cases reduced growth and made people’s lives materially worse off. A fixation on bureaucracy is a hamstring to business. For liberals to win, Ezra wants them to not just be “not as bad” as conservatives, but he wants them to embrace a pro-growth mindset and pro-growth policies. These policies would deliver more energy, more housing, and more jobs without ever-increasing government expenditures.

I feel I can conclusively say that Klein has lost the argument, at least in online left-leaning circles. Instead, Bernie Sanders and the anti-growth crowd are winning people over to the idea that we need to *further* restrict businesses, further increase government bureaucracy, and thereby further reduce growth.

Bernie doesn’t want to fix electricity prices by improving generation and transmission like Klein does, he wants a moratorium on building datacenters.

Bernie doesn’t want to fix housing by allowing private companies to build more of it like Klein does, he wants to prevent companies from buying houses.

Bernie doesn’t want to grow the economic pie like Klein does, he wants to shrink and reslice it.

But Bernie wouldn’t have a microphone if people weren’t willing to listen to him, and in online left-leaning circles, Bernie is listened to, not Klein.

I think it’s because fundementally, people are reactionary in their own backyards. It’s all well and good to say we should encourage economic growth. But new businesses compete with old residents for land, water, and electricity. And so old residents complain that new businesses push up prices, and demand that new businesses be stopped completely. This pattern is universal and as old as civilization itself. But the modern American left is now overwhelmingly urban, and urban areas are where new businesses want to build, so the American left is now overwhelmingly anti-business.

I just want to rattle off a few arguments I’ve seen online about building, why these arguments don’t hold water, and why I think Klein will not manage to bring his Abundance Agenda into prominence.

Bernie has recently called for a moratorium on new datacenters, to protect consumers from increased electricity prices. I’ve seen a lot of the online left that considers itself “pro-growth” defend this, on the principle that:

  • “Data centers produce economic growth, but not for the people who pay the higher electricity prices.”

Because data centers are “different,” it’s Good to ban new ones, it’s not anti-growth at all it’s just anti-“bad”-growth. To which I’d say:

  • “________ produce economic growth, but not for the people who pay the higher electricity prices.”

Insert factories, electric trains, mass transit, a new University campus, or literally *anything else* and this argument is the same. This isn’t an argument against data centers, it’s an argument against any economic growth whatsoever. When things change there will always be winners and losers. When economies grow, some individuals don’t get the full benefit of that growth. But the idea of the Abundance Agenda was that the losers need to suck it up for the greater good, the price of your house isn’t worth blocking new housing and increasing the homeless rate of the wider city.

When it’s “other people” blocking housing and causing problems, it’s easy to demonize them and say they’re small-minded, wrong-headed, etc. But suddenly when it’s your back yard, and its your electricity bill, then the same people who demonized NIMBYs become NIMBYs themselves.

Of course it’s different, because THOSE OTHER people didn’t have reasonable concerns, they were motivated solely by greed and stupidity. WE however are smart and reasonable, all our concerns are well-thought out. This is how everyone thinks, but a lot of online liberal spaces are incredibly insular, and so don’t realize that their “reasonable” complaints are nothing new, but are just part and parcel of the NIMBY handbook going back decades.

If you say that new homes aren’t needed, and developers are just greedy, then there’s a reasonable amount of the online left who will dogpile you for your stupidity. New homes ARE needed, homelessness proves that there aren’t enough homes for everyone. Building new homes reduces home prices and increasing housing.

But if you say data centers aren’t needed, suddenly you’re on the 60 side of a 60/40 issue. A minority of the online left has no issue with data centers. But there are enough anti-AI people, anti-Silicon Valley people, anti-everyone rich (which therefor means anti-AI because rich people own and are the face of AI companies), and just plain closeted NIMBYs that being against new data centers is a “reasonable” belief in these spaces, where being against new housing wouldn’t be.

A few years ago, Silicon Valley and techies in general were seen as a staunch bastion of liberalism, proof that LIBERALS were actually the economically smart ones and not conservatives. A single election was all it took to change that, with a few techies siding with Trump, and with others not being sufficiently *anti*-Trump, the Tech sector has lost its shine and is now placed by many liberals in the same bin as the steel sector, the automotive sector, or even the oil and gas sector. These are just “bad people” who make money by making the world worse. So if they want AI, some people will reflexively oppose them, and supporting AI comes at a social cost in these spaces, even if you strenuously state how much you oppose the techies and the wider Silicon Valley elite.

With this shift, Silicon Valley can now be railed against in liberal spaces in just the same way as Ford or US Steel. These idiots want to build a new thing? It won’t bring any real jobs, it will dirty up our town, it will raise our prices, and they’re just making money by being evil anyway.

So blocking any new silicon valley thing becomes a socially defensible position, where 4 years ago it wasn’t. This is how coalition politics shake out on a local scale, people don’t weigh up the real-world costs and benefits of a position, they weigh up the *social costs* and the *social benefits* of a position. Supporting AI carries a social cost, opposing it carries a social benefit. That decides how the coalition reacts to AI much more strongly that the real-world economics of the situation.

Because simply put, a data center moratorium is a dumb as a factory moratorium. I, personally, won’t be enriched by a new factory being built. And most modern factories are so automated that they provide vanishingly few direct jobs, they aren’t the assembly lines with workmen that people think about, they’re honestly about as automated as a data center these days.

But my area will benefit from the increased investment, prices will go down as supply of goods increases, and I think other people should be allowed to make money by investing just as I’d like to be allowed to make money by investing myself. I wouldn’t want my dream restaurant to be blocked by NIMBYs who don’t want me bringing traffic to their part of town, so I don’t think it’s right to block other people’s economic activities even though a new data center will bring more electricity demand to me.

Some try to argue that data centers don’t produce anything real, that all AI is a bubble. That still isn’t a reason to block data centers. YOU DO NOT KNOW how the AI race will shake out, nobody does. The point of capitalism is that everyone makes their bets, and we find out later who won. If you want to bet against AI, short NVIDIA, or short Microsoft, Google, and Meta. You can bet against them and make money if you’re right, but you don’t know you’re right, and if the AI boosters are right and you block them from building datacenters, you’re impoverishing us all just like when you block housing, or a new factory, or a new University campus. You’re reducing economic growth because you think you know better but won’t put your money where your mouth is by shorting the stock, instead taking the easy way of blocking the business.

But this has been a rambly post about my opinions. The point is that these are the arguments I’ve seen all over left-leaning online spaces. The arguments are overwhelmingly anti-capitalist, anti-business, and anti-growth. Any sector that is not seen as explicitly left-leaning becomes a socially acceptable target for attack and NIMBY policies. This is antithetical to Klein’s abundance agenda. This is why I thought his agenda would not win in the left-of-center mind space, and I’m even more confident of that prediction now.

Coalitions aren’t build by reasoned argument, they are build by the social costs and benefits of holding a specific position. Techies have been etched with the scarlet letter (T for Trump, natch), and so opposing anything and everything they do has a social cost in left-of-center spaces, regardless of the reasoned arguments that growth is good for the people’s prosperity. Basically all businesses are etched with the scarlet C for conservative, and so opposing business is generally in vogue as well. Klein’s agenda relies on allowing businesses to get their way, to improve all our lives by letting business do business. That isn’t going to fly in the modern left, and I doubt Klein can change it.

Revealed Preference, Revealed Belief

Revealed preference is a very important economic concept because quite simply: talk is cheap. You cannot poll people on what they economically most want, because humans are want to lie about ourselves so that we appear more noble, more virtuous, and so on. You cannot poll people, instead you have to look at what people *do*.

To explain revealed preference in simple terms: actions speak louder than words. People like to claim that they eat healthily, that they care about what they’re putting into their bodies. But many of those very same people fill their shopping cart with junk food at the expense of all else. So while they claim to eat healthily, they are revealed to eat junk food. Their revealed preference is that they prefer the taste of junk food over the benefits of healthy food, but you wouldn’t know it by talking to them.

At a societal level, revealed preference also shows up whenever popular causes force people to put their money where their mouth is. Reducing plastic waste polls really well, and large segments of society claim that they would happily pay more for a biodegradable option rather than pay less for a plastic option. But the data from supermarkets doesn’t bear this out, with nearly all consumers continuing to prefer a cheaper plastic option when available compared to a more expensive biodegradable option.

So when economists try to understand what drives people’s economic activity, whether it’s what they buy, where they work, or how they commute, one cannot rely on what people *say* they do, you must instead find out what they *actually* do. Because the gap between words and actions is massive and we all want to appear more noble than we truly are.

With revealed preference comes the tantalizing, but tricky prospect of studying *revealed belief*. Revealed *preference* is just showing what *actions* people take that are contrary to their statements. But revealed *belief* would be about showing *the reasoning behind those actions*.

To give an example, lets dissect the junk food vs healthy food choice. You might find people who adamantly claim that they eat healthy food *not just* for their health. They may claim that healthy food tastes better, is more convenient, and is even cheaper than junk food. But if that same person is revealed to mostly eat junk food, we can surmise that their stated beliefs about healthy food vs junk food (that it tastes better, is more convenient, and even cheaper) are also wrong.

Such a person who claims to eat healthy food but only eats junk food clearly has significant cognitive dissonance, or is just *lying* in order to seem healthier. It isn’t just that their actions belie their beliefs, rather their *revealed beliefs* are contradictory to their *stated beliefs*. They probably don’t actually believe healthy food is tastier and cheaper, they just say that to try to further the lie that they eat only healthy food. Their real belief is that junk food is tastier and cheaper, that’s why they buy it and eat it.

This *revealed beliefs* thing is tricky though because there could be several confounding factors. Say someone *only states* that they believe healthy food is tastier than junk food. If they are then revealed later to be buying junk food, is it because they actually don’t think healthy food is tastier? Or is it because the cheapness of junk food and the expensiveness of healthy food outweighs taste considerations? There can always be some other reason that people take their actions, outside of their stated reasons.

But with recent events, I do think I’ve seen a mass example of revealed beliefs. And it’s with tariffs.

When Trump was coming on the scene, first in 2016 and again in 2024, economists and political commentators from both sides of the Atlantic argued passionately against his tariffs on every conceivable level. Trump’s tariffs weren’t just a good idea taken too far, rather *any tariffs at all* would harm consumers and depress the American economy to unimaginable levels. Even tariffs against geopolitical foes like China should be avoided, as such tariffs harmed America a lot more than they harmed China, and so ultimately would be counterproductive.

Yet today in 2026 I see *many of those exact same people*, primarily from the European and Canadian parts of the Atlantic, argue passionately that the EU and other nations *must respond in kind* to Trump’s tariffs. That Europe and Canada should raise massive counter-tariffs against Trump, equal or greater in value to whatever he is levying against them, and specifically targeted at America’s major industries. When Trump’s team met EU officials and agreed to a “deal” whereby the US would raise tariffs and the EU would not respond in kind, this was seen as a disaster, a surrender, and a damning indictment.

It seems clear that there is a revealed belief going on here. These transatlantic thinkers claim that tariffs hurt America more than they hurt the tariffed countries, but if that were the case, then counter-tariffs would hurt the EU and Canada more than they’d hurt America. The “solution” to Trump’s trade war would then be to do nothing at all. LET Trump tariff every nation to high heaven, he’s primarily hurting America after all, and don’t respond in kind under any circumstances. Don’t tariff American products, don’t go after American businesses, don’t do anything differently than you’d normally do, because any such anti-trade measure would harm your own countries more than it harms America.

But the revealed belief here is that Trump’s tariffs *do* harm other countries more than they harm America, because counter-tariffs and other trade barriers are being called upon, on the assumption that they will harm America more than they’ll harm other nations. It seems that many transatlantic thinkers are revealing that all the rhetoric around tariffs was a Noble Lie. All the claims about how tariffs are ineffective and self-destructive were lies meant to dissuade the public from supporting tariffs in the first place. But now that the tariffs are out of the bag, the Noble Lie has no more use, and the Awful Truth about tariffs, that they are harmful to one’s own nation, but are effective at countering trade imbalances, has come to the fore.

Noble Lies such as this beclown the person saying the lie. They reveal the liar to be a hypocrite and untrustworthy. If you found that the person who goes on and on about healthy food was actually eating nothing but junk food, you’d probably never again trust their recommendations to you about healthy eating. And likewise, a lot of poli/econ commentators have lost a lot of credibility in my eyes by going back on their pre-Trump claims about tariffs. By revealing that they never believed those things in the first place, they reveal (to me at least) that I should never trust them again going forward.

“GDP is bullshit”

Transcription: “GDP is also a bullshit metric. If I buy $100 of flouride, add water, buy some bottles, repackage it as Crest Mouthwash, and sell it for $15/bottle, I’ve generated like $1500 of GDP. That’s not really adding value, that’s enriching shareholders at the cost of people who don’t realize they’re being robbed.”

Response: my guy, that’s literally the definition of adding value.

Now to be fair, this comment was downvoted when I found it, meaning more people disagreed than agreed, but still, this sentiment about “adding value” is something I see all over the internet in anti-capitalist spaces. People will literally explain adding value, then say something adds absolutely no value.

Even a marxist would agree that the labor required to add water, buy bottles, and package something adds value to the product. And a capitalist would say that if this poster successfully created mouthwash that people would buy for $15/bottle, then they’ve added value to that $100 of fluoride. And if this poster actually did this experiment, and made money off of it, they could quickly start a company and become rich.

But they can’t do this, because it’s actually quite difficult to create good, quality fluoridated mouthwash, and they have no skills besides complaining on the Internet.

Still, they have explicitly defined a process in which a low-cost good is turned into a highly desirable product, a process which both a labor-obsessed marxist and a capital-obsessed capitalist would say has “added value” to that good, and have said that it isn’t “real” value. They extend this to say that GDP is bullshit.

“GDP-is-bullshit”ism has seemed to take hold in some spaces. I can see why, people’s personal situations don’t always track the wider economy, so the economy as a whole (measured by GDP) can go up massively while some people or some sectors are struggling. It may not matter to you than millions of people have more time, money, and leisure because you personally lost your job as say a factory worker. In this case GDP can seem like a false measurement because people have a hard time looking outside themselves.

But in another way, it is true that some politicians laser-focus on GDP to the expense of all else. It is a basic truism that when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric. GDP is a *metric* of economic health, but once voters realized this they started grading their politicians on the GDP measurements they saw in the news. That in turn made GDP into a *target* for politicians to point at and say “look, I’m making things better!”

In that case, GDP can go up (because it’s being targeted) while people’s actual situation is going down. This is exactly what happened during the tail end of the Trudeau administration in Canada, Trudeau focused solely on rising GDP as his target, but GDP-per-capita went down. People’s living situations in Canada were not really improved at all despite Trudeau raising the national GDP.

Still, GDP is a good measure of what it measures: productivity. And what is productivity? It is the turning of low-value things into high value things.

The above poster blithely described it as “bullshit,” but think of this: everything we as a society need and want requires someone else to use their time, money and effort to make it for us. If there isn’t enough food for all of us, our lives are measurably worse off. Increasing the production of food requires the labor of a farmer, requires the cultivation of land, requires the creation of irrigation and of transport infrastructure and warehouses for the food and inspections to ensure the food is clean. The creation of all those things is captured in GDP.

GDP directly captures when something of value is created, whether it’s food, or irrigation to make the food, or warehouses to store the food, or even Crest Mouthwash made from raw fluoride. YOU may not think the thing created has value, maybe you don’t wash your mouth. But the beauty of capitalism is that OTHER people get to decide for THEMSELVES what they think is valuable, and if they want mouthwash, they’ll happily pay for it, and thus creating new mouthwash to sell to those people raises GDP.

This is a small post, it’s mostly meant to dunk on a single Internet commentator, and by extension dunk on an entire subculture of “GDP-is-bullshit”ists. But I want to make clear: GDP is NOT bullshit. It is a measure of goods and services created. Those goods and services have VALUE, maybe not to you, but to SOMEONE ELSE. If they didn’t have value to someone else, they wouldn’t raise GDP. And so complaining that some people’s goods and services add value, even though you don’t think they’re useful, is like complaining that other people are having fun with a game you don’t like.

“Why don’t they only film the hits?”

There’s a joke from “That Mitchel and Webb Look” that I want to dissect like a frog for a moment. The video is just one minute long, but if you don’t want to watch it I can summarize it here:

  • “So for the sketches we’re filming, I’m thinking we’ll make them “hit, hit, miss, hit, miss, miss”
  • “Do we have to film all the misses as well as the hits? Why not only film the hits and use those for the show?”
  • “Well it’s a sketch comedy show, it has to be hit and miss.”

The joke doesn’t need to be explained, but I will anyway: why does a sketch comedy show have a lot of sketches that miss the mark, as well as ones that are laugh out loud funny? Isn’t it easier to just film the hits? Well obviously the writers didn’t think those misses would miss the mark, they thought those misses might be hits as well, that’s why they wrote them and filmed them. You don’t know for sure what will be a hit and what will be a miss before you release the show.

A similar pattern is discussed with venture capital investing. Venture capitalists invest in hundreds of startups on the assumption that around 90% of them will fail and make no money at all. The 10% that succeed are expected to pay for all the failures. Well then why don’t venture capitalists *only* invest in the successes and not waste money investing in the failures? Again: they don’t know for sure what will succeed or fail before investing. A huge amount of time and money goes into predicting the success or failure of startups so these VCs can try to invest wisely, but it isn’t a solved problem by any means.

And if you think this investing problem has an obvious solution, take out a personal loan and invest 50,000$ in a single startup that *you know for sure* is guaranteed to be successful. You’ll 1000x your money and be able to pay off the loan and interest easily.

But this pattern of “why not only go for the hits?” holds true in science as well. But here many people don’t seem to understand or believe it.

Governments, corporations, and charities invest billions into potentially lifesaving treatments every year. 90% of those scientific ventures will come to nothing, only a few will be successful. But you don’t know for sure which will succeed and which won’t before you try.

I think of this because I all too often see people complain about “why did we invest X number of dollars into researching such and such, when Y was invented with so much less?” A World War 2 version of this is the infamous refrain about how the project to develop a better bomb-sight for American planes costed more than the Manhattan Project which made nuclear bombs. A modern version of this complaint might be complaining that the Amyloid hypothesis in Alzheimer’s disease has received so much funding despite never curing Alzheimer’s.

In both cases though, our best foreknowledge seemed to indicate that this was the right path. Nuclear fission was completely unproven tech, the scientists themselves were pessimistic about their abilities to make a bomb out of it. When the first test of a real nuclear bomb took place, the scientists involved had a bet going for how much power the bomb would produce (with some predicting it would be a dud). *EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM* drastically underestimated the power of the bomb they had created, the most wildly optimistic predictions underestimated the bomb’s power by half.

By contrast air-power was a proven war winner when the USA started spending billions on bomb-sights. Germany’s blitzkrieg had used massive air power to help them overwhelm, surround, and destroy, other nations all across Europe. Air power could destroy the railroads and bridges that let troops move across modern battlefields, it could destroy the factories where the troop’s guns and tanks were made, and domination of the air allowed an army a far better picture of the battlefield then their enemies had. In this scenario, the allies looked at the success of German air power and believed that upping their own air power might similarly prove dividends. They never got the total success of the German blitzkrieg, but overwhelming air power was at least part of how the USA held on in the Korean war, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

Similarly, the evidence for Alzheimer’s disease has always seemed to point toward Amyloid Beta playing a key role. The evident failure of drugs targeting Amyloid Beta means there’s a lot more we have to learn, but just because the Amyloid Hypothesis is flawed doesn’t mean a competing hypothesis is automatically right. Putting billions towards the Tau or neurotransmitter hypotheses is not guaranteed to have brought success, in fact these hypotheses were studied even during the dominance of the Amyloid Hypothesis, and neither of them produced working drugs either.

People have a video-game understanding of research, as I’ve complained about before. They think that if we just put enough money towards the correct hypothesis, we’ll find what we’re looking for. But we don’t know what’s correct before we commit our money, and if our hypothesis fails, we don’t even know if we just haven’t thrown *enough* money at the problem, or if we’re chucking good money after bad. Which answer you lean to likely says more about your politics than about the quality of the research itself. Should we throw more and more money towards commercial nuclear fusion, even though that industry has never once succeed in even the most modest goals set for itself? Should we cut off the Amyloid Hypothesis, even though a century of research shows that Amyloid Beta does play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease? Everyone seems to think they already know the answer, but few are willing to prove it with evidence.

Opportunity Costs in Civilization 6

One of the most important concepts I learned in economics is the idea of opportunity costs.  Every action we take has a cost, not just the cost of the action itself, but the cost of *now not being able to do something else* with either the time or money or both that we just spent.  

A simple example: a company only has 100$ to invest in a machine.  If they buy the machine that makes blue widgets, they can’t also buy the machine that makes red widgets.  Thus, buying the blue widget machine doesn’t *just* cost 100$, it also has the *opportunity cost* of not buying the red widget machine.

There are also opportunity costs with time, if you decide to go to Europe for your holiday vacation, you can’t also go to South America at the same time.  So the cost of going to Europe isn’t just the cost of the time and the tickets, it’s also the opportunity cost of not going to South America (or anywhere else) as well.

As an aside, this is why for some people it can make sense to NOT go to college EVEN IF college were totally free.  The cost of going to college includes the *opportunity cost* of not having a full-time job (if you’re a full-time student).  

A comedian once made a joke that, after graduating college he couldn’t find any work “because the dropouts already had the jobs.”  A funny joke, but it demonstrates a point:  You spend 4 years getting a degree, but if that degree doesn’t measurably increase your employment prospects, you could have been better off spending those 4 years getting work experience at a full-time job.  You could not only get the money that a full time job gives you, but the experience itself would increase your employability and ability to get better jobs.

So the education and degree you’re seeking needs to increase your employability *more* than just doing 4 years of work.  If not, then it’s a net loss *even if your education was free* because you had the *opportunity cost* of not getting those 4 years of work experience.

But I didn’t want to blog about college, I wanted to blog about Civilization again.

The non-gamers in my audience may be tired of my gaming blogging, but I’ve spent a lot of this holiday season playing Civ IV and Civ VI with friends, so I’ve been thinking about this.

I complain that in Civ VI, some of the leaders seem to have traits that are utterly worthless, they don’t feel like they improve your Civ’s abilities any more than having a vanilla Civ with *no* traits.  Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of these, her ability to culture-flip cities feels very underpowered and completely useless, and doesn’t make her any more powerful than a Civ that doesn’t have any abilities at all.

My friend shoots back at this by saying that if you put a lot of resources into it, you can set up a situation in which you culture-flip whole continents in an instant.  And yes, this is theoretically possible.  Does that mean Eleanor is “very powerful in the right circumstances?”  No.  Because of *opportunity costs*.  

See, the cost of putting all your resources into Eleanor’s culture-flipping ability is that *you can’t put those resources into other things*.  You can’t research technologies or build military units if you are instead spending your entire GDP on culture buildings.  Culture isn’t free, and it doesn’t just cost what it costs to produce it, it has the *opportunity cost* of not doing anything else with that money and production.

So in any situation where Eleanor can “culture flip a continent” by spending an absurd amount of resources on culture, any other Civ could just use those resources to win the game with military, or science, or even diplomacy.  

Eleanor’s ability is useless not because you *can’t* use it to do things, but because the amount you have to spend to make her ability not-useless could instead be better used to win the game in *any other way at all*.  Her ability has an *opportunity cost* in that if you try to use it to its fullest, you are by definition not using those resources on better strategies that will win you the game more easily.

And that’s what I feel about a lot of the Civ VI leaders.   Some  leaders have abilities so minor they don’t feel impactful.  Some have abilities that completely change the nature of the game.  And some like Eleanor have these abilities that are actually traps, because the opportunity cost of trying to use their ability to its fullest makes you worse off than if you’d ignored their ability and played the game normally.

People didn’t like Civ IV’s leader system because every leader drew from a limited pot of abilities.  Gilgamesh is Creative/Protective, while Catherine the Great is Creative/Imperialistic.  From my perspective, that’s unique, *no one but Gilgamesh has that specific combination of traits*.  From other people’s perspective though “they’re both creative so they’re too similar to be cool.”  

These people who say this seem to really be drawn to Civ VI because every leader has *completely unique abilities* not seen anywhere else.  But from my perspective “many of those abilities are worse to use than just ignoring the ability and playing the game normally.”  Leaning into your “special ability” can have an opportunity cost, and no one but me seems to recognize this.

So in the future, please think about opportunity costs, both for college and for your video games.  Making a nation have a super special ability isn’t actually cool if leaning into that ability makes you worse off than if you’d ignored it and played the game normally.   Opportunity costs are real, even if not everyone understands them.

Amazon will not be part of the “Resistance”

I wanted to write this half a year ago, but with Trump’s tariffs back in the news, I figured I’d give it another go.

When Trump first enacted his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs, many experts (mostly partisan experts though) predicted the apocalypse. It was bad enough that many news sources started educated their readers on the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which anyone who watched Ferris Bueler’s Day Off will know were the tariffs enacted during the Great Depression. These tariffs have been blamed for contributing to the depth and intensity of the Great Depression, and naturally partisans wanted voters to make that connection to Trump’s Tariffs.

I myself also started watching out. I live in a major city with a major train hub, and as I commute past it I like to look out and check how many boxcars are being loaded and unloaded by trains. Earlier this year it seemed the tariffs might have actually been apocalyptic, the train yard was empty on some days. But despite partisans stoking fears of COVID-level shortages, tariffs have seemed to have a marginal effect on the US economy. Growth has remained strong in 2025, with the US well ahead of pretty much every advanced economy on earth in terms of growth rate. The EU may be a massive free trade area, and the USA may have become an increasingly protectionist autarky throughout the Trump-Biden years, but that hasn’t been enough to make the EU more competitive or the US less.

It’s likely because the tariffs are indeed marginal. Tariffs are a tax on imports, but like any other tax they can be avoided and mitigated by changing behaviors. Companies have shifted to sourcing their products from areas with lower tariffs, changing their production line to build more things in America, or in some cases are simply accepting lower profits and not passing the cost of the tariffs onto consumers because they need to maintain market share. In other cases the tariffs *are* leading to a rise in prices, but consumers still have the chance to substitute tariffed goods for other goods or just stop buying alltogether.

The tariffs have likely contributed to inflation remaining well-above target, and have likely made certain consumers much poorer without realizing it (as they purchase tariffed products and can’t find substitutes), but the tariffs have not had nearly the destructive effects that I and many others believed they would.

But the biggest problem for Trump’s detractors is highlighting the adverse effects of Trump’s tariffs. Remember that the American people seem to broadly like tariffs: Biden expanded Trump’s tariffs, Bernie surged in the Democratic Party by denouncing Clinton’s pro-corporate policies (which were usually also pro-trade policies) and Trump has completely remade the GOP into a protectionist party. America’s two parties are dominated by protectionists, and many free-trade Democrats have been furious that 2028 hopefuls have mostly denounced Trump’s tariffs as being “too high, too broad,” rather than hitting out that “tariffs are just plain bad and shouldn’t be used.”

It seems that Americans really do like tariffs, so trying to attack Trump for his tariff policy doesn’t hit as well as it “should.” This is a big problem for free-trade Democrats because to them it’s patently obvious that Trump’s tariffs have led to higher inflation and lower growth, but Americans aren’t necessarily buying it.

Enter Amazon. As the foremost distributor of direct-to-consumer goods, Amazon is acutely sensitive to trade policy. Any raise in tariffs will cause a raise in prices for imported goods, causing consumers to purchase less and that hurts Amazon’s bottom line. Amazon has every reason to lobby as strongly as possible *against* tariffs, and as a consumer-facing company that everyone knows, free-trade Democrats thought they’d found their edge.

The idea went like this: what if Amazon *shows consumers* how much higher their prices are because of tariffs? What if every time a consumer buys a 100$ imported product, Amazon shows its base cost but then hits them with a “+15$ because of tariffs” fee at the checkout? Consumers would be furious at these hidden costs, but their fury would be directed at Trump and his tariffs. The tariffs would become unpopular, Trump would become unpopular, the free-trade Democrats and Amazon would be the big winners in 2026 and 2028 when (hopefully) less protectionist Democrats would be swept into power on a wave of consumer backlash.

It all seemed so perfect, leaked reports even claimed that Amazon was openly considering this idea.

But then Amazon made an official statement that they would not under any condition display tariff prices. Their statement said that while such a move was considered, it was never approved, which isn’t unusual as companies are constantly considering many thousands of moves that are never approved. Furthermore Amazon spokesmen pointed out that the company had never shown consumers the cost of tariffs during the Biden administration, even though Biden had hiked tariffs to their highest point since Jimmy Carter.

Amazon felt the move would damage its own brand, worsen its political position, and bring basically no benefit. If Amazon was an arm of the Democratic party, then maybe it would make sense. But as a profit-maximizing entity, pissing off your customers with hidden fees *and* wading into the political arena with a nakedly partisan endorsement of the opposition (by blaming the current administration for high prices) just doesn’t make sense.

So Amazon will *not* be part of the Anti-Trump Resistance. As Michael Jordan once said, Republicans buy sneakers too, and most profit-maximizing companies find it best to *not* piss off half the country by taking overtly partisan stances. They may try to take political stances, but they will always present themselves as non-partisan to consumers, because they don’t want to lose business from angry voters. And directly blaming Trump’s Tariffs for high Amazon prices, after 4 years of never doing such for Biden’s Tariffs would indeed be an overtly partisan act, because it’s an attempt to blame Republicans for high prices and push consumers towards supporting the Democrats.

This then made Amazon a target of April’s 2-minute-hate in the eyes of free-trade democrats. These Democrats don’t see “showing the cost of tariffs” as partisan at all (because people always believe their own beliefs are just “the obvious truth,” and not a partisan stance). Rather, when Amazon *refused* to show the cost of tariffs, it was blamed for kowtowing to a “fascist” government, comparisons to 1930s German companies were ever-present, and Bezos himself was derided as a coward and a collaborator, rather than the profit-maximizing businessman that he is.

The simple fact is that obviously no multinational company is going to want to lose half its customers, so no multinational company is going to make their storefront an advertisement for the Democrats and against the Republicans. I’m sure Amazon is lobbying the administration on reducing tariffs, it was widely reported that tech giants did this exact same lobbying last time Trump was in power. But just because Amazon doesn’t like tariffs doesn’t mean they want to torch their credibility with Republican consumers. Because Republican consumers might angrily ask why Amazon is sourcing products from overseas (and showing people a tariff) rather than sourcing *American* products like Trump (and Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders) would prefer they be doing.

Anyway I’ve found a dozen ways to restate this one point: Amazon is not going to become part of the Resistance, it will not show consumers what the price of Trump’s tariffs are in part because that would be a partisan move that would invite blowback and boycotts from Republicans: “why isn’t Amazon buying American instead, and why didn’t Amazon do this stunt during the Biden administration?”

But I wanted to note one additional reason Amazon won’t be showing consumers the price of tariffs, and it’s isn’t because of what Amazon wants, it’s because of what their suppliers want.

The relationship between Amazon and its legion of medium-sized suppliers is a tricky one. On the one hand some random clothing store like Shoes&Shirts LLC (fake name) probably likes that Amazon gives them a massive amount of customers to sell to. Amazon’s global consumer base makes it easier to scale up by just having a single contract with Amazon, rather than having to negotiate multiple deals with brick-and-mortar stores in every single country.

On the other hand, Amazon’s dominance of the market gives them a lot of power over their suppliers, they can negotiate a large cut of the proceeds, demand suppliers abide by Amazons rules and regulations, and overall an agreement with Amazon can be like a pair of golden handcuffs. If you’ve seen how indie developers complain about Steam, you’ll understand how small and medium suppliers complain about Amazon.

The situation can be even worse, since Amazon competes directly with its own suppliers. Say Shirts&Shoes LLC has a new style of Comfy Sweater that is flying off the digital shelves. Amazon can see this, and see that another company makes a nearly identical sweater for a fraction of the cost. Amazon can then source their own Comfy Sweater from this other company and try to undercut Shirts&Shoes LLC on price, fulfilling the orders themselves and taking Shirts&Shoes’s business out from under them.

Amazon suppliers are therefore very very cautious with what information they give to Amazon. They do *not* want to tell Amazon the price it costs them to make something, they only want to reveal the price they’re selling it for. Giving away the price to make something makes it even easier for Amazon to undercut them.

If Shirts&Shoes’s sweater is selling for 100$, and you can source it for 60$, you still don’t know for sure if you can undercut them. Maybe Amazon lists their own sweater for 75$, but Shirts&Shoes responds by cutting the price down to 50$ because they can actually make it for even less than that. Amazon would be putting a lot of money into a failed attempt at capturing new market share, Shirts&Shoes would be furious at the attempted betrayal, AND both would now be making less money because the shirt is selling for less so both sides get less of a cut. The only winners would be the consumers.

So Amazon’s suppliers DO NOT want to give Amazon any information more than they need to. And that by the way includes the price of tariffs.

When Shirts&Shoes brings a shirt into America, customs charges them a tariff based on the declared value of the shirt. Shirts&Shoes then has to set the sale price at a level high enough to cover not only the cost of the shirt, but also the cost of the tariff. If the value of the shirt is 20$ and there’s a 100% tariff, then they can’t sell the shirt for less than 40$ without taking a lose.

But they may be selling the shirt for 100$ anyway and taking 60$ of profit. Now, the shirt’s price may have gone up because there used to be no tariff and now there’s a 100% tariff. So the free-trade Democrats would love if the shirt was listed on Amazon for a price of 80$, but had an extra 20$ “tariff tax” at the checkout that would be directly blamed on Donald Trump.

But Shirts&Shoes doesn’t want to reveal that the base cost of their shirt is 20$ with a 20$ tariff on top. Because at that point if Amazon can source the same shirt for 35$, then they can undercut Shirts&Shoes and steal their business, and both sides know it. Instead, Shirts&Shoes would like the costs going into the shirt to be as obfuscated as possible.

They’d probably like their customers to think that it costs them 90$ to make a shirt and they’re selling it for 100$, because that way they don’t seem to be making “too” much profit. If customers knew Shirts&Shoes had such a high mark-up, customers might think they were getting ripped off, and would make nasty posts on the internet to complain about Shirts&Shoes’s prices. This could harm Shirts&Shoes’s brand.

And they’d probably like Amazon to think that it costs them 5$ to make a shirt and they’re selling it for 100$. Because they don’t want Amazon to attempt to undercut them and either steal their business or initiate a price war which harms their profit margins.

So ambiguity is entirely in Shirts&Shoes’s interests, and so they don’t want to reveal any tariff information to Amazon. That in turn means that even if Amazon wanted to, it wouldn’t be able to reveal tariff information on any third party products, only on products it sources itself. That could backfire if Amazon even decided to reveal tariff prices, as *only Amazon’s own goods would show the tariff as a hidden cost*. Buy a good sourced by Shirts&Shoes? What You See Is What You Get. Buy a good sourced by Amazon? You have no idea WHAT the real price will be.

To summarize, Amazon (and other profit-seeking companies) will NOT be part of the resistance, as they do not want to damage their brand in the eyes of partisans. Likewise, it’s not even a simple thing for Amazon to JOIN the resistance and reveal to customers the true price of tariffs. They’d be pissing off their own customers by making customers feel like the price is a bait-and-switch, they’d be demanding information from their suppliers that the suppliers don’t want to reveal, and if the suppliers DON’T reveal that information, then only Amazon-sourced products would show a tariff anyway, meaning Amazon gets all of the blowback for “high prices” while their suppliers can claim “Same Low Prices As Ever,” even if prices everywhere are actually rising.

Partisans think everyone should join their fight, and that the only reason not to is base cowardice. They’re usually wrong.

How much of Canadian-bound immigrants wish to eventually immigrate to America?

This will be a post long on musing and short on evidence. But I have two anecdotes about Canadians, or at least Canadian-bound immigrants.

In grad school I met a Chinese woman who moved to Canada for her undergrad, but her express purpose was to eventually find her way into an American graduate school (which she did). She knew that not only would a Canadian undergraduate degree look good to an American Grad school, but she also knew that she could get her American visa while living as a student in Canada, and that it would be easier to do that than to get a visa while living in China. Most people don’t realize, but even if you’re accepted to a University, you aren’t guaranteed a student visa. The American state department can reject your visa if they think you’ll overstay, and the staff are very strict when issuing visas in China and India, but much more lax when issuing visas in Canada.

Now why didn’t she do her undergraduate degree in America? I don’t know, I never asked. Maybe it was too expensive, maybe she couldn’t get in. But she was open an honest that she though an American degree was better than a Canadian one, and much better than a Chinese one, and so getting an American degree was crucial for her career.

And a researcher I know at my current job has Canadian citizenship, but he and his family immigrated there with the intention of eventually reaching America. I don’t know how, but he said it’s a lot easier to get permanent residency and citizenship in Canada as opposed to America, and it’s a lot quicker. And once you’re a Canadian citizen, you have a much higher chance of getting a visa into America compared to an Indian citizen.

Like in China, the state department considers Indian citizens to be at a very high risk of overstaying their visas, and so are reluctant to give visas to them. But Canadian citizens are low risk. If you eventually want to move to America for work, moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian citizen can be a long-term strategy.

So how common is this overall? I have absolutely no idea, but I’d like to know. I know that recently both Canada and America had very high spikes of immigration. Canada under Trudeau defended its immigration policy on economic grounds as bringing in more workers to grow the economy, America under Biden instead used humanitarian grounds, as America being a beacon for the tired, poor, and huddled masses. But during this spike, there were still stories of people coming to Canada and then trying to use that to move to America.

So how true is this, and what are the implications? A troubling implication would be if Canada was seen as a “secondary” destination for many migrants, who would only go there if they thought or knew they wouldn’t be able to go to America. That would mean the international opinion of Canada’s economy is rather low, and also that it probably wasn’t receiving the best and brightest compared to America (because the best and brightest are more likely to be accepted into America).

This could also have ramifications to how Canada is affected by American policy. America is endorsing a highly restrictive immigration policy. Will this cause more immigrants to seek Canada, as they cannot reach America? Or will it cause *less* immigrants to seek Canada, as many of them *only went to Canada in order to reach America, which they now cannot do*?

Canada is also changing its policy at the same time, so teasing apart a single cause is difficult, maybe impossible. But it does make me think.

I was once talking to an econ guy at a conference, and he said that if every country on earth adopted open borders, most countries would see their immigration plummet as almost all immigrants they would have received would instead go to the United States. I don’t know if this is true, and he was an American of a certain political persuasion, so he may have had emotional reasons to believe this is true. But if anyone else out there has evidence of this, I’d love to see it.

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.