Tag Archives: politics

The Great Disruption Part 2: A laundry list of failed predictions

I wrote earlier about The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding, a book which claimed to be an unerringly scientific prediction of the future of our climate’s future, but was in reality a pseudo-religious call to action in favor of degrowth ideology, with every counter-argument ignored without even a retort. I’ve meant to write for a while but all I have is a laundry list of grievances against the book. This is the streams of my consciousness, so let’s go.

The author understands a tiny bit of economics, and understands that technology does not destroy jobs but rather lowers costs. The powered loom didn’t destroy jobs in the clothing industry, more people work in this industry today than before it’s invention. Rather the powered loom lowered the price of clothes such that all of us can afford many more pairs of clothes than could our ancestors. Lower prices, more efficiency, more consumption.

But he considered our human drive for technology to be a “pathology” because “it doesn’t work” (in what way?). He seems to claim that our lives are not tangibly better than our predecessors, we just have “more stuff.” I strongly disagree, I live a life of much more comfort an ease than did my parents on the 20th century, and I can even point towards tangible benefits since he wrote his book in 2008. The ability to call my family no matter where either of us are has greatly eased my mind when my family are taking a long cross-country trip. I no longer worry that they may be stuck or stranded without help, or that they’ve taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. Both of those are impossible as long as smart phones exist.

Furthermore, Paul believes that we reached the limits of resource extraction in *2005*, and that the 2008 crash was proof of this. This is again laughable, US oil production has nearly tripled since 2005, China has increased its demand for coal and iron, even food production has continued to increase. There is no way in hell to defend the idea that 2005 was the point where we reached maximum resource extraction, we’ve easily breached that mark every year since 2010. In 2008 when he wrote his book, the global economy was in a recession, and his thesis may have been believable. But with 20 years of growth since then, his claim is clearly bunk.

He claims that he predicted the 2008 crash by looking at resource constraints and ecological changes. Desertification, bleaching of corals, global warming, these were all signs that humanity was reaching the limits of growth and our economy would eventually crash.

But since 2020 our economy has boomed, even if the bottom 99% haven’t felt it. So question for Paul: have those ecological changes stopped? Because if desertification, coral bleaching, and global warming all predict an economic crash, then the only way to account for our economy *not* crashing is to say that those things are no longer happening. Or perhaps Paul’s prediction was bunk and ecological changes *do not* predict economic ones.

Paul also falls into what I call the Paradox of the Evil Billionaire. On the one hand, Paul claims that we all know how billionaires don’t have a shred of patriotism in their bodies, and would gladly sell out their own countrymen to make a quick buck. On the other hand, Paul and others claim that Foreign Billionaires will buy up American farms and send all the food back to their home countries, even though they’d make much more money by continuing to sell that food in America. Note that American food prices are *much much much higher* than in places like China or India, food is worth a lot more here than it is there.

So why are these Evil Billionaires, who *only* care about making more money and *definitely* will sell out their own countrymen for a buck, suddenly being secret patriots by taking a loss in order to send American food back to their home countries instead of selling it for a profit in America?

It’s because Paul (and others) believe in conspiracies more than facts, and the conspiracy that “foreigners are out to get us” is a much more powerful one than “all rich folks are amoral bastards.”

So Paul has this fantasy that in the future, countries will be forced to enact harsh laws on who can own farmland, because there won’t be enough food to go around and people will be sending food to their homelands instead of selling it for the highest price. In reality, farm production has continued to increase and food is still affordable for most Americans. Egg prices for one have crashed in 2025, making them much more affordable than last year.

Paul brashly contends that “2008 was the year that growth stopped.” LOL. LMAO even.

Paul contends that 2008 was only the beginning of a sustained economic downturn and global emergency which would last decades. Here’s some of his predictions, and the results of the past 20 years:

  • Food demand will increase but agricultural output will decrease, causing skyrocketing food prices. Hasn’t happened
  • Fresh water, fisheries, and arable land will run out leading to sky-high prices for food and water. Nope, hasn’t happened.
  • “Sustained and rapid increases in oil prices as peak oil is breached.” LMAO, no.
  • He does claim that “there could be” a global pandemic which shuts down air travel, so he weasels his way into one correct prediction. Still, the pandemic is over and air travel is back, so it didn’t lead to any lasting effects like he claimed.
  • He also puts the global pandemic right alongside “terrorists attacks wiping out a major city,” so I think clearly he was just making shit up that sounded scary. Again no, terrorists haven’t wiped out any major cities.
  • He claims there will be a “dramatic drop in global [stock] markets and a tightening of capital supply.” Again, no.

So basically all of his predictions are bad. He’s a degrowther, after all.

He essentially predicted a mass global crisis because we’d run out of oil and coal. He wasn’t really an environmentalist either, he didn’t think renewables could ever bridge the gap. Rather he just wanted the economy to be *smaller*, and so he created a bunch of fanciful predictions that proved it would become smaller in the future. He was wrong of course, the global economy has never been larger.

Here are also some of the changes he thinks society must make, and WILL make, to stave off the catastrophe, along with my commentary:

  • He thinks the societies that will best cope with the catastrophe will be the ones that start to “ration electricity.” In reality, rationing electricity is a sign that your society is *failing*, not succeeding, at coping with the present.
  • He wants to “erect a wind turbine and solar plant in every town.” This is just stupid on top of everything else. Not every town is suitable for wind or solar power, and besides power generation is done best using *economies of scale*, where lots of power is generated all in one place and then distributed to the markets far away. His idea would be inefficient and bad, so of course it hasn’t happened.
  • He wants to “ration the use of ICE cars,” “ground 1/2 of all aircraft,” “shop less, live more.” No, no, and no. And what does he mean by “live more?” People buy things they want because they think it will improve their lives. When he says “live more” he just comes across as a boomer complaining that society is too fast-paced for his old back to handle, and that he doesn’t like how women wear so much makeup these days. Most of his complaints come across as cultural rather than economic, and these are severely *conservative* cultural complaints at that.
  • He thinks we must (and therefore WILL) stop using fossil fuels by 2024. Hasn’t happened.
  • He thinks that as of 2008 there is “no significant future for coal or oil, short of some surprising breakthrough technology.” Was fracking really all that surprising?
  • “The market hasn’t priced in that all coal and oil companies will be worthless.” LMAO, nope. I’m sure he’s moved the goal-posts by now, but these companies have continued chugging along regardless.

Paul also says “I talk to people all the time who understand this *common sense*, they know that despite so-called “experts” saying their lives are improved these past few decades, they don’t feel any better off.” He has just discovered nostalgia, and thinks he’s the only one who understands. Again, he is fundamentally a cultural conservative, things were better in the “good old days.”

Anyway these are just my thoughts on Paul’s book. It really is not worth a read as anything other than blog fodder. It is badly written, badly argued, and hasn’t stood the test of time. I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, I got it at the library instead. But they should really discard it and put something better on their shelves.

EDIT: one final aside: when I posted this post, WordPress suggested I add additional tags to increase it’s reach. They suggested “faith” and “Jesus” as appropriate tags. Why?

The Great Disruption: A Degrowth Apocalypse

In 1972, a report on “the limits to growth” was published laying out a detailed argument that there simply weren’t enough resources in the world for economies to continue growing.  In 2008, the fruits of that 1972 paper came to pass, as every grifter who’d read it published a book saying that the financial crisis was proof that economic growth was now at an end.  Richard Heinberg said this in 2010, and in 2011 Paul Gilding did the same.

In a blurb, “The Great Disruption” by Paul Gilding is just like “The End of Growth” By Richard Heinberg, which I reviewed previously.  The two books both claim that resources, *especially fossil fuels* are running out (or rather, ran out back in 2010-2011 when these books were published).  Both books claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by this resource constraint (and *not* by the sub-prime mortgage crisis which actually caused it).  And both claim that since we’ve reached the limits of growth (back in 2010…) we now have to live in a world where no more growth is possible.  We instead need to adopt Degrowth, where we eliminate fossil fuels entirely and shrink out economies and our livelihoods in order to continue living on this earth.

But unlike “The End of Growth,” this book is much more than a thesis, it’s a sermon.  In my opinion, “The Great Disruption” is Paul Gilding’s stab at writing a Degrowther Book of Daniel.  

For those of you who aren’t faithful, the Book of Daniel is one of the primary “apocalypse” books of the old testament.  An apocalypse doesn’t really mean the “end of the world,” rather it literally means “revealing,” and an apocalypse book is when the truth of the future is revealed to a prophet and he writes that truth down for all to read.

In the Book of Daniel, Daniel foresees the rise and fall of several earthly empires, culminating in the rejuvenation of Israel and the eternal reign of God.  It doesn’t matter, says Daniel, that the current world is ruled by tyrants and that the situation seems hopeless.  God will destroy the evil and restore the righteous, and it *will* happen just as Daniel says it will.

In “The Great Disruption,” Paul Gilding foresees the inevitable fall of capitalism and the liberal world order, culminating in a degrowther paradise where we all agree to consume at little resources as possible to maintain the world’s stability.  It doesn’t matter, says Gilding, that the current world is ruled by capitalism and the situation seems impossible.  “We have no other choice” he says, and so everything he says *will* happen, just as he says it will.

This comparison to scripture isn’t an idle one.  The whole time I read “The Great Disruption” I kept noting how it felt like a sermon, not a argument.  Paul Gilding doesn’t really try to persuade the reader that his plan for a degrowth future is the best one, instead he repeatedly asserts that “we have no other choice” and that everyone *will eventually accept* that “we have no other choice.”  And so, once Government, Corporations, and People eventually accept that we “we have no other choice,” they will all begin acting exactly as he thinks they should act, by cutting off fossil fuels, travel, and all consumer goods in order to degrow the economy.

He tries to persuade the reader of some things, yes.  He works to persuade us that climate change needs to be addressed, that there are limits to growth, and that the 2008 financial crisis was the moment when Growth Finally Stopped for all time.  

But he doesn’t ever try to persuade the readers that his degrowth future is possible, feasible, or better than the other options.  He doesn’t even try to persuade us that it will actually happen.  He keeps writing anecdotes about people questioning the possibility and feasibility of his plans and predictions, and he keeps responding the same way: “we have no other choice.”

This is the hallmark of a sermon, or an apocalypse.  In such works as these, The Truth (capital Ts) isn’t something you argue or persuade, but something you announce and reveal, with no room for questioning or doubt.  Any quibbles about the details are brushed aside because “it will happen, don’t question it.”  Instead, the focus is on laying out this revealed future, what will it look like, who will be punished, and who will be rewarded.

I’ll try to write more on Paul Gilding’s book, but I can’t recommend it as anything other that a hoop to be dunked on.  Paul’s predictions and prognostications are all wildly off-base, he doesn’t understand economics *or* energy, and everything he said Will Happen simply Hasn’t.  He wanted to impart a moral imperative into the Degrowth movement, with a vision of the future that was as utopian as it was unquestioned.  But his predictions for the future have all been disproven by our present, and he looks as mad as the Malthusians who believed we’d run out of food in the 19th century.

Overall this book is what I’ve come to expect from degrowthers.  Every single prediction of theirs has been disproven, yet they keep pretending that history is on their side.  I don’t know if they’ll ever learn. But their books give me something to dunk on.

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.

Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy: the uncanny resemblance between communist countries and monarchies

I’m reading Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy, a written account by former Chinese Diplomat Qian Qichen of ten episodes when China made a name for itself on the world stage. What strikes me though is how much of communist diplomacy in the 1980s revolved around funerals.

I don’t know how true this is, but I was told that funerals were important parts of diplomacy for European monarchs and states. The funeral of a sovereign is a time when even old enemies can be temporarily reconciled in a shared expression of mourning. The Christian funeral service allows the separate nations to find familiarity in their shared religious observances, and the priest may even give a sermon reminding us that every death is a new beginning: a time to bury the hatchet and forge bonds anew.

The event of a ruler dying in office, and of their neighbors coming together under the banner of their shared religion, gives a chance for old enemies to make amends. If the sovereign themselves had enemies, those enemies might take the opportunity to make nice with the sovereign’s successor. Or if his neighbors were enemies with each other but friends with him, they can at least exchange pleasantries at the Christian funeral and perhaps promise to meet again and bury the hatchet.

All this to say: this kind of funeral diplomacy was a key part of Chinese diplomacy in the 1980s. China was severely isolated in the 1980s, they had almost no relations with Russia, they had fought a war with Vietnam, their main ally was the economic basket case North Korea, and the West hated them only marginally less than their fellow communists.

But under Deng Xiaoping, China wanted to reset its foreign relations and normalize its borders in both the North and the South. But while Deng was ready, his fellow communists were non-committal. In fact Qian Qichen’s book makes clear how little China spoke to the other communist countries, and how little those countries listened to China.

But several moments came together to allow China to approach its neighbors in a more friendly manner. Several leaders of both the USSR and Vietnam died in rapid succession, and each funeral was a chance for the communist world to come together to mourn the leaders’ passing and forge new ties of friendship. China rapidly sent an emissary to Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral to make clear that they wanted to reset Sino-Soviet relations. And the death of Le Duan in Vietnam allowed the Chinese and Soviet ambassadors a chance to speak privately, even if they avoided each other in public.

The parallels between this communist “funeral diplomacy” and the Christian “funeral diplomacy” I outlined above are quite striking. And it does put into perspective how many communist countries acted like monarchies. Unlike in a Democracy, monarchies assume the ruler will reign until death, and reign undisputed. There are very few opportunities in a monarchy for policy change because the guy in charge probably believes the same things he believed 20 years ago. So the death of a monarch is a rare opportunity to bring about a policy change.

And like in the old Christian tradition, these communist monarchs could come together under a shared banner of mourning. They may denounce each other in public, but once a communist leader dies his fellow communists can usually agree that at least he was a Marxist instead of a capitalist. That alone creates a shared ideology which can underpin the “let’s bury the hatchet” feeling during the funerary events. Just as a priest may remind the attendants of their shared Christianity, so too may a communist orator remind the attendants of their shared communism.

Qian Qichen naturally asserts that it was China’s skillful policy and diplomacy that brought about the positive resolution to these 10 events, but many of the early events were mostly matters of circumstance. Leonid Brezhnev was a hardliner, so of course he wouldn’t accept resolving the Sino-Soviet border dispute in China’s favor, nor would he or Le Duan accept resolving Cambodia in China’s favor. But Gorbachev was a reformer (or a lightweight if you believe his critics) who was happy to make deals in China’s favor in order to reduce the political and military pressure on the Soviet Union while he tried to reform it economically.

In the end it’s likely all of these events would have been resolved one way or another as China industrialized and became a real player on the world’s stage. But communist funeral diplomacy allowed Deng Xiaoping to resolve most of these disputes in the 80s when China was still a mostly agricultural nation that still had to import food to survive.

It’s something to think about.

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.

Declaring victory on my Twitter prediction, conceding defeat on self-driving cars

I’ve made a few predictions over the years here, and I want to talk about two of them.

I’m declaring victory in saying that 2022 was *not* the Year Twitter Died. It was an extremely broad opinion in the left-of-center spaces that Musk was a terrible CEO, that firing so much Twitter staff would destroy the company, that it would be dead and overtaken very soon. I can concede the first one, the second two are clearly false.

The evidence from history has shown that firing most of Twitter’s staff has *not* led to mass outages, mass hacks, or the death of twitter’s infrastructure. It may seem like I’m debating a strawman, but it’s difficult to really convey the ridiculous hysteria I saw, with some claiming that Twitter would soon be dead and abandoned as newer versions of most popular browsers wouldn’t be able to access it. Likewise it was claimed that the servers would be insecure and claimed by botnets, and would thus get blocked by any sane browser protection. None of that has happened, Twitter runs just as it did in 2021. It is no less secure and it not blocked by most browsers.

Nor has the mass exodus of users really occurred. Some people think it has because they live in a bubble, but Mastodon was never going to replace Twitter and Bluesky is losing users. And regardless of your opinions on that, the numbers don’t lie.

I’ve said before that I used to be part of a community that routinely though Musk’s sky was falling. Every Tesla delay would be the moment that *finally* killed the company, every year would be when NASA *finally* kicked SpaceX to the curb, every failed Musk promise would *finally* make people stop listening to him. You’ve heard of fandoms, I was in a hatedom.

But I learned that all of that was motivated reasoning. EVs aren’t actually super easy, and that’s the reason Ford and GM utterly failed to build any. It’s not that Musk was lucky and would soon be steamrolled by the Big Boys, Musk was smart (and lucky) and the Big Boys wet their Big Boy pants and have stilled utterly failed in the EV market despite billions of dollars in free government money.

Did Musk receive free government money? Not targeted money no, any car company on earth could have benefited from the USA/California EV tax credits, it’s just that the Detroit automakers didn’t make EVs. Then they got handed targeted free money, and they still failed to make EVs.

NASA (and the ESA, and JAXA, and CNSA) haven’t managed to replicate SpaceX’s success in low-cost re-usable rockets sending thousands of satellites into orbit. So now *another* Musk property, Starlink, is the primary way that rural folk can get broadband, because Biden’s billions utterly failed to build any rural broadband.

And of course while Musk has turned most of the left against him, he has turned much of the right for him, which is generally what happens when you switch parties. And now that he’s left Trump, some of the left want to coax him back. Clearly people still listen to him even if you and I do not.

So I was very wrong 10 years ago about Elon Musk being the anti-Midas, but I learned my lesson and started stepping out of my bubble. I was right 3 years ago when I said Twitter isn’t dying, and everything I said still rings true. Big companies still use Twitter because it’s their best way to mass-blast their message to everyone in an age when TV is dying and more people block ads with their browser. The same reason people prefer Bluesky (curate your feed, never see what you don’t want to see) is the same reason Wendy’s, Barstool Sports, and Kendrick Lamar prefer Twitter. They want their message, their brand, to show up in your feed even if you don’t want to see it. It’s advertising that isn’t labeled as an ad.

So that’s what I was right about, now I’m going to write a lot *less* about what I was wrong about, because I hate being wrong.

I was wrong about how difficult it would be to get self-driving cars on all roads. In 2022 I clowned on a 2015 prediction that said self-driving cars would be on every road by 2020. Well it’s 2025, and I’ll be honest 5 years late isn’t that terrible.

At the time I thought that there was a *political-legal* barrier that would need to be overcome: how do you handle insurance of a self-driving car? No system is perfect and if there’s a defect in the LIDAR detector or just a bug in the system, a car *can* cause damage. And if it does, does Google pay the victim, or the passenger, or what? Insurance is a messy, expensive system, split into 50 different systems here in America, and I thought without some new insurance legislation (such as unifying the insurance systems or just creating more clarity regarding self-driving cars), that the companies would realize they couldn’t roll these out without massive risk and headaches.

I was wrong, I’ve now seen waymos in every city I’ve been to.

So it seems the insurance problems weren’t insurmountable, and the problem was less hard then I thought. You can read my thoughts about how hard I *thought* those problems were, but to be honest I was wrong.

Assuming your political opponents are just “misinformed” only guarantees that you won’t win them over

A bit more streamsofconsciousness than other posts, because I’m writing late at night. But here goes:

I don’t know much about the right-of-center political shibboleths, but it’s been a shibboleth on the left that people only vote conservative because they “don’t know any better.” They’re “misinformed,” they’re “voting against their own interests,” they’re “low-information voters,” these are the only reason anyone votes for the GOP. Nevermind that the “low-information voters” tag was first (accurately) applied to the *Obama* coalition before Trump upset the political balance of power.

Remember that in the 2012 matchup, Obama voters consumed less news than Romney voters, and were less informed on the issues at large. But in those days calling someone a low-information voter was nothing less than a racist dog-whistle (at least among the left-of-center). By 2016, Trump had upended American politics by appealing to many voters of the Obama coalition, and now this racist dog-whistle was an accurate statement of fact on the left.

“Yes some voters just don’t know any better. They don’t know the facts, they don’t know right from wrong, they just don’t know. And if they don’t know, the quickest solution is to teach them, because once we give them the knowledge that “we” (the right thinking people) have, they’ll vote just like we do.”

But attacking liberals (in 2012) and conservatives (in 2016 and 2024) as “low-information” is old hat, what about attacking leftists?

That’s what the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait has done in a recent article. Now, he doesn’t directly state “leftists are misinformed” like he would say about conservatives. It’s obvious Chait still wants leftists in his coalition and doesn’t want to insult them too badly. But he’s laying out the well-worn left-of-center narrative that his political opponents do not understand things, and that he needs to teach them how the government actually works so they can agree with his positions and support his favorite policies.

In Chait’s view, leftists just don’t get that the government is too restrictive, and that these restrictions are the cause of the housing crisis. They don’t realize it’s too regulatory, and those regulations harm growth. And they don’t get that government red tape is the reason all our infrastructure is dying and nothing new can be built. Chait attacks California High Speed Rail and Biden’s Infrastructure bill as hallmarks of this red tape. California HSR is 10 times over budget and still not a single foot of track laid down, while Biden signed the Infrastructure bill in 2021 and wrongly believed that he could have photo-ops in front of new bridges, factories, and ports in time for 2024.

The fruits of Biden’s infrastructure bills are still almost entirely unbuilt, their money still mostly unspent. And this lets Republicans make calls to overturn those bills and zero-out Biden’s spending. If his projects were actually finished on-time and during his presidency, Biden’s enemies could never attack his legacy like that. But government red tape stood in the way.

See, with claims like these, Chait is arguing in favor of the Abundance Agenda. I’m not entirely opposed to it. See my many posts on de-regulation.

But Chait is once again missing the mark here. He claims that Leftists don’t *understand* abundance, and that’s half of why they oppose it. He claims the other half is that they’ve built their power base as being the people who “hold government accountable” and oppose its over-reach. But Chait is mostly arguing that Leftists don’t realize that their crusade against Big Government is a “bad thing” that has made our economy worse. And I don’t think Leftists are misinformed at all, I think they just have different priorities than me and Jonathan Chait.

Let me explain though a specific example: Josh Shapiro is well-loved for repairing an I-95 overpass in rapid time. He did so by suspending all the red tape that usually slows down such infrastructure projects. Chait then argues, if we know we need to suspend the rules to get things done quickly, then why do we need to have these rules in the first place? They’re slowing us down and preventing us from building what’s needed, so shouldn’t we just remove some of them?

But here’s the red tape that Shapiro suspended:

  • There was no bidding process for procurement, contractors were selected quickly based on the Govenor’s office’s recommendations
  • There were no impact studies for the building process
  • On-site managers were empowered to make decisions without consulting their superiors or headquarters
  • Pennsylvania waived detailed financial reporting processes
  • Pennsylvania waived most environmental reviews
  • Pennsylvania waived the requirement to notify locals of the construction, and to gain local approval for that construction

I don’t exactly have a problem with these ideas, and if Chait wants to make these de-regulations a central part of the Democratic brand, more power to him. But Chait is wrong that leftists are simply misinformed, I think many leftists would say that while these waivers are fine in an emergency, we should not support this deregulation for all projects, even if it saves us time and money. The reasons (for a leftist) are obvious.

  • Deregulating procurement is central to the Trump/DOGE agenda, and opponents say this opens the door to government graft as those in power can dole out contracts to their favorites.
  • Impact studies were also deregulated under Trump in two different executive orders. Biden revoked both orders at the start of his term because of his focus on health and the environment. I think most leftists would assert that protecting the environment and health is more important than other government priorities.
  • On-site vs HQ is less of an emotive topic, but the need for “oversight” is still a driving idea any time the government Does Stuff
  • Waiving of financial reporting opens up accusations of fraud
  • Waiving environmental reviews, see point 2
  • Waiving local notification and buy-in. You can probably get away with this when “re-“building, but will ANY democrat stick their neck out and say locals shouldn’t have a say in new highway construction? I doubt it. Highways change communities, and any change needs community buy-in (so they say). This focus on localism is very popular on the right, left and center, no matter how much I and the Abudance-crats may oppose it.

So Chait, do the leftists not understand Abundance? Or do they have strongly-held beliefs which are incompatible with Abundance?

This whole theory of “low-information voters” is always appealing to democracies biggest losers. It’s why the GOP liked it in 2012, and it’s why Democrats like it in 2024. The idea cocoons us in a comforting lie that we alone have Truth and Knowledge, and that if only everyone was As Smart As Me, everyone would Vote Like Me.

It also seems Obviously True on the face of it. “The best argument against Democracy is a conversation with the average voter,” so the saying goes. And when you see any of your opponent’s voters interviewed directly, you can’t help but notice how much information they are *lacking*. And it’s obviously true, most people don’t know how government works, they don’t understand permitting, they don’t get that environmental impact reviews cost so much money and time. So obviously if we gave them that knowledge, they’d start voting “correctly,” right?

This misses an important point about political coalitions and humans in general: the wisdom of the crowds. Most people don’t know most things, but we all (mostly) take our cues from those who do know.

Think about the leftist coalition in America, the Berniecrats, the AOC stans, the DSA and the WFP. Most of the voters in this coalition don’t have a clue how environmental review works. But there are some in the coalition (probably including Bernie and AOC) who do know how it works, and the rest of the coalition takes its cues from those people.

There are certainly some people who have looked long and hard at the Abundance Agenda, and they have concluded that (for instance) removing environmental reviews would lead to Americans being exposed to more pollution and harmful chemicals. It was only because of environmental reviews that the EPA took action against PFAS, for instance.

So Chait is arguing that we need to reduce regulatory burden and reduce the ability of locals and activists to halt projects with their red tape and environmental reviews. I agree with this.

But Chait then argues that the only reason leftists don’t agree with us is because they don’t understand how harmful red tape and reviews are, and thus leftists have lead a wrong-headed campaign of being the people who say “no” to new buildings. I disagree with this.

I think the evidence shows that leftists simply have different beliefs than me and Chait. Leftists believe that red tape and reviews are necessary to protect the environment. And a leftist might argue that Chait complaining about environmental reviews is like a conservative complaining that “cars would be cheaper if they weren’t forced to have seatbelts and useless safety stuff.” Chait says environmental review doesn’t help us. Well I’ve never needed my seltbelt either, because I’ve never crashed.

I’m sure you can see how stupid the seatbelt argument is, well that’s probably how stupid leftists would see Chait. Yes 99% of the time an environmental review finds nothing objectionable about a project, but what about those few times when they do? Do we scrap the whole system because it’s usually a waste of time? I say again: without environmental review, the EPA would not yet have taken action on PFAS. A leftist could seriously say to Chait: do you support allowing PFAS in the water? Because it might still be allowed without environmental review.

I don’t know what Chait’s response would be, I’m sure he’d try to say “well that’s different,” because any review that *found* something was clearly a good review. But you don’t know beforehand which reviews will find something dangerous and which won’t. To a leftist, that means you have to do them all.

Now, most leftists *do not understand environmental review* just like most liberals, moderates, conservatives, and reactionaries. Most people don’t understand most things. But the leftist coalition includes people who *do* understand it, and they’ve weighed the costs and benefits and come out with a different stance than Chait has. The rest of the coalition takes its cues from the understanders, just like the every other coalition does.

But Chait’s thesis is built on a lie that because most leftists don’t understand, they’ll side with him and Abundance once they *do* understand. I disagree strongly. Most leftists will continue taking their cues from the informed leftists, and Chait is not saying anything new to inform those informed leftists. The coalition will only modify its position on this issue once the majority loses faith in the understanders (and thus seeks new ones with new positions), or when enough of the current understanders retire and are replaced by new ones. Coalitions, like science, advance one funeral at a time.

But this idea that people are misinformed and just need a smart guy like *me* to set them straight, this is a central tenant of politics that I think needs to die. You shouldn’t assume your opponents are just misinformed, you need to understand that they *actually have different ideas than you do*, and try to win them over by finding common ground. Otherwise you’ll continue to be the Loser Coalition just like Rush Limbaugh and the Romney-ites of 2012.

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…