Competing Historical Narratives

I don’t personally understand why policy arguments need to be coupled with historical narratives to be compelling. If some aspect of the status quo is bad, then that is true regardless of whether it used to be less bad and regardless of how it got to be that way. But I am clearly an outlier in this regard. Whether because people are hardwired to love stories or because stories do actually illuminate something that I seem unable to comprehend, building a historical narrative around one’s policy preferences appears to be an indispensable part of stoking a political movement or, at least, selling a book.

In the history offered by Abundance, the main economic story of twentieth-century America is that the country went from having low administrative burdens on construction to having high administrative burdens on construction. The book is actually a little scattered when it comes to explaining why this happened. Sometimes the blame is put on environmentalists. Other times it is put on the individualistic cultural revolutions of the 1960s, including the New Left, and the consumer protection movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader.

The authors also rehearse a number of broader political theories that state that, as societies become longer lived and more affluent, they tend to feature a proliferation of interest groups and deliberation that invariably slows down large-scale decision-making. Fellow Abundist Matt Yglesias has yet another theory that speculates that the proximate cause is the migration of the upper class to the political left, which has led to “the adoption of a kind of English gentry attitude that prioritizes ‘open space,’ quiet, good taste, and a harmonious social order over dynamism, prosperity, and the kind of broad, upward absolute mobility that is made possible by growth.”

Among the Left, for whom the book is written, this historical narrative has quite a lot of competition for the master story of the late twentieth century. Alternatives include:

1. The country, along with the rest of the Western nations, underwent a neoliberal wave of reduced unionization, welfare state retrenchment, privatization, and deregulation. As David Schleicher notes, when it comes to regulation at least, the preferred narrative of Abundists is exactly at odds with the narrative of the “neoliberal turn.”
2. The country underwent a wave of monopolization and corporate concentration following changes to the interpretation and enforcement of antitrust and related regulations. Three of the most critical reviews of the book came from Zephyr Teachout, Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, all of whom appear to be big believers in the centrality of this historical narrative.
3. The country underwent a shift from managerial capitalism where executives were given relatively free rein to govern corporations according to their personal judgment to shareholder capitalism where executives became extensions of the shareholder class and were forced to make decisions with the sole aim of maximizing short-term cash returns. J. W. Mason is the most prominent proponent of this story.

I personally don’t have any stake or much interest in this debate. When it comes to the economic policy topics I focus on, the United States has always been pretty awful and so there is no real or imagined past worth idealizing. Maybe mid-century Sweden, but not mid-century America. But as noted already, I am clearly unusual in thinking that none of this particularly matters. The spreading of particular historical narratives helps popularize and center specific policy agendas and so individuals with other policy agendas will inevitably take issue with an Abundist historical narrative that, were it to become the dominant story believed by liberal thought leaders and politicians, may have the effect of sidelining their policy topics.

Sidelined Agendas

Normally, I am dismissive of critiques that take the form of complaining that a specific bit of policy writing does not address some issue that it is not aiming to address. But, again, Abundance, by its own telling, is not simply a book aimed at adding some items to the policy radar. It is meant to become the focus of first liberal and then American political life, the answer to the question of what the Democratic Party should look like post–Joe Biden.

Because these fairly narrow technocratic policy issues are pitched in this way, critiques about what Abundists leave to the side are, I think, completely legitimate. What are we meant to be moving away from if we remake American liberalism in this way?

One of those things appears to be welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism more generally. Indeed, at times, the authors even slip into saying so explicitly. For instance, they write that:

For decades, American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark. Liberals fought for expansions of health insurance and paid vacation leave and paid sick days and a heftier earned-income tax credit and an expanded child tax credit and decent retirement benefits. Worthy causes, all. But those victories could be won, when they were won, largely inside the tax code and the regulatory state. Building a social insurance program does occasionally require new buildings. But it rarely requires that many of them. This was, and is, a liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money.

The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds.

As someone who actually spends his time trying to convince people to adopt Nordic welfare institutions, the bolded sentence stopped me in my tracks. American liberals are internationally notable because of how thoroughly they reject proposals that mirror these systems.

The Nordic countries don’t use means-tested tax credits to provide cash benefits to children. They just send all of the kids a check each month. The Nordic countries don’t expand health insurance via means-tested tax credits and mandates to buy private health insurance. They have universal public insurance. (On this point, the authors miss a chance to see how the inefficiency and administrative burdens they loathe in construction actually plague the welfare state too, something liberals are very much to blame for but also have no desire to fix.)

But putting that all aside, the bigger issue here is that, contrary to what Eric Levitz wrote in his review, the authors do appear to be contrasting their agenda with the welfare state. Elsewhere, they write that “the world we want requires more than redistribution,” which they punctuate by writing that “We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” They lump together the unexpected electoral performances of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and conclude that they show “how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable.” As Malcolm Harris notes, the implication is that both politicians flourished in the context of scarcity crises by indulging scarcity-thinking and offering zero-sum redistributionist solutions. The abundance agenda is presented both as a policy alternative to the “socialist left” and “populist-authoritarian right” — a Third Way if you will — and as a way of ushering in new economic conditions that will diminish their appeal.

Of course, I think it would be a huge mistake, on the merits, to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction, both because parceling out the present matters but also because these institutions will determine how the authors’ utopian future will be parceled out. Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.

This point is more general than Musk of course. Many of the anxieties that stoke opposition to the kinds of construction projects and rapid technological innovations favored by the authors are downstream of economic inegalitarianism. People block housing construction because they fear living next to the people that our economic system provides so little income to. They block nearby transportation and energy infrastructure because they don’t want to tumble down the economic ladder by impairing the value of their personal real estate assets. They resist productivity-enhancing technology because they fear job loss and permanent income loss. The preservation or deepening of economic inegalitarianism could easily turn the authors’ utopian vision of 2050 into a dystopian nightmare. Attending to distribution is a must.

Other critics of the book raise similar concerns about their agendas being sidelined. This has mostly come from antitrust advocates who managed to successfully fight their way to the top of the progressive economic agenda after the prior focuses on Sanders-style welfare statism and macroeconomic stimulus faded. Klein and Thompson don’t appear to say anything about antitrust in the book, neither to discuss its policy merits nor to use it as a contrast to the abundance agenda.

The only overlap seems to come when the authors pan a local San Francisco procurement regulation requiring that public money flow to small construction firms. Nonetheless, because it is the reigning top dog, antitrust advocates are right to worry that they have the most to lose if the narratives and policy focuses of Abundance become dominant. (As Gyauch-Lewis notes, we are already seeing hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of new organizations being established, all aimed at achieving this task.)

Political Practicality

One of the personally amusing aspects of reading Abundance is that it kept reminding me of a two-hour discussion I had with Klein in 2019 about Medicare for All. In the discussion, Klein is fairly agreeable to the point that moving to a universal public health insurance model would be hugely preferable over the status quo. Indeed, one of the main arguments in favor of such a move is the very abundance-style argument that it would cut out half a trillion annually from pointless health care administrative burdens. Another argument for Medicare for All is that it would reduce health care unit costs, something Abundance actually does discuss, but only in the context of hoping to induce a bidding-down of doctor pay by increasing doctor supply, something that would clearly not be as effective as a public insurer using monopsonistic price-setting power.

In our discussion, Klein balked at making Medicare for All the centerpiece of a Democratic health care agenda because he thought it was not politically practical. There is too much opposition of it from too many powerful constituencies on top of the usual status quo bias and general human fears of rapid change. At one point in the discussion, he asks how I would overcome employer opposition to the change, and I responded that we will just have to beat it, which he clearly did not find persuasive.

It’s not hard to imagine having the same conversation about Abundance but with the roles reversed. Whatever the merits of their proposals, Klein and Thompson are pushing an agenda that requires direct confrontation with many powerful, entrenched constituencies. The main thing they lament about the administrative burdens of construction is the way in which we have given homeowners — who account for two-thirds of the adult population and are older, richer, and more politically engaged than non-homeowners — effective veto rights over construction in their area, sometimes directly in the public planning process and other times indirectly by empowering them to sue developers. Will these homeowners want to be divested of this power so that transmission lines, railroads, energy plants, and apartment towers can be built right by them?

In science, they are upset at the way in which the financing system favors older researchers  institutions and individuals who know how to ply the grantmaking system. Do these people and institutions really want to see their funding redistributed to others? Do the American Medical Association and doctors more generally want to see a huge influx of doctor supply, something that is being pitched explicitly as serving the purpose of bidding down doctor salaries?

What about the firms that manage to win a lot of government business because they have figured out how to navigate the administrative burdens that drown so many of their competitors and drive up the cost? What about all of the highly paid consultants and paperwork jobs generated by the current system? Are these not exactly the same as the medical billers and health insurance claims adjusters that Medicare for All would displace in the name of efficiency? Doesn’t the diminution of their prospects make the whole thing a political nonstarter?

To be clear, this is not an argument I particularly care about. But it is one Klein purports to care about, at least when attempting to clip the ambitions of the Left. Yet Abundance never really grapples with it.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the book seems fine to me. I’d say the policy specifics are a bit of a retread, but that’s not really a critique: the authors never claim novelty and the book itself is literally a retread of some articles they wrote for the Atlantic and the New York Times. It’s a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have. In short, I think the pique over the book is out of proportion to what the book is.

With that said, the broader Abundist world that the book is attempting to push forward — a world that appears to be teeming with libertarians, right-wing Democrats like Jared Polis and Ritchie Torres, refugees of the effective altruist implosion, and tech sector types — does seem like it could head in some pretty bad directions that Abundance would fit naturally into. But this would not be the fault of Klein and Thompson.