Abundance and the Left
Ezra Klein talks with Bhaskar Sunkara about Abundance, Zohran Mamdani’s victory, and why progressives need a state that works at the speed of their ambitions.
Ezra Klein: “Creating a left that people don’t fear — because what they’re really afraid of is that the government will run things badly — is very important. But that means being both angrier about government failures and more curious about them than even the Right is.” (Lloyd Bishop / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Bhaskar Sunkara
In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that administrative bloat is strangling America’s ability to build homes, clean energy, and public goods. Klein spoke with Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara about what this means for the Left — and for any politics serious about governing.
Can you define “abundance” and what makes it distinct from other strains of progressivism?
Abundance is the argument that a lot of what is wrong in our society is that we have manufactured scarcities. We have made it too hard to build and create the things people need more of. The places where we focus in the book are housing, clean energy, and state capacity.
New Deal liberalism was very much about the rapid creation of things that the working class needed in the physical world. But that growth machine became reckless — building highways through communities, despoiling rivers and streams, cutting down forests — and it created a backlash in the form of the New Left. And that was fair. There needed to be ways for people (and ultimately nonprofits) to sue and make sure their voices were heard.
But the solutions of one era become the problems of the next. Those procedures became overgrown. So now you have insane outcomes, like laws that are designed to make sure we have a cleaner environment being deployed against the development of solar panels and transmission lines and congestion pricing. Or the fact that in places like California and Washington, DC, it costs a lot more to build affordable housing than to build market-rate housing.
That’s why someone like Zohran Mamdani got interested in Abundance, because his plan for housing is a plan to build a lot of public housing. But you’re not going to be able to build enough public housing under the current rules and regulations that we use.
What role do you see for redistribution in your vision of abundance?
I would like to see a lot more redistribution. But Abundance isn’t meant to be a book about every problem. Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.
Abundance is about this category of goods that government has lost the ability to deliver on even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. That doesn’t take away from the need for redistribution. But if you have taxed rich people to build something and you can’t build the thing, that is going to erode faith in your politics over time.
Are there more tensions with “predistributional” forces like labor standards and unions?
I don’t see it as opposed to labor standards or a high minimum wage or unions. I support sectoral bargaining. I support, in most places, a significantly higher minimum wage. But we can’t make public projects uniquely unaffordable and slow to build.
The thing that people to my left should really grapple with is this: If you want to build public housing or clean energy, then one definition of successful left governance would be to build enough of those two things. So what do you think needs to be changed to get there? Can you do it if it can cost you more than a million dollars to build a unit of affordable housing — as has happened in DC? Can you do it if it takes a decade or longer to lay down an interstate transmission line?
I think it’s fine to say that the backbone of your strategy is going to be public and not private, but then you have to grapple with how to deliver public projects affordably and fast. That’s where the rubber on this meets the road.
I think that we are seeing, between the Green New Deal left and things that are in Jacobin, the emergence of a left that wants to build a lot. I’m just not sure it’s really grappled with the fact that government, as it is currently set up, is not really able to do it — sometimes because of corporate power and moneyed interests but sometimes because there are so many rules and concessions that government itself simply can’t act agilely. That creates a broader problem: When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether. If you don’t increase the supply in the thing the state is subsidizing, you get lines. You get rationing. You get denials. You get delays. You get high costs. And people are going to be furious at you.
One of the most effective attacks on basically any form of ambitious expansion of social insurance or things the government does is the belief that if the government does it, it’s going to lead to shortages. You can see this with people imagining that Mamdani’s five state-run grocery stores will somehow create Soviet-style groceries.
Creating a left that people don’t fear — because what they’re really afraid of is that the government will run things badly — is very important. But that means being both angrier about government failures and more curious about them than even the Right is.
As you mentioned, Zohran embraced some of your ideas from Abundance during his mayoral campaign. What did you think about his campaign’s key policy demands?
I think he’s somebody who wants the government to deliver, and he’s been sufficiently involved in government that he sees how difficult it is. He also sees how poisonous it is when it fails. So his embrace of parts of the Abundance critique wasn’t surprising to me. And it’s not just him. Bernie Sanders got asked about Abundance, and I laughed when I saw him describe it as not an ideology but just “common sense.” Here’s more Bernie:
Look, if the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy? Absolutely correct. It is terrible. Over the years, I brought a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible, even in a state like Vermont — which is maybe better than most states — how hard it is to even get the bloody money out! Oh, my God! We’ve got 38 meetings! We’ve got to talk about this. Unbelievable.
I don’t think you want the leading democratic socialists to view government this way! And that means you need to change it.
But institutional renewal is always really hard. The New Deal was hard. What the New Left did was hard. Every three or four or five decades or so, you have to take stock of the ways in which your institutions and your laws may no longer match your problems and your needs, and begin the hard and sometimes ugly work of stitching them back together.