If you’re like me, and the policy dok that takes too long to X, you couldn’t escape the discussion of a new book called Abundance.
Written by Derek Thompson of the Atlantic and Ezra Klein of the New York Times (co-founder of VOX), Affluence is one of the policy books with the big idea that everyone has to have an opinion, whether they read it or not.
Abundantly, Thompson and Klein’s big idea is that America’s politics and life over the past 50 years have been distorted by “irrelevant ideologies” that have artificially reduced the supply of key commodities, such as housing and energy, through bushes of government restrictions and regulations. They advocate for a future that is “more” rather than “less” for everyone, encouraging construction and innovation, and embracing a rich politics that unleashes America’s prosperity.
Thompson and Klein are self-identified liberals, and their books are primarily intended to diagnose what they see as wrong in recent decades in Democrat governance. They point to examples of democratic cities like San Francisco and New York. There, regulations have made it virtually impossible to build new living spaces, making housing costs more and more people unreachable.
Even on issues that Democrats care deeply about as much as climate change, their policies had the effect of slowing progress by making it difficult to build up the enormous amount of clean energy needed to reduce carbon emissions without damaging the economy.
As a result, even if technological advances continued, we stopped feeling it and appreciating it, a consistent theme in this newsletter. Instead, little by little, and often with the best intentions, we put countless invisible brakes on development. And when I lost my ability to physically build, I lost my ability to build a better future.
Abundance isn’t just for the Democrats
Given how much abundance focuses on where Democrats got wrong, the book sparked debate among progressives. If you want to read more about it, but don’t want to get lost in endless posting threads or a 3-hour podcast, my VOX colleague, Eric Levitz, has a great part about the debate and why Democrats should listen to the rich message.
However, it is a mistake to think of abundance as a book that only means to blue voters. That mind has an important message for Americans from all political backgrounds. We don’t have to fight endlessly about who gets what reduced pie. For too long, we have convinced American life that we must treat it as a zero-sum game, but we can change the rules. We can embrace that pie – policies that make housing more affordable where people want to live, policies that actively grow that will energize the high-tech economy without burning the planet, and provide better health care at a low cost.
Thompson and Klein recognize that Americans never agree with everything, and that there is an issue with just a fundamental difference between the right and left. But they are right to argue for politics focused on improving material progress in areas where most Americans want a better life for themselves and their children, and where important fields (housing, education, energy) can appeal to almost everyone. As Thompson wrote in the Atlantic this week, richness can “combine the progressive virtue of working class care with the celebration of the greatness of a traditionally conservative nation.”
If we can do that, we may be able to break the polarization that shook progress and transformed American politics into a match of all deaths of the winner.
I am sure not everyone who reads Abundance agrees with every page. Diagnosing mistakes that hindered progress is much easier than creating a political movement that can unleash it. But I believe there is a hunger for a vision of a future that I am essentially unafraid. It gives me hope at the moments when we desperately need it.
This version of the story originally appeared in Good News Newsletter. Sign up here!
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