I have a problem with a lot of non-fiction books; They tell you everything they can tell you, and then they just keep beating that drum in slightly different ways for the next 100 pages.
If I was going to try to summarize Abundance, the hot new take from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, it would be that they wanted to tell you a million ways that it is worse that Democrats want to get certain good things done for society and the world, but sometimes make it more bureaucratic and complicated than it has to be, than it is that the Republicans don’t want to do any of those good things.
In the very last pages of the book, the authors say outright, “This book has offered a critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years.” But they never really explain why they spend an entire 200 pages doing that and not offering much of a critique of how conservatives have governed over those years.
I suspect it’s for the same reasons that you don’t see a lot of exploration of why educated, affluent White men vote Republican, namely:
1) So many commentators/analysts are educated, affluent White men, so exploring the psychology of what Marc Andreeson would apparently call “my people,” cuts a little too close to home, and
2) They’re considered a lost cause. For example, ~40% of White men (who represent ~35% of 2024’s electorate) voted for Kamala Harris, but people would much rather talk about the swing in the Hispanic/Latino men’s vote, from 57% for Biden in 2020 to 50% for Trump in 2024 (Trump got 40% in 2020). To be clear, that swing applies to a mere 6% of 2024’s electorate, so therefore the swing represents <1% of the full electorate. Move just 2% of White men and you absorb more than the Hispanic male swing, but let’s not talk about that, I guess? [Source: Pew is my favorite source for voting stats, particularly their validated voter reports, which are much more credible than exit polls.]
My point is that we give White men a pass in electoral discussions, and Klein and Thompson mostly give Republican governance a pass too. It would have been relevant to cite GOP recalcitrance about government and “starve the beast” mentality that favors privatization to benefit only a small slice of the public at least as much as focusing on the Democrats trying to do too much (if you even accept that they make the case Dems try to do much, which, maybe?).
The over-arching concept that with an abundance mindset we could allocate budget to address our issues, so long as we don’t try to do anything about those pesky environmental and social and civil rights issues doesn’t exactly speak to a transformative approach to society. And it left me feeling a bit hopeless. Are all those issues going to be addressed as if by magic? Is that not another form of trickle-down thinking? Is there no scenario where we can both protect our world, protect marginalized, underrepresented and/or underserved groups, and continue to innovate and grow? What is the point of abundance if it continues to serve so few?
I mean easy for these guys to mock the environmental and inclusivity goals written in to various sweeping legislation and regulatory guidelines of the last Administration and before. As though infrastructure investment and actual building just chugs along except for when Dems are in charge. Consider them a strong vote for pattern matching (which is just another word for bias) and no accountability for eliminating it. Again, not inspiring. Pretty depressing.
They also cite government problems that seem much more like human problems to me. When they talk about government’s problems with technology, particularly the way things become Frankensteined, it reminded me of Microsoft software for many years. It reminded me of technology I worked on in my corporate tech days, TBH.
As another example, when talking about how the government tends to fund plausible ideas, less than “highly novel” ideas, they talk about how a team of researchers from Harvard University recruited their own 142 star medical researchers to act as evaluators in a makeshift grant-review process to see if they could replicate the outcomes of the government’s evaluator team. AND THEY DID. Which kind of indicates, again, that it is a human problem to score highly novel poorly, not a government one.
The last criticism I’ll offer is that there are tons of citations in this book, and yet they often confidently cite opinion without a citation to validate it. It provided little record scratch moments repeatedly where they’d say something that felt like they were drawing a conclusion that didn’t seem to align with my experience or expertise or researched perspective, and sure enough, there was no supporting footnote for that conclusion.
Here’s one example, reflected in this quote: “It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve [emphasis mine], we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress.”
WHO CLAIMS THIS?????
Just like when people saying inclusivity requires sacrificing quality for diversity…literally NO ONE is telling you to do that. You are reflecting your own bias when you assume that’s the consequence of prioritizing inclusion.
Another example. I understand that regulation has slowed things down in certain areas…California itself just eased some of its CEQA environmental regulations to facilitate more housing more quickly to try to address our very critical housing crisis. I had no issues with the whole regulation+NIMBYism discussion, but then they say something like this : “It was a move reminiscent of blue states creating so many rules around permitting and environmental regulations that it became impossible to build [emphasis mine] necessary housing and energy.”
But, FYI, California is THE #1 solar state. And four out of ten of the top 10 wind/solar states are blue/swing states (3 totally blue; 1 a swing, but leans blue). So, I don’t know, maybe the brush you’re painting with is a little too broad.
I could go on; I made lots of notes, which to be fair I rarely do anymore, so obviously it was a compelling read that tried to say big things. But, more accurately, it tried to diagnose and align any big problems they could lay at the feet of liberalism…but I just kept waiting for the “abundance” part of the book.
Just like most TED Talks I’ve ever watched (in person or online), I learned a lot about problems, and got more things to worry about, but didn’t really learn about solutions. In fact they explicitly reject trying to offer solutions. Other than removing environmental protections and inclusivity targets and guidelines.
So, again, easy for them to say.
I do want to leave you with something they wrote that I cheered and have to share. #ResidentVegan
“We do not primarily use land to live on. We primarily use land to feed ourselves. About half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, three-quarters is given over to raising livestock or growing feed for livestock. It is difficult to find an environmental challenge that is not tied up in raising animals for our consumption.
Industrial animal agriculture is more than a climate problem. It is a moral stain upon modernity. There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food.”
Make that your next book guys, only focus on offering solutions, since Jonathan Safran Foer probably made the strongest moral case you can make already in Eating Animals. I’d read that in a heartbeat.
So, yeah, I had big thoughts and feels while reading this. Have you read it, what did YOU think???
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