Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 500

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Abundance," by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.

An uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most. In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won by shifting almost every part of America to the right. But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance. Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump, with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Philadelphia County shifted four points right, Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Cook County (Chicago) shifted eight points right. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted twelve points right, Queens County shifted twenty-one points right, and Bronx County shifted twenty-two points right.

Voting is a cheap way to express anger. Moving is expensive. But residents of blue states and cities are doing that, too. In 2023, California lost 342,000 more residents than it gained; in Illinois, the net loss was 115,000; in New York, 284,000. In the American political system, to lose people is to lose political power. If current trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right; even adding Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to the states Harris won won’t be enough for Democrats to win future presidential elections.

The problem is not just political. Young families are leaving large urban metros so quickly that several counties—including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under-five childhood population in the next twenty years. Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families while presiding over the parts of the country that they are leaving.

In her essay “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” Jerusalem Demsas, who covers housing at the Atlantic, traces the politics of treating homes as assets. Housing is often spoken of as a safe investment, but it’s not. Homes rise in price when there are too few of them to go around. The greater the gap between supply and demand, the higher the returns for homeowners. “At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight,” she writes. “Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.” 

The logic of this is inescapable, and the politics it creates predictable. “[A] home’s value is directly tied to the scarcity of housing for other people,” Demsas says. “This system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers.”

In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.

In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris attended law school (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition). When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.

Olson predicted that a thriving, successful society would become more complex to navigate over time. There would be more groups and voices and laws and processes. Those who succeeded would be those best suited to operating at the nexus of that complexity. In the economy, that might be management consultants and financiers. In politics, it will be lawyers. There is nothing wrong with lawyers. There might be something wrong with a country or a political system that needs so many of them and that makes them so central to its operations. That might be a system so consumed trying to balance its manifold interests that it can no longer perceive what is in the public’s interest. 

“Legitimacy is not solely—not even primarily—a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” Bagley writes. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.” And that is where government is failing. California’s High-Speed Rail Authority has been scrupulous in following the law but has been unable to deliver a train. The result is less, not more, faith in government.

When California applied for federal money under the terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration gave preference to bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered was not really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific places. The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there, and so did the initial construction. California is building high-speed rail in a place that makes it less likely that it will generate the ridership, political support, and financial backing to ever finish. The irony is that it’s not just bad for the high-speed rail project. It’s also bad for air pollution across the state.

Liberals might detest the language that Trump and Vance use to demonize immigrants. But blue America practices its own version of scarcity politics. Zoning regulations in liberal states and cities that restrict housing supply have increased costs far more than the recent influx of immigrants. These restrictions exacerbated an affordability crisis that was harnessed by the right. Thus, the mistakes of liberals contributed to the rise of illiberalism. “The tendency to turn against outsiders in the face of critical shortages is not restricted to a basket of deplorables,” Jerusalem Demsas wrote in the Atlantic. “It’s in all of us. Most people see others as a threat to their resources, whether it’s immigrants coming for your housing, yuppies pushing up rents, other students taking slots at all the good schools, or just more people on the road, adding to congestion.”

As the chronic housing shortage and affordability crisis destabilized the reigning political order internally, America’s greatest external threat has been the rise of China, a superpower that many now fear and even envy. How could they build so much as we struggled to complete even simple projects? As sluggishness and process came to feel like the defining features of American governance, it became common, even at the heights of American power, to hear China’s speed and capacity spoken of wistfully. “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the [Senate] floor,” Senator Michael Bennet said in 2010. “You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Many valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If the rate of scientific progress is slowing, how can we help scientists do their best work? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present? 

To pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal. One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack. Decades of attacks on the state have turned liberals into reflexive champions of government. But if you believe in government, you must make it work. To make it work, you must be clear-eyed about when it fails and why it fails.