Ezra Klein is an anti-intellectual
Finally got Abundance from the library as I refuse to fund this nonsense (hopefully I’m not causing the library to buy another license).
Abundance purports to be a vision of the future. In order for that to be true it has to solve three potentially catastrophic problems:
- climate change
- baby bust (there is nothing wrong with decreasing population but sometime in the future it has to stabilize)
- wealth inequality (I believe wealth inequality causes the rise of fascism but even if not you again need to stabilize in the future or all the world’s resources will be in a few hands — this happens sooner than you think because of a snowball effect see Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
Below I show that Abundance does a poor job solving anything, but particularly wealth inequality. Laying out a vision of the future where humanity basically fails is anti-intellectual at best and oligarchy inspired corrupt ideology at worst.
Here on page seven Abundance says:
In 1950, the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it was 6 times the average annual income.
In the 1950s poverty was double what it is now (says Google though that is hard to measure), they didn’t have most appliances or large homes, and overall it was a time of extreme scarcity of consumption compared to now:
[Side note: If we are consuming more now, isn’t that a win for neoliberalism? No because 1) anything that leads to wealth inequality and fascism isn’t sustainable and 2) heavy neoliberalism started in the 1980s.]
Then when you follow the footnote link for that sentence it is all about using better regulations to lower housing costs:
Improving renter protections, expanding social housing and more tightly regulating the mortgage market would slow down housing appreciation. Cutting down on short-term rentals and vacation homes also has a dramatic impact on housing affordability. In a recent study, MIT, UCLA, and USC found that for every 10% growth in Airbnb listings, a zip code’s average rent increased by 0.4%.
Another solution would be to limit foreign investment and speculation. When Vancouver passed a 15% tax on all sales to foreign home buyers, the price of single family property dropped 20% before rebounding, giving housing appreciation a short-term respite.
A more dramatic intervention would be to reverse the trend of corporations getting into the housing market and reintroduce public land ownership. From 2013 to 2015, corporations purchased almost $2 trillion worth of land and buildings in the world’s top 100 cities.
Then on page 14 of Abundance:
Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.
Then on page 24:
Too many have bought into a perverse inversion of what the city should be. Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class. But through bad policy and worse politics, we are doing in the twenty-first century what we so feared in the nineteenth: we are closing the American frontier.
Klein and Thompson’s vision for the future is that ever increasing wealth inequality won’t matter because everyone will have a house. Where have we heard that one before? Oh that’s right it’s the standard neoliberal “home ownership society” abundance bullshit that got us into the 2008 financial crisis. On page 31:
Consider the fortunes of janitors and lawyers, Ganong and Shoag write. Janitors and lawyers have long made more money working in New York than in the Deep South. As a result, many migrated from the Deep South to New York. But as housing costs in New York rose, the benefits of migration crumbled, at least for the janitors. The lawyers still came out ahead, but the janitors saw housing consume more than 50 percent of their paychecks.
Again from Google (cause there is only so hard I am willing to work cleaning up Klein’s mess):
- The median annual wage for janitors and building cleaners in the United States was $35,930 in May 2024.
- The median annual wage for lawyers was $151,160 in May 2024.
Of course the situation is much much worse than the story incomes tell. An American who can buy stocks or a house in the right neighborhood will get a very high rate of return.
The stock purchases require the right job. The “right” neighborhood is defined by gentrification. Then health care and child education follow from the right job and neighborhood also.
But supposedly in Klein’s America of the past, the janitor moving to a major city was able to overcome the inequality and secure upward mobility for his children. Cause if not upward mobility then what was the point?
[Side note: Klein and I’s disagreement here might be subtle but 1) the city of the past was not going to help the migrating janitor get out of poverty and 2) Even giving the janitor of the present back 50% of his salary lost on housing, he is then at $60K and still thoroughly screwed by health care, child education, not owning stocks or a house in the right neighborhood.]
From page 32:
We made mobility into an engine of inequality, and we did it on purpose, using policy levers that made life in dynamic cities too costly for the poor to afford.
Except that:
- America never had the upward mobility Klein imagines. Cities were and are so called “dynamic” only for the right people.
- Inequality caused cities to become expensive not the other way around. IE bankers / software engineers got rich and gentrified New York / San Francisco and implemented exclusionary policies. Not exclusionary policies were implemented leading to the wealth inequality of bankers / software engineers. Where I live in Silicon Valley it was fruit orchards before the engineers came.
- Policy levers are to blame for inequality but they are the same neoliberal, mostly federal, policies we all knew about throughout.
- The everyone move to the cities and be upwardly mobile bullshit has already been tried “The Seoul Metropolitan Area, which includes Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi Province, is home to more than half (50.7%) of the country’s total population.”
[Side note: One might argue that moving to the cities is working in that it is better than the rural life. However 1) Not better enough for South Korea to avoid a near miss with fascism and 2) Not better enough to stem the rising wealth inequality shown here.]
Page 46:
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.”
Except that:
- Rich people don’t need housing to suppress upward mobility — there are stocks, health care, expensive education, the cost of even having children, and as many other wealth inequality, rentier type schemes as they can devise.
- The easiest way to fix the situation is to prevent wealth inequality as FDR did with highly progressive tax rates. Any scheme that leaves wealth inequality in place is insincere and anti-intellectual.
But okay one would imagine that Abundance believers would contend that growth is the solution to all problems — even the ones caused by growth.
Page 49:
The toxicity of growth triggered a reaction among intellectuals and, later, within government. In 1962, Rachel Carson, a marine biologist suffering from breast cancer, published Silent Spring, which argued that chemical pesticides were devastating our ecosystems and destabilizing the biosphere. The book is broadly credited with founding the environmental movement, but like any founding document, it hit a nerve because it concretized anxieties that already existed.
Page 54:
Anti-growth politics could, and often did, tip into a kind of misanthropy aimed at newcomers. Those who already lived in a place were its stewards, its guardians, its voice. Those who wanted to move to that place were recast as a consumptive horde.
Because America or its big cities don’t allow enough immigration?!?!?!
This is the problem with neoliberal thought and the Abundance repackage of it — it’s all been tried before unsuccessfully. The only real fix for wealth inequality is policies or events that directly reduce wealth inequality.
Page 77:
Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $609 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $384 million. Canada gets it done for $295 million. Japan clocks in at $267 million. Portugal is the cheapest country in the database, at $96 million.
Yes and it’s the same for health care, education, and now, likely, the cost to build a drone. But okay fine how does Portugal build the cheapest rail? — here is a notice of the award of a new high speed rail 30 year contract — more on this later.
Page 90:
The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country. Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it adversarial legalism. “It is only a slight oversimplification to say that in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe,” he writes.
The reason our decisions are no longer made by bureaucracies is because neoliberal deregulation and “third way” governance have destroyed those bureaucracies. So now, this year, after 16 years trying Texas high speed rail fails with
“The Texas Central Railway project was proposed as a private venture,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said. “If the private sector believes this project is feasible, they should carry the pre-construction work forward, rather than relying on Amtrak and the American taxpayer to bail them out.”
Obviously that’s not what’s happening in Portugal where the EU is helping to foot the bill for construction and the Portuguese rail system was nationalized in 1975.
Back to housing page 106:
The reality of housing development doesn’t track along such neat ideological lines. Kuttner says that eliminating zoning restrictions and making it easier to build multifamily housing would make only a modest difference in our problems. He does not provide any evidence for this claim, but there is evidence against it. Houston has no zoning rules at all, though it does have some land use regulations.10 As a result, it is dramatically easier to build in Houston than to build in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle or Boston.
…
This divergence is decades old, and its consequences are clear. Houston has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city.
So we start with MAGA bullshit comparisons between the 2020s and the 1950s and now we move on to MAGA like bullshit comparisons between San Francisco and Houston.
It’s the same idea, San Francisco has a poverty rate half of Houston’s insane 20%. Plus
National report: Houston metro is second-worst for providing affordable housing options
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, no state has enough affordable housing for its lowest-income renters. Texas is tied for third-worst for number of affordable homes for extremely low-income households. The report, released March 4, also indicates that Houston has the second-most severe shortage of rental homes that are affordable to extremely low-income households. The coalition used the 2022 American Community Survey to compile its data.
Only the Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, Nevada, area ranks worse in the nation, with 13 affordable and available rental homes. Claiming the №3 worst metro area is Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington with 17. The Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown area ranks 10th-worst with 21.
Oh and on San Francisco homelessness:
In 2024, San Francisco counted just over 8,300 people experiencing homelessness, including both sheltered and unsheltered individuals.
Absolutely San Francisco should do better for those 8,300 people and it’s a disgrace they don’t. But don’t forget this is about a “vision of the future” and fucking shit hole Houston is not it.
But now on page 112 the knives finally come out:
Call this “everything-bagel liberalism.” The everything bagel is, of course, the best bagel. But that is because it adds just enough to the bagel and no more. It does not, actually, pile everything atop the bagel. In the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is an attempt to create a true everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. The same is true for public projects. When the government adds the right number of goals, standards, and rules, much can be accomplished. When it adds too many, the project can collapse under its own weight, as has happened to high-speed rail in California.
As if our democracy hadn’t been long since captured by big business, oligarchs, and racist / xenophobic voters! No it’s just that we weren’t smart enough to choose that middle bowl of porridge.
But fine since Klein keeps coming back to it, let’s discuss what happened to California high-speed rail. Yesterday, the Federal Railroad Administration released an over 300 page report:
Most notably, the CHSR Project continues to be marred by countless change orders for almost every contract. Change orders ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to over $100 million. In just over two years, from January 2023 to present, CHSRA has publicly reported approximately $1.6 billion in change orders, suggesting that a substantial portion of all payments to contractors are being made outside the original terms of negotiated contracts. There is no indication that such renegotiations and costly change orders, necessitated by CHSRA’s failure to manage this project effectively, will ever stop.
Simply put, CHSRA is not using State or Federal funding to advance responsibly the CHSR Project. Rather, it is simply perpetuating the same inefficient project management activities with change order after change order. It is no surprise, therefore, why CHSRA has made minimal progress to advance construction. The sheer volume and frequency of these change orders shows waste through an inexcusable combination of poor planning, implementation, or mismanagement of contractors, insufficient legal authority and technical expertise, and other factors.
So that’s the Trump administrations take. However page 47 of the report has a Letter to the Legislature (March 8, 2024) with this sentence:
We cannot emphasize too strongly that lack of action by the Legislature and Governor to identify an adequate and stable source of funding for the project is increasing costs and hindering management’s control of the project.
So Klein says burden of government rules, transportation secretary Duffy says mismanagement, and someone on the project says unstable funding — plenty of finger pointing.
However the take away of “everything-bagel liberalism” from the wreckage of this project is just a giant neoliberal smoke screen anyway. Suppose this project succeeds and software engineers are able to commute to Silicon Valley from far away. Then what?
I mean first of all Silicon Valley already outsources much of its engineering to poor countries all over the world. So it’s unclear why anyone needs to ride a train to accomplish that. In fact this project is kind of the opposite of the dynamic cities that Abundance is advocating and more about getting smaller towns involved.
Second how is California high-speed rail even supposed to help wealth inequality? If the point is that people working on building the train system will have quality jobs then spend away — just make sure the money reaches people that are not already rich.
But the money isn’t reaching poorer people because richer people are preventing that. That’s what happens in general with wealth inequality and why allowing it to reach such monstrous levels is so hard to undo.
[Side note: I don’t want to come off as not wanting the many jobs and cool new and more environmentally friendly transportation that high speed rail creates. It’s just that high speed rail and other public works projects are not a vision of the future — for instance Japan leaned heavily into such programs but it didn’t solve their wealth inequality or economic woes.]
Page 116:
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.
Ah now we’re getting somewhere. Instead of trying to reach poor people with the money, the government should have targeted rich coastal elites. That way the rail would actually get built and eventually there would be a “trickle down” to the Central Valley when (and if) they get their turn.
This is the real meaning of “everything-bagel liberalism” — if you try to help the poor or the environment you will fail. Just leave those toppings off of your bagel.
Don’t worry it’s not like that’s exactly how neoliberals have failed for the last fifty years and led us to the brink of fascism. Except that it is.