Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance made a big splash when it landed in March of this year. I wanted to get around to reading this while on a train or a plane, but as luck would have it, I sleep incredibly well on both, so it's languished in my "to read" pile until now.

Because of my delay, the hot take train has already left the station to such an extent that Ezra has commented on the commentary over a month ago. Due partly to Klein's influence in Democratic circles, and partly to the qualities of the book itself, I expect that aspects of Abundance will become electorally relevant in the next few cycles.

Unlike my published notes on Philosophy of Software Design, this will be a bit of an outsiders perspective. I am a professional software engineer with decades of experience, but I have no particular training in politics or history, so this is more of an exercise in self expression than an expert opinion.

Introduction: Beyond Scarcity

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.

I love this description of what has happened to the American economy in my lifetime, which is entirely post-Reagan.

To expand upon what this means, in the 80s, a stereo hi-fi system or a television were major purchases. A reasonable PC in the mid 1980s was somewhere in the $1,500 - $2,000 range, which adjusted for inflation is about $4,500 - $6,000. Today, you can buy a very good computer for about $1,000 and then spend the $1,000 you saved on your phone.

These efficiencies and innovations are the kinds of things that conservatives and capitalists point to when defending the system, but over the same period of time, the cost of a house and the cost of higher education, two primary methods of class mobility, have skyrocketed.

[..] Economic growth is not an addition of sameness. The difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. We have settled on a metaphor for growth that erases its most important characteristic.

This takedown of the metaphor of the economy as "a pie we must grow" feels like the replacement of one useful but simplistic model with another that captures and omits different truths. The purpose of the pie metaphor is to describe an economy which is not zero-sum, which coincidentally would be a useful lesson for the current administration to take a look at.

A lot of the growth of the "Asian tigers" in the previous century, and China in this century, has been achieved through transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial and then service/information economy, and I think the authors would say this was the type of change they are referring to.

But amid the transitory nature of these changes, the real mechanisms for growth are scaling systems of production, improving their efficiencies, miniaturization, etc. Making something and then learning how to make it better. To mirror the points that Ezra and Derek make regarding invention in a later chapter, most of the economic growth is growing the pie; the transformation is a multiplier.

Now imagine dozing off for another thirty-year nap between 1990 and 2020.

This quote compares the transformation of society and of our built environment made between 1875-1905 to the transformations we see in the present. The rest of the book does a pretty good job of defending its thesis that that the reason the majority of our transformations since 1990 have been in the IT space is that there's been a lack of procedural muck to slow things down, but my immediate reaction to this whole section is that we are generally bad at recognizing transformative changes during our own lifetime.

The idea that everyone has a Star Trek tricorder that they can use to chat with friends across the globe for free or order groceries for delivery would be wild to someone in 1990, even though we see the progression of the technologies that got us here to be not only clear but inevitable.

When I would travel to Portugal as a kid in the 90s for family vacation, I might as well have been going to the Moon, such was the isolation from my life back home. That's changed in a very transformative way, but it's been such a gradual process that it doesn't feel revolutionary.

The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage.

They don't provide any supporting data for this claim, but I'm glad it's here. Economists will insist that markets can account for externalities, but, like neoliberalism's supply-side economics, this has repeatedly been shown to be a self-serving fantasy.

Chapter 1: Grow

America lost its primacy in semiconductor innovation because much is learned in the making of things.

This echoes the themes in How Tech Loses Out, one of my favorite blog posts/talks in recent times. From an engineering perspective, "much is learned in the making of things" is a good description of what's lost when you outsource.

Those much-mocked Bay Area parties where young AI engineers gather in group houses to ingest psychedelics and contemplate the singularity matter.

The context for this quote is how the physical proximity we get in Cities is still relevant and still has an outsized effect on innovation.

I agree with the overall message. From the point of view of this tech industry insider, the proximity and energy they've identified does have a lot of value. I was a big fan of back to office largely due to communication and collaboration grounds.

This particular point about Bay Area tech bro parties is a lionization of a toxic form of this argument which perpetuates many of the issues we've been trying to work against in the industry since the 60s. These kinds of events are a milieu of excitement and connection, but they are also filters that exclude all sorts of people, especially women and minorities, and the mythologies built up around these parties keeps those filters in place.

There are communal learning spaces and accessible events that are not exclusionary or a danger to female participants. It's particularly ironic as a future chapter laments on our inability to recognize potential Katalin Karikó's in STEM. We've lost many such potential innovators simply due to structural gender discrimination.

Any growing community that likes itself roughly the way it is faces a problem. If more people want to live in that community, then developers will build places for them to live. Worse, they might build dense places for them to live.

Emphasis mine.

It's not entirely clear to me, at least in its full context, if "worse" is a value judgement that is being attributed to the "growing community" or one that is held by the authors, but it goes unexplained and unchallenged.

As someone who is interested in the "good urbanism" movement and in addressing both our environmental and housing crisis, we have to move the window on this. Much like 29% of Americans identify with "no religion", a large but culturally invisible minority of Americans who would prefer to live in an urban, walkable neighborhood where they have access to things like shops and medical care without having to drive.

New York City did not become expensive because living there sucks. If the point of this book is to encourage liberals to lean into the "laws" of market forces to achieve their policy goals, we have to be willing to see that these kinds of places are out of reach to most Americans because they are both desirable and in short supply.

Klein grew up in Irvine, California. When you Google Irvine, the first image you see is one that looks like an attractively greened office park cut in half by a 9-lane stroad. Redfin's "What to Love about Irvine, Ca" article features a header image which is about 60% highway and 20% parking lot.

I'm not saying this specifically to dig on Irvine. More than once I felt like the Abundance book takes for granted certain unsustainable aspects of our lifestyle, often derisively called "car brain", that are both bad for the environment and act as alienating and isolating forces doing harm to our society.

To walk the streets of the Tenderloin in San Francisco or Skid Row in Los Angeles is to tumble into the dystopia tucked amid the plenty of these cities. Tents line the buildings, feces line the sidewalks, needles crunch underfoot.

We can be critical of the left and of the state of public safety in some Democratically led urban centers without adopting bad-faith right wing framing of those problems. The New York City subway could be vastly improved in terms of maintenance, modernization, and safety, but adopting the language of someone like Sean Duffy to describe these problems is not the way.

Chapter 2: Build

The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity.

In many ways, Abundance is proposed as a liberal alternative to degrowth, and I think it's in arguing against degrowth that the book shines the most. This is a provocative statement, but ultimately I think it tracks reasonably well. You can't sell people on giving up what they have for something that is obviously worse, but you can certainly shift the window on new technologies that have have limited tradeoffs and significant upsides like induction stoves and EVs.

This is one of the difficulties that new urbanism has; it's hard to convince a lot of people who are dependent on their cars every day that this dependence is optional and that the alternatives include tradeoffs but also significant upsides. These same people will go on a European holiday, spend 10 days walking around Rome or Florence, eating heavily while losing weight, and then return home to their suburban car-centric lifestyle and forget what they know.

A 1996 law offered this favoritism to border security, and the Trump administration used it to great effect in constructing parts of their border wall.

I highlighted this paragraph with a note that simply reads "what the fuck is this lol."

There's not much evidence that the border wall was even meaningfully constructed, much less that anything about that process was efficient or a particularly savvy navigation of statute.

Chapter 3: Govern

A significant portion of this chapter is related explicitly or implicitly to the stories that Jennifer Pahlka tells in Recoding America. I didn't make any highlights in this chapter, but it's the book at its strongest and most persuasive.

Chapter 4: Invent

This chapter devotes a significant amount of space to the development of the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, describing the struggles by now Nobel Laureate Katalin Karikó to get funding for mRNA based therapeutics in the US in the 80s, as well as the Covid-19 response in general.

In it is this comment on masks, which I've given its own little section as I wanted to include quotes from outside of the book.

Masks

But two years later, the coauthor of a large analysis of global masking research concluded that “there is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference, full stop.”

This is incredibly misleading. In the book, it links to a footnote which is not an actual reference:

So, did mask mandates work, or didn’t they? The frustrating answer is it depends. Jason Abaluck, a Yale professor who helped run the Bangladesh study, offered a sobering synthesis. The success of mask mandates—like the success of most behavioral interventions—hinges on many factors, including public trust in government, civilian adherence to the mask rules, and state capacity to enforce them. In places where a well-informed and motivated public conscientiously wore high-quality masks almost all the time, mask mandates probably worked, he said. “But if Alabama tomorrow mandated mask-wearing, it would do nothing.” Derek Thompson, interview with Jason Abaluck.

We can't say that "masks don't work" when what we really mean is that "mask mandates don't work." These are different things! The first can be false while the second is true, and that is what nearly all studies point to. Masks don't become magically ineffective when transported to Alabama, instead the people in Alabama don't follow the mandate.

They don't follow the mandate partially due to a misguided "don't tread on me" individualism where Americans will simply refuse to adapt even a minor inconvenience for the sake of others, but also partially to people pushing a poorly substantiated agenda that masks themselves don't work.

The gold standard for a scientific basis for "masks don't work", put forth luminaries like Bret Stephens, is a study of studies published in January 2023 by Cochrane Library which found that Masks didn't have clear effects.

When you read the actual report, you find it's full of important caveats. Their overall confidence on their results was low:

The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.

Furthermore, there was an adherence issue:

Relatively low numbers of people followed the guidance about wearing masks or about hand hygiene, which may have affected the results of the studies.

In higher-adherence studies taken among health care workers, the results were slightly different but no less inconclusive:

We are very uncertain on the effects of N95/P2 respirators compared with medical/surgical masks on the outcome of clinical respiratory illness (RR 0.70, 95% CI 0.45 to 1.10; 3 trials, 7779 participants; very low‐certainty evidence). N95/P2 respirators compared with medical/surgical masks may be effective for ILI (RR 0.82, 95% CI 0.66 to 1.03; 5 trials, 8407 participants; low‐certainty evidence).

These are weak conclusions. There are other studies that suggest the opposite; that prevention measures worked, and that despite the elevated risk in a hospital setting, most transmission happened outside of hospitals. The overwhelming medical consensus is that masks are effective, and the mechanism is pretty straightforward and understandable even by laypeople.

The most important idea that emerged from the Bush report was the primacy of “basic research”—a term Bush meant to refer to science at universities and research centers that seeks to understand the world “without thought of practical ends.”

I wasn't aware that this concept had a name, but I love the name and the concept. There is a somewhat similar follow-up later in the chapter:

[..] This is how science often works; a broad base of knowledge is built, upon which we piece together disparate fragments of a puzzle to create new breakthroughs.

This, and "basic research", are why Connections should still be required viewing for children. Much of the damage being done today to public trust in Science and Medicine come from a fundamental illiteracy in how it functions.

Too much science is, in his words, “doomed to succeed”—fated to duplicate what we know rather than risk failure by reaching into the unknown.

Ironically, there is a replication crisis in modern science. Too many of these so-called safe studies pounce upon weak signals to deliver "results" that simply aren't there when we go to look for them again.

Neither liberals nor conservatives have articulated a clear politics of invention. Neither have prioritized the rigorous analysis of public policy in sciences.

The book acknowledges its point of view and that of its authors as a liberal one, but this kind of both-sidesism is tiresome, especially as the current administration is dismantling the NIH, NSF, and other Government apparatuses that the book leans into as vital avenues for positive change. Elon Musk being a conservative doesn't make the conservative movement somehow pro-engineering or pro-science.

We still don’t know how to identify and nurture the Katalin Karikós of the world. To find them, we need a better science of science.

This section argues for a "meta-science" approach to the way that we fund science and technology research. It describes some differences in the way that DARPA and NSF works, successes and failures of both, and comes up with a porque no los dos? as an answer.

I think that's fine, but I don't think this is a tractable problem in the general sense. As Vannevar Bush hinted at with his description of "basic research", there is no reliable way of identifying what has promise and what doesn't, and what you end up with when you try to do that is probably just familiarity in-group bias.

Chapter 5: Deploy

John Arnold, the cochair of Arnold Ventures philanthropy, put it pithily: “America has the ability to invent. China has the ability to build. The first country that can figure out how to do both will be the superpower.”

This is a nice quote, but due to Wright's Law, described extensively prior to this quote, it seems like building is a better predictor of future innovation than the other way around. The toaster story I linked earlier agrees.

I need to spend some time considering how separate I think these processes are.

In the book, the authors describe the development of penicillin as a chance discovery in a war torn Europe that was only made manifest by US military-industrial efforts to scale up production and distribution. They make a similar case with mRNA vaccines and operation Warp Speed.

For every transformative new technology, there are perhaps thousands of smaller advancements that are achieved through the mastery you build by design and manufacture, including innovations related to the general processes of design and manufacture itself. There isn't a country on earth that can build new factory capacity faster than China; they've been doing just that the past 20 years, so it's no surprise that they're good at it.

OWS solved problems by enabling the private sector rather than commanding it.

Earlier, they describe how BART significantly reduced the cost of a new fleet of trains by in-housing some of the expertise around building, shipping, and designing those trains.

This seems a bit contradictory, but Abundance makes the case that different problems require different solutions. I'm not sure how you turn this into a reliable mechanism for leadership when the answer to "how do we build more of what we need" is always "it depends!"

How do we know when it is public/private partnerships and when it is "enabling the private sector?" How do we identify Karikó's?

The Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 moved Washington to create the Advanced Projects Research Agency, later renamed DARPA, which contributed to the invention of the personal computer, GPS, and drone technology.

Big nitpick here, and it might be a little close minded in light of the way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being fought, but drone technology is itself a fairly derivative and uninspiring application of pretty old aerospace tech, has very limited impact for the public good, and belongs nowhere near PCs and GPS in the annals of great technological innovations.

One lesson of Apollo’s surprising unpopularity is that the program was sustained by leaders within NASA and the White House, which never pulled the plug on an audacious task that polled poorly among the public.

My own personal "crisis in democracy" is that a lot of the best and most inspiring things that we've done have not been popular at the time of their doing, such as the moon landing and the civil rights movement. In our time, though it's certainly no comparison to the moonshot, I'd add things like smoking bans, congestion charges, and the broad awakening to continuing racial injustices that our society was jolted into by the BLM protests.. which unfortunately was followed by slamming the snooze button and voting for a fascist rollback.

Conclusion: Toward Abundance

The Democratic and Republican parties do not merely disagree over the details of tax policy. They disagree over the legitimacy of elections, of institutions, of the structure of American government.

Gee, I wonder which side is right. Impossible to say.

At the [1964 World's] fair’s most popular event, the General Motors “Futurama II” exhibition, tens of millions of people glided through elaborate dioramas that imagined life at the end of the twentieth century.

The original "Futurama" exhibit, from the 1940 World's Fair, is infamous in climate advocacy circles for imagining a future with no public transit. For an example, see Climate Town's How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

The book cites this popular phrase in the context of the tangle of environmental review requirements and other slowing mechanisms in government. On the left, it is popular to use this phrase to describe organs of the government that are perceived to engage in oppression, like police departments. The suggestion is that the system is either beyond reform, or that if the outcomes were not preferable, the system would have already been changed.

As an engineer, this has never sat right with me. The purpose of the Francis Scott Key bridge was not to collapse. There is a whole area of study on emergent behaviors, on the unintended consequences of complex systems. Changes that seem simple to outsiders can be complex from the inside. They can be complex for bad reasons, like corruption, but they can be complex for good reasons, too.

The bar to ascribe an outcome to intent should be higher than the existence of that outcome, and I think this phrase leads us to lowering that bar too often.

The ideas and movements of the last few decades are not our villains. They were the responses to the crises of another time.

This defense of neoliberalism rings somewhat hollow in a book that advocates for increased productivity as a way to recapture a lost middle class lifestyle in a society whose economic inequality indicators like GINI seem to have hit a suspicious inflection point in the early 1980s.

In today's world, where imaginary crises like the "migrant caravan" or pet-eating immigrants become major election issues, I have to wonder to what extent the authors believe that neoliberalism fixed issues with liberalism that existed in the real world.

The use of "liberal" as an epithet in leftist circles stems largely from this type of appeal to centrism that is present in a lot of center left writers and thinkers. The authors are happy to cede this kind of framing to conservatives; for another example, describing a crisis of "open borders under Biden"; even when the framing runs counter to reality. All the while, conservatives are free to deny elemental facts of modern life with universal scientific consensus like vaccine efficacy and climate change.

Out of this style of imbalance, we get inward excoriations of the excesses of the left, like the backlash against Mamdani, while conservatives and their increasingly damaging behavior are written off as not available for persuasion.

An effort to equate the legacy of liberalism from FDR to Nixon with the legacy of neoliberalism created under Reagan feels preposterous from our current vantage point under the ruins of the great institutions that liberalism built and neoliberalism has, at last, destroyed.

Jul 26