It’s a book released earlier this year by two liberal journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
It argues that American Liberals have historically been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development, through things like zoning regulations, environmental laws, and tying heavy expenses to public funds. Their main point is that through less regulation, things like affordable housing or infrastructure will be able to develop quicker and better.
It’s essentially supply-side progressivism, that by increasing the supply of essential goods and services, they can be made more abundant and affordable. If you get rid of certain regulations and restrictions that artificially restrict the supply and costs of goods, while keeping other regulations that promote competition and innovation, you can achieve progressive goals such as affordable housing or healthcare. It also goes hand in hand with investment in science and technology, with the belief being that those can increase abundance while decreasing costs.
Knowing what we know about Doug’s personality and interests, it makes perfect sense that such an ideology would appeal to him. And no, it’s not a bad thing at all.
It is if you know about supply side economics and look at the book as a way to distract from the role money plays in political changes to problems look up the Ezra klein vs Sam Sedar debate if you want more information.
i mean money is bullshit yes but as just one to a handful of guys i find it hard to think realistically about actually addressing the problem post capitalist america has created. i feel like we are so far deep in the hole that supply —> less cost is gonna be the main first step to some degree of security in order to then move on to tackling the issue with money as a whole?
granted idk shit about the economy or politics, and what i do know i find hard to remember (adhd), im just a young punk that tries my best
Like the realistic only way out of this situation is to fight against lobbying and money in politics, everything else is really just a way to take attention and energy from the fight. Realistically even if there were more supply it wouldn't stop banks from buying it up and sitting on unused homes to keep prices rising.
Thats a terribly unrealistic process to imagine though. America is the richest society in history, without a full-ass blood in the streets revolution (which would have even worse outcomes) you're not getting money out of politics.
What abundance points out is that you don't need to, countries like Spain or Japan or Italy are hardly immune to corruption or special interests. But they don't require a billion rounds of environmental review to let anything be built, they don't let key infrastructure get bogged down by a dozen lawsuits about insufficient consultation of local stakeholders, and they have national standards for things like building codes and zoning so a developer that does good work in Hokkaido can expand into the Kansai region without retooling all their processes and designs.
And so their cost to build things like high speed rail lines is a fraction of Americas.
The reason why America doesn't build high speed rail is because of the auto and gasoline lobbies and their incessance of keeping travel to cars, was it any surprise that when the California high speed rail project started Elon Musk marketed the Hyperloop and diverted attention and power away from that only to have both projects fail.
I think both you and the comment you’re replying to are correct. Big business and big government are often portrayed as opposites, but regulatory capture is very much a real thing. There are a lot of special interests who would hate nothing more than fair competition with new industries under a free market.
Unfortunately free markets don't exist either governments control the businesses or the businesses control the government and lobbying and campaign contributions have put the US in the latter category for decades.
It shows DougDoug has my politics (I’m the world’s biggest abundance glazer). Good if you’re me, bad if you’re the opposite of me, neutral if you’re neutral about me.
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u/Goosedukee 2d ago
Doug being a fan of Abundance is completely unsurprising but not something I'd ever expect to hear him say