Andrew Varsanyi

Abundance is just a mushy moderate surrender to neoliberalism and inequality

I have to confess, unlike many of my liberal brethren on BlueSky, I do not hate Ezra Klein or the New York Times. In fact, I usually find Klein to be thoughtful, imaginative, thorough, and intelligent and I read the Times pretty much daily. I don’t think they shouldn’t be criticized and the Times like that annoying colleague we all have, posses an irritating habit of triangulating to what they misidentify as the moderate center in just about every news story. Objective facts exist and they shouldn’t pivot away from calling out an out-of-control political movement just because its popularity ticked up. But, I digress…

I picked up Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance last week. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. The book is several chapters of cobbled together essays from several previous columns by both authors mixed in with some new materials and anecdotes.

The book’s structure is simple. It begins by contemplating a utopian future where mankind has conquered climate change, acquired unlimited energy, and generally made everything pretty great. They use this worn-out and oversimplified framework to explore several different areas where, apparently, liberals and well-meaning progressives have fallen in for a kind of management-centered process thinking in dealing with society’s problems and, as a result, have grown blind to the needless complexities and inefficiencies that have gotten in the way of building things.

Thompson and Klein do well in the part of the book where they talk about how this management thinking crept into liberal progressivism. Their critique of Ralph Nader and the then New Left’s emphasis on legalistic means to challenge government power and, by design or accident, introduced all kinds of new ways to disrupt, delay, and prevent building. This section is fine, but isn’t anything really new.

What angers me, though, is that, in putting forth its wish for the liberal world to embrace building new things, the book lacks any grounding in theory or any values judgment on what society should do with the “abundance” the authors argue we can unlock in their newly deregulated and “de-processed” government world.

Perhaps the most pernicious part of the neoliberal system we inhabit — the political economic system existing since the 1970s centered on markets as the prime and legitimate movers of everything from finances to culture — is that it has successfully convinced people that it is not only one available idea of how a society can be organized, but is the only option. Klein and Thompson argue from a place inside of this system and are apparently incapable (or just unwilling) to look at the neoliberal system and contemplate anything different. As a result, what is most noticeable in the book is the absence of any identifiable theoretically-enforced proposals for change.

Abundance is fundamentally a book about progress; Klein and Thompson are Progressives in the oldest sense, they believe that improvements can be made through rational measurement, management, and action. But the exact kind of progress the book argues for is what has broken the Democratic Party and center-left parties worldwide. It is the progressivism of a group of elite liberals completely disconnected from workers. It is not grounded in any cultural ideas or values; it is a materialistic world where better living standards are assumed always to be concomitant with cultural liberalization. I wish that were true, but it’s not. The last two decades of politics make that abundantly clear.

In ignoring contemporary culture, politics, and theory, Thompson and Klein use the same logic that other neoliberals have for decades — effectively that everything will work out if we can just find a way to make society richer, to make more of everything. There’s no concern over working conditions or distribution. The two writers’ optimism is the same outdated and disproven one as Tony Blair’s. And the backlash against the so-called Middle Way, which we are living through right now, is something they seem happy to ignore.

Housing is the best example of Klein and Thompson’s limited imagination. There is a housing crisis across a lot of the West; I am a Canadian, and it’s even worse there than here in the states. But Klein and Thompson blindly accept the post-1960s idea that your house is your most important asset. It simply wasn’t always that way and — I would argue — shouldn’t be.

Houses became the primary asset through which middle-class families save for and actualize their retirements solely because the U.S. (and, indeed, most of the West) abandoned the public and private sector pension systems in the late seventies and eighties. The way to really disrupt the housing market (in addition to building more houses, something you would have to foolish not to support) is to stop the insanity wherein our economies and the lifestyles and livelihoods of nearly our whole population is predicated on housing values having to increase over time. Give people another place to invest their money and guarantee themselves future assets and — dare I say — abundance and they will make different choices, including ones to support, even demand, more housing for everyone.

I believe that Klein (and probably Thompson) would support this idea. But they didn’t write about it. Instead, they chose to double down on the same old management liberal pretending that characterized the policies of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. These leaders managed their economies as neoliberals, gradually eroding workers’ rights and power while undermining collective solutions to problems and passing tax cuts for job creators (who just happened to be the ones who were already rich.) The policies emanating from this book are about de-regulation and localization. The same policies that broke the damn system in the first place.

Fundamentally, what I am saying is that this book is conservative. It doesn’t call out the system that has allowed billionaires to get richer while increasing numbers of middle- and working-class people fall into housing instability. It doesn’t call for real change. It calls for re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I’m sure we can make the chairs look nicer, but that doesn’t really solve anything.

Conservative. That’s probably the best word for this book. If liberals are actually gonna fix shit, we need to look at why MAGA came to be in the first place and come up with far more radical proposals. This crisis has come because of neoliberalism’s confidence that markets will take care for things themselves and that collective solutions never ever work. Collective solutions like pensions and unions (and, yes, anti-trust policy) worked for forty years.

In my view, we need higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the poor, and much greater investment in collective systems of financial security like pensions and unions. In Klein and Thompson’s view, we just need another McKinsey consultant to find efficiencies in our processes.