“More broadly, Klein underestimates the value of rulemaking and enforcement. The alternative to a society governed by laws (in which lawyers play an important role) is one ruled by fiat.”
This quote is wild, considering that almost every other Western nation does not use judicial review for infrastructure project and usually just use administrative law.
I love how some comments assume because the abundance agenda might appeal to some Republicans, it must be bad. Seems like ideology is more important to some than growth. Democrats need to expand the tent.
You clearly haven’t read the book. It’s about building low-income housing, infrastructure, public transportation, national industrial policy, health policy, and building green energy and transmission lines. The book is about what the government can do to help people. Not a book about corporations.
These are bread and butter issues for democrats -- things the state could do. You may disagree with the priorities, but you need to represent the abundance argument correctly. Not some straw man you've created.
Bro I don’t need to think harder about the strawman you’re accusing me of creating. Maybe you should consider the possibility that I’m a lot more intelligent than yourself.
Calling something “derangement syndrome” is not an argument.
Please look at how people like Jon Chait, Josh Barro, and Noah Smith - all explicitly anti-left - are reacting, each having published pieces that assert that the book is obviously intended to be an attack on the left wing of the Democratic party and is merely written in a way designed to avoid saying so directly; very bizarre to fall on your fainting couch because left Democrats are naturally critical of the book
Hey now he's married to a woman, that I can accept. But if he was gay and not married, I would take offense if you said there's no way he would want to.
The guy in the picture making fun of Klein talking about zoning reform while AOC is drawing stadium-size crowds is correct, for better or for worse. As soon as I learned about this "abundance" thing I predicted it would mostly go nowhere and that Bernie-style economic leftism is the next wave of Democratic politics. The problem is that people who accuse Klein of "laundering conservative ideas" are right. He is making the same basic, obvious arguments that conservatives have made for generations. Sort of by definition, people who accept these arguments aren't really leftists. That was hammered out long before most of us were born. There was never any possibility that just slapping the name "Klein" on top of them would be the thing that finally moves the needle.
If Ezra Klein, or anyone else, is truly interested in "abundance," then their best shot is to sit this one out and start building up their connections on the right side of the aisle, so they can try and influence policy in a future Republican administration, like 10+ years down the road if they're lucky and play their cards right. "Abundance" has no home on the left, never has, probably never will. To think otherwise is to misunderstand what the left is and how people are sorted into or out of it.
It’s true that conservatives have made similar arguments. Whether that means Klein should not engage with the left at all, I’m not so sure. The left is just the place where ideological conversation usually takes place. His addressing them seems rational.
Elizabeth Warren is talking about housing supply. Tim Walz is a Yimby. Barack Obama, you guessed it, is also a Yimby.
I think these people are better barometers of inter-left priorities than most. Though they're less annoying about it on Twitter, so we think about them less.
It's all well and good that prominent dems like Warren and Obama acknowledge the fundamental supply/demand mismatch underlying housing costs, but until they actually tell a union or environmental group to shove it, it's all just words.
I can tell you're mad, but I just don't think you're familiar with the facts here. Let's do Tim Walz.
After its passage in 2018, the Minneapolis 2040 upzoning plan faced a legal challenge Smart Growth Minneapolis (the most obnoxious nimbys), Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds, and, the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis.
The lawsuit was based on the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA). The plaintiffs argued that the city had failed to conduct an adequate environmental review. Typical NIMBY stuff.
There were further injunctions against the city implementing the plan in 2022 and 2023. Walz finally had enough in 2024 and the state legislature passed HF5242 which includes provisions to say these injunctions are ridiculous, let Minneapolis build. Look up HF5242 if you're curious.
Barack Obama lives on 29 mostly empty acres on Martha's Vineyard, when he's not at his 3 acre oceanfront property in Hawaii. Elizabeth Warren lives in a $3M townhome in low density, low-storey Cambridge MA. The Walzes permanent residence it is up in the air right now but I'm guessing it will have ample lebensraum.
The term you're looking for is YIYBY: Yes In Your Back Yard.
I worked in construction in Dallas in the early 2000s until the crash and the shit Klein is saying is exactly what the GW Bush republicans I worked with were saying. So why do we have to pretend to give Bush Republican ideas from 20 years ago a shot? Genuinely. 20 years later I can tell you they deregulated everything they could and it made construction worse. You don’t just coordinate with the utilities, you coordinate with the utility carrier, your subcontractor, the utility carrier’s subcontractor, and it feels like any Dick and Harry who walks by. Houston has no zoning laws, and no one outside of Houston wants to live there. This shit has already been done, in Texas. I don’t need to listen to someone argue for policies that have already failed or sucked.
The housing crash was about finance, not building rules.
It took 15 years for construction employment to get back to where it was in 2008. Those are good jobs. Not a surprise that the main growth of those jobs are in Texas.
And? I was in large commercial construction, multiple projects disappeared overnight because lenders suddenly called their loans or only had LOI. I’m saying if these were good ideas, Texas would be a shining beacon, with its deregulation and no nasty unions. But no, the industry here relies mostly on immigrants and folks with records that won’t let them get jobs elsewhere. There’s an abundance of construction, but not good paying jobs in it, even as the number of skilled trades people drops. Quality is bad and dropping. I’m commenting because it infuriates me to see these guys get a platform, get paid to think, and then… repeat republican talking points from 2005. No one owes these guys their attention.
Texas has been crushing it in building new housing and green energy infrastructure, so I don’t know what you’re on about. They also lead the nation in construction job growth, and have done so for a long time.
Compare it to a place like Venice Beach, which has *fewer* homes now than in 2000.
The idea that ideological conversation takes place only on the left seems like a claim that requires serious justification.
IMO it's naive for Klein to think he can get anywhere with this on the left. But that's his home, so you can't really blame him for trying. I wish him luck. But again: Naive. Perhaps I'll be wrong about this though, I've been wrong before.
I should be more direct, I think that what's happening is that Klein and Thompson believe that their readers will mostly be people on the left, partially due to the fact that lefties like to read about ideology and partially due to their reputation as being on the left. So in that sense they are just addressing the reader, which seems natural.
The rhetorical trick here is: are their readers _on the left_ or are they _leftists?_ Person Online is using the term "leftist" narrowly and almost tautologically as the category of left-leaning people who _would_ be uninterested in what Klein and Thompson offer.
“Person Online is using the term ‘leftist’ narrowly and almost tautologically as the category of left-leaning people who _would_ be uninterested in what Klein and Thompson offer.”
No, he is using the term to describe all who are left of center.
MOST of whom - not all, but yes most, and particularly almost all of the *activists* on the left - are in fact not interested in the things he is talking about, because they want and believe that they can have their culturally and economically Marxist world.
That they don’t need to compromise with the center, let alone the right, to not only win elections but to enjoy forever the golden eggs.
Where or not you or this Substack’s author happen to be in the minority who side with Klein or not.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of left of center, at least not in America. I think much of the American left-of-center embraces liberalism and regulated capitalist markets, and either looks critically on or flat-out rejects Marxist ideology.
Then either to left is doomed or we’re all doomed.
But I don’t think you’re correct. US political parties have to appeal to half the electorate. That’s the nature of first past the post electoral politics.
You can’t have a serious political party that wants to build “affordable” housing but supports regulations that make it cost $500 a square foot and take decades to build.
Klein’s point isn’t that the goals of the left are wrong, but that they are in tension and the effort to make every project an everything bagel that both achieves its stated goals and hires small, minority-owned contractors and does no environmental damage and causes no disruption to its neighbors inevitably leads to delays and cost overruns.
There’s a huge political space between no effort to help people with housing at all, which seems to be the Republican position now, and every project must be an everything bagel. That space might once have been occupied by centrist Republicans but it certainly isn’t now
>You can’t have a serious political party that wants to build “affordable” housing but supports regulations that make it cost $500 a square foot and take decades to build.<
Except that the Democrats are that party and have been for decades, and they still win elections.
Democrat voters don't want to hear about deregulation. They want to hear what are you going to give them for free? The best strategy for implementing this "abundance" stuff through the left, if you were going to try, would be to run on giving people handouts and then once you're in power try to quietly do the deregulation on the side. This is unlikely to work for the same reason that people who think they can use Trump as a vehicle for their own agenda are consistently disappointed. Once AOC has been voted in on a platform of free shit, she's probably not going to give deregulation the time of day.
As an engineer involved in real estate and construction, I can tell you that you are dead wrong about Republicans and housing. We invest like mad, with the intention of selling the most units to the most people in the shortest time possible. Of course, if you’re talking about government -somehow- building free stuff and giving it away, well no. That’s not a real solution. That’s just a recurring disaster.
When Ezra Klein talks, the hackles of conservatives (as opposed to Republicans) raise because he speaks with the inflections of an overeducated ivy league elitist. He pals around with Larry Summers, who is probably the single greatest architect of failed globalist policies. Amongst the current crop of Silicon Valley elitists, Klein and similar thinkers have no traction.
I have a pet Theory that viewing diversity of opinion as a negative has been such a significant part of the left for 80+ years partially because their ideas are so stuck in the 19th century. When people are still founding their views on marx, it’s obvious to everyone but the acolytes that history has shown those ideas fail. So it becomes a religion and not a political movement. religions punish blasphemy they don’t celebrate it.
I had an instructive conversation with an old friend who’s gone far left that illustrates this point. I was advocating for some of picket ideas, which appeal to me because they have a leftist sense of justice and empathy, but actually try to learn from the lessons of the last 150 years. My friend said he didn’t even consider Piketty’s ideas because he admitted he hadn’t read all of Marx, and was dismissive of Marx's ideas because they were all theoretical or sociological observation of his time.
The unions stuff is so annoying, because unionism is literally feudalism. It's a guild. If you want to get away from neo-feudalism, you need to let go of unionism. Most working class people aren't skilled workers in unions -- those people are middle class -- rather, they're unskilled workers in retail, food, and entertainment. They work as cashiers, clerks, secretaries, not as plumbers, electricians, and roofers.
The anti-abundance left seems to have this fetish for blue collar men based out of guilt or overcompensation. Blue collar men are famously right-wing, ever since truckers started listening to Rush Limbaugh. So unionism is this one neat trick where problem-glasses girl-bosses can link arms with tobacco-chewing wife-beaters to form an effective coalition to win elections.
And yes, this has actually worked for the last 50 years. However, Trump's overtures to unions may change this. In any case, it's not actually decreasing income inequality or lifting people out of poverty, because #1, wages in skilled manual labor have gone up; #2, suppressing the supply of housing actually lowers demand for skilled laborers, which also suppresses their wages; #3, most poor people aren't skilled laborers, they're unskilled laborers.
If Democrats were serious about lifting people out of poverty, they would focus on trying to raise wages and lower the cost of living for cashiers, waiters, and low-level construction workers. And because this kind of unskilled labor is so insecure (hiring and firing, season labor), it doesn't make sense to try to make the jobs themselves better. You have to focus on externalities -- education, healthcare, housing.
I’d be curious to hear more about the weirdness of the Revolving Door Project. Before this article, I never browsed their site - I only read some of their posts I’d seen linked around.
They do seem weirdly obsessive in a way I didn’t realize
Grow tf up. You mock “abundance agenda” detractors for calling this repackaged Reaganomics, then immediately dive into supply side rhetoric.
I only made it a couple paragraphs into this writeup. I cannot process your lack of self-awareness.
The abundance agenda is a full-stop recommitment to Reaganomics by pencilneck softbois desperate to protect the passive revenue streams they were raised upon.
More b.s. from the same folks that thought reducing fraud and waste in the government would balance the budget. Would be nice if all these "everything would be great if there were no regulations" types had even a rudimentary understanding of the regulatory process or were willing to concede that other interest groups had an equal right to advance their agenda. But, to wrap this in the "Dems need to embrace .... in order to regain power" is bullshit.
I think some of the obsession might be due to the fact that they are, at the moment, in terms of broad popular appeal, the most influential "public intellectual" liberals? (Which says a lot about the differences between the modern left and right nowadays.)
It’s always odd when the party that made stealing legal starts talking about how we need to strictly enforce laws around building. It seems like the enforcement of laws only matters when not enforcing them would be beneficial.
"The question remains: will the left ever get its head out of its ass and realize that a diversity of opinion and inclusion will help popularize their ideas? I hope that this pathology is a bug of the left and not a feature, but I can’t be so sure."
Hope is not a strategy.
The pathology you describe is most definitely a feature of today's activist left.
Perhaps someday you will realize this.
And start voting for the only major party - however imperfect you find/claim/believe some if its politicians to be - that actually is (imperfectly) pro-abundance.
Because the left of the last 9+ years is unequivocally, totally anti-abundance.
“More broadly, Klein underestimates the value of rulemaking and enforcement. The alternative to a society governed by laws (in which lawyers play an important role) is one ruled by fiat.”
This quote is wild, considering that almost every other Western nation does not use judicial review for infrastructure project and usually just use administrative law.
It’s especially wild coming from the left who’ve made stealing legal in their cities.
Grow tf up and use your real name like a bigboy if you’re gonna spew garbage nonsense. You have less than zero credibility.
Using your real name on the internet is for influencers and retards lol. There is no upside and huge downsides
go away bot
I love how some comments assume because the abundance agenda might appeal to some Republicans, it must be bad. Seems like ideology is more important to some than growth. Democrats need to expand the tent.
Both parties are spammed by rhetoric and propaganda.
Yes, to many of us there are more important things than “growth.” jfc
You clearly haven’t read the book. It’s about building low-income housing, infrastructure, public transportation, national industrial policy, health policy, and building green energy and transmission lines. The book is about what the government can do to help people. Not a book about corporations.
These are bread and butter issues for democrats -- things the state could do. You may disagree with the priorities, but you need to represent the abundance argument correctly. Not some straw man you've created.
wtf does your reply have to do with my comment?
Think real hard.
Bro I don’t need to think harder about the strawman you’re accusing me of creating. Maybe you should consider the possibility that I’m a lot more intelligent than yourself.
I have read the book.
I disagree with it.
Calling something “derangement syndrome” is not an argument.
Please look at how people like Jon Chait, Josh Barro, and Noah Smith - all explicitly anti-left - are reacting, each having published pieces that assert that the book is obviously intended to be an attack on the left wing of the Democratic party and is merely written in a way designed to avoid saying so directly; very bizarre to fall on your fainting couch because left Democrats are naturally critical of the book
He's not gonna fuck you dude
Hey now he's married to a woman, that I can accept. But if he was gay and not married, I would take offense if you said there's no way he would want to.
The guy in the picture making fun of Klein talking about zoning reform while AOC is drawing stadium-size crowds is correct, for better or for worse. As soon as I learned about this "abundance" thing I predicted it would mostly go nowhere and that Bernie-style economic leftism is the next wave of Democratic politics. The problem is that people who accuse Klein of "laundering conservative ideas" are right. He is making the same basic, obvious arguments that conservatives have made for generations. Sort of by definition, people who accept these arguments aren't really leftists. That was hammered out long before most of us were born. There was never any possibility that just slapping the name "Klein" on top of them would be the thing that finally moves the needle.
If Ezra Klein, or anyone else, is truly interested in "abundance," then their best shot is to sit this one out and start building up their connections on the right side of the aisle, so they can try and influence policy in a future Republican administration, like 10+ years down the road if they're lucky and play their cards right. "Abundance" has no home on the left, never has, probably never will. To think otherwise is to misunderstand what the left is and how people are sorted into or out of it.
It’s true that conservatives have made similar arguments. Whether that means Klein should not engage with the left at all, I’m not so sure. The left is just the place where ideological conversation usually takes place. His addressing them seems rational.
https://x.com/ewarren/status/1819056219622895750
Elizabeth Warren is talking about housing supply. Tim Walz is a Yimby. Barack Obama, you guessed it, is also a Yimby.
I think these people are better barometers of inter-left priorities than most. Though they're less annoying about it on Twitter, so we think about them less.
It's all well and good that prominent dems like Warren and Obama acknowledge the fundamental supply/demand mismatch underlying housing costs, but until they actually tell a union or environmental group to shove it, it's all just words.
I can tell you're mad, but I just don't think you're familiar with the facts here. Let's do Tim Walz.
After its passage in 2018, the Minneapolis 2040 upzoning plan faced a legal challenge Smart Growth Minneapolis (the most obnoxious nimbys), Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds, and, the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis.
The lawsuit was based on the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA). The plaintiffs argued that the city had failed to conduct an adequate environmental review. Typical NIMBY stuff.
There were further injunctions against the city implementing the plan in 2022 and 2023. Walz finally had enough in 2024 and the state legislature passed HF5242 which includes provisions to say these injunctions are ridiculous, let Minneapolis build. Look up HF5242 if you're curious.
https://moreneighbors.org/2024/05/21/minnesota-legislature-passes-critical-bill-on-housing-environmental-laws-cannot-be-weaponized/
To be clear, I'm think that Walz acted slowly here, and I'm annoyed by that! But your criticism of him as "all just words" isn't even true!
The audubon society the only actual environmental group dropped the lawsuit.
Barack Obama lives on 29 mostly empty acres on Martha's Vineyard, when he's not at his 3 acre oceanfront property in Hawaii. Elizabeth Warren lives in a $3M townhome in low density, low-storey Cambridge MA. The Walzes permanent residence it is up in the air right now but I'm guessing it will have ample lebensraum.
The term you're looking for is YIYBY: Yes In Your Back Yard.
I worked in construction in Dallas in the early 2000s until the crash and the shit Klein is saying is exactly what the GW Bush republicans I worked with were saying. So why do we have to pretend to give Bush Republican ideas from 20 years ago a shot? Genuinely. 20 years later I can tell you they deregulated everything they could and it made construction worse. You don’t just coordinate with the utilities, you coordinate with the utility carrier, your subcontractor, the utility carrier’s subcontractor, and it feels like any Dick and Harry who walks by. Houston has no zoning laws, and no one outside of Houston wants to live there. This shit has already been done, in Texas. I don’t need to listen to someone argue for policies that have already failed or sucked.
The housing crash was about finance, not building rules.
It took 15 years for construction employment to get back to where it was in 2008. Those are good jobs. Not a surprise that the main growth of those jobs are in Texas.
And? I was in large commercial construction, multiple projects disappeared overnight because lenders suddenly called their loans or only had LOI. I’m saying if these were good ideas, Texas would be a shining beacon, with its deregulation and no nasty unions. But no, the industry here relies mostly on immigrants and folks with records that won’t let them get jobs elsewhere. There’s an abundance of construction, but not good paying jobs in it, even as the number of skilled trades people drops. Quality is bad and dropping. I’m commenting because it infuriates me to see these guys get a platform, get paid to think, and then… repeat republican talking points from 2005. No one owes these guys their attention.
Texas has been crushing it in building new housing and green energy infrastructure, so I don’t know what you’re on about. They also lead the nation in construction job growth, and have done so for a long time.
Compare it to a place like Venice Beach, which has *fewer* homes now than in 2000.
The idea that ideological conversation takes place only on the left seems like a claim that requires serious justification.
IMO it's naive for Klein to think he can get anywhere with this on the left. But that's his home, so you can't really blame him for trying. I wish him luck. But again: Naive. Perhaps I'll be wrong about this though, I've been wrong before.
I should be more direct, I think that what's happening is that Klein and Thompson believe that their readers will mostly be people on the left, partially due to the fact that lefties like to read about ideology and partially due to their reputation as being on the left. So in that sense they are just addressing the reader, which seems natural.
The rhetorical trick here is: are their readers _on the left_ or are they _leftists?_ Person Online is using the term "leftist" narrowly and almost tautologically as the category of left-leaning people who _would_ be uninterested in what Klein and Thompson offer.
“Person Online is using the term ‘leftist’ narrowly and almost tautologically as the category of left-leaning people who _would_ be uninterested in what Klein and Thompson offer.”
No, he is using the term to describe all who are left of center.
MOST of whom - not all, but yes most, and particularly almost all of the *activists* on the left - are in fact not interested in the things he is talking about, because they want and believe that they can have their culturally and economically Marxist world.
That they don’t need to compromise with the center, let alone the right, to not only win elections but to enjoy forever the golden eggs.
Where or not you or this Substack’s author happen to be in the minority who side with Klein or not.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of left of center, at least not in America. I think much of the American left-of-center embraces liberalism and regulated capitalist markets, and either looks critically on or flat-out rejects Marxist ideology.
His point is not really about Klein; it's about *you*, your position and your argument.
I agree 100% that Ezra Klein and what he's attempting is not harmful.
He's just got 0% chance of succeeding in the next 8 years, and pretty low chance of succeeding even after that, in the Democrat Party.
AOC expressed support for YIMBYism and Elizabeth Warren fought for national zoning reform and broke the hearing aid cartels’ regulatory capture
Then either to left is doomed or we’re all doomed.
But I don’t think you’re correct. US political parties have to appeal to half the electorate. That’s the nature of first past the post electoral politics.
You can’t have a serious political party that wants to build “affordable” housing but supports regulations that make it cost $500 a square foot and take decades to build.
Klein’s point isn’t that the goals of the left are wrong, but that they are in tension and the effort to make every project an everything bagel that both achieves its stated goals and hires small, minority-owned contractors and does no environmental damage and causes no disruption to its neighbors inevitably leads to delays and cost overruns.
There’s a huge political space between no effort to help people with housing at all, which seems to be the Republican position now, and every project must be an everything bagel. That space might once have been occupied by centrist Republicans but it certainly isn’t now
>You can’t have a serious political party that wants to build “affordable” housing but supports regulations that make it cost $500 a square foot and take decades to build.<
Except that the Democrats are that party and have been for decades, and they still win elections.
Democrat voters don't want to hear about deregulation. They want to hear what are you going to give them for free? The best strategy for implementing this "abundance" stuff through the left, if you were going to try, would be to run on giving people handouts and then once you're in power try to quietly do the deregulation on the side. This is unlikely to work for the same reason that people who think they can use Trump as a vehicle for their own agenda are consistently disappointed. Once AOC has been voted in on a platform of free shit, she's probably not going to give deregulation the time of day.
As an engineer involved in real estate and construction, I can tell you that you are dead wrong about Republicans and housing. We invest like mad, with the intention of selling the most units to the most people in the shortest time possible. Of course, if you’re talking about government -somehow- building free stuff and giving it away, well no. That’s not a real solution. That’s just a recurring disaster.
When Ezra Klein talks, the hackles of conservatives (as opposed to Republicans) raise because he speaks with the inflections of an overeducated ivy league elitist. He pals around with Larry Summers, who is probably the single greatest architect of failed globalist policies. Amongst the current crop of Silicon Valley elitists, Klein and similar thinkers have no traction.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the American left is made up of leftists. I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.
Abundance is a good argument to win the voters Democrats need to win. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s stadiums are full of wasted votes.
I have a pet Theory that viewing diversity of opinion as a negative has been such a significant part of the left for 80+ years partially because their ideas are so stuck in the 19th century. When people are still founding their views on marx, it’s obvious to everyone but the acolytes that history has shown those ideas fail. So it becomes a religion and not a political movement. religions punish blasphemy they don’t celebrate it.
I had an instructive conversation with an old friend who’s gone far left that illustrates this point. I was advocating for some of picket ideas, which appeal to me because they have a leftist sense of justice and empathy, but actually try to learn from the lessons of the last 150 years. My friend said he didn’t even consider Piketty’s ideas because he admitted he hadn’t read all of Marx, and was dismissive of Marx's ideas because they were all theoretical or sociological observation of his time.
Increasing supply is Econ 101.
Abundance is a completely milquetoast idea. Which is why it's great and should have bipartisan appeal.
If leftists oppose it, you know it's good. People who don't understand Econ 101 should not be in positions of power.
Hey stablegenius how did your ancestors’ ownership/rentier class earn passive income before the Emancipation Proclamation?
The unions stuff is so annoying, because unionism is literally feudalism. It's a guild. If you want to get away from neo-feudalism, you need to let go of unionism. Most working class people aren't skilled workers in unions -- those people are middle class -- rather, they're unskilled workers in retail, food, and entertainment. They work as cashiers, clerks, secretaries, not as plumbers, electricians, and roofers.
The anti-abundance left seems to have this fetish for blue collar men based out of guilt or overcompensation. Blue collar men are famously right-wing, ever since truckers started listening to Rush Limbaugh. So unionism is this one neat trick where problem-glasses girl-bosses can link arms with tobacco-chewing wife-beaters to form an effective coalition to win elections.
And yes, this has actually worked for the last 50 years. However, Trump's overtures to unions may change this. In any case, it's not actually decreasing income inequality or lifting people out of poverty, because #1, wages in skilled manual labor have gone up; #2, suppressing the supply of housing actually lowers demand for skilled laborers, which also suppresses their wages; #3, most poor people aren't skilled laborers, they're unskilled laborers.
If Democrats were serious about lifting people out of poverty, they would focus on trying to raise wages and lower the cost of living for cashiers, waiters, and low-level construction workers. And because this kind of unskilled labor is so insecure (hiring and firing, season labor), it doesn't make sense to try to make the jobs themselves better. You have to focus on externalities -- education, healthcare, housing.
I’d be curious to hear more about the weirdness of the Revolving Door Project. Before this article, I never browsed their site - I only read some of their posts I’d seen linked around.
They do seem weirdly obsessive in a way I didn’t realize
Malcolm Harris read the book, my friend:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris
Grow tf up. You mock “abundance agenda” detractors for calling this repackaged Reaganomics, then immediately dive into supply side rhetoric.
I only made it a couple paragraphs into this writeup. I cannot process your lack of self-awareness.
The abundance agenda is a full-stop recommitment to Reaganomics by pencilneck softbois desperate to protect the passive revenue streams they were raised upon.
Klein mid bro
He’s mid during my college years and he is mid now
More b.s. from the same folks that thought reducing fraud and waste in the government would balance the budget. Would be nice if all these "everything would be great if there were no regulations" types had even a rudimentary understanding of the regulatory process or were willing to concede that other interest groups had an equal right to advance their agenda. But, to wrap this in the "Dems need to embrace .... in order to regain power" is bullshit.
I think some of the obsession might be due to the fact that they are, at the moment, in terms of broad popular appeal, the most influential "public intellectual" liberals? (Which says a lot about the differences between the modern left and right nowadays.)
69 articles about Matthew Yglesias are about 66 too many if you want to address his point of view.
It’s always odd when the party that made stealing legal starts talking about how we need to strictly enforce laws around building. It seems like the enforcement of laws only matters when not enforcing them would be beneficial.
The authors of the book are Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, not the Democratic party
That is true I was generalizing unfairly. But I was referring to Kenny Stancil’s counter argument not Klein and Thompson’s initial point
"The question remains: will the left ever get its head out of its ass and realize that a diversity of opinion and inclusion will help popularize their ideas? I hope that this pathology is a bug of the left and not a feature, but I can’t be so sure."
Hope is not a strategy.
The pathology you describe is most definitely a feature of today's activist left.
Perhaps someday you will realize this.
And start voting for the only major party - however imperfect you find/claim/believe some if its politicians to be - that actually is (imperfectly) pro-abundance.
Because the left of the last 9+ years is unequivocally, totally anti-abundance.