On April 2, President Trump proclaimed “Liberation Day” and announced the imposition of dramatically higher tariffs on imports into the country. A universal import surcharge of 10 percent went into effect on April 5, with considerably higher country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries scheduled to follow on April 9. As a result of these announced moves, the average U.S. tariff would skyrocket from around 2.5 percent to nearly 25 percent. This would make the U.S. far and away the most protectionist large economy in the world; the only places with tariffs in this range are islands living off tourism (Bermuda, Bahamas) that import basically everything.
The market reaction was swift and panic-stricken. The S&P 500 index lost 10 percent of its value in two days – the first time that’s happened since 1929 (does that year ring a bell?). Reports started rolling in from businesses large and small: huge increases in their costs would be forcing production cutbacks and layoffs. Analysts rapidly downgraded their economic forecasts, the likelihood of a serious recession now up sharply. If all that weren’t enough, bond markets began slumping badly and the risk of an immediate and catastrophic financial crisis loomed into view.
And so, on the afternoon of April 9, Trump reversed himself just hours after the “reciprocal” tariffs went into effect, “pausing” their imposition for 90 days (while jacking up tariffs against China into triple-digit territory, then Swiss-cheesing them with exemptions). His advisers tried to pretend this turnaround was all part of some grand “art of the deal” master plan, but even Trump admitted to reporters that he had pulled back in the face of markets’ “yippy” reaction (of course he then later claimed that he didn’t mean what he said).
An immediate financial meltdown was avoided, but the U.S. economy has still sustained a self-inflicted gut shot and is now slowly bleeding out. Current tariff levels represent an enormous and ruinous cost increase for untold numbers of U.S. businesses; at this point a wave of business failures and layoffs is unavoidable. An economy that looked poised for strong growth on the eve of Trump’s inauguration is now limping toward a possible recession or worse – all because of the arrant stupidity of one man and the enabling cowardice of his fellow Republicans in Congress.
Why start off a discussion of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance with a nod to the recent trade war madness? Because the self-inflicted economic harms analyzed and critiqued in Abundance consist of unnecessary government-imposed restrictions on supply – which is precisely what Trump’s tariffs amount to as well. Think of it this way: Trump is trying to replicate, immediately and in public, what has been going on slowly and quietly in the shadows for upwards of half a century.
These two stories of self-harm feature very different motives. Trump’s trade idiocy emerges out of the toxic stew of his economically illiterate, zero-sum worldview: the strong do as they please while the weak suffer what they must. By contrast, the steady accumulation of rigidities and bottlenecks that now undermine performance in one key economic sector after another proceeded from impeccably progressive and public-spirited intentions: checking powerful corporations on behalf of consumers, workers, and the environment.
The central message of Abundance, though, is that this is a distinction without much of a difference. In both cases, dysfunctional barriers have been erected that make goods and services harder and more expensive to produce and sell. The harm is the same – a poorer economy with an overall lower standard of living – regardless of whether it’s inflicted through ignorance and malice or with admirable solicitude for the marginalized.
Ezra Klein, now a New York Times columnist, and Derek Thompson, a writer at The Atlantic, are both avowed liberals, as they take repeated pains in the book to point out. Perhaps they feel the need to make these reassurances because their book takes such unsparing aim at contemporary American liberalism’s fundamental governing failure: its systematic prioritization of process over results.
It wasn’t always this way – far from it. American liberalism’s turn toward activist government in the Progressive and New Deal eras was enthusiastic about the possibilities of putting centralized, discretionary power in the hands of experts: “technocracy” and “social engineering,” terms that would later be used mostly by the critics of such things, were embraced with naïve confidence. Back then, partisans of a muscular state had little use for procedural restraints generally and judicial oversight in particular: recall that New Dealers embraced a philosophy of judicial restraint, since the alternative would have left most of their initiatives voided as unconstitutional.
We have long looked back at the 1960s and ‘70s as a time of resurgent anti-statism on the right: the Goldwater candidacy, followed the backlash of the “silent majority” against political and cultural radicalism. It’s only become clear rather recently that the American left of that time was also being reshaped by its own version of anti-statism – a story well told in Yale historian Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens. The threat of nuclear war, the war in Vietnam, Southern sheriffs’ crackdowns on peaceful civil rights protesters, the worsening blight of pollution, long accommodated by government – for the rising generation of left-leaning intellectuals and activists, the perils of centralized state power were all too clear.
Led by such figures as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader, a new vision for progressive politics emerged: instead of seeking to put as much power as possible in the hands of public servants, the idea now was to ensure that the exercise of public power was subject at every turn to progressive checks and second-guessing. Distrust of the state on the right led to efforts to shift power away from government and back to private markets; distrust on the left led instead to calls for “power to the people” – or, more precisely, the self-appointed representatives of the people who came to staff the burgeoning complex of professionally managed nonprofit activist groups. And what leverage did these groups have to keep government in line? A dramatic expansion in “public voice – in particular, dramatically expanded access to the courts through relaxed rules of standing.
The irony, as Klein and Thompson point out repeatedly, is that this new progressivism has ended up empowering an especially hidebound kind of conservatism: an enervating “procedure fetish” within government, combined with a hydra-head “vetocracy” outside. This combination has saddled us with a woefully underperforming public sector generally, and an especially profound disability with respect to any project involving the large-scale rearrangement of atoms in the physical world.
This is why the three states that lead the nation in homelessness – the most obvious and distressing consequence of exorbitant housing prices caused by limits on new construction – are Hawaii, New York, and California, all deep blue states where Democrats control the levers of power. This is why California’s high speed rail project has spent billions for decades on an invisible monument to state incapacity – while China has laid down over 23,000 miles of high-speed rail over the same period. This is why new rail projects across the United States average some $609 million per kilometer of track – compared to $384 million in Germany, $267 million in Japan, and only $96 million in Portugal. And this is why the Biden administration’s big infrastructure bill committed $7.5 billion to build a nationwide network of 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles – and only seven new stations were in operation two years later.
Here’s Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, reflecting ruefully on the administration’s shortcomings in an interview with Klein after the book came out:
It takes a couple dozen people to say yes to make something happen, and it only takes one person to say no to stop that thing from happening. The bias is always toward no. And you might ask: Why can’t the president just override the no? That’s where we as an administration were intensely scrupulous about process, propriety, mindful of the role of the agencies, and so there was a degree of self-deterrence that was almost culturally built in.
Klein and Thompson argue that public interest liberalism was responsive to its times – but times have changed. “The ideas and movements of the last few decades are not our villains,” they write. “They were the responses to the crises of another time…. That we have not matched our institutions to our moment is our failure, not theirs.” Just as the New Deal order’s complacency about centralized power gave rise to the “public interest” liberalism that dominates progressive governance today, now it is time for a revitalized “supply-side progressivism” – a “liberalism that builds” – to recover the promise of activist government by freeing it from the hypertrophy of accumulated procedural roadblocks and veto points.
A new liberalism of abundance, Klein and Thompson contend, is needed not just to address urgent public challenges like housing affordability and climate change. In their view, reviving government’s ability to rise to urgent challenges also represents our best chance to fight back against right-wing authoritarian populism and the ongoing undermining of liberal democratic norms and institutions. “A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements,” they write, “is to prove the success of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government.”
The prehistory of the abundance movement
The argument that Klein and Thompson synthesize in Abundance is an extremely familiar one to me – and that’s because, as they graciously acknowledge in their book and recent podcasts, my Niskanen Center colleagues and I are responsible for developing significant parts of it. (Of course, many others have made important contributions as well!) If you ask me, the pro-abundance intellectual movement can be traced back to a pair of Kindle singles (remember those?) – Ryan Avent’s The Gated City in 2011, followed by The Rent Is Too Damn High by Matt Yglesias (now a senior fellow at Niskanen) in 2012. I wasn’t far behind: my Human Capitalism, which came out as a Kindle single in 2012 and then was released as a physical book the following year, cited Avent in arguing for the deregulation of new home construction. In 2013, Steve Teles (now also a Niskanen senior fellow) came out with an essay called “Kludgeocracy in America” in National Affairs, now widely cited as early diagnosis of American state incapacity. In 2017, Steve Teles and I followed up with The Captured Economy, which identified artificial supply restrictions plaguing not only housing but also healthcare (via the licensing of medical providers and abusive patenting by pharmaceutical firms).
The Niskanen Center opened its doors in 2015 as a libertarian think tank focused pragmatically on getting policy wins. By the time I got there in 2017, it had already moved beyond its libertarian roots in a “liberaltarian” direction, a shift that I further encouraged once on board. In 2018, we published a policy manifesto unveiling our category-busting policy vision, one that aims at improving the performance of both the private and public sectors. And just as Klein and Thompson do now, we argued that this is the best way to respond to Trumpism’s assault on American institutions:
There is only one sure way to quiet our populist distempers and restore faith in democratic institutions, and that is for those democratic institutions to deliver effective governance. The failures of governance are what got us into this mess; public confidence in government will return only when government demonstrates through successful problem-solving that such confidence is merited.
In 2020, Sam Hammond and I followed up with another white paper fleshing out more of the specifics of Niskanen’s distinctive policy approach. The paper features many of the elements of the contemporary “abundance agenda,” with sections on reducing barriers to new housing, “supply-side” reforms to healthcare, experimenting with how we fund scientific research, and overhauling our dysfunctional infrastructure construction process. We weren’t clever enough to come up with the “abundance agenda” label; instead, we talked about creating a “high road, high performance” economy – with policy that takes the high road (investing in people and public goods) while also focused ultimately on results, i.e., high performance.
2021 saw the release of two big, agenda-setting Niskanen papers: my white paper on state capacity, and a paper by Steve Teles, Sam Hammond, and Daniel Takash called “Cost Disease Socialism” that examines the popular but perverse policy combination of simultaneously restricting supply and subsidizing demand (see healthcare, housing, education, and child care). Meanwhile, while I was researching the state capacity paper, I came across a brilliant law review article by Nicholas Bagley at the University of Michigan called “The Procedure Fetish,” which I thought was an essential complement to Paul Sabin’s historical analysis in Public Citizens. I got Nick to adapt his article into a shorter and more accessible essay (and was later able to convince him to affiliate with Niskanen as a senior fellow). All three of these Niskanen publications are discussed in Klein and Thompson’s book.
Also featured prominently in their book is the work of Jennifer Pahlka, author of the excellent Recoding America and now a Niskanen senior fellow. I met Jen after she had finished the book but before it came out, and was happy to learn that she had leaned on my state capacity paper and Nick’s procedure fetish essay in framing her analysis. We were able to get Jen to join us at Niskanen, which then has enabled us to launch a major state capacity initiative.
Niskanen addresses other, unrelated issues as well, but there is considerable overlap between our work and Klein and Thompson’s abundance agenda. Our state capacity initiative seeks to improve the government’s ability to implement policy and deliver results across the board. Our climate team focuses on expediting the buildout of transmission infrastructure that connects places where the sun shines and the wind blows to the places where people live – a challenge that requires a frontal assault on vetocrats and procedure fetishists. Our social policy team advocates policies for unlocking abundance in housing and healthcare.
Niskanen’s conception of the politics of the abundance agenda differs from Klein and Thompson’s, but I believe the two approaches are entirely complementary. Klein and Thompson are a pair of progressives who are addressing fellow progressives and offering a new paradigm for center-left politics. At Niskanen, on the other hand, we try to transcend political and ideological divisions: we develop policies that can appeal to (at least some) progressives for progressive reasons and (at least some) conservatives for conservative reasons. It is inherently unpredictable when and from what source political demand for our supply of ideas might arise, so we don’t prejudge the issue: we happily peddle our wares to all comers. As far as the various elements of the abundance agenda are concerned, progress is going to require a whole herd of progressive oxen to be gored – especially when it comes to rethinking environmental review and blasting away decades of accumulated red tape throughout government. An abundance agenda that carries the day is going to have to rely on bipartisan support. (I’ll just note here, though I think it goes without saying, that prospects for an ultimately successful abundance movement are contingent upon eventually moving past the evil and destructive spell of Donald Trump.)
Our hopes for broad-based progress toward liberating bottled-up supply thus depend on efforts in both parties. Specifically, both need to create intra-party factions that favor problem-solving governance that benefits everyone over zero-sum culture war theatrics. Accordingly, I salute the efforts of Klein and Thompson to jump-start an abundance faction within the Democratic Party. And I’m happy to say that their book has got things off to a rousing start. My fear was that their challenge to the progressive status quo would be killed with kindness: widespread avowals that “of course we’re all for abundance,” followed by the inevitable redefinitions necessary to bring all existing progressive hobby horses within its scope. Abundance would then end up as just another topping on progressivism’s everything bagel.
But that’s not what’s happened at all. On the contrary, the book has come in for sharp criticism from various quarters of the left – it’s warmed over neoliberalism, it’s nothing but deregulation, it ignores corporate power, it ignores the importance of redistribution. Klein and Thompson have dutifully responded that these charges miss the mark: you can support a robust welfare state and checking excess corporate power, as they do, while pursuing the policy ideas of the abundance agenda. This is true enough, but the critics are onto something nonetheless: what Klein and Thompson are offering are not just discrete policy ideas, but a new organizing principle for progressive politics. And, what’s more, an organizing principle that basically excises the “degrowth” and “procedure fetish” strains of progressive opinion from its vision. The partisans of those strains of opinion, both of which are more influential the farther left you go, recognize they are in a zero-sum competition for the soul of American liberalism. I know which side I’m rooting for.
The apparent difference in substantive governing priorities masks a deeper divide between the abundance agenda and progressive politics as usual. Klein and Thompson see the business of politics as pragmatic problem-solving: creating new capabilities and removing old obstacles to achieve broad public benefits that cut across regional, demographic, and cultural lines. By contrast, much of recent progressive politics – especially the “woke” embrace of social justice radicalism – has been fundamentally performative in nature: much less concerned with actual governing outcomes than with elevating zero-sum symbolic fights designed to confirm in their own minds progressives’ intellectual and moral superiority. In an interview after the book came out that touches on the strong negative reaction from the left, Klein zeroes in on the fundamental difference between trying to make the world a better place and trying to stroke your own ego:
But the left who has sort of responded to it angrily, I also just don’t really think they’re that far left anymore, I think they’ve become very symbolically left. But they’re not that interested in government outcomes. They’re interested in the left-wing coalition. They’re interested in a kind of like aesthetic of leftism and like, are you sufficiently against corporate power and against the oligarchy? But I keep having these weird arguments where I’m talking to somebody who just, they seem very disinterested in whether or not the government can build all this public housing they want built. They seem very disinterested to me in whether or not the government can build all this green energy infrastructure that their Green New Deal requires. They seem very disinterested to me in what the government can actually achieve unless you can identify corporate power as the figure standing in the way.
In my view, the American left’s performative turn has been a disaster for the Democratic Party – and for the cause of constitutional government more broadly. Not only has it been responsible for a great deal of folly and genuine injustice, but by far its greatest harm has been its role in paving the way for Trump’s rise to power. I don’t see any way for sufficient numbers of swing voters to have been convinced to vote for someone as outlandishly unfit as Trump unless they were utterly disgusted by the alternative on the left.
Accordingly, creating an abundance faction within the Democratic Party isn’t just good news for the Democratic Party – it’s good news for America. First of all, the problems targeted by the abundance agenda are immensely important, and addressing them successfully will ultimately require contributions from both major parties. And to maintain our two-party system as a functioning democracy, the Democrats desperately need to break decisively with leftist folly and return to the cultural mainstream if they are to reliably outcompete MAGA for votes. The abundance agenda gives moderate Democrats a bold and appealing program of reform to be for – in the middle of a legitimacy crisis like the one we’re presently enduring, being tagged as an apologist for the institutional status quo is a political death sentence – while they condemn and seek to root out the left’s pernicious influence.
The abundance movement vs. the crisis of dynamism
Let me conclude by trying to place the nascent abundance movement in the broader historical context that is the primary focus of my essay series and forthcoming book, The Permanent Problem.
This much, I hope, should be clear to regular readers: the abundance movement represents a recognition of and response to capitalism’s crisis of dynamism. Over the past half-century or so, productivity growth has been consistently disappointing in the advanced capitalist economies; since the financial crisis of 2008-09, it has been all but nonexistent outside the U.S. On the one hand, this simply reflects the fact that growth has gotten harder: the transition from poverty to mass affluence over the 20th century involved a number of one-off changes that, while they were happening, acted as tailwinds for growth (the shift of the workforce from agriculture to manufacturing and services, urbanization, increasing labor force participation by women, the move toward mass secondary and then tertiary education). Those one-offs are now largely complete, and so their contributions to growth rates have been exhausted.
It may also be the case that, for a variety of reasons, innovation gets harder over time as the “low-hanging fruit” gets plucked – certainly, this maturation process occurs for specific technologies and industries. But whether or not good ideas are getting harder to find overall, it is beyond contention that it is now harder to put good new ideas to use. Innovation consists of invention plus diffusion, but that critical and less glamorous second step must advance in the face of proliferating obstacles – in particular, the vetocracy and fetishistic attachment to procedure described by Klein and Thompson.
Focusing on the cut and thrust of contemporary policy and political debates, Klein and Thompson offer a close-up, ground-level view of the problem. Especially given how much attention they’re getting, this represents a highly welcome and important contribution. But from the broader perspective offered here, we can see that the roots of the problem go far deeper than Klein and Thompson are able to trace – and that means, alas, that responding to the problem adequately will require far more profound changes in both institutions and outlook than the two of them contemplate.
Klein and Thompson attempt to explain what’s gone wrong by telling a simple cyclical story of yesterday’s political solutions causing today’s political problems. The great invigoration of American government during the Depression and World War II helped to accelerate a massive postwar building spree – which, for all its accomplishments, led to increasingly obvious environmental despoliation (think of the Cuyahoga River catching fire, or the Santa Barbara oil spill) as well as injustices and social disruption caused by highway construction and urban renewal. The public interest liberalism of the 1960s and ‘70s arose as a response to these problems – and succeeded rather brilliantly, with plummeting levels of air and water pollution and a shift to outright punctiliousness in observing procedural safeguards. But now the wheel has turned once more, and those solutions have given rise to the contemporary problems of vetocracy and procedural fetishism.
This narrative is true enough as far as it goes, but it misses the bigger picture. Klein and Thompson see the swinging of the pendulum, but don’t notice that the whole clock is moving as well. America’s postwar boom wasn’t just another upswing in the business cycle; it marked the dawn of mass affluence, which deserves to be reckoned as a fundamental phase change in the human condition. Before America in the 1950s, no large society had ever existed in which the vast majority of people could take the fulfillment of their basic material needs for granted. Soon the other advanced democracies would follow suit, and we can now look forward to the very real possibility that serious material deprivation will be reduced to a tragic rarity all around the world.
Such a radical transformation in the circumstances of life has brought momentous cultural change in its wake – which, unsurprisingly if you think about it, has thus far turned out to be a decidedly mixed bag. On the plus side, the achievement of mass existential security has broadened our moral horizons and make us kinder and gentler toward the formerly marginalized and oppressed. Dramatically expanded opportunities for women, the dismantling of de jure racial oppression and the stigmatization of racist attitudes, greater acceptance of homosexuality and the legal recognition of same-sex marriage, improved protection of the rights of criminal suspects, heightened concern for the well-being of the natural world around us – all these count as significant strides of social progress.
The relative stability of the long agrarian age allowed cultural forms to compete and evolve, ensuring over time that the cultures that survived were at least at some basic level adaptive to the circumstances of time and place. By contrast, the breakneck pace of scientific, technological, economic, and social change over the past couple of centuries has produced a great deal of cultural innovation – all of which is far too new to have undergone any kind of vetting and pruning. Which makes it more or less inevitable that our current culture is marbled with dysfunctional elements.
The experience of recent decades has done much to clarify how our cultural responses to mass affluence have misfired. With greater wealth and thus more to lose, a certain degree of increased loss aversion is both entirely appropriate: our tolerance for life-threatening risks is understandably less now that death before old age is increasingly rare. But our culture of loss aversion – which underlies the vetocracy and procedural fetishism, compounded by “degrowth” attitudes, that Klein and Thompson decry and seek to reform – has become clearly dysfunctional, undermining the technological and economic dynamism needed to maintain prosperity and keep all those life-threatening risks at bay.
The dysfunction has become especially obvious in the housing sector and in our response to climate change. When bleeding-heart progressives cause a massive outbreak of homelessness, and environmental groups fight tooth and nail in the courts to stop new clean energy facilities, it’s pretty clear we’ve wandered off course. Indeed, it is the growing recognition of these absurdities that has summoned the abundance movement into existence. Together with the geopolitical challenges now posed by China and Russia, the sheer scale and seriousness of our problems may suffice to lead our politics away from empty theatrics and back toward constructive problem-solving.
Maybe – I certainly hope so. But I’m concerned that this “challenge and response” dynamic – in which the emergence of some threat creates the momentum for necessary reforms – will operate only within the relatively narrow circle of governing elites. I’m afraid that most ordinary people aren’t sufficiently interested in or knowledgeable about public affairs for the consideration of abstract public policy issues to bring about any dramatic changes in their worldview. Accordingly, even if new political leaders emerge who want to focus on workable solutions to real problems, the question remains: will the public follow?
Here again, cultural change since the advent of mass affluence makes the issue doubtful. The combined corrosive effects of television, the internet, and social media on attention spans and cognitive sophistication have reduced the public’s capacity for instrumental rationality – for weighing tradeoffs and matching means to ends. A recent article in the Financial Times headlined “Have humans passed peak brain power?” marshals the disturbing evidence: declines in reading, diminished ability to use mathematical reasoning, reduced reasoning and problem-solving abilities, rising difficulties in concentrating and learning new things. Four decades ago, before the internet or social media had hit the scene, Neil Postman had this withering assessment of the political culture of “post-literacy”: “Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now – generally coherent, serious and rational; … under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.”
The years since Postman wrote have only served to underscore that verdict. In America today, the MAGA movement has inducted a significant fraction of the voting public into a crazed personality cult that traffics in incessant lies, conspiracy theories, and other delusions. And please don’t imagine that the other side of the aisle is a model of epistemic virtue. It turns out that progressives are also quite skilled in believing what they want to believe no matter what the facts say. Back in 2016, a majority of Democrats believed that Russia had actually tampered with vote totals in the recent election; in a 2006 poll, a majority of Democrats thought that George W. Bush was either actively involved in the 9/11 attacks or knew about them in advance and did nothing to stop them.
Furthermore, addiction to the frictionless undemandingness of being online renders people increasingly unwilling and even unable to cope with the various stresses of interacting with the physical world and flesh-and-blood people. This is most evident in the young – who now worship a very jealous god indeed, the smartphone, and have retreated from driving, working after school, having sex, and hanging out with friends in order to better serve Him. Here’s an anonymous professor at a public university whose Substack post on “The average college student today” went viral:
They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun.
The abundance agenda is all about unlocking energies to act in the physical world and improve our material circumstances. But how much appeal does that vision hold for people who find the physical world messy, scary, and boring, and who seek to hide from it as much as possible?
So what should be our takeaway from viewing the fledgling abundance movement in the broader historical context of the permanent problem? You could say that my historical narrative resembles Klein and Thompson’s: once again, it’s a case of yesterday’s solutions causing today’s problems. In my telling, however, the dynamic is playing out, not at the level of politics and policy, but at the civilizational level. In Keynes’ terminology, we have triumphed over the economic problem but now are floundering in the face of the permanent problem.
The bottom line, then, is that the problems targeted by Klein and Thompson have roots that extend deep into our culture. Accordingly, an abundance movement capable of defusing capitalism’s crisis of dynamism will need to reach deep as well. Seeking changes in policy and the policymaking process isn’t enough: thoroughgoing institutional and cultural renewal must be our ultimate aim.
But any labor, however Herculean, must begin somewhere. And Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, with their excellent new book, have chosen promising ground on which to start. All of us who hope for a future blessed with both material and spiritual abundance should applaud their efforts and seek to lend our own. Success is never guaranteed, but working on a difficult and important task brings its own rewards.