AbundenceA recent review in--I think 'The Atlantic'--skims the debate that has roiled this country since its creation: efficiency vs. freedom, fiat vs. evolution, great vs. small, central vs. local. How is power distributed within an organizing entity and its constituent parts? There are vaults of debates on the topic but apparently nothing is new. This is a running commentary on that review.
Two new books are at the heart of this discussion. One is Abundance, by Ezra Klein, the star New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a journalist at the Atlantic. The other, Why Nothing Works, comes from Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All three writers are Democrats or sympathetic to the Democratic cause. All dislike Donald Trump. All want blue cities, blue counties, and blue states from coast to coast.
These books have been very well-hyped. Many feel they offer the Left new direction and hope, the next years' Democrat blueprint.
All three feel the United States, despite its inordinate wealth, is not matching its twentieth century dynamism. Could this government — Republican or Democratic-run — stand up another interstate highway system? A network of railroads? Could this Department of Defense effectively invent the internet?
The Klein-Thompson duo argues that an “anti-growth” mentality has constrained the left for the last several decades. NIMBYism and aggressive regulations have strangled housing supply and innovation. As government support for research and development dried up, science produced fewer society-wide breakthroughs. Once, we built whole subway systems in a decade, sent human beings to the moon, and created the internet. Klein and Thompson do blame neoliberalism — a long-running retreat from government investment and a foisting of responsibilities on the private sector. But they’d prefer lighter zoning and environmental laws to speed up growth.
The dynamism and growth here are obviously not the growth that everyone sees with the nation knocking on the moon's door or developing medications, developing new energy sources, or improving water efficiency. Their growth is more targeted and moral. Like equal housing or educational outcomes. These may well be desirable to many, but their rationale is faith-based and, in our increasingly secular world, that is a hard sell. More, it demands an extension of the traditional constitutional guarantees of equality of all men before the law to equity for all men in growing areas of social sensitivities like housing, more charity-based than legal.Dunkelman’s thesis is similar. For New Yorkers, there’s plenty in Why Nothing Works to devour. He begins with the great bête noire of the modern left, Robert Moses, and argues that the master builder’s legacy is somewhat misunderstood. Or, at least, we’ve overlearned the lessons of the Moses era. Moses, of course, ran roughshod over much of New York, ramming highways through thriving neighborhoods and thwarting the expansion of mass transit. He behaved like a tyrant and cared little for conventional democracy. Politicians couldn’t move him, nor could protest. For 40 years, he was emblematic of an imperial approach to governing, and it was Robert Caro’s The Power Broker that exposed, finally, many of his excesses.
Under Moses, the government could be unfeeling — but it worked. And it was not Moses-style development that triggered New York’s decline in the 1970s, as Caro strongly intimated. Rather, it was the collapse of the manufacturing sector, white flight, and fiscal mismanagement. The public works Moses left behind were necessary for New York’s post-fiscal crisis renaissance.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. All autocracies struggle with the limited vision of their citizens. Dunkelman frames American views of governance as a centuries-long clash between Hamiltonians, who argue for stronger centralized authority, and Jeffersonians, who are wary of government overreach.
But the trouble began when the Jeffersonians kept winning. Beginning in the 1970s, skepticism of government power began getting baked into both political parties.
And projects like the California high-speed train--estimated in 2008 at a cost of $33 billion with a completion date in 2020 is now estimated at over $100 billion, with completion in 2030 and no ridable track exists yet (currently, $10 billion has been spent.)--for some reason are not cautionary tales for these people.
The review, at this point, takes a strange turn. It argues that the Left’s role is poorly understood, and Dunkelman is a wonderful guide.
Watergate taught a generation of young progressives to distrust federal power, and the left began to favor hamstringing government whenever possible. Numerous new chokepoints, some of them well-meaning, were invented, from arcane local laws to community boards that could stifle building that alienated locals. Preservationists warred to freeze urban neighborhoods in place, hoping to avoid catastrophes like the obliteration of the old Penn Station — but they also, in their zeal for saving the Old, helped to ensure these cities would grow less affordable. Building new affordable housing, commuter railways, or any other type of large infrastructure project became far harder in the era of community control.
If only the stubborn citizenry would succumb to the benign and creative overarching vision of the Left. But it is a lot more complicated than that. There are all sorts of motives in the community movements. One is the aesthetics of government housing. One is energy efficiency. One is the snail darter. One is community home value, i.e., selfishness. And, while a home is a quintessential Amerian achievement, it may not be a successful gift. Housing is more than a construction project; it comes with people. I would bet that the unreliability of government--a huge problem--is way, way down the list.
It gets stranger.
How to make America dynamic again, he asks? How to build here like they do in China and Japan, where it’s routine to throw up new high-speed rail lines every decade? And if we solved these problems, would it be enough?
But we are not China nor Japan. We are unique, conceived in liberty and equality before the law. And the deep regard for personal property. These are not impediments to be overcome; these are what we are. The success of this nation is a result of these concepts, an escape from those of the feudal East and Old Europe. These books complain that restoring the grand old days of fiat governments and religious wars will be an uphill fight.
David Sirota, the founder of Lever News and a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, summed up one stinging progressive critique of the whole project: “Abundance being defined as ‘kill zoning laws and corporate regulation’ but not ‘give everyone decent medical care’ — that’s the tell, and you’re the mark.” It’s true that this is not a focus among the advocates of abundance. Relaxing zoning laws won’t do anything to bring us universal healthcare or bolster the social safety net. It may not even, in the short-term, do enough to create affordable housing. One of the great divides within the YIMBY movement, which can be folded into the abundance push, is how much regulation should exist around what people pay in rent. Some YIMBYs do back stronger tenant protections and versions of rent control while others, like Klein ally Matthew Yglesias, plainly do not. Yglesias is also skeptical of lifting the federal law that effectively bans the construction of new public housing.
Abundance, then, can hold different meanings for different advocates. If the belief is that a robust, efficient federal government should do more to help working class Americans, then we need a new program of mass home-building like we saw in the 1930s and 1940s. Without the New York City Public Housing Authority, the largest city in America would probably have an unfathomably large amount of homeless, the tent cities in the five boroughs making the Tenderloin and Skid Row look like minor, quasi-pastoral encampments. If you believe zoning reform is enough — and the government need only get out of the way — then how much housing must be built, exactly, for rents to start falling enough so a family making well under $100,000 can comfortably afford a market-rate apartment? Turning New York (or any city) into Tokyo is easier said than done.
So neither book nor Sirota accept the idea that local political events and national faith-based concepts are in any way separate. Rather, they are reflections in the same mirror, the expression of an activist core, based upon government-imposed faith-based equity. The stagnation they see is very focused and, dangerously, concentrated in a pinpoint devotion to equity at any cost.
Then, the bland "conclusion:"
"What abundance advocates do get right is that governments — federal, state, and local — must do far better. We have fallen a long way from the twentieth century; we led the world in building and innovation until we didn’t. We are still a remarkably wealthy nation and we must find a way, as we persevere in this new century, to beat back stagnation. Otherwise, the future is going to be much more frustrating."
Freedom and property as impediments, government as a competent prime mover; little is new. 
