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Review: Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
This new entry into the Abundance territory is a wildly successful bestseller, written in the classic biz book bestseller style of charming or heart-wrenching anecdotes to illustrate the one basic idea of the book. The idea is that we need to build and grow our way to Abundance, and to do that we need to cut the red tape that the Left is administering everywhere.
My first reaction to the book was to see how the authors added to or responded to Diamandis 2012 Abundance book, which I included as part of my Tech-Led Abundance guiding image. The short, and puzzling, answer is they don’t. They don’t mention him or the book. I didn’t find an explanation (though I didn’t look too hard). The authors do say they are looking more at the political aspects than the technological ones, but come on! The two books are much more similar than they are different.
Let me reframe the core argument: we need grow and build our way out of the problems created by growing and building. There is not slightest wince in the book at this logic, but it’s a whopper for me.
That said, we do have some points of agreement. Klein and Thompson focus on the political problems that the Left has created with over-regulation. It aligns to a degree with my Ineffective Left driver. I emphasize the ideological purity test more than the authors. We agree that the Left has stalled progress, but we disagree on what progress is. Their version of progress is building and growth; mine is more effective experiments and scaling of decentralized small-scale community-based solutions. I have also taken a degrowth position, which Klein and Thompson swat away without much attention as impractical. What I find ironic, not just with them, but with what we might call the Growthers, is they point out all the ways in which people are slowing down growth, and then in the next sentence say degrowth can’t work.
In After Capitalism, I identified Tech-Led Abundance as one of three guiding images present to some degree today. I am very hopeful that technology can indeed enable Abundance. Where I part company is in the definition of abundance. As you might have gleaned from the title of this post, Abundance doesn’t mean more stuff [of course, for those lacking in the basics, more stuff is a good thing … this is a distribution problem]. And both Klein & Thompson and Diamandis see a world of more stuff – not just physical stuff but more virtual stuff too. More, more and more.
I prefer to see Abundance more in terms of well-being and spirituality in a holistic way that comfortable meets material needs, but given our current growth-driven problems, it probably means we’ve matured to the point where small is beautiful (a frequent target of the Growthers). I’m not saying we walk around in paper sacks and scavenge berries in the wild, but rather we make a deliberate and intentional decision to right-size our lifestyle to be in balance with nature.
A lot of the stuff Klein and Thompson cite is your typical too much red-tape stuff and I’m not sure there is much new added here. I sense it’s popular as it suggests technology will come to the rescue … providing hope, even its false hope. If we can cut the red tape, all will be well. I don’t want to be too hard on approach, as I’ve said many times, let’s figure out where we are going first. They suggest we build our way there. Fair enough, but as has come up many times in my podcasts and Q&A sessions, audiences are skeptic of the Tech-Led Abundance image … seeing it to close to today and too likely to be co-opted. Klein’ and Thompson’s version suggests this skepticism is well-founded. – Andy Hines
Regarding growth, I took issue with one of my CEO’s that would say, “you are either growing or dying”. His view eventually wrecked the company in my opinion – poorer treatment of the customers, employees, and owners, but by goodness we had growth… I’m not a growther.
But I also take issue with this statement, “…we make a deliberate and intentional decision to right-size our lifestyle to be in balance with nature…”.
First, as an individual that is very achievable, but as a group, “we”, it is not so easy. Economics 101 makes it clear that “groups do not act”. Individuals act and are then retroactively “grouped” for political purposes. Meaning, what you advocate requires changing a lot more than an approach to commerce. In an age when political organizations focus on identifying oppressors (they/them) and oppressed (us), with no relief in sight, it is unlikely “we” will find solidifying criteria as a nation (much less globally) for many decades. Entities like the UN are a perfect illustration of the fecklessness of such efforts.
Second, “deliberate and intentional” sounds very much like government enforcement. Eventually, government will find ways to use institutions (education, religion, entertainment, etc.) to “normalize” the new rules for “right-size”, “lifestyle”, “balance”, and “nature”, but in the interim there will be much suffering and loss of individual liberty…
Third, what will be the source of information for deciding: “right-size”, “lifestyle”, “balance”, and “nature”? Scientists as a whole have proven that they are human first and scientists second meaning they place their economic self-interest ahead of most everything else and can’t set the standards. Religious leaders talk a good story, but the various and powerful religions do not get along very well (and haven’t for millennia), so can’t set the standards. Politicians and used car sales professionals are like sails in the wind – no way those leaders set the standards. CEOs have been “hitlerized”. Academia has lost all credibility. Journalists have destroyed their credibility. Where is the solidifying force for standardizing “right-size”, “lifestyle”, etc. going to come from?
Fourth, the mission statement you propose, “…we make a deliberate and intentional decision to right-size our lifestyle to be in balance with nature…” sounds quite utopian. The utopian societies up to this point have all been tyrannical. No thank you.