>What is the real goal of Abundance? I can’t read minds, but I think KT are trying to show power-hungry Democratic leaders an amazing opportunity: Forget the “everything-bagel liberalism” of the past, prioritize abundance in word and deed, and you’ll gain more votes than you lose.
I think this is exactly what they're doing. Abundance is not actually targetted at the masses, they're targetted at leadership. And leadership does tend to be at least mildly ideological and progressive, not moderates who're fed up with politics. But also it's not purely cynical. They're telling leadership, "You really want to help people? Do this." Politicians tend to be quite power hungry, yes, but quite a few have at least a couple altruistic bones. If you convince them a policy will help many, many people, and will be neutral on their political career or even only mildly hamper it, a good fraction of politicians will do it.
>Alas, this probably won’t work unless KT manage to trick progressive Democrats into supporting major pro-market policy changes they ideologically abhor. If I were a power-hungry Democratic politician, I’d listen patiently, smirk, and say: “Thanks, but I’ve got a much better idea.” Namely: Add “abundance” to the everything-bagel, loudly make some cosmetic changes, trick the marginal moderates, and hold my coalition together. Wouldn’t you?
Your Myth of the Rational Voter talks about how politicians know voters punish them for bad results even if the politicians implement the exact policies voters asked for. And voters also reward politicians for good results even if it was policies they hate that led to the good results. Many politicians are economically illiterate and lack the knowledge to properly weigh the trade offs between good results and popular policies; educating them on how to better get good results shifts the balance towards good results and away from popularism.
Also, there are many relevant progressive decision-makers besides just politicians and progressive voters. There are also judges, bureaucrats, etc. If you can convince a progressive judge or bureaucrat that requiring an onerous enivironmental review will really do immense damage, that can lead to fewer environmental reviews and/or less onerous environmental reviews too.
Another factor is probably that Klein and Thompson are ideological Democrats on non-economic issues too. I believe support the Democratic party on issues like gender and race and gun control and so on. They want to empower the Democratic party, they don't want to just spread Abundance.
Good results on housing reform would take way longer than an election cycle to become apparent to anyone. You would need to add a lot of housing over many years before prices meaningfully reacted.
If you somehow did make prices fall dramatically a quickly current homeowners would revolt because you just trashed the most important asset (for many their only asset). That's electoral poison.
The negative effects (changes to neighborhoods, etc) show up immediately and have a proximate cause to blame. Housing being 10% cheaper 10 years from now is after many of these politicians move on and hard to credit them for.
I think its easier for polities that are in a high building equilibrium to keep that up, because there are lots of stakeholders in the current equilibrium getting rich off it (homebuilders) and making donations to politicians. There are also fewer status quo stakeholders against it (unions, which are way less powerful in the sunbelt even in education which is basically a property amenity).
All this is to say that politicians probably won't be rewarded for some of these reforms. They will just have to do them and spend political capital because they think they are the right thing to do. Will that be enough, we will see. My main opinion about the center left is that they are huge cowards, but I wish them the best of luck.
This is the good news, IMO, from Bryan's housing book. His solutions, even if implemented, would take forever to affect housing prices significantly. Which avoids the problem you point out.
In other contexts, I have suggested the solution to SF housing involves 3 things:
zoning elimination, an insane supply of bulldozers, and 75 years.
If it took 75 years to drop housing prices by 50% in real terms, that will still be an increase in nominal terms, which makes it less noticeable to the current homeowners.
For a politician to benefit politically from lower housing prices, it would have to be noticeable and quick. But if it was noticeable and quick, existing homeowners would revolt. As such is very hard for politicians to benefit politically from housing reform. They are screwed either way.
The reason the Sunbelt gets around this is because they are already in a high build low price equilibrium. They can add lots of housing stock while seeing prices appreciate slowly. The homebuilders and other people who benefit from this growth fund the local politicians. Existing homeowners don't mind they just see new amenities coming in and most of the development is in an empty field away from them.
This works because there is lots of Greenfield (non-infill) development and a lot of (non-destitute) population inflow to suck it all up.
If you look at the place in Florida were I am they are slapping down master planned single family home communities with strong HOAs as far as the eye can see on empty land (which is in abundance). They aren't doing in-fill development on expensive urban real estate to build tenements.
I think the fact that they support housing deregulation and have moved the governor of California in that direction is already wonderful news. Who cares that they don't fully agree with you on everything else! This is a win!
My unkind thought upon reading the book was that it was written to sell lots of copies. I think more injection of reality into the book would have meant lower sales. Klein and Thompson know their stuff so I have to believe this was deliberate.
There is a pretty huge tradeoff between more immigration and lowering house prices. Just ask Canada. There is no politically viable zoning reform that would offset that kind of rapid population increase.
If voters see that prices are going up and their neighborhoods are full of hostile invaders living twelve to a house and overcrowding your schools and emergency rooms they are going to reject it. They in fact have in basically every developed country in the last election cycle.
Rapid *voluntary* immigration would not be a problem if government hadn't created the equivalent of minimum wage laws for housing. 100, 150 years ago, the tenements provided all the housing the new immigrants needed and could afford. They violate zoning and building codes now, making cheap housing impossible.
Yeah, people don't want tenements in their neighborhood. Shocker. You know who else doesn't have tenements in his neighborhood, Bryan Caplan. He's in a wealthy single family bubble where only the well off can afford the local school district and he goes to fancy Fairfax hospitals.
When you buy a property you are buying access to a whole suite of services in the local area. Tenements would underprice the value of those services, which is why nobody wants them built in their area.
There is a 0% chance of changing this and nobody in the "abundance" camp is running on denying public education, healthcare, public transport, etc to immigrants (the opposite).
Oh, nonsense. You are buying the privilege of renting from the government, and you have no more moral right to tell others what to do with their property than the government does.
You want more distance between your house and your neighbors? Buy a bigger lot, pay them an easement, but if you rely on government to enforce that distance, you are as big a bully as government.
You don’t want to live next door to an apartment block? Buy that lot, build the house you approve of, and rent it out. Otherwise you are just another government bully.
You’re afraid someone’s going to build a big box store or a skyscraper next to you? Think again, dummy, why would anybody waste their own money on a project which the infrastructure won’t support? But the government will be happy to eminent domain your neighbor and ram a freeway through your neighborhood.
Your moral sense of entitlement just makes you a branch of government.
Grow up. We live in a world of public amenities with massive public support. They aren’t going away. They are segregated by geography. That’s life. That’s why nobody is going allow you to build a tenement full of human trash next to them and that sentiment is being rejected all over the world.
Klein & Thompson (but more specifically Klein) don't support cuts to progressive programs, focusing on STEM over humanities, being as tough on unions as you'd like to be, or supporting vouchers, because they don't actually think any of those things would actually be good because they're center-left progressives, not weirdo quasi-libertarians.
Whenever you're a political person whose views are not perfectly matched by the center of gravity of either party, you have the choice of which party you think you'll have the best shot at pulling in your direction.
KT believe their best shot at good policy is trying to convince democrats to be less reflexively pro-regulation, and need at least reluctant tolerance from progressive types to do this. So far, this project seems like it's making a few waves in very short time and might really shift the needle in the US' largest state.
Libertarians seem to largely believe that their best shot is wrestling the republican party into being pro free trade, pro-immigration, being less militaristic and soften on social conservatism/christian supremacism. This is going, and I can not stress this enough, *terribly*.
So I'd hesitate to criticize their approach. They seem genuinely to angle for change, not intellectual brownie points. That sometimes means picking your battles to avoid making enemies.
I'm unconvinced of 8 | 11. Other governments (Spain, Taiwan, China) have been able to construct metros and high speed rail at costs and timelines 1/10 of blue states. Given this, I don't think the problem is identifiably "big government", but rather the specific mode of governance identified in Abundance - common to blue states from 1970-present.
This is exactly what I was thinking. This isn't some imaginary fantasy theory of what government could hypothetically do if we lived in a different universe. It's a thing we know governments can do if they are effective, which is what Klein and Thompson advocate for. Also, the reality is that a lot of people do actually want things like metros and high speed rail, and don't just accept that they're impossible to ever achieve
>A few kind words for foreign-born scientists aside, Abundance ignores the single greatest abundance opportunity on Earth — immigration. You could fairly object, “Progressives are pro-immigration for humanitarian reasons, not economic gain.” But if you’re selling abundance to progressives, isn’t “Immigration, which you already favor, is also good for abundance” a great talking point?
Ezra talked about this on his podcast. One of the most frequent responses he gets to Abundance is "Why didn't you talk about progressive stump issues - especially healthcare?" and he pointed out that going viral with the democrat left involves factional arguments at this point. You have to present yourself as a "better leftist" or the left will just start screaming fascist and glue themselves to the pavement. So, a chapter about healthcare or immigration would bore moderate readers who mostly agree and lefties who are looking for radical purity testing arguments - so in the interest of getting the most eyes, he stuck to factional criticisms.
Nailed it. It’s all branding to get “moderate” Dems elected. I’ll believe it when some actual changes are made in the deep blue state of CA, such as reduced gasoline taxes to help the working class and trades people, school vouchers, hydro power, limits on public union power, criminalizing repetitive property crimes, etc. You know, things that the far left will fight like hell to defeat!
Bryan’s critique amounts to a complaint that the book focuses on some things to the exclusion of other things that perhaps would be better suited to a different book by Bryan Caplin which he can title “The World According to Bryan Caplin.”
I beg to differ. Frankly, one of the refreshing aspects of Abundance and the related YIMBY movement is that, unlike the progressive “Groups” c. 2015-2024, it doesn’t try to take a stance on everything.
“But if your view of progressives is that negative, why would any proponent of abundance continue to identify as a “progressive”? If you reply, “I call myself a progressive so progressives will listen to me,” you’ve got to wonder, “What’s the point of talking to these benighted fanatics?” Wouldn’t it make more sense to address your case to moderates?”
This has been the biggest mystery to me of 2025. So many have come forward from the left and denounced immigration, advocate for deregulation, call for putting away “the woke”, agree that climate change is not taking place to the extent previously claimed, but scoff when I ask why they remain part of the “left”.
They refuse to leave the boundaries of the left, for fear of the indignation they have shown the right for decades.
The obvious reason is that while disagreements with others on the left can often be significant, they see the alternative as worse. They are sticking with the vaguely left-of-center coalition because they consider the right-of-center coalition to revolve entirely around the person of Trump, who is thoroughly morally and intellectually bankrupt. it's a complete non-starter.
Indeed. When the Right gives up on climate change denial and similar anti-science and anti-reality policies then I'll start to consider them to be worth talking to. As things stand, I'd have as much chance trying to talk sense into the Republican Party under Trump as I would trying to talk sense into the Communist Party under Nikita Khrushchev.
>What is the real goal of Abundance? I can’t read minds, but I think KT are trying to show power-hungry Democratic leaders an amazing opportunity: Forget the “everything-bagel liberalism” of the past, prioritize abundance in word and deed, and you’ll gain more votes than you lose.
I think this is exactly what they're doing. Abundance is not actually targetted at the masses, they're targetted at leadership. And leadership does tend to be at least mildly ideological and progressive, not moderates who're fed up with politics. But also it's not purely cynical. They're telling leadership, "You really want to help people? Do this." Politicians tend to be quite power hungry, yes, but quite a few have at least a couple altruistic bones. If you convince them a policy will help many, many people, and will be neutral on their political career or even only mildly hamper it, a good fraction of politicians will do it.
>Alas, this probably won’t work unless KT manage to trick progressive Democrats into supporting major pro-market policy changes they ideologically abhor. If I were a power-hungry Democratic politician, I’d listen patiently, smirk, and say: “Thanks, but I’ve got a much better idea.” Namely: Add “abundance” to the everything-bagel, loudly make some cosmetic changes, trick the marginal moderates, and hold my coalition together. Wouldn’t you?
Your Myth of the Rational Voter talks about how politicians know voters punish them for bad results even if the politicians implement the exact policies voters asked for. And voters also reward politicians for good results even if it was policies they hate that led to the good results. Many politicians are economically illiterate and lack the knowledge to properly weigh the trade offs between good results and popular policies; educating them on how to better get good results shifts the balance towards good results and away from popularism.
Also, there are many relevant progressive decision-makers besides just politicians and progressive voters. There are also judges, bureaucrats, etc. If you can convince a progressive judge or bureaucrat that requiring an onerous enivironmental review will really do immense damage, that can lead to fewer environmental reviews and/or less onerous environmental reviews too.
Another factor is probably that Klein and Thompson are ideological Democrats on non-economic issues too. I believe support the Democratic party on issues like gender and race and gun control and so on. They want to empower the Democratic party, they don't want to just spread Abundance.
Good results on housing reform would take way longer than an election cycle to become apparent to anyone. You would need to add a lot of housing over many years before prices meaningfully reacted.
If you somehow did make prices fall dramatically a quickly current homeowners would revolt because you just trashed the most important asset (for many their only asset). That's electoral poison.
The negative effects (changes to neighborhoods, etc) show up immediately and have a proximate cause to blame. Housing being 10% cheaper 10 years from now is after many of these politicians move on and hard to credit them for.
I think its easier for polities that are in a high building equilibrium to keep that up, because there are lots of stakeholders in the current equilibrium getting rich off it (homebuilders) and making donations to politicians. There are also fewer status quo stakeholders against it (unions, which are way less powerful in the sunbelt even in education which is basically a property amenity).
All this is to say that politicians probably won't be rewarded for some of these reforms. They will just have to do them and spend political capital because they think they are the right thing to do. Will that be enough, we will see. My main opinion about the center left is that they are huge cowards, but I wish them the best of luck.
This is the good news, IMO, from Bryan's housing book. His solutions, even if implemented, would take forever to affect housing prices significantly. Which avoids the problem you point out.
In other contexts, I have suggested the solution to SF housing involves 3 things:
zoning elimination, an insane supply of bulldozers, and 75 years.
If it took 75 years to drop housing prices by 50% in real terms, that will still be an increase in nominal terms, which makes it less noticeable to the current homeowners.
I think you miss my point.
For a politician to benefit politically from lower housing prices, it would have to be noticeable and quick. But if it was noticeable and quick, existing homeowners would revolt. As such is very hard for politicians to benefit politically from housing reform. They are screwed either way.
The reason the Sunbelt gets around this is because they are already in a high build low price equilibrium. They can add lots of housing stock while seeing prices appreciate slowly. The homebuilders and other people who benefit from this growth fund the local politicians. Existing homeowners don't mind they just see new amenities coming in and most of the development is in an empty field away from them.
This works because there is lots of Greenfield (non-infill) development and a lot of (non-destitute) population inflow to suck it all up.
If you look at the place in Florida were I am they are slapping down master planned single family home communities with strong HOAs as far as the eye can see on empty land (which is in abundance). They aren't doing in-fill development on expensive urban real estate to build tenements.
No, I was agreeing with your point and saying that it isn't a "worry" because no one is going to make changes that fast in the High Cost areas.
But, yes, its also why the changes will be hard to get implemented, because no one will benefit in an election cycle.
I think the fact that they support housing deregulation and have moved the governor of California in that direction is already wonderful news. Who cares that they don't fully agree with you on everything else! This is a win!
Support housing *de*regulation?
Oops! Corrected. Thanks.
My unkind thought upon reading the book was that it was written to sell lots of copies. I think more injection of reality into the book would have meant lower sales. Klein and Thompson know their stuff so I have to believe this was deliberate.
There is a pretty huge tradeoff between more immigration and lowering house prices. Just ask Canada. There is no politically viable zoning reform that would offset that kind of rapid population increase.
If voters see that prices are going up and their neighborhoods are full of hostile invaders living twelve to a house and overcrowding your schools and emergency rooms they are going to reject it. They in fact have in basically every developed country in the last election cycle.
Rapid *voluntary* immigration would not be a problem if government hadn't created the equivalent of minimum wage laws for housing. 100, 150 years ago, the tenements provided all the housing the new immigrants needed and could afford. They violate zoning and building codes now, making cheap housing impossible.
Government is always the problem.
Yeah, people don't want tenements in their neighborhood. Shocker. You know who else doesn't have tenements in his neighborhood, Bryan Caplan. He's in a wealthy single family bubble where only the well off can afford the local school district and he goes to fancy Fairfax hospitals.
When you buy a property you are buying access to a whole suite of services in the local area. Tenements would underprice the value of those services, which is why nobody wants them built in their area.
There is a 0% chance of changing this and nobody in the "abundance" camp is running on denying public education, healthcare, public transport, etc to immigrants (the opposite).
Oh, nonsense. You are buying the privilege of renting from the government, and you have no more moral right to tell others what to do with their property than the government does.
You want more distance between your house and your neighbors? Buy a bigger lot, pay them an easement, but if you rely on government to enforce that distance, you are as big a bully as government.
You don’t want to live next door to an apartment block? Buy that lot, build the house you approve of, and rent it out. Otherwise you are just another government bully.
You’re afraid someone’s going to build a big box store or a skyscraper next to you? Think again, dummy, why would anybody waste their own money on a project which the infrastructure won’t support? But the government will be happy to eminent domain your neighbor and ram a freeway through your neighborhood.
Your moral sense of entitlement just makes you a branch of government.
Grow up. We live in a world of public amenities with massive public support. They aren’t going away. They are segregated by geography. That’s life. That’s why nobody is going allow you to build a tenement full of human trash next to them and that sentiment is being rejected all over the world.
Funny way to grow up, by depending on government to fight your battles. No thank you.
The kids are the people relying on mommy and daddy government.
Klein & Thompson (but more specifically Klein) don't support cuts to progressive programs, focusing on STEM over humanities, being as tough on unions as you'd like to be, or supporting vouchers, because they don't actually think any of those things would actually be good because they're center-left progressives, not weirdo quasi-libertarians.
If you want to improve progressive ideology, read Klein and Thompson.
If you want actual abundance, read Magoon.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/
LOL
Thanks for the shout out (and I will deliver my promised $20 bribe immediately!)
Whenever you're a political person whose views are not perfectly matched by the center of gravity of either party, you have the choice of which party you think you'll have the best shot at pulling in your direction.
KT believe their best shot at good policy is trying to convince democrats to be less reflexively pro-regulation, and need at least reluctant tolerance from progressive types to do this. So far, this project seems like it's making a few waves in very short time and might really shift the needle in the US' largest state.
Libertarians seem to largely believe that their best shot is wrestling the republican party into being pro free trade, pro-immigration, being less militaristic and soften on social conservatism/christian supremacism. This is going, and I can not stress this enough, *terribly*.
So I'd hesitate to criticize their approach. They seem genuinely to angle for change, not intellectual brownie points. That sometimes means picking your battles to avoid making enemies.
I'm unconvinced of 8 | 11. Other governments (Spain, Taiwan, China) have been able to construct metros and high speed rail at costs and timelines 1/10 of blue states. Given this, I don't think the problem is identifiably "big government", but rather the specific mode of governance identified in Abundance - common to blue states from 1970-present.
This is exactly what I was thinking. This isn't some imaginary fantasy theory of what government could hypothetically do if we lived in a different universe. It's a thing we know governments can do if they are effective, which is what Klein and Thompson advocate for. Also, the reality is that a lot of people do actually want things like metros and high speed rail, and don't just accept that they're impossible to ever achieve
Terrific review that will save me from reading the book which i considered but decided not to for some reasons you discuss in this blog post.
thank you!
>A few kind words for foreign-born scientists aside, Abundance ignores the single greatest abundance opportunity on Earth — immigration. You could fairly object, “Progressives are pro-immigration for humanitarian reasons, not economic gain.” But if you’re selling abundance to progressives, isn’t “Immigration, which you already favor, is also good for abundance” a great talking point?
Ezra talked about this on his podcast. One of the most frequent responses he gets to Abundance is "Why didn't you talk about progressive stump issues - especially healthcare?" and he pointed out that going viral with the democrat left involves factional arguments at this point. You have to present yourself as a "better leftist" or the left will just start screaming fascist and glue themselves to the pavement. So, a chapter about healthcare or immigration would bore moderate readers who mostly agree and lefties who are looking for radical purity testing arguments - so in the interest of getting the most eyes, he stuck to factional criticisms.
I really regret having only one like.
"if you’re selling abundance to progressives, isn’t “Immigration, which you already favor, is also good for abundance” a great talking point?"
They're going for a big tent, and most people (probably even them) don't want open borders or something similar.
Sir what do you think about textbooks versus popular books such as this one for their epistemic value?
Nailed it. It’s all branding to get “moderate” Dems elected. I’ll believe it when some actual changes are made in the deep blue state of CA, such as reduced gasoline taxes to help the working class and trades people, school vouchers, hydro power, limits on public union power, criminalizing repetitive property crimes, etc. You know, things that the far left will fight like hell to defeat!
Bryan’s critique amounts to a complaint that the book focuses on some things to the exclusion of other things that perhaps would be better suited to a different book by Bryan Caplin which he can title “The World According to Bryan Caplin.”
I beg to differ. Frankly, one of the refreshing aspects of Abundance and the related YIMBY movement is that, unlike the progressive “Groups” c. 2015-2024, it doesn’t try to take a stance on everything.
“But if your view of progressives is that negative, why would any proponent of abundance continue to identify as a “progressive”? If you reply, “I call myself a progressive so progressives will listen to me,” you’ve got to wonder, “What’s the point of talking to these benighted fanatics?” Wouldn’t it make more sense to address your case to moderates?”
This has been the biggest mystery to me of 2025. So many have come forward from the left and denounced immigration, advocate for deregulation, call for putting away “the woke”, agree that climate change is not taking place to the extent previously claimed, but scoff when I ask why they remain part of the “left”.
They refuse to leave the boundaries of the left, for fear of the indignation they have shown the right for decades.
The obvious reason is that while disagreements with others on the left can often be significant, they see the alternative as worse. They are sticking with the vaguely left-of-center coalition because they consider the right-of-center coalition to revolve entirely around the person of Trump, who is thoroughly morally and intellectually bankrupt. it's a complete non-starter.
Indeed. When the Right gives up on climate change denial and similar anti-science and anti-reality policies then I'll start to consider them to be worth talking to. As things stand, I'd have as much chance trying to talk sense into the Republican Party under Trump as I would trying to talk sense into the Communist Party under Nikita Khrushchev.
(All the anti-science cranks have up and left the Democrats and become Trumpists: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for )