The new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson demonstrates from the opening pages just what’s wrong with the concept of “Abundance.”
They writers present a utopian scenario of a time, 2050, when technology has transformed human life into something with no worries or cares:
Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.
Sounds just lovely. So does a lot of what Abundance promises—plenty of affordable housing, high-speed rail networks across the country, affordable health care, miracle drugs for just about everything … other than warp drive, replicators, Vulcan logic, and the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek (although they still had to fight the Klingons), it’s a science fiction fantasy come to life.
The problem is that the authors postulate that most of this will happen through the marvels of the neoliberal capitalist free market, if we just get rid of all those pesky rules and regulations that have hindered the construction of housing and the development of new tech.
There are absolutely things I agree with in the book. It’s ridiculous that California has spent more than ten years trying to build a high-speed rail line from SF to LA. Klein and Thompson point out that some of that can be traced to an over-reliance on outside contractors, when public employees could have done the job better and quicker.
They talk about the success of the COVID vaccine, when government, academia, and the pharma companies all worked together, with few constraints, to address a global crisis.
But they also follow what has become the mantra of the new centrist Democrats: Limiting or abolishing old-fashioned regulations, like the California Environmental Quality Act, will be the key to building and Abundance society.
They assume new inventions, not regulations, will end climate change.
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They don’t discuss at all the crisis of economic inequality, or the need for taxation policies that reduce it. They just assume that our current economic system, with fewer barriers, more government support for scientific research, and less bureaucracy to slow down research grants will inevitably lead to a better future.
This has not been the case in the United States since the late 1970s.
Since 1980, nearly 100 percent of all the economic gains from tech productivity have gone to the top 10 percent, most to the top one percent. The benefits of AI right now are no different. This tech is not being built by “the collective knowledge of humanity,” but by a few large companies and VC-backed startups, and the profits are not even remotely shared.
That’s not going to change be eliminating CEQA.
Let’s go back to my Star Trek metaphor. There’s a scene in The Next Generation where a time traveler from Earth’s past winds up on the Enterprise, and he marvels at the new technology, and asks, in wonder: “How much did this cost?”
Captain Picard shakes his head. “We don’t measure things like that anymore,” he says.
It’s the year 2364 and a tatty old space shuttle containing former Wall Street capitalist Ralph Offenhouse, who was cryogenically frozen in 1994, has just been discovered floating through space by a starship called the Enterprise–D. Upon waking, Offenhouse discovers that, although science has found a cure for his previously terminal illness, his bank accounts and investments have all gone. To his horror, not even his beloved Wall Street Journal has survived the ravages of time.
“A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” the ship’s captain Jean-Luc Picard tells him. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.
Star Trek exists in a post-Capitalist world, where not only has technology solved a lot of problems, but there are no poor people—and no rich people. The only Capitalists are the Ferengi, who are widely distrusted.
That’s not the utopian world Klein and Thompson are imagining.
The book has won great plaudits from the usual suspects, is already New York Times bestseller, and will make both authors lots of money. It’s perfect tech bro neoliberal porn, something that should make Elon Musk happy: The Abundance the authors imagine requires nobody who is currently obscenely rich, and nobody who will become obscenely rich, to sacrifice anything. Technology and free markets unleashed will save us all.
We have, of course, heard this before, from Frederick Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan, among others. We are hearing it now from people named Trump, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.
It didn’t work the last time, and it’s not working this time.
Former Sup. Dean Preston notes:
The problem is there is nothing paradigm-shifting in this book especially when it comes to housing. Calling for more privatization, deregulation, and trickle down economics is calling for more of the failed status quo.
There’s a reason the Trump crew hates Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (along with their deep racism and sexism and homophobia): As the Harvard and Rutgers Scholar Susan Fainstein says in The Just City, “Equity is by definition redistributive.”
In other words: You can’t eliminate poverty without also eliminating, or vastly reducing, great wealth. Abundance utterly ignores that concept.
A final note: I have been reviewing books for more than 40 years, at the Bay Guardian and at 48hills. I have never once had an author who was on a tour promoting a book refuse a request for an interview. Not once.
When I contacted the publicist for Abundance and asked if I could interview Klein, they told me that “isn’t possible.”
Okay, I’m just a lowly local reporter. But I thought I’d give it a final try.
This is the message I sent by email:
Hi, I’m going to review the book, and since Ezra isn’t available for an interview, I wonder if I could send a couple of questions by email. Maybe just one: In the intro where you describe a wonderful world of abundance, you say “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.” In the past 50 years in the US, virtually all of the economic benefits of increased productivity due to technology have gone to the top ten percent, most to the top one percent. Without a radical change in our tax structure, that will not change during the AI era; already, AI money goes largely to the very rich and a few big corporations. Thomas Piketty argues that we can’t solve any of our looming social problems with “abundance” or anything else unless we address economic inequality, and the only solution is much higher taxes on great wealth and income. Do you disagree? How do you propose that “profits are shared” under our current neoliberal system, where that has never happened (not since the end of the post-war boom).
I will let you know if I hear back.
