Building the Future
Abundance and the Left
Marc J. Dunkelman opens his book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, with an anecdote from 1986 in New York City. New York’s then mayor, Ed Koch, was taking a beating in the local tabloids over the city’s Parks Department blowing millions of dollars in taxpayer money on a failed effort to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. If repairing an ice-skating rink seems like no big deal for a big city government it was turning out to be anything but simple.
The Parks Department aimed to replace the older, clunk brine-based refrigeration system with a newer and more efficient technology known as Freon. In 1980, City Hall ordered the rink shuttered, the pipes beneath it turned out, and the whole system uprooted to make way for a $4.9 million replacement that was meant to take three years. A contractor installed twenty-two miles of new piping for the Freon. When that phase was complete, the Parks Department had yet to secure a contractor to pave over the new plumbing. The plumbing ended up being exposed to the elements for a year. When pavers were finally hired, they underestimated how much concrete they needed to complete the job. Rather than order more, they diluted their insufficient supply. Then, to protect the piping, the pavers chose not to use vibration machines typically used to collapse any air pockets. The predictable result of all this: the ice melted, and the rink didn’t work. The city had no choice but to begin again.
When it looked like another two years and $3 million was needed in stepped a brash developer who offered to get the job done. It turned out to be a godsend for Koch as the developer ended up delivering the job for $750,000 less than the original estimate and the rink was open for that year’s holiday season. Who was this developer? None other than Donald J. Trump. It was this public relations bonanza, along with the publishing of his ridiculous, ghost-written book, The Art of the Deal, around the same time that brought Trump to real prominence.
Why did the city fail so badly at such a mundane task? Mostly because sixty years earlier New York’s state legislature had passed a law designed to prevent mayors from giving municipal gigs to politically connected (or bribe offering) contractors, known as Wicks Law. As a result, the city had to hire separately the lowest bidding construction, plumbing, electrical, heating, and ventilation contractors on any municipal project over $50,000. When it came to the Wollman Rick, the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. Trump simply had to hire a general contractor and dangle future business to ensure the job was done on time.
Fast forward to the present day and New York still has quite a problem with such projects. Penn Station, the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, handling over 600,000 people a day, has been stuck under Madison Square Garden for over 50 years, since its now mythical classical structure was demolished in 1960. A quick study of the sheer number of plans proposed and interests involved leaves one’s head spinning. In an actually astute move, the Trump Administration recently took over the project and appointed Andy Byford, former director of the MTA, who helped New York’s subway system out of the ‘summer of he;’ depths of 2017 (Byford was forced out in a fit of egomania by then Governor Andrew Cuomo). However, it is unclear if Byford will have the authority to cut through all the embedded interests and get a sorely needed plan through.
The 2nd Ave subway in New York has been around long enough to spawn legends. The line was first proposed in 1920. The thing is it still doesn’t exist. ‘Phase I’ of the project, a total of three subway stations, was finally completed in 2017. A 1.8-mile expansion, thanks to the spiraling complexity in managing intergovernmental and utility coordination, the project came in at a cost of $2.5 billion per mile- 8 to 12 times more expensive than similar subway projects in Europe. Needless to say, there is yet no sign of Phase II.
Lest New York be dismissed as a hard luck case, there is the infamous high speed rail line that will connect LA and San Francisco that was supposed to be completed by 2020. Originally slated to cost $33 billion, if the full system ever gets built now, a distant prospect, it could run as high as $128 billion. Meanwhile, China’s high speed rail network spans over 28,000 miles. Japan’s bullet trains cover about 2000 miles. South Korea’s covers about 250 miles in the most densely populated parts of the country. Europe features several high-speed train lines. The amount of high-speed train miles in the U.S.: zero.
EV Charging stations? The bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed in November 2021 set aside $5 billion to fill the gaps in the network of U.S. charging stations. Private companies were installing stations by then but mainly in urban areas with a lot of EVs. Rural areas were largely ignored. The point is to install stations where profits are too low for corporations. Forced to rely on a system that distributes 90 percent of funding to states to figure out how to spend (the states have no experience with EVs) and incorporating the needed public feedback stemming from the 946 Administrative Procedure Act meant that by February 2025 out of the 1000 to 1500 stations that were envisioned, a grand total of 58 charging stations were installed. Transportation is the largest CO2 emitting sector in the U.S.
Compare this with Norway’s buildout of EV chargers throughout the country. Along with other steps such as free parking for EVs, Norway is a world leader with EVs making up 90 percent of new car sales.
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derak Thompson and Why Nothing Works are both books that confront this lack of state capacity. While Abundance has generated much more attention, Why Nothing Works is also quite informative, arguably even the better book. But the works bookend each other. Published a month apart they have sparked a necessary debate on the Left still licking its wounds in the wake of Trump’s decisive reelection.
The theme of both books can be summed up like this: in the post-war, post-New Deal world, with the expansion of suburbia and the necessary rise of the environmental movement, and in reaction to the destructive excess of urban planning, most visible in the form of Robert Moses, such as Moses infamous battle with Jane Jacobs over Moses’ attempt to run a highway through New York’s Greenwich Village (indeed, for more on the gruesome effects of Moses’ highway building in New York feel free to check out my book Emerald City: How Capital Transformed New York), the ‘establishment’ came to be distrusted in progressive circles leading to many veto points being entrenched, that along with the Republican/conservative hated of government in general, has severely limited state capacity- capacity now needed to build high-speed trains, expand green energy transmission lines, and build out EV charging stations.
One illustration of this cited by Klein and Thompson is the fact that the U.S. has twice as many lawyers per capita as Germany, four times as many as France. Much of this legal energy is now devoted to suing the government. Klein and Thompson cite the important success of the environmental movement in passing the Clean Air Act in 1970 and Ralph Nader’s successful lawsuits of the late 1960s but also note that ‘Behind these victories, Nader’s revolution created a new layer of government: democracy by lawsuit.’ And certainly, lawsuits have come from corporate interests as much as anywhere else. But in 1967, there were 3 cases per 100,000 Americans directed at enforcing federal laws. By 1976, there were 13. By 2014, there were 40.
Dunkelman describes this dynamic as a struggle between what he calls the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses of progressivism. The Hamiltonian is an emphasis on top-down projects (the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority, etc.), the Jeffersonian being an emphasis on thwarting overbearing central authority. As Dunkelman documents, progressivism in the U.S. has swung back and forth between these two instincts, with one having the upper hand but, of course, both can and must coexist. While obviously going back to the days of Robert Moses isn’t desirable, Dunkelman argues:
Progressivism will need to shift course yet again. But rather than perpetuate the cycle, or open the door to another age defined by Robert Moses-style Hamitonianism, reformers need now to seek a more balanced approach. One that puts centralized power and individualized safeguards in proper harmony. First and foremost, that will require a change in the progressive mindset. It will mean pursuing policies that give public officials more room to maneuver, even while guarding against unlimited mandates. It will mean shaving back but not eviscerating some of the reforms that have defined the last half century. In a phrase, in will mean giving communities a voice, not a veto.
Klein and Thompson put it like this: ‘A simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.’
For instance, a point of emphasis in Abundance is housing. Between 2023 and 2024 homeless in the U.S. increased by 18 percent to roughly 771,000 people. That is just about as many people who live in North Dakota. The biggest factor in the increase is a lack of affordable housing due to the housing shortage. This is particularly true in large cities such as New York (a recent Coalition for the Homeless annual report showed a 12 percent increase in number of non-migrant residents in city shelters), Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Yet in Austin, Texas, where it is easier to build housing, rents have actually declined the past couple of years due a boom in housing supply despite Austin’s population increasing by over 20 percent since 2010.
As Klein and Thompson cite, in 2023, the San Francisco metro area issued about 7500 new housing permits. The Boston metro area issued 10,500. New York City, Newark, and New Jersey-together- issued fewer than 40,000. The Houston metro area? 70,000. This divergence goes back decades. Houston has the lowest homeless rate of any large U.S. city.
There is a further rub. In Los Angeles, voters chose overwhelmingly in 2016 to pass Proposition HHH, a ballot measure that raised $1.2 billion through a higher property tax to create 10,000 apartments for homeless people. By March 2024, the city had built only 4344. A 2022 audit found the units cost, on average, about $600,000- almost twice the cost of the median sale price for a home in Houston. The main problem? The way using public money layers on more requirements, additional goals (what Klein and Thompson call ‘everything bagel liberalism’), and delays. A similar dynamic happened in Washington DC, as a handful of affordable apartments cost over $1 million each to build, financed in part with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credits program. As Klein and Thompson put it: ‘It is damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds. Shouldn’t things happen faster when that are backed by the might and money of the government?’
Then there is the energy transition. The world is installing more solar and wind power than ever before but according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, fossil fuels accounted for almost 83 percent of U.S. energy consumption in 2023. According to one model by Jesse Jenkins of Princeton University, cited in Abundance, a full buildout of solar and wind power would need 590,000 square kilometers of land. That’s equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Even if that model is overstated, between building the infrastructure and moving the power through transmission lines, a large amount of land will be needed. Both Abundance and Why Nothing Works cite the difficulty in building out transmission lines across states with examples of failed projects. Nuclear energy, of course, needs much less land and isn’t intermittent, but has long faced even more such regulatory hurdles and opposition. Meanwhile, China is currently building half of nuclear plants currently under construction in the world.
Plenty of criticism has come at what now is being called the ‘Abundance Agenda’ (again, all of it aimed at Abundance; Why Nothing Works has generated hardly any attention). On its face this can seem strange. After all, if the Left’s agenda isn’t ‘Abundance for All’, what the hell is it, exactly?
For starters, there is too large a segment within the Left that is explicitly anti-Abundance. Degrowth types with their talk of overconsumption, too much stuff, and calls for a ‘radical reduction in the use of energy and materials’, are basically making conservative pro-austerity arguments (I’ve written critiques of degrowth here and here). Needless to say, a planet full of vegans living in dorm rooms isn’t coming anytime soon.
More substantive criticism on the Left appears mostly to focus on what isn’t in the book than what is in the book. The debate has devolved into one between an Abundance agenda and a populist one. In other words, why didn’t Klein and Thompson extend the theme further or focus more on redistribution and economic populism? Isn’t this Abundance agenda a path to more neoliberalism and deregulation? Is it just Bill Clinton and the New Democrats all over again?
It is worth pointing out first that both books were written for progressive audiences. Neither exactly argues against populism but seek to focus a bit more on progressive blind spots. It is true, however, that plenty of technocratic and libertarian types have jumped on the Abundance bandwagon, apparently to the tune of $100 million. ‘Centrist’ governors such as Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, and Kathy Hochul have expressed support. Billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg, and Wall Street executives Rob Granieri and Mark Heising are claiming the mantle.
Josh Barro argues that in big cities the Abundance agenda will require a fight against unions. No, not actually. Trade unions aren’t usually against building things. In fact, it is not at all difficult to envision that a build out of green energy and high-speed rail, which already have the support of unions, will see unions become stronger, not weaker. Writing in the Boston Review, Sandeep Vaheesan puts forward a decent critique of what he thinks is underemphasized or overlooked in the book including what he argues is a deference to private capital and single-minded focus on red tape while ignoring things like the role of short-term orientation of shareholder capitalism. He ends by putting forward the New Deal as the historical example to emulate.
Here’s the thing: even a social democratic government that raises taxes on the rich and expands planning and the public sector is going to need state capacity to build out its public housing, public transportation, and Green New Deal (try to build public housing in the U.S. now and see how far you get). During the original New Deal, a lack of state capacity was much less a problem. A state that can’t delivers lemons or wallows in inefficiency, cost overruns, and delay is one that brings forth the likes of Ronald Reagan to proclaim, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."
As this good piece in The Nation by Waleed Shahid argues ‘The Abundance Debate is Broken.’ The piece makes the obvious point that Abundance and Populism shouldn’t be natural enemies. Shahid writes:
While populism is a compelling message and diagnosis, it alone isn’t sufficient. Populist rhetoric frequently underestimates or sidesteps critical governance problems: bureaucratic complexity, policy entrenchment, and inefficient public administration. These challenges aren’t purely driven by purely by corporate elites- they’re embedded features of governance itself demanding their own targeted solutions beyond populist critiques alone.
Shahid also notes:
If the abundance coalition cannot distance itself from the billionaire class underwriting it- and the anti-populist impulses that come with it- it risks becoming not a governing vision but a technocratic buffer to prevent more transformative reforms.
Abundance can’t be left to the billionaires. It must be a vital part of any Left project if any such project is to find success. In an interesting piece for Compact titled ‘How Trump Stole the Future from the Left’, Ralph Leonard (self-described conservative Marxist) describes Trump and Elon Musk, before their quite predictable public divorce, as seemingly ‘among the few leading figures of our time who possess a vision for the future and are willing to pursue it as a political program, not just another AI startup.’ This included everything from the vision of colonizing Mars to wacky ideas about conquering Greenland and turning Gaza into a resort community. Still the point remains that the Left has been weak on vision in recent times, at least not one that would actually appeal to most people. This can change: a country covered with high-speed trains, abundant clean energy, some precision urban farming, and housing for all is a good place to start. So is an entrepreneurial state that can competently plan and deliver on its public moonshots.