Republicans sometimes denounced Barack Obama as a low-key authoritarian, and that’s defensible as a purely descriptive matter—he could be decidedly illiberal and anti-democratic where it suited him, all that diktat by “a pen and a phone” business, as with illegal immigrants—but he didn’t have the soul of a Leninist, even back when he was younger and more radical. (And now, radicalism is something Obama cannot afford: He’s too rich.) He is not a radical man, and not a cruel man—he is a smug man.
And, if you’re being honest with yourself, you can see how he might have got that way. He didn’t start his life in Dickensian squalor or anything like that, but, while he went to fancy private schools, he didn’t have a terrific family life—hippie-weirdo mother, absentee father—and was largely raised by his grandparents. And his life turned out … great. You could see how a guy like Barack Obama could get to thinking he was pretty smart. He probably was the smartest guy in a lot of rooms—he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, but in Springfield, Illinois? Pretty smart. And pretty smart for Washington, too. And one of the dumb things smart people routinely do is to over-generalize from their own experiences: “The decisions I made turned out awfully well for me, so it is only sensible—only rational, only an empirically demonstrable fact—that similar decisions will work out similarly for other people. That’s just pragmatism, and only a fanatical ideologue could deny it.”
The poet laureate—the Homer, the Dylan Thomas, the Tupac by-God Shakur—of that kind of smug, self-satisfied, utterly ignorant way of looking at the world is, of course, Ezra Klein, who has a new book out with Atlantic writer Derek Thompson: Abundance. It is a book that stands on two pillars: the insipidity of its prose and the blasé certitude of its argument.
“Scarcity Is a Choice,” the authors declare, emphasizing the sentiment by making it a section title. They are not the first to make this argument, and they cite, among others, Aaron Bastani, author of the much-remarked-upon Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto from 2018. “Our era features too little utopian thinking,” the authors insist. And they work manfully to fix this, mostly by pretending that inconvenient facts simply do not exist or that they are irrelevant. And so we have an economically oriented book dedicated to the idea of scarcity that never—not once, not on a single page—deals in a serious way with the concept of scarcity as it is used in economics. Which is to say, the book’s thesis—that “scarcity is a choice,” that scarcity can be eliminated by transferring the choice-making power away from the people who don’t know what to do with it (you rubes with your gasoline-powered cars and suburban lawns) to the people who do (you know who they are, and, if even you don’t, they do!)—is an exercise in question-begging.
Scarcity, as understood in economics, is not a choice but a fact: There are 24 hours in a day, and an hour dedicated to x is an hour that cannot be dedicated to y; an acre of land that is dedicated to growing corn cannot simultaneously be used as a parking lot; $1 paid in taxes is $1 not available for private consumption or investment; etc. The authors simply take Bastani’s “luxury communism” model (scarcity effectively eliminated by technology) and run with it: Never mind the actual real-world physical limitations on our ambitions and our utopian desires—just assume technology will take care of it. And if technology doesn’t take care of it, then give a great deal of central-planning power to people such as Ezra Klein—and the class of people he represents—and they’ll flip the politico-economic switches to produce the desired result.
Never mind that government planners and would-be managers of the national economy have been flipping those switches like cocaine monkeys in a federal lab for going on a century now: Eventually—and this is their article of faith—infinite federal cocaine monkeys banging away at ergonomically optimized keyboards are going to produce the turn-by-turn directions to utopia.
The results are, of course, hilarious. The authors are big on the promise of “laser-ignited nuclear fusion,” which sounds like something from Star Trek but is a real thing—a real thing with some caveats. “We know nuclear fusion can work: it is how stars generate power,” they write. “We have never known if we can make it work here on earth—at least not affordably and at scale. But we are getting closer.” Every word of that is true, but there is a very large gap between “affordably and at scale” and “closer.” We have been getting closer to usable fusion and a million other wonders since the first of Ezra Klein’s intellectual forebears saw somebody start a fire by clicking two rocks together and began drawing up plans for a utopia of fully automated luxury caveman communism. We’ve been getting closer for 300,000 years and, with apologies to Zeno, you can keep getting closer and not actually get there. They list “green hydrogen” as one of the products that needs to be “invented or improved,” but green hydrogen—meaning hydrogen produced via electrolysis unsupported by fossil fuels—has been around since the 18th century, when the electricity used was produced by a hand-cranked static-electricity generator. Green hydrogen today is a small but real industry—about $4 billion in sales last year. We’ve been getting closer—for a while. Maybe that’ll scale up quickly, or after 200 years—and whichever it turns out to be matters.
If you happen to be the sort of person who reads a book and then reads the notes and then looks at the material referenced in the notes, Abundance will imbue you with a homicidal spirit, because the authors—great practitioners of “Just the facts, zir” factiness—can be pretty sloppy with the data. For example, at one point they mention that the cost of attending college has gone from x to 28x, which is true—in nominal terms. In real (inflation-adjusted) terms, the data they reference documents a multiplier of 3.9 rather than 28. College getting four times more expensive isn’t nothing, but it isn’t 28 times, either. The authors talk about the promise of a petroleum-free world delivered by wind turbines (each of which contains about 80 gallons of oil for lubrication, not to mention the hydrocarbons used to manufacture, transport, and install them) and solar panels, which typically are made from polyester or another plastic polymer, i.e., literally made from oil. Pretty much every offshore wind turbine you’ve ever seen represents tens of thousands of gallons of marine fuel burned.
There are bigger-picture omissions, too. As I have observed a few times over the years, one of Klein’s unexamined premises is that some version of central planning can be effective—by which I mean that it can produce something like the intended results at some reasonable cost without catastrophic unintended consequences—and that the failure of American government to make that kind of planning work is a matter of will—because scarcity, like all the other unpleasant facts of life, must be a choice. You will look in vain in this book for the words “public choice” or anything like substantive engagement with the ideas of the public-choice theorists, whose insights into the limits and character of government action are essential to anybody who wants to actually understand why all these very nice, intelligent, highly educated, well-meaning people in Washington and the state capitals manage to consistently screw things up so badly whenever they are asked to do anything more complicated than fill a pothole or assassinate “the Osama bin Laden of Facebook” via drone.
It’s been more than a century since Ludwig von Mises published Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, which offered a compelling—and, so far, unrefuted—argument about the limitations on government efforts to supplant market processes with economic planning, an argument that has been developed over the years by everyone from economists to chaos theorists—and that has been attested to by a century of failed planning efforts. But, for the authors of Abundance, such criticisms either do not exist or do not merit a meaningful response. Their position is, in effect: “Just give us the power and we’ll give you the laser-ignited fusion.”
The real autocracy starts to creep in when the authors turn their attention to legal and regulatory reform, which, of course, are a necessary part of realizing any practical and meaningful program, much less the utopian one these fellows are dreaming of. In the case of California’s high-speed rail fiasco, the problem, they decide, doesn’t have anything to do with the nature of the bureaucratic enterprise or anything like that—the problem, we are to understand, is that the people who know what to do are spending too much time in “negotiation.” For real:
What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the build or the design, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to public disappointment and frustration, which leads to loss of money that might otherwise have been approved if the project were speeding toward completion.
Question: What’s the alternative to negotiation?
For those of you keeping score at home, the problems adumbrated there include: democracy, recourse to the law, and property rights. Now, I am sure that if you asked the authors whether they believed that the government should just run roughshod over these concerns in order to build a railway between two cities already connected by jet service, the answer would be: “No.” Except …
The problem is that if you subsidize demand for something that is scarce, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. Too much money chasing too few homes means windfall profits for homeowners and an affordability crisis for buyers. Too much money chasing too few doctors means long wait times or pricey appointments. This leads to the standard Republican riposte: Just don’t subsidize demand. Keep the government out of it. Let the market work its magic. That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice.
And there you have the oogedy-boogedy magical incantation by which an economic problem is transmuted into a moral one. The goods and services necessary to providing high-quality medical care are scarce. They are a textbook case of economic scarcity—there are only so many doctors and nurses able to work so many hours, only so many hospital beds, only so many pharmaceutical factories turning out so much product, etc. These are tough facts to deal with, and, in the main, our political class has chosen to not deal with them, and they have gone about not dealing with them by relying on a slogan: “Health care is a human right!” Or, to put it another way: Health care is one of those goods “where access is a matter of justice.” At which point, it is time for all these cats to say “M.E.O.W.” and trample down the rules on the argument that this is the Moral Equivalent Of War. And so we read the authors lamenting not that it is so easy for California activists to block the construction of big projects but that it is as easy for them to block projects of which the authors approve (solar farms) as it is to block the ones they dislike (oil refineries, not that there’s been one of any consequence built in the United States since the 1970s). If only there were some way to keep official obstacles in place for the Very Bad Things while making straight the way for the Very Good Things!
We’ve been down that road a dozen different times on a dozen different political journeys, and the end is always the same: Scarcity is a fact, not a choice, and getting all self-righteous about “justice” doesn’t make the scarce goods any less scarce—in fact, it often makes them more scarce by imposing regulations that raise prices or drive producers out of the market entirely. There’s a reason that so many smart and ambitious young people choose careers in finance over medicine, which once was the exemplary high-income/high-status job. Heavy-handed regulation of the kind the authors generally endorse (e.g., California’s decision to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035) is, as they recognize from time to time, part of the problem. They acknowledge how yesterday’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems, and they are right on the merits about many of the things they desire to see come to pass—more housing construction, the desirability of a revivified urbanism, more nuclear power, etc.—but they are unable to move on to the next thought, which should be this: Why on earth would we believe that the central planners in Washington in 2025 or 2029 are going to be any more effective than the central planners in Petaluma, California, were in 1971 when, as the authors lament, they introduced the “Petaluma Plan” that set the benchmark for how to go about choking off the supply of new housing? The problem, of course, is the thing the authors pretend to foreswear: ideology.
“We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity,” they write. And what does that mean? What does it imply?
The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.
But there is no need at all for the market to distinguish between wealth that comes from one source and wealth that comes from a different source. Where the question is wealth, the source of wealth is not the relevant issue; where the question is environmental degradation and other community ills, externalities are the relevant issue. The source of wealth is only the issue if you make a—what’s the word?—decision to make it the issue. Dealing with complex externalities, particularly environmental ones, is a tough nut. But you don’t have to rebuild the world from scratch along utopian lines to do it, either: You either define property rights more precisely or, where that is not feasible, you regulate and try to do so in a way that is modest, direct, transparent, consistently applied, etc. Which is to say, you pass regulations that assume not the world’s perfectibility but its imperfectibility. You leave the utopianism to the stoned sophomores and the ideology-ensorcelled fanatics and the actual idiots.
The extent to which Abundance is a rhetorical blueprint rather than a practical one may be learned from the Democratic (the book is acknowledged to be directed at Democrats) reaction to it. As Henry Grabar writes in Slate: “The good news is, the authors have dropped a potent political manifesto into the lap of a Democratic Party that seems confused about any messaging bolder than ‘Trump take egg.’ Klein and Thompson offer a vision of a ‘liberalism that builds,’ a can-do antidote to blue-state malaise.” But one more loosey-goosey call to arms is not what this world needs. We need less utopian thinking, not more. We need more modest thinking, more specific thinking, more humble thinking. Fewer manifestos. More thought.
