Abundance

Why can’t we have nice things? Why are we heading more toward Mad Max than, say, Star Trek or the Jetsons? This might be the most important question of our time.

There have been a number of books asking versions of this question recently. From Jen Pahlka to Yoni Appelbaum and Marc Dunkelman, a number of people are tackling why we haven’t been making big strides in areas like housing or climate change or delivery of government services. I might add, why is poverty seemingly intractable despite our GDP setting record highs and AI arriving in order to do more and more work on our behalf?

Now, the biggest effort yet to explain our halting progress has arrived in the form of “Abundance” by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic. Derek joins me on the podcast this week to discuss.

“Abundance” opens with a vision of the future. ‘The world has changed. Not just the virtual world, that dance of pixels on our screen. The physical world too: its houses, its infrastructure, its medicines, its hard tech.’ Ezra and Derek imagine a world where people work perhaps 3 days a week because AI is doing a lot of the busywork. Energy is clean and food is plentiful because of advances in agriculture and technology.

“We could be making many more scientific advances than we are at present,” Derek observes. “But our researchers are spending up to 40% of their time filling out grant applications rather than actually doing research.” Derek and Ezra have painstakingly gone through the red tape and bureaucracy attendant with scientific research, housing, infrastructure and other areas of opportunity. Their mission is to have liberals focus on results more than rules and innovation more than inaction; indeed, clearing out some of the constraints will be necessary on many fronts.

I love that Derek and Ezra, two of the most prominent thinkers of our time, are setting themselves to a big-picture growth and problem-solving agenda. They are actively trying to transform our politics. “Trump is embodying the politics of scarcity,” Derek says. “The abundance agenda can be the antidote and define the next era of American liberalism, a liberalism that builds.”

We have definitely been constrained for too long by this tit-for-tat red vs. blue dynamic that is not addressing the true challenges of our time. ‘We are attached to a story of American decline that is centered around ideological disagreement,” is how they put it. Perhaps a vision of abundance can set us free.

A lot of people 5 years ago asked me, “Could we really give people universal basic income? Do we have those kinds of resources?” I would respond, “Do you remember anyone asking whether we could afford it when we bailed out Wall Street for $2 trillion? We are the richest, most advanced society in the history of the world; we can afford to address gross poverty, especially because we would get back the investment in people many times over.” In many ways, that was an argument of abundance vs. scarcity.

I started Forward largely to free us from this dysfunctional ideological clash and path to nowhere. As Derek and Ezra write, “Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.” If we can make outcomes the measuring stick, big things will be possible. There is now a different political conversation getting started, and I’m eager to help it gain power and energy. Let’s do what we can to share it.

For the Abundance book, click here. For my interview of Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, click here. To join Forward to actually fuel the politics of possibility, click here. The future won’t build itself.