Abundance Liberalism

Discussion

Christopher Beha:

"In the pages of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling book Abundance, the posts of Matt Yglesias’s Substack Slow Boring, and the campaign speeches of Josh Shapiro and other 2028 hopefuls, the argument sounds: Well-intentioned but misguided and fundamentally illiberal progressive policies have stifled liberalism’s natural tendency to produce growth and innovation. Trumpism arose as a response to an artificial scarcity; to defeat Trumpism, liberalism simply needs to return us to the promise of abundance.

The great appeal of abundance liberalism is that it promises to attract Trump voters without betraying the larger progressive project of social and economic equality that seems to run against these voters’ interest. Abundance liberalism says that we can generate enough growth in absolute terms to keep everyone happy, even as we ensure that the proportional share of this growth is more fairly distributed. In the process, liberalism can do what it has always done at its best: Work well enough in practical terms to put theoretical questions to rest.

Abundance liberalism’s left-wing critics argue that inequality rather than scarcity is the great economic problem of the age. The goods that middle class white men used to enjoy are not going to China or immigrants or women of color or some other Trumpist boogeyman, but to a tiny number of (white male) billionaires now on their way to becoming trillionaires, and pro-growth abundance policies will only make this problem worse. In this view, it already is in the narrow self-interest of most Trump voters to support progressive policies. They just don’t recognize it. But it is a foundational liberal principle that people get to determine their own self-interest, and so far Trump voters don’t seem to agree.

Klein and Thompson begin their book with a hopeful picture of the world that abundance policies promise us by the year 2050. The reader is asked to imagine waking up in perfect comfort, wrapped in a “cocoon” of clean and cheap energy and looking out the window, where “an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills,” pharmaceutical cures for every imaginable physical and psychological complaint. Soon the reader’s embedded “micro-earpiece” announces a “voice text” from a friend who is on a weekend vacation, having hopped the two-hour flight from New York to London.

The authors’ chief worry in putting forward this vision is that we won’t believe such good fortune possible. To me, the future they describe seems on the contrary entirely plausible. The trouble is that it terrifies and disgusts me. I don’t want to see armies of drones when I look out the window. I don’t want to be continuously distracted from the world in front of me by a pinging earpiece. I don’t want every instance of my waking and sleeping life mediated by technology, no matter how smoothly functioning and environmentally friendly. The imagined reader in this tableau seems to live entirely alone and doesn’t even set eyes on another human being. No doubt there’s a star pill you can take to alleviate the sense of isolation resulting from this condition, but it hardly seems like an ideal to be working toward.

Of course Klein and Thompson are entitled to disagree with me about the nature of the good life, and they might note that they have intentionally limited their picture to the kinds of goods that technological innovation and economic growth can provide. But that is precisely the point. These are the goods that technocratic liberalism inevitably tends to recognize as good, and it is not clear that they are the ones whose lack we most acutely feel.

One of the most salient features of contemporary American life is how anxious, depressed, isolated, angry—simply put, how unhappy—many of us are. If we take seriously the utilitarian view of happiness as the great measure of the good, this would seem to be liberalism’s most profound failure. We are unhappy although in absolute terms we remain the richest nation on the planet. We are far less happy than many far less affluent societies. We already have technological powers beyond the imagining of Bentham or Mill or even our own great-grandparents, and we are not happier than any of them. We have cut the distance from New York to London from months to weeks to days to seven hours. Will cutting it from seven to two finally deliver us from our existential distress?"

(https://www.compactmag.com/article/abundance-is-not-enough/)