The Baffler- What’s the Matter with Abundance?
More ➜“If there are not enough homes, can we make more?” the authors ask. “If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy can we make more? If not, why not?” Their solution is for politics to take technology and innovation “more seriously” and to relieve them from the encumbrance of bad policy. “To have the future we want,” they helpfully summarize their case, “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” It’s hard to argue with that. Abundance is mostly hard to argue with, by design: Klein and Thompson have written a super-partisan sales pitch for a politics of new construction rather than a rigorous, methodical inquiry regarding the causes of national stagnation. The authors lament that America is “stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.” This third way is well trod, by everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to today’s Democratic Party insiders, and Klein and Thompson’s offering is among the most approachable attempts to map it of late. But their collation of columns is less than the sum of its parts, like a clip-show episode of a 1990s sitcom. […] Link
