an abundance agenda « Peter Levine

Not for the clashing of sabres,
   For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
   With more abundant life.

-- from Songs for the People by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

To become a more just and sustainable society, we must produce a lot. For instance, to improve affordability and address homelessness, we need much more housing. One estimate claims that we need 7.3 million additional lower-cost rental units. But the graph above this post shows a long-term decline in new housing starts per capita.

We also need windmills and solar panels, more and better transmission lines, batteries, electric vehicles, commuter railway lines and intermodal transit points, heat pumps, and urban trees.

All this production will weigh on the environment, but I don’t see any path to a sustainable economy that doesn’t involve first making a lot of new things that replace the machines we depend on now.

The graph below shows rising production of renewables along with steady production of oil and coal. We need the former to accelerate, which should also push the latter down:

Trends in oil and gas production and renewable energy production, from St Louis Fed.

Regulation is important for health, safety, and other values, but it doesn’t produce stuff. Regulation can be a barrier to production, although the severity of that problem is open to debate. Certainly, regulations must be smart, efficient, and mutually consistent.

Redistribution is necessary to address inequities, but it is not the way to create abundance. To be sure, when disadvantaged people receive support, they are able to buy things, but that may not boost the total supply of the things we need. Besides, once we produce more, we can choose to distribute more.

Governments can boost supply by buying things. The massive Biden investments in green technologies and microchip manufacturing are at least well intentioned and may turn out to be crucial. However, the private sector is going to produce most of what we need, even if governments are important customers or investors. The question is how to expand the private production of good things, such as affordable housing and renewable power.

Steve Teles and Ron Saldin discuss an abundance agenda in political terms, presenting it as a response to certain tendencies on both right and left. They argue that abundance may create a new alignment and counter partisan polarization, which is rooted in zero-sum competition. They compare an abundance agenda to the Progressive Movement, which formed strong factions within both major parties. In the 1912 general election, three presidential candidates competed to be the best progressive, offering different but comparable interpretations of what progressivism meant.

Progressivism wasn’t about abundance, but their analogy is political. An abundance agenda could scramble the political spectrum today, as progressivism did from 1900-1924. Teles and Saldin argue that only the Democratic Party is really hospitable to abundance right now, for Trump has a “hold on the GOP.” But they envision a somewhat longer timeframe.

I find their political analysis interesting, and I am open to the argument that abundance could counter hyper-partisanship. However, I would separate political arguments from substantive policy issues. For the good of people and the planet, we must produce a lot more good things very soon, and that goal should determine our political strategies. In other words, we shouldn’t produce more to reduce polarization, but scrambling the political spectrum might help us to produce more of what we need.