Without considering these wider questions, it is hard to see how the politics of abundance can work. Even if one accepts that liberals have been complicit in the undermining of government, it doesn’t make it any easier to undo the damage. Trust in politicians and officials is exceptionally low, and with good reason. Klein and Thompson argue that liberal politicians would benefit from taking more risks and being able to show results, and they cite the example of the Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, rushing through the rebuilding of the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia after a disastrous accident. As they acknowledge, however, his scrapping of procurement rules, and the autonomy given to project leads to bypass normal safety procedures, could have gone horribly wrong. If it had, voters would have been unlikely to give Shapiro the benefit of the doubt. In the UK, during Covid, the vaccine programme bypassed normal procurement rules to great acclaim, yet attempts to do the same for protective equipment led to widespread fraud and a big scandal. Much of the worst regulation is created reactively – in response to scandals, to assuage an angry public – and it is not hard to see how taking more risks could backfire in such an adversarial political system.
One of the best chapters in Abundance looks at the way in which scientific funding in the US is granted ever more cautiously to academics who – and projects that – already have a track record, thus failing to support riskier ideas that could lead to paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. The authors also highlight the absurdly bureaucratic grant processes that lead to scientists spending a vast amount of time filling out forms and managing obsessive audits of their spending. The same is true in the UK. But there is a reason that this happens – this is public money, and it is easy to embarrass politicians by highlighting even small amounts of fraud or by “outing” a silly-sounding project in the media. The political environment is what decreases risk appetite.
Ultimately, “abundance” is a highly optimistic political philosophy – even utopian in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s version – and we do not live in an optimistic age. It is hard to get people excited about nuclear fusion and driverless cars when even the most basic services don’t seem to work, and public spaces look ever shabbier. These authors are making an important point about the rigidities of regulation and the cost of procedural sludge. But to make progress, we need a much more coherent and broader framing that tackles the deeper defects of our economic and political systems. Assuming that the problem is primarily about over-regulation mistakes a symptom for the cause.
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Sam Freedman (@Samfr): The centre left has joined the populist right in despairing of good government
https://t.co/JdxdLEDE5n