The problems of “Abundance”

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their new book, “Abundance,” gaze out across the American landscape and see a dark specter looming: scarcity. 

Amid the teeming Walmart shelves, SUV-filled parking lots and bulging freezers of the world’s most robust consumer economy, Klein and Thompson see a nation where “what’s needed to build a life” – housing, education, health care – is in increasingly short supply. 

Scarcity may be the enemy, they argue, but it is one that we can vanquish – if government fully commits to the task. Klein and Thompson envision a federal government that invests in outside-the-box scientific research, takes timely action to scale up critical new technologies, and eliminates regulations – including pesky laws intended to protect the environment – that limit the speed with which we can “solve our problems with supply.”

For the last 50 years, they argue, both the right and left sides of the political spectrum have been insufficiently committed to using the tools of government to overcome scarcity, creating a struggle between “a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.”

In response, Klein and Thompson propose a new political order that they believe can unite the nation behind a kind of technological manifest destiny – an abundance movement with a “bigness that befits the American project.” A materialist movement that is somehow also oriented toward the ends their liberal readers tend to support, including environmental sustainability and a more equitable distribution of wealth. 

The authors of “Abundance” correctly identify some of the symptoms that have rendered liberal politics and policymaking in the 21st century ineffective – an obsession with process, a fixation on bloated policies that address multiple problems poorly rather than solve one problem well, and so on. 

But if Klein and Thompson have identified the symptoms, they’ve misdiagnosed the disease. Scarcity is not, by and large, America’s problem. It is, rather, the problems that result from our abundance – the ecological impacts of a high-throughput consumer economy; our failure to replace the sense of meaning and purpose once drawn from work that has since been automated away; the tech-driven stratification of society and accelerating concentration of wealth – that threaten to do us in.

These are problems that cannot be “solved with supply.” And failing to keep those problems front of mind in a renewed quest for “more” could wind up making them even worse.

We’re already abundant, thanks

For a country supposedly locked in the grip of scarcity, early 21st century America is, by any historical standard, a remarkably abundant place. America produces vastly more food than it can consume, we use more than three times as much energy per person as the global average, and we lead all industrial nations in personal consumption expenditures per capita. 

America’s gross material abundance is nowhere so apparent as in the stuff we don’t use – the bric-a-brac we stuff in our ever-growing proliferation of self-storage outlets; the tremendous volumes of trash we throw away; the energy wasted by the idling SUVs in every school pickup line. 

Given the centuries of manual and intellectual labor expended in civilization’s effort to overcome material scarcity, it’s astonishing that we manage to take our current state of abundance for granted. Even more astonishing is that we have achieved a state of abundance with a steep reduction in the amount of human labor required to produce it.

Klein and Thompson acknowledge this state of abundance, sort of. “An uncanny economy has emerged,” they write, “in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most.” These trappings, which they call the “startling abundance of the goods that fill a house,” have “distracted us,” they believe, from the creeping emergence of scarcity in other realms.

There is some truth to the notion that, in our “uncanny economy,” the things we don’t need seem to be cheaper than ever while the things we do need – housing, health insurance, family care – seem to be getting more expensive all the time. Yet, scratch the examples of scarcity raised by Klein and Thompson and you will often find abundance hiding underneath. 

Health insurance is getting more expensive, but a smaller share of the population is uninsured than at any time in recent history, and insurance buys an array of miracle cures unimaginable decades ago. We have no shortage of medical specialists or medical administrators, an overabundance that, paradoxically, results in America spending more money on health care for worse outcomes than other wealthy nations. 

Child care may cost more today, but a larger share of young children are cared for in professional settings (as opposed to by a friend or neighbor) than ever. Housing prices – especially in the “superstar” cities that Klein and Thompson suggest that most people seeking economic opportunity would move to if they could – are certainly high, but the typical American lives in a space at least twice as large as in the late 19th century. And, in significant portions of the country – including my former Rust Belt hometown – the most urgent problem in recent decades has not been that housing is too scarce but that it is too abundant, leading to widespread housing abandonment. 

And that’s not to mention that the vast majority of Americans – and a large and growing share of the population of the planet – now have access to all the world’s knowledge, infinite streams of entertainment and cultural content, instant videophonic communications, navigational tools that would have been the envy of any pilot or military general a few decades ago, and so much more in a device the size of a deck of cards that one can carry in one’s pocket. 

The aggregate material abundance of modern America does not mean that everyone has what they need to survive, or to live well – far from it. But our great-grandparents, if dropped into our world, would see it not as a place of scarcity, but rather of extravagant wealth – bigger cars, more abundant food, and consumer goods that are more sophisticated in almost every way.

And then they might wonder why the hell everyone is so miserable. 

Misery among riches

New York Times writer David Leonhart recently highlighted a growing paradox in American life: Our economy is the envy of all the world’s nations in terms of aggregate growth. Yet, on many measures of life satisfaction, we trail other countries – and are falling farther behind by the year. 

The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy of any rich nation, the highest rate of fatal drug overdoses and among the highest rates of youth depression. America ranks lower among wealthy nations in life satisfaction than we did three decades ago, despite decades of economic growth and rapid technological change. Americans are more socially isolated, less trusting and more politically polarized. We sit alone and unhappy amidst our riches. 

The issue of America’s stagnating life expectancy is one that “Abundance” co-author Derek Thompson has addressed in other writing, calling America a “rich death trap.” Among the potential causes he highlights: obesity, a classic “problem of abundance” driven in part by increased access to calorie-dense foods (fueled by government-funded research and subsidies of exactly the kind Klein and Thompson recommend in other realms) and sedentary lifestyles made necessary by a superabundance of cars, highways, parking lots and strip malls – all of them incredibly expensive to build and maintain. Only a country as staggeringly wealthy as the United States could afford to build a system so efficient at sending so many of us to an early grave.

The idea that material overabundance might be a contributing cause of our ill health and unhappiness, rather than a solution to it, is not new. By the early 2000s, the term “affluenza” had come to synthesize the idea that society’s growing wealth was not making us happier and could, in fact, be making us sick. In his article in the New York Times, Leonhart quotes Stanford psychologist Anna Lembke: “Our brains evolved for a world of scarcity, and the kind of abundance we are experiencing now is a mismatch for our ancient wiring.”

What, Leonhardt’s story seems to ask, if we are not living in a world of scarcity at all, but rather a state of abundance? And what if it is our failure to recognize that we have achieved abundance, and adjust our habits and priorities accordingly, that is at the root of America’s social crisis? 

If that diagnosis is correct, it would mean that the branch of the center-left represented by Klein and Thompson – and the political movement they hope to build – is fixated on solving the wrong problem. 

Solving old problems, creating new problems

The problem Klein and Thompson propose to solve – that of scarcity – may be the wrong problem, but it is an appealing one to target because its solutions are tractable within the current political and economic order. It also, coincidentally, happens to align with the economic interests of powerful industries who stand to benefit from abundance-unleashing policies. 

But fixating society on the wrong goal comes with consequences – not just the opportunity cost of diverting attention away from our deeper, more existential challenges, but also literal ecological and other costs that go largely unexplored in “Abundance.”

An example: The authors cite approvingly a vision of energy “superabundance” proposed by Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado, which is defined “modestly, as simply every human having access to energy that residents of Iceland enjoy.” A little research and some basic math, though, shows this goal to be far from “modest.” Iceland is the second-most energy intensive country on Earth after only oil- and gas-rich Qatar. Providing every human on the planet with Icelandic levels of energy would require a seven-fold increase in worldwide energy production. Iceland can afford to use so much energy, in part, because it sits atop literal volcanoes. The rest of us are not so lucky. Even clean energy sources such as wind and solar power require minerals to dig up, land to disturb, and the construction of infrastructure to get energy to the places where it is used – none of it cost-free. Continuing to rely on fossil fuels to meet part of that growing demand for energy would be even worse.

Getting half of America’s water from desalination, another vision from the “abundant” future, would create huge volumes of mineral-intensive brine that would need to be safely disposed of without endangering marine life. Getting more of our produce from vertical farms would require incredible amounts of energy, with one source estimating that nine acres of solar panels would be required to produce electricity for one acre of indoor crops. And so on.

That technology and economic growth can have unforeseen negative consequences is something Klein and Thompson acknowledge in relation to the 20th century environmental movement, whose success in cleaning the air and water they hail. But that was then and this is now, and it is all but assumed in “Abundance” that the technologies of the future will be ecologically benign in a way that the last generation’s technologies have turned out not to be – a questionable assumption given both the recent track record of industrial development and the political drift of the current U.S. government, whose values and technological aspirations, it’s safe to assume, Klein and Thompson do not share.

More of what matters?

To determine which technologies and practices will be worth our time and money and might be capable of helping to untangle today’s myriad crises – from climate change to crashing biodiversity to income inequality to loneliness – we need a framework, a way of choosing a course of action from among a rapidly expanding range of possibilities. You will not find that framework in “Abundance.”

Klein and Thompson define “abundance” as “the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had.” But they fail to deal with the meaty questions embedded in that saccharine definition: What is “enough”? What do we “need”? And, most importantly, what constitutes “lives better than what we have had”? 

To produce, as the authors promise, “not just more, but more of what matters,” we need new ways of finding consensus around what matters. We need a new way of rebuilding common ground when the tools emerging from our current abundance – our smartphones, our algorithmically targeted social media feeds, our consumption-driven attention economy that diminishes our contact with other human beings, and so much more – are pulling us farther apart.

To elevate “abundance” as the core challenge of our times without being careful to define what we want to be more abundant (and what we want to be less abundant) is to open the door to co-optation by forces that do not share the humanistic, ecologically sensitive point of view that Klein and Thompson advocate. To any American who is not listening closely, the “energy abundance” promoted by Klein and Thompson and the fossil fuel-driven “energy dominance” proposed by President Trump sound all but indistinguishable. If anything, the former sounds like a weak, “near beer” substitute for the latter. Why would you want to sign up for a future of lab-grown meat when you can have the real thing right now? 

Baked deeply into “Abundance” is the idea of technology as a deus ex machina that absolves us of the need to make choices about “what matters” – choices that are more difficult, but more important than ever. How do we distribute the wealth that technology provides when that same technology threatens to put more of us out of work? How do we square our material wealth with our personal unhappiness and extract our society from its current downward spiral? And how do we mold not just our use of energy, but also our consumption of resources and our impacts on the natural world to ensure a vibrant and healthy planet for the future? 

A new vision

There is a brief moment in “Abundance” that provides an opening for these deeper questions. Klein and Thompson open the book with a sort of dream sequence of what life in their abundant future would look like. It is a post-graduate urbanist’s dream – a world of locally grown greens, comfortable apartments and two-hour flights to London. But it is also, the authors suggest, a future of broadly shared prosperity, built on wealth produced by AI. They fantasize that artificial intelligence has brought about shared wealth and shorter work weeks because “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.”

This is not, of course, the direction the tech industry, dominated by a few major players who hold unimaginable levels of concentrated societal and economic power, is currently going. Technology in recent decades has driven intense wealth concentration, not wealth dispersal, and investors in AI companies are currently placing bets that the future will be more of the same. Reversing that trend will require a revolution more profound and sweeping than even the New Deal – an economic reordering of earth-shaking proportions, built on new notions of “what matters.”

The only way to achieve the result Klein and Thompson seem to desire is to have that bold, paradigm-shattering conversation now, and not after some mythical future state of abundance has been achieved. And we can have that conversation now if we recognize that, in nearly every material way that matters, we are already “abundant.”

A societal conversation that begins with a recognition of our current state of abundance can allow us to look at our societal problems, and solutions, in new ways. It might, as Klein and Thompson suggest in the above anecdote, lead to new and more expansive ideas about what constitutes the “commons,” more holistic and elegant solutions to our ecological problems that don’t recreate the mistakes of the past, or new ways to attain the things that are truly scarce in 21st century America – time and space to connect with and care for others, opportunities to indulge our sense of wonder and reconnect with nature, and much more.

In “Abundance,” Klein and Thompson seek to offer a cure for what ails America. But the source of the disease is not our failure to produce enough meat, enough energy or even enough housing or slots in day care centers. The source is rather our lack of recognition of the abundance we currently enjoy – abundance brought to us by centuries of the blood, sweat and brainpower of our ancestors – and our inability thus far to transition our economy from an endless quest for more into a directed and conscious quest for better. 

For the set of discrete societal problems that really can be “solved with supply” – and they do exist – “Abundance” provides some useful ideas. But in failing to recognize that those problems are the exceptions, not the rule, the book fails to meet both the dangerous perils and the exhilarating possibilities of the moment.