This Is Abundance

American author Ezra Klein has written a book about his vision for the future. The Climate Laundry conducted a rudimentary analysis to determine if he knows what he's talking about. Spoiler alert: he doesn't.

If ever you need a litmus test for whether something is a good idea or not, you might consider applying Musk's Razor. This consists of asking the question "Does Elon Musk think this is a good idea?", taking into account that this is a man who thinks it’s a good idea to allow spaceships to explode within international airspace, and do Hitler salutes in public.

Just such an opportunity arose this week, when the K-holed eugenicist opined to his minions of “a future of abundance for all”. This, curiously, is the very thesis that American authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lay out in a new book, Abundance, which they say will save the US Democratic party, liberalism in general, and the United States of America. The book has received a lot of attention, mostly because Klein is quite famous, and partly because Americans, faced with the fact that Donald Trump is currently imposing a white supremacist police state on their nation and its people, are looking for positive visions of the future.

In brief, the authors of Abundance say that humanity is in a pickle because we've simply not built enough stuff. Build more housing, infrastructure and energy generation, they claim, and everything will be OK. Or in their words: “This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.”

Unfortunately, there's a problem with the thesis, which is this: everything we have, outside of solar radiation and the occasional meteoroid, comes from our small, finite Earth. And at no point does Abundance acknowledge this.

This is a problem specifically because our planet’s finiteness lies at the very heart of our very gravest emergencies, and our wickedest of problems. After all, if our atmosphere wasn’t finite, we’d not be capable of elevating atmospheric CO2 concentrations to record levels. If our oceans were endless, we’d likely be incapable of acidifying them at such an alarming rate. If our forests were infinitely massive, deforestation wouldn’t be a global crisis. And so on.

And here's the rub: humanity has expressly done these things in its quest for abundance, or what economists call growth.

But on trawling through Abundance, it becomes clear that Klein and Thompson haven’t thought about the planet at all. "Abundance," they write, "is a state. It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had. And so we are focused on the building blocks of the future. Housing. Transportation. Energy. Health. And we are focused on the institutions and the people that must build and invent that future. Let’s begin."

Over the course of 304 pages, it transpires that the two authors are patently not systems thinkers. They argue for a liberalism that puts build, baby, build at the right, left and centre of its modus operandi, without any concern for what scientists call feedback loops, what economists call externalities, or what the CIA calls blowback. And if the global scientific community has, in its collective curiosity, shown us any single thing over the past half-century, it’s that understanding cause and effect really, really matters.

It is, then, instructive to look not at what Klein and Thompson do talk about in their book (the chapter titles excitedly exhort Americans to "Grow", "Build", "Govern", "Invent" and "Deploy"), but at what they’ve left out. And so, as a systems enthusiast, I conducted a rudimentary search of the text of Abundance for a non-exhaustive selection of topics that might assure me that these authors are at least interested in testing their thesis against, say, material reality.

Here are some terms that do not appear in the book. Subscribe to read on.