* cut red tape that’s preventing government or the market from achieving liberal goals, and
* when you consider new red tape, make sure to weigh the benefits of the regulation against the damage done by them
Used_Maybe1299 on
Unrelated to the point of this article but every time I see that Abundance cover I think it’s AI generated.
JeromesNiece on
The book’s final chapter addresses their reasoning for why they didn’t provide a more detailed agenda or policy prescription. To summarize what they said, you can have a wonderfully detailed policy proposal, but if you haven’t convinced anyone on the motivation behind the changes, it will all be swiftly undone anyway. Their goal is to convince more people of the goal to work toward, and if you can get there, the how will sort itself out.
You may be unconvinced of this reasoning, but you have to acknowledge it, lest you come across as not actually reading the book that you’re reviewing.
jtalin on
> Each of these restrictions on building, on their own, make sense. Who doesn’t want nice homes, environmental protection, union jobs, and community input?
*Raises hand* (on at least some of those)
Vaccinated_An0n on
Honestly a nothing-burger review. The review writer thinks that Abundance should have been more explicit in prescribing the policy changes that should take place when in reality the required policy changes will vary a lot by location and topic.
surreptitioussloth on
I think the two biggest problems for achieving abundance goals are:
Identifying what regulations/procedures need to be reformed vs are doing their job effectively
Identifying what regulations/procedures are bad because of commitment to process vs because the people implementing them legitimately do not want the effective outcome
Like, in NIMBY towns, you can blame a lot on onerous procedural requirements, but if the people there do not want more building, that’s not really a problem addressed by focusing on red tape
Another example is the Broadband expansion when republicans insisted on longer/more in depth planning procedures before spending the money, at least partially based on prior failure of providers to deliver on their promises, and probably partially in service of obstructionism
What is an abunist to do in that situation? Maybe you can put forward shorter timelines and more efficient planning procedures, but there will come a point where you can get things done with long planning process or not at all. Which decision leads to more abundance?
KrabS1 on
(Obligatory: as a Redditor, I haven’t read the article, but…) I think something that a lot of reviews of this book miss is that its intended to be closer to the first piece on this, and not the last. The means are super complicated and difficult, and I don’t think anyone (the authors included) have any illusions about that. The idea here is more on the “grand vision” side about re-orienting how we think about governments and problems.
The good news is that SOME of the hard work here has been done. There are a lot of policy ideas floating around left leaning spaces, but most have stood as stand-alone concepts with no grander vision or coalition. The YIMBY movement is by far the largest of these, but they are all over. I think the idea of this book is to create a framework that can fit in these plans, point them all in roughly the same direction, help prioritize them (a little – this part was definitely lacking), and help give a framework for future work in this space.
IDK – I guess this would be the equivalent of Reagan’s small government laissez-faire conservative vision, or FDR’s New Deal politics, or something on those levels. Those are big ideas, but on their own they don’t really do anything. They are more a framework to fit policy ideas into, and a framing for the party moving forward. For a long time, Republican’s brand was “the conservative party.” Klein and Thompson are proposing that Democrats work to brand themselves as “the abundance party,” which believes in government and is looking for ways to make it work better.
8 Comments
!PING YIMBY&READING
I thought the means were
* cut red tape that’s preventing government or the market from achieving liberal goals, and
* when you consider new red tape, make sure to weigh the benefits of the regulation against the damage done by them
Unrelated to the point of this article but every time I see that Abundance cover I think it’s AI generated.
The book’s final chapter addresses their reasoning for why they didn’t provide a more detailed agenda or policy prescription. To summarize what they said, you can have a wonderfully detailed policy proposal, but if you haven’t convinced anyone on the motivation behind the changes, it will all be swiftly undone anyway. Their goal is to convince more people of the goal to work toward, and if you can get there, the how will sort itself out.
You may be unconvinced of this reasoning, but you have to acknowledge it, lest you come across as not actually reading the book that you’re reviewing.
> Each of these restrictions on building, on their own, make sense. Who doesn’t want nice homes, environmental protection, union jobs, and community input?
*Raises hand* (on at least some of those)
Honestly a nothing-burger review. The review writer thinks that Abundance should have been more explicit in prescribing the policy changes that should take place when in reality the required policy changes will vary a lot by location and topic.
I think the two biggest problems for achieving abundance goals are:
Identifying what regulations/procedures need to be reformed vs are doing their job effectively
Identifying what regulations/procedures are bad because of commitment to process vs because the people implementing them legitimately do not want the effective outcome
Like, in NIMBY towns, you can blame a lot on onerous procedural requirements, but if the people there do not want more building, that’s not really a problem addressed by focusing on red tape
Another example is the Broadband expansion when republicans insisted on longer/more in depth planning procedures before spending the money, at least partially based on prior failure of providers to deliver on their promises, and probably partially in service of obstructionism
What is an abunist to do in that situation? Maybe you can put forward shorter timelines and more efficient planning procedures, but there will come a point where you can get things done with long planning process or not at all. Which decision leads to more abundance?
(Obligatory: as a Redditor, I haven’t read the article, but…) I think something that a lot of reviews of this book miss is that its intended to be closer to the first piece on this, and not the last. The means are super complicated and difficult, and I don’t think anyone (the authors included) have any illusions about that. The idea here is more on the “grand vision” side about re-orienting how we think about governments and problems.
The good news is that SOME of the hard work here has been done. There are a lot of policy ideas floating around left leaning spaces, but most have stood as stand-alone concepts with no grander vision or coalition. The YIMBY movement is by far the largest of these, but they are all over. I think the idea of this book is to create a framework that can fit in these plans, point them all in roughly the same direction, help prioritize them (a little – this part was definitely lacking), and help give a framework for future work in this space.
IDK – I guess this would be the equivalent of Reagan’s small government laissez-faire conservative vision, or FDR’s New Deal politics, or something on those levels. Those are big ideas, but on their own they don’t really do anything. They are more a framework to fit policy ideas into, and a framing for the party moving forward. For a long time, Republican’s brand was “the conservative party.” Klein and Thompson are proposing that Democrats work to brand themselves as “the abundance party,” which believes in government and is looking for ways to make it work better.