Talking Past Each Other
A Crisis Dispatch
Derek Thompson posted on X this week that he is glad the author of “Rent Control Is Fine, Actually” calls themself Unlearning Economics, because it’s good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and economists themselves. The post links to a Nathan Robinson piece in Current Affairs. The framing is the structural problem.
Where I stand on the substance: I generally like Abundance. Thompson and Klein have correctly identified a real cluster of pathologies in how progressive governance has actually operated for fifty years — the proceduralism that produces nothing, the veto-cracy, the NIMBY architecture, the way state capacity has been systematically degraded by the very people who claim they want to wield it. The reactions from the anti-liberal left that paint Abundance as a corporate Trojan horse — the Sam Seder version, the Nathan Robinson version — are overwrought. Most of them have not engaged with the actual book. Abundance is closer to the opposite of what they describe. It is an argument for the state to be able to do things again, in service of the kind of polity working people can live in.
Sam Seder is wrong on the substance, and the wrongness matters because Mamdani — who is currently mayor of New York and who is, on every account I have read, operationalizing significant parts of what Abundance recommends — is the figure who is actually showing how the supposed dichotomy between Abundance-style state-capacity reform and democratic-socialist values politics resolves. It does not resolve as a contradiction. It resolves as a synthesis. The mayor of the largest American city is doing the work Abundance describes, while calling himself a democratic socialist, while operating from the values position that Abundance is supposedly the corporate enemy of. The dichotomy collapses on inspection.
So far Thompson and I are on the same page.
