Efficiency and Abundance

Lowering costs or shifting them?

Hi folks and welcome back to Hackwatch! I hope you haven’t missed us too much; I’ve been dealing with health issues and the rest of the team has been busy, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately, we’ll have another hiatus after this piece as well; I’ll be having surgery today to remove a portion of my lung and the tumor it’s housing. Don’t get cancer, but if you do, this is the kind to have—it’s a slow-growing tumor called a carcinoid that usually doesn’t metastasize and can often be cured by surgery alone. I’m very lucky as people with tumors go. I’ll probably come out on the other side at the cost of just half a lung.

But while I’m waiting for that, I’ve been following the discourse around Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, and the movement it comes out of. (Even though I’m grateful that I probably only need a single surgery to handle a large tumor, I could really go for one of Ezra and Derek’s star pills from page 2.)

[Ed. Note: If you want some music to listen to while reading (or in general), I’d recommend “Souls in the Machine” by The Goo Goo Dolls, “All at Once” by The Fray, “The Devil” by The Wandering Hearts, “Relatively Easy” by Jason Isbell, “This Land” by Gary Clark Jr., “Blame it on Me” by George Ezra, and “Our Bright Future” by Tracy Chapman.]

In the interest of full transparency, I have been cynical about the abundance agenda for a while. I have been following it for the last two years, seeing its metamorphosis from a single essay to a well-funded and organized political movement, and in November of 2024 I wrote what I believe was among the first widely read pieces critical of the movement. Despite Ezra Klein and others calling it a hit piece, I think the actual criticism was relatively tepid. My main objective was to highlight how money from crypto, Big Tech, and the oil industry was involved in the movement, and raise the question of why and what powerful industry players think they stand to gain from an “abundance agenda.”

It also garnered a lot of takes, including quite a bit of criticism centered on my calling the movement “rebranded neoliberalism.” I explained what I mean by the term here at the time. I’ve also posted another blog this morning defining neoliberalism on the RDP site, which you can see here. This passage captures the thrust of how I think about the term:

“In short, neoliberalism is an economic perspective where markets are the benchmark. It includes privatization of state services, but also specific ways of thinking of government “like a business:” pursuing efficiency and evaluating success in market terms through cost-benefit analysis. It involves a subordination of ideals of public good under this framework. Obviously, programs were always evaluated for costs and benefits; what the neoliberal turn changed was how things are evaluated. Harms that cannot be readily converted into monetary costs are frequently secondary under our modern neoliberal analyses.”

And, while I think Klein and Thompson are among the least neoliberal in the abundance movement, their version of efficiency still buys into this exact sort of framing. Whether they themselves are neoliberals is academic; neoliberalism, at least as I’m using it, is neither bad nor good. It can be used to justify privatizing public libraries and union-busting (bad) or to oppose reckless protectionism and isolationism (good). I’m mostly including this part to clarify that and try to move beyond the focus on vocabulary.

Efficiency’s Effect

For the rest of this column, I want to focus on this way of thinking and why the pursuit of cost-efficiency and easier building inherently includes large tradeoffs that I have not seen considered nearly seriously enough.

Let’s begin with an example from Abundance. On page 74, the authors lament that while we once built things like the transcontinental railroad, we now struggle to take on projects of that scale.

However, Klein and Thompson don’t deal with the fact that Central Pacific, who built most of the western side of the railroad through California, Nevada, and Utah, exploited Chinese immigrants who were paid half of what white workers were. Many of those workers died or suffered serious injury. Not to mention that it was incentivized by the federal government giving away huge tracts of land to the railroads, including through areas that had only recently seen Native American genocide.

That process was also insanely corrupt, with the Union Pacific Railroad, who built the eastern side of the railroad from the Missouri River to Utah, engaging in massive fraud in what became the Credit Mobilier scandal.

One of the messier parts of the #discourse around the book has been a weird back and forth of abundists and critics all trying to claim the legacy of FDR. Matt Yglesias, for instance, argued that FDR was largely able to build because the procedural roadblocks that hamper building had largely not been set up yet. But the Roosevelt administration was still expanding building at an enormous scale while it had perhaps the strongest policy of favoring unionized contractors that we’ve ever had.

I actually do think Yglesias is correct on the topline. But, I think where he and his allies stray is ignoring that some of the most costly restrictions we’ve put in place are things like “it’s not okay to bulldoze poor communities,” “we can’t just abuse our workers,” “let’s make sure we aren’t racist,” and “no poisoning people.” Regulations may be a barrier to building at the speed of, say, China, but many of those regulations are the cost of kind governance. It is challenging to quantify all the lives saved by disasters that didn’t happen because of tighter regulations, but there is no shortage of horror stories about the human and ecological consequences of projects built without adequate guardrails, at home and abroad, in the past and the present.

Our current regulatory system is far from adequate; even with regulations and initiatives to address environmental damage, disparate racial impact and more, we still allow the Tennessee Valley Authority to dump carcinogenic waste in a black community, for instance. The past that Klein and Thompson mourn, where we could build more freely, was upheld by pillars of genocide, monumental theft, and wanton disregard for frontline communities. I don’t expect either of them to condone this type of conduct, but to ever truly understand why we have those irksome regulations, these past atrocities and their ongoing reverberations need to be addressed.

Klein and Thompson’s book gestures towards workplace safety regulations as an example of inefficiency. How much of an increase in worker injury should be tolerated in the name of speedier construction? They take aim at a patchwork of environmental laws aimed at, among other things, preventing widespread species extinctions. How much are they willing to join their libertarian pro-abundance counterparts in targeting laws like the Endangered Species Act and their state-level iterations to expedite building, even if that extinguishes entire species? Are Klein and Thompson actually comfortable with the consequences if their agenda were widely implemented at scale? I’d like to see someone ask them directly.

(Honestly, we’re just hoping that they debate any sharp-elbowed critic without a vested interest in reciprocally friendly coverage in The New York Times, Atlantic, or Ringer podcast network).

We still allow brutal working conditions in the United States, especially regarding heat exposure. The rail workers likely to vanguard any new transcontinental railroad are still only barely able to seek medical attention when sick and are subject to grueling work schedules. Freight rail companies are still fighting unions over having two people operate their engines, as opposed to one. And fellow abundist Matt Yglesias has previously pointed to this push to require a minimum crew of two as an example of unions rent-seeking to preserve member jobs at the expense of higher transportation costs.

What that view misses, though, is any interrogation of who the second person would be. It isn’t simply a redundancy. Absent that rule, all engines are only required to have one person on board to pilot the train. The second person would be an engineer. Train crashes are rare, but when they happen they are disastrous. Just think back to East Palestine, Ohio. A crew of two with an engineer means a better chance of realizing when something goes wrong because one of them won’t be focused on driving. And when something does go wrong, addressing it safely is much more doable with two people. Think about how hard it must be to try and get your train to a depot while simultaneously driving, trying to fix or manage whatever mechanical problem arises, and trying to communicate that something’s gone wrong.

Similarly, community involvement is meant to allow those impacted by new infrastructure to protect themselves. It can absolutely slow the building process and add additional costs. But the unspoken tradeoff is that we are more likely to—intentionally or unintentionally—harm and exploit people without it. What happens without these processes can be seen in projects that skirt them; in Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI data center went ahead and expanded on-site fossil fuel turbines without a permit, and the community is now being exposed to dangerous air pollution and carcinogenic chemicals like formaldehyde.

When you want to build a pipeline through a populated area, you have a choice: go around and/or take additional safety measures, or go ahead as planned. Many of these regulations do not simply add costs, they shift the costs. The intent is to internalize costs so that frontline communities have less to bear. Safety regulations shift the cost of accidents from workers (death, injuries, etc.) to their employers (more precaution, risk mitigation).

Workplace safety requirements also make a certain level of safety a societal guarantee and thus outside the marketplace of negotiation. That transformation increases the leverage of both witting but vulnerable and unwitting workers while ensuring that no one needs engineering and biochemical specialties in order to assess the tradeoffs of taking jobs that might be riskier than they appear from afar.

There are some instances where you can eliminate regulatory burden where the risk of such tradeoffs are minimal. Upzoning, for instance. As progressives, we’ve always opposed restrictive zoning, as much of it was deliberately constructed to facilitate white flight (see: redlining). But to get back to building at the scale of the transcontinental railroad, we have to consider the externalities presented by new bargains.

Efficiency is not costless. But it is unclear to me how abundists would balance building against the wellbeing of affected people when they conflict. There is a way to do it, but not without recognizing and owning that this is a live and urgent question, and perhaps not without necessarily narrowing “abundance” from a cardinal principle to one of a set of priorities, something some of its champions are actively opposed to.

If “abundance” is meant as an overriding principle, then that means reckoning with who will bear the costs of building that are being re-externalized.