Review: Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

This new entry into the Abundance territory is a wildly successful bestseller, written in the classic biz book bestseller style of charming or heart-wrenching anecdotes to illustrate the one basic idea of the book. The idea is that we need to build and grow our way to Abundance, and to do that we need to cut the red tape that the Left is administering everywhere.

My first reaction to the book was to see how the authors added to or responded to Diamandis 2012 Abundance book, which I included as part of my Tech-Led Abundance guiding image. The short, and puzzling, answer is they don’t. They don’t mention him or the book. I didn’t find an explanation (though I didn’t look too hard). The authors do say they are looking more at the political aspects than the technological ones, but come on! The two books are much more similar than they are different.

Let me reframe the core argument: we need grow and build our way out of the problems created by growing and building. There is not slightest wince in the book at this logic, but it’s a whopper for me.

That said, we do have some points of agreement. Klein and Thompson focus on the political problems that the Left has created with over-regulation. It aligns to a degree with my Ineffective Left driver. I emphasize the ideological purity test more than the authors. We agree that the Left has stalled progress, but we disagree on what progress is. Their version of progress is building and growth; mine is more effective experiments and scaling of decentralized small-scale community-based solutions. I have also taken a degrowth position, which Klein and Thompson swat away without much attention as impractical. What I find ironic, not just with them, but with what we might call the Growthers, is they point out all the ways in which people are slowing down growth, and then in the next sentence say degrowth can’t work.

In After Capitalism, I identified Tech-Led Abundance as one of three guiding images present to some degree today. I am very hopeful that technology can indeed enable Abundance. Where I part company is in the definition of abundance. As you might have gleaned from the title of this post, Abundance doesn’t mean more stuff [of course, for those lacking in the basics, more stuff is a good thing … this is a distribution problem]. And both Klein & Thompson and Diamandis see a world of more stuff – not just physical stuff but more virtual stuff too. More, more and more.

I prefer to see Abundance more in terms of well-being and spirituality in a holistic way that comfortable meets material needs, but given our current growth-driven problems, it probably means we’ve matured to the point where small is beautiful (a frequent target of the Growthers). I’m not saying we walk around in paper sacks and scavenge berries in the wild, but rather we make a deliberate and intentional decision to right-size our lifestyle to be in balance with nature.

A lot of the stuff Klein and Thompson cite is your typical too much red-tape stuff and I’m not sure there is much new added here. I sense it’s popular as it suggests technology will come to the rescue … providing hope, even its false hope. If we can cut the red tape, all will be well. I don’t want to be too hard on approach, as I’ve said many times, let’s figure out where we are going first. They suggest we build our way there. Fair enough, but as has come up many times in my podcasts and Q&A sessions, audiences are skeptic of the Tech-Led Abundance image … seeing it to close to today and too likely to be co-opted. Klein’ and Thompson’s version suggests this skepticism is well-founded. – Andy Hines