While I think we need to pay attention to the bad fiscal forecast, your argument about old age entitlements always seems confused to me.
Elderly people have higher wealth on average because most of them have been saving for retirement. They need entitlements on top of that because some of them haven't saved, and (due to short term bias and planning that takes entitlements for granted) almost none of them have saved enough to maintain their standard of living in retirement.
Since old people's labor is not very productive, wealth plus entitlements is their sole source of consumption. So they are mostly in a worse position when it comes to real spending power than younger people.
This also forgets that the pool of retirement savings is very unequally distributed (again, not really a concern for libertarians, but still noteworthy in its own right). The average household aged 65 and above has approximately $600,000 in retirement savings, whereas the median household income is only $200,000. What's more, the median 65+ household has an income of $60,000, which (based on the recommended formula of saving 6x your household income) suggests that the majority of seniors lack sufficient savings to retire. Reforming old-age entitlements would likely have the effect of either (1) compelling older Americans to work more (not good for me as a socialist, but as a Right-Abundance guy, your mileage may vary), which could limit the ability of younger generations to progress in their careers, or (2) a sizeable increase in poverty among the 65+ crowd. Sounds a lot like abundance for me, but not for thee.
The obvious answer is that seniors hold much of their wealth in real estate, which is not part of the calculation you provided. Most should be downsizing on their houses and freeing up savings for retirement instead of ransacking the youth.
"Median Net WorthAccording to the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances:
Under 35: Median net worth is $39,000
Ages 65–74: Median net worth is $409,900
These figures include your total assets (like real estate, investments, cash, retirement accounts) minus liabilities (like mortgages, loans).
The word "Abundance" clearly has a technical meaning unfamiliar to me. A link to an explanation would be nice, particularly as, given that it's a repurposed common english word, google is quite likely to offer readers little that is relevant to this meaning.
I am vaguely familiar with a political position that thinks we (world, or nation) have enough that we don't need to have anyone desperately poor, and should support everyone at a basic level, without a giant bureaucracy verifying true need, let alone term limits for welfare recipients. But from context, I don't think this is what Abundant DC wants - from reading your article, it almost seems as if their main goal is to farther increase the concentration of people in cities, particularly the larger ones, basically by making large cities more livable.
The practical/core idea of Abundance is that many widespread policies (particularly NIMBYism, everything bagel-ism, and sluggish governmental processes) functionally strangle supply. (And, also, that the government can work to increase supply where markets would fail to.) If you have strangled supply, you can spend as much as you like on (e.g.) subsidizing housing, college education, or medical care, but the supply can't meet the demand so you just make prices go up.
One quote from Abundance on specifically housing, for example:
"The way to think about homelessness, they write, is to imagine a game of musical chairs. With ten chairs and ten people, everyone will find a chair when the music stops. That will be true even if one of the players is on crutches. With nine chairs, someone will inevitably be left out. That’s when individual life circumstances begin to predict homelessness. If you live in a city with too few homes, poverty and drug abuse and unemployment and mental illness make it likelier that you will be among those who end up without a home. But the cause of homelessness isn’t the poverty or the addiction or the unemployment. All those conditions are far more prevalent in, say, West Virginia than in California, and yet California has six times the per capita homelessness of West Virginia."
That makes a kind of intuitive sense to me. (Of course that doesn't mean it's right.)
I'd also note that it seems as if standards for housing have gone up, with presumably unforeseen results. When I was a child, we lived in a variety of elderly housing, of interest only to the poor. I remember in particular the year where my mother suddenly acquired a battle scarred tom cat, having discovered the building had a rat problem, as well as the insect problem we already knew about. (We moved about a year later.) One can say things like "wretched housing; no one should have to live that way", and destroy housing like that, or fine the landlord till they give up and abandon the building. But I'd still prefer living with bugs and even rats than in a tent or in what I hear is normal for homeless shelters.
I don’t think there’s a definitive term for Abundance. It’s a term adopted by this political movement. Here is how the book Abundance describes it: “it's about having "the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet.”
The main thrust of the book is that we have ceded to much control to parochial interests, like neighborhood groups, unions, and burdensome regulation and can no longer build the things we need to accomplish this.
The Abundance movement originated from the YIMBY movement, and most YIMBYs live in expensive cities like SF, DC, and NYC. Hence, the intense focus on housing costs, and then to a lesser extent, concerns particular to cities: public transportation, etc. This is why it is predominantly liberal.
However, as Richard notes, these concerns cross the political spectrum. Even if you abolished capitalism, the new government would be stymied by the same forces. Libertarians of course already dislike unions and regulations. So there’s something for everyone.
In fact, I'd argue that the Abundance movement offers a much needed landing strip for apostates and the disillusioned from MAGA who can provide critical mass for the pro-liberal de-Trumpification of American that can bring America back to its founding ideals from the scourge of MAGA and its protofascist thought
Even now despite corrosion of American right's mind, WSJ still continuously correct on some issues vs more statist FT in its editorial line due to these insights, even if (much, much less than others) it still sometimes phrases criticism of Trump in the most gentle and occasionally almost Straussianly opaque terms
> In Detroit, the government at one point was having trouble selling abandoned homes for $1. The reasons are obvious enough, with many Midwestern cities having murder rates that rival those of some of the most violent Latin American countries.
I don't think that factored into it. What I read in coverage of the phenomenon was that these houses with a sale price of $1 never sold because the city passed the former owner's tax bills through to the new owner, pushing the actual sale price into the tens of thousands of dollars.
No there is going to be more competition for labor on the construction job market and their pay is going to go down and the houses are subsequently going to cost a little bit less
If there’s “more competition for labor on the construction job market” that means cost of labor goes up. Really not trying to be argumentative. Just to explain what I mean: Say you’re a roofer used to getting $500/day. Someone offers you $450/day instead. You’re going to say no. If they offer you $600/day instead, you might consider that. There’s no shot you’re going to willingly take a job for $450/day unless you lost your $500/day gig and there’s no better options.
A lot of the price on a house is also driven up strictly because the pool of housing is constricted by the HOA and locals and paper work and the price on housing would go down even if the construction workers earned a small percent more. The construction workers would earn a little bit more but the price on the house would be less because the company that build it would not be able to take a high margin when there is multiple houses being built in the same area and are competing for people to buy them
You’re explaining a situation where builders overbuild. Builders might accidentally do that in some specific areas. That happened during the Global Financial Crisis.
I liked this piece. In your housing article you argued that anti-monopoly types are wrong, since concentration is low by DOJ standards and zoning is the actual barrier. That makes sense there. But in tech and data markets, concentration is much higher and directly shapes information and political debate. So I’m curious how your reasoning would apply in that case.
While housing still has hundreds of players, in search, app stores, and digital ads it’s basically one or two firms with network effects locking everyone in. User behavior is the profit source, and platforms charge rents on access. By some measures, five firms capture almost all the ad revenue. Under these conditions, it’s more like concentration itself acting like a barrier, even without state protection.
So is abundance supposed to regard that as “efficiency,” (the way you argue about homebuilders)? Or would a Reaganite version of abundance need to take gatekeeper power in data and platform markets more seriously? If a few firms control most news and political debate, deciding what people see while selling the same data for profit, the result is closer to information management than open competition. And the incentives still push/nudge toward culture wars and the attention economy. Too close to oversight, too far from liberty.
While I think we need to pay attention to the bad fiscal forecast, your argument about old age entitlements always seems confused to me.
Elderly people have higher wealth on average because most of them have been saving for retirement. They need entitlements on top of that because some of them haven't saved, and (due to short term bias and planning that takes entitlements for granted) almost none of them have saved enough to maintain their standard of living in retirement.
Since old people's labor is not very productive, wealth plus entitlements is their sole source of consumption. So they are mostly in a worse position when it comes to real spending power than younger people.
This also forgets that the pool of retirement savings is very unequally distributed (again, not really a concern for libertarians, but still noteworthy in its own right). The average household aged 65 and above has approximately $600,000 in retirement savings, whereas the median household income is only $200,000. What's more, the median 65+ household has an income of $60,000, which (based on the recommended formula of saving 6x your household income) suggests that the majority of seniors lack sufficient savings to retire. Reforming old-age entitlements would likely have the effect of either (1) compelling older Americans to work more (not good for me as a socialist, but as a Right-Abundance guy, your mileage may vary), which could limit the ability of younger generations to progress in their careers, or (2) a sizeable increase in poverty among the 65+ crowd. Sounds a lot like abundance for me, but not for thee.
https://www.guardianlife.com/retirement/savings-by-age
The obvious answer is that seniors hold much of their wealth in real estate, which is not part of the calculation you provided. Most should be downsizing on their houses and freeing up savings for retirement instead of ransacking the youth.
"Median Net WorthAccording to the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances:
Under 35: Median net worth is $39,000
Ages 65–74: Median net worth is $409,900
These figures include your total assets (like real estate, investments, cash, retirement accounts) minus liabilities (like mortgages, loans).
The overall national median net worth in 2022 stood at about $192,700–$193,000" https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/average-net-worth-by-age
The word "Abundance" clearly has a technical meaning unfamiliar to me. A link to an explanation would be nice, particularly as, given that it's a repurposed common english word, google is quite likely to offer readers little that is relevant to this meaning.
I am vaguely familiar with a political position that thinks we (world, or nation) have enough that we don't need to have anyone desperately poor, and should support everyone at a basic level, without a giant bureaucracy verifying true need, let alone term limits for welfare recipients. But from context, I don't think this is what Abundant DC wants - from reading your article, it almost seems as if their main goal is to farther increase the concentration of people in cities, particularly the larger ones, basically by making large cities more livable.
The practical/core idea of Abundance is that many widespread policies (particularly NIMBYism, everything bagel-ism, and sluggish governmental processes) functionally strangle supply. (And, also, that the government can work to increase supply where markets would fail to.) If you have strangled supply, you can spend as much as you like on (e.g.) subsidizing housing, college education, or medical care, but the supply can't meet the demand so you just make prices go up.
One quote from Abundance on specifically housing, for example:
"The way to think about homelessness, they write, is to imagine a game of musical chairs. With ten chairs and ten people, everyone will find a chair when the music stops. That will be true even if one of the players is on crutches. With nine chairs, someone will inevitably be left out. That’s when individual life circumstances begin to predict homelessness. If you live in a city with too few homes, poverty and drug abuse and unemployment and mental illness make it likelier that you will be among those who end up without a home. But the cause of homelessness isn’t the poverty or the addiction or the unemployment. All those conditions are far more prevalent in, say, West Virginia than in California, and yet California has six times the per capita homelessness of West Virginia."
That makes a kind of intuitive sense to me. (Of course that doesn't mean it's right.)
I'd also note that it seems as if standards for housing have gone up, with presumably unforeseen results. When I was a child, we lived in a variety of elderly housing, of interest only to the poor. I remember in particular the year where my mother suddenly acquired a battle scarred tom cat, having discovered the building had a rat problem, as well as the insect problem we already knew about. (We moved about a year later.) One can say things like "wretched housing; no one should have to live that way", and destroy housing like that, or fine the landlord till they give up and abandon the building. But I'd still prefer living with bugs and even rats than in a tent or in what I hear is normal for homeless shelters.
It has been done on purpose and was perfectly "Forseen" on every step of the way to where the regulations are now
DEREGULATION, PRIVATISATION, AND GUTTING ENVIRONMENATL IMPACT TO QUICKEN PROCEEDINGS AND GET WORK DONE.
MORE HOUSING, MORE ENERGY + CHEAPER, FASTER INNOVATIONS + FASTER TECHOLOGY DIFFUSION = ABUNDANCE
I don’t think there’s a definitive term for Abundance. It’s a term adopted by this political movement. Here is how the book Abundance describes it: “it's about having "the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet.”
The main thrust of the book is that we have ceded to much control to parochial interests, like neighborhood groups, unions, and burdensome regulation and can no longer build the things we need to accomplish this.
The Abundance movement originated from the YIMBY movement, and most YIMBYs live in expensive cities like SF, DC, and NYC. Hence, the intense focus on housing costs, and then to a lesser extent, concerns particular to cities: public transportation, etc. This is why it is predominantly liberal.
However, as Richard notes, these concerns cross the political spectrum. Even if you abolished capitalism, the new government would be stymied by the same forces. Libertarians of course already dislike unions and regulations. So there’s something for everyone.
Did you mean Derek Thompson? (wrote Thomas)
Yes thanks
In fact, I'd argue that the Abundance movement offers a much needed landing strip for apostates and the disillusioned from MAGA who can provide critical mass for the pro-liberal de-Trumpification of American that can bring America back to its founding ideals from the scourge of MAGA and its protofascist thought
Even now despite corrosion of American right's mind, WSJ still continuously correct on some issues vs more statist FT in its editorial line due to these insights, even if (much, much less than others) it still sometimes phrases criticism of Trump in the most gentle and occasionally almost Straussianly opaque terms
> In Detroit, the government at one point was having trouble selling abandoned homes for $1. The reasons are obvious enough, with many Midwestern cities having murder rates that rival those of some of the most violent Latin American countries.
I don't think that factored into it. What I read in coverage of the phenomenon was that these houses with a sale price of $1 never sold because the city passed the former owner's tax bills through to the new owner, pushing the actual sale price into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Is that wrong?
YIMBY is kind of an interesting phenomenon to me because in my opinion they’re selling the promise that upzoning will make house prices go down.
Is it a problem that it won’t and can’t?
Maybe the empty promises are fine, idk.
Why would the prices not go down?
If builders start building so many apartments that the price appreciation starts to let off, they’ll quit and do something else instead.
No there is going to be more competition for labor on the construction job market and their pay is going to go down and the houses are subsequently going to cost a little bit less
If there’s “more competition for labor on the construction job market” that means cost of labor goes up. Really not trying to be argumentative. Just to explain what I mean: Say you’re a roofer used to getting $500/day. Someone offers you $450/day instead. You’re going to say no. If they offer you $600/day instead, you might consider that. There’s no shot you’re going to willingly take a job for $450/day unless you lost your $500/day gig and there’s no better options.
A lot of the price on a house is also driven up strictly because the pool of housing is constricted by the HOA and locals and paper work and the price on housing would go down even if the construction workers earned a small percent more. The construction workers would earn a little bit more but the price on the house would be less because the company that build it would not be able to take a high margin when there is multiple houses being built in the same area and are competing for people to buy them
You’re explaining a situation where builders overbuild. Builders might accidentally do that in some specific areas. That happened during the Global Financial Crisis.
I don't think you're wrong here, but I'm still curious as to your strategy of going out of your way to alienate the right, it feels counterproductive.
I liked this piece. In your housing article you argued that anti-monopoly types are wrong, since concentration is low by DOJ standards and zoning is the actual barrier. That makes sense there. But in tech and data markets, concentration is much higher and directly shapes information and political debate. So I’m curious how your reasoning would apply in that case.
While housing still has hundreds of players, in search, app stores, and digital ads it’s basically one or two firms with network effects locking everyone in. User behavior is the profit source, and platforms charge rents on access. By some measures, five firms capture almost all the ad revenue. Under these conditions, it’s more like concentration itself acting like a barrier, even without state protection.
So is abundance supposed to regard that as “efficiency,” (the way you argue about homebuilders)? Or would a Reaganite version of abundance need to take gatekeeper power in data and platform markets more seriously? If a few firms control most news and political debate, deciding what people see while selling the same data for profit, the result is closer to information management than open competition. And the incentives still push/nudge toward culture wars and the attention economy. Too close to oversight, too far from liberty.
Great pic! 🫡
Thank you for your service.