Some thoughts on "Abundance"

Niklaus and I went for a walk a couple of weeks ago and Ezra Klein's "Abundance" came up as a topic of conversation. Since neither of us had actually read the book, Niklaus made the brilliant and altogether novel suggestion that we should actually do that and then perhaps come back and discuss the book after that. After much consideration, I ended up listening to the book in the car using Libro.fm, which I think assigns some trivial amount of revenue to Flyleaf Books.

Broadly speaking, Klein is onto something here and listening to his book wasn't a waste of the scant car time I get between the office, the Farm and home these days. Undoubtedly Democrats (primarily, in America) have larded together too many layers of restraint on lots of things people want to do in the world these days, raising compliance costs. Broadly speaking, that's why the sane amongst us understand that the warp and woof of American history has given rise to alternations in regimes, with Democrats adding regulations on and then Republicans trimming them back, until some sort of crisis comes and makes it clear we need more back (the burning of the Cuyahoga River and the Financial Crisis loom large here).

Klein puts the accents in the right places and argues convincingly about housing scarcity as a huge societal problem and cause of homelessness, no doubt. But when he holds out Houston as an exemplar and the huge number of housing units it has been able to add due to it's lack of zoning, he kind of forgets how the Houston metro area's willingness to build in watery lowlands has caused it to be an epicenter of home insurance damage claims when climate change strengthened hurricanes come through. If you build a house in a swamp so people can sleep there, have you really created abundance? 

Klein argues convincingly that we should be pursuing a lighter regulatory touch around energy abundance because having more bountiful sources of energy could help us solve some of the big problems that bedevil us. Briefly, making it easier to have transmission lines to get solar power generation to where the power will be used and to build nuclear power plants (and harness fusion) could get us a long way towards carbon capture and sequestration, for example.

One place I'm not sure he's right is that less is less and more is more in all cases. First and foremost I think about America and our fetish for freestanding single family homes designed for car culture. I remain unconvinced that this is the best way. I think 1600-1800 square feet of semidetached for family of 4 with good soundproofing and better parks with good public transportation would provide for the higher populaton density that promotes better human connection and higher productivity. Yes, it sounds like Europe.

The physical infrastructure of Europe and a culture where businesses can scale up and down (i.e. hire and fire) as needed and individuals can try, fail, file and file for bankruptcy without stigma does not sound all that bad.

Anyway, I am basically farting out text now and must move on. I will keep an eye out for a copy of Klein's book at one of our local used book stores and buy the physical thing. An important book.