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Comment by LargeWu

1 day ago

This is a bad-faith description of the abundance movement.

The central thesis of the abundance movement is this: Every time we make a regulation, we are making a tradeoff. In the case of housing, an example would be "zoning only for single family housing". It's trading off affordability for quieter neighborhoods. Another might be "public housing contracts must favor minority-owned contractors". It trades off affordability for the development of a disadvantaged constituency.

Over time, many of these such regulations accumulate. Environmental reviews. Impact studies. Public comment periods. And while every individual regulation might be well meaning, the totality of them creates market distortions that disincentivize or even utterly prevent the very thing we're trying to accomplish.

So, the abundance movement looks at these and says we need to think about these in terms of tradeoffs, and pare back the regulations that have bad tradeoffs. This is often derided by critics as deregulation which makes developers more profitable. While that might be a side effect, it's not the main reason. It's deregulation to remove market distortions that, in the case of housing, constrain supply and therefore drive up housing costs.

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LargeWu

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CPLX  1 day ago

The abundance movement IS a bad faith movement. It’s entirely the creation of the donor/billionaire set and its rollout is designed to stop the Democratic Party from taking the obvious next step of tackling concentrated economic power, following the utter and abject failure of corporate centrism.

There’s literally no ambiguity here, the abundance summits feature obvious had faith actors like Andreesen.

This kind of thing has been going on for decades. It’s the same playbook as Third Way and New Dems and so on.

These people’s ideas led to the current political situation we’re in today. They don’t want to be held accountable for that.

So we get this Calvinball style collection of principles that change weekly but never seem to ever even consider doing something that Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and their friends don’t like.