Comment by thrance
1 day ago
Truthfully, I don't. IMHO, abundance liberalism has a blind spot when it comes to the power of money in modern politics. We didn't stumble into a situation where buying a house requires an entire lifetime of work out of sheer bad luck. Some private interests greatly benefit from this situation and have enough power to keep things from changing.
Until we address this, and the abundance crowd doesn't want to, all of this is pointless bickering.
Have you read the book? A large portion of it is dedicated to how we got here.
Nimbyism and people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it. The levers that have been used to make those values high include a ton of regulation that makes it impossible to build start ups homes even if you were a perfectly moral actor seeking to generate exactly 0 profit.
> until we address all of this
Address what? I was convinced by Ezra and Derek because they constantly show real evidence as the opposing side keeps bringing vibes.
What are your actual, concrete issues that you think the abundance crowd is not addressing and what are your specific policy positions that you think need to be implemented first?
> people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it.
Yes, exactly, and what are Klein and Thompson proposing to fix this? Fuck all. They only write about curing the symptoms of this crisis while telling us to ignore the root cause of it all: housing is now a very popular investment vehicle, used by many powerful private interests who absolutely wouldn't want to see their portfolios halve in values.
How are we to believe that the Democratic establishment, lead by the same old people, backed by the same old wealthy donors, will now be able to make a stand against the very people that put us in this situation in the first place, and are now funding the politicians and "thinkers" behind this movement?
Abundance liberalism is nothing but a rebranding of neoliberalism in a desperate attempt to astroturf a renewed interest in the failing democratic party. It is running away from any reform that would be critical to capital, hence why they dispense so much vitriol on the progressives and almost none on the right.
tldr: abundance does not address money in politics because it is birthed from it, and will therefore never be able to fix the housing crisis because its existence is convenient to capital.
What they proposed is that we reduce regulations strangling the building of housing. The sheer quantity of regulation being the problem. We can have some for things we really care about, but we need to value actually building housing at something other than at the bottom of the priority list.
If you want a real world example of policies under this agenda that have now been put into place, look at the California budget passed under Newsom a month ago under the section literally titled “Advancing an Abundance Agenda”
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into...
> It is running away from any reform that would be critical to capital, hence why they dispense so much vitriol on the progressives and almost none on the right.
It has vitriol to the type of progressive who crows about if you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds. The default for the right is that they are bad, the type of discussions like the one in the article this thread is about are internal left infighting, not intended for the general public.
Also I will quibble on you that it’s not a reform to capital. Saying everyone gets rich from the benefits of capitalism, by structural design, is a reform from our current “git gud” increasingly laissez faire approach.
If you’re one of those folks whose arguing for abolishing capitalism entirely, I agree with your end goal but I think we’re a century or two of progress at reducing scarcity away from implementing that level of reform