Not By Political Will Alone: Desire and the Complications of Building Abundance

Some Thoughts About Klein and Thompson's Abundance

Building the future requires not just having political will, but a good assessment of what is worth desiring, and having some restraint on our desire.

Saying Adieu to Scarcity?

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance seems nearly made in the lab for me to engage with. For the last two years, I’ve been working out a variety of angles on the question of scarcity, the effects it has on the moral life, and what might be needed to move past it. And so, when I saw that Klein and Thompson were co-authoring a book which flatly disagrees with the scarcity thesis that I’ve been operating with, I was intrigued.

In some ways, their concern is not a new one. Since the 1800s, social thinkers have been positing what a world of materialist abundance could look like, from utopian agrarians to Marxists to anarchists.

But it is the mechanism for addressing scarcity that make Klein and Thompson’s work distinct. The core scarcities they address are well known: homes, medicine, energy, transportation. It is our mechanism for addressing these that has been all wrong, they suggest. Our political imagination has been dominated, they argue, by demand-side economics, providing people with the goods they desire, or conversely, encouraging people to demand the goods that are good for them.

You can see in this account both a traditional conservative and liberal version which trade on fulfilling people’s desires that is under scrutiny. Whether in the form of providing people with low-cost goods they desire, or nudging and subsidizing people’s choices of health insurance, housing, or renewable energy, demand-side economics emphasize that there are limited goods to go around. Conservatives emphasize the free market mechanisms which distribute goods, and progressives emphasize the need to enable all people to purchase these fixed goods.

Beginning with scarcity of resources, they suggest, is how immigration becomes stifled (seeing migrants as a threat), how restrictive housing codes foster a housing crisis, how people cease from risking to create something good out of a fear that it might not work. The way forward is not to be resigned to scarcity of goods, they suggest, but to emphasize supply-side thinking: to build new housing, seek new energy sources, and to pioneer, build, and deploy new transportation modes, medicines, and essential goods. Doing this requires government-private partnerships, being willing to set aside certain well-intended rules to exercise political will, and to fund innovation on purpose.

One of the tics of the book—exercised early and often—is its treatment of material issues, such as housing, but setting aside the raison d’etre for why housing codes or scarcity came to be in the first place, and often, other salient limits on these material goods. For example, they detail the reasons people flocked to cities (social mobility and pay), as well as the consequences of not having enough housing there (i.e. homelessness, long commutes). If cities do these things, and are the hubs for future innovation, they the obvious way forward is to build more housing, quickly and affordably. In their view, then, regulations need to be modified, innovation in process needs to be governmentally funded, and some requirements need to be set aside to make this happen.

But lost in this story of the overgrowth of housing, though, are the very real limits that climate and geography place on these problems. There’s a reason that the degrowth movement gained traction, and it wasn’t because people hated growth: they were keenly aware that the world has real limits which can’t be easily done away with without real ecological and social costs. The elements needed for innovation is not unlimited: silica powder, rare earth metals, water—none of it is endless. The authors are pro-addressing climate change, but emphasize that the way forward is innovation, not retrenchment into scarcity and hunkering down. A key example which haunts the possibilities the books touts for quick, mass-effect investment is Operation Warp Speed: we developed an mRNA vaccine in less than a year once? Why not again? Why not apply the same logic to energy, housing, climate, or medicine?

Throughout the book, the authors delve into the history of recent innovation, offering a 10,000 foot vision of how exemplary inventions happened, and how thinking with supply-first, we might build our way into a better and more expansive future. As much as I think the book falls short, it’s fair to say what it’s not trying to do. The book is not:

1. A blueprint for governance. Though one of the major themes is public-private partnership, and that both conservatives and progressives desire this kind of partnership, the book intentionally shies away from how this might be accomplished. It’s not so much a strike against the book. It’s just simply not what the book is about.

2. A screed against conservatives. Written to and by progressives, it’s wanting progressives to ask how they have such high ideals, and yet, also so little progress. Why is it that housing codes in California have restricted housing in a populous state? How is it that they’ve passed a bill for high speed trains, and yet only have a handful of bits of it built after nearly 20 years? The key, they suggest, is that progressives forgot what codes were for, and have become rule compliant in their imagination.

3. Yet Another Neoliberal Appeal to Our Better Angels. Gone is the appeal to “hope” of 2008, or to “being better”. Fully in focus here is the politics of achieving abundance, and what it would mean to achieve a world in which there is enough of the basics that occupy so much of our political debates.

It’s a straightforward political vision, a vision implicitly prioritizes a more equitable society, in which housing, for example, might be more in reach for the majority of society.

But here’s where the vision starts to be very narrow. In each of the instances examined—tech development, medicine, housing, etc.—the questions are examined in terms of the politics which inhibit and enable these developments. Questions of building political support or building out innovation go largely unexamined. Setting aside concerns for nepotism, race, or gender in building the future, particularly in emergency concerns, becomes laudatory when necessary to achieve the goods needed for all of society. These other elements, however, they are aware of. The authors, I do not think, are interested in a purely utilitarian vision in which the needs of the few are destroyed because of the needs of the many.

The more interesting question of how people will buy into a future of innovation and spending in this manner also goes unanswered. This one, I think, gets at some deeper questions the work rests on, and is worth following down.

They assume, for example, that unsung heroes will continue to labor for years on end, waiting for their time to shine, but cannot say why they should in the rational vision of politics they offer. It’s taken for granted that people will support policies which, at current, undermine the wealth engine of housing, but don’t say how this shift can happen.

While on the one hand, the book presumes that people will desire something that is not in their best interest, it simultaneously assumes people should get what they desire in a fairly unrestrained fashion. If 40 million people decide they want in on the action in San Fransisco, build the housing necessary! Provided that there is ample energy for everyone, through some yet undiscovered and less toxic fuel source, we should be able to provide sustainable lives at a mass scale, complete with regular cross-country flights. If labs can create meat in a way which obviates the need for mass slaughter of animals, all the better. Each of these examples which the book uses presume that what is needed is a kind of future capable of sustaining not just needs but desires. For what is abundance if not a world beyond simply what is needed?

The book rests upon a short distance between will and the world, but leaves out the question of how we learn to desire goods in the world. And this, I think, gets to the fatal flaw of the book: the dynamics of desire, and that absent taming desire, we misunderstand what scarcity is, and what a good future might entail.

Scarcity’s Durability and the Desires of the Heart

That people should be able to access goods without first qualifying the goodness or badness of that desire in advance is the unacknowledged core of the book, I think. For, in describing the link between goods which are supplied and the ones to whom they are supplied, the book assumes that our desires communicate straightforwardly. It is not enough to ask that people should be housed but that they be housed in this place. If the limits of the world disagree, then some future form of innovation is required. Again, if all we’re talking about is sustaining life—of bare need—that’s not really abundance in excess which makes choice possible. For abundance to be the goal, then the limits of the world must ultimately yield before our desire, and yield to it in the form of innovation.

To agree with the authors halfway, scarcity is sometimes a political choice. Sometimes, scarcity is not embracing politics as the art of the possible. Not all scarcities in the world are natural, and some are the products of of choices that can be otherwise. But this does not mean that there are scarcities which, in reality, limit our political choices, or at best, present us forms of abundance which do not conform to our desires. In the Chihuahuan desert, for example, there is an abundance of daylight and desert vistas, but no amount of innovation will bring more water.

The problems of desire that the book raises are three-fold, as I see it. These three problems are interlocking, each of which calling into question the straight-forward claim that desire makes on our choices, and in turn, our politics.

First, the persistence of wanting more than we have. Meeting needs is one thing, and meeting them in a more just way than we do now is possible; unhooking real estate from wealth creation is difficult, but one possible road that can be taken. But this is different than saying that everyone who wants to own a home in the Bay area should be able to find one. we cannot ultimately grow our way into satiating desire, into “abundance”, because our desires for goods are endless. Supplying ample goods is a better way forward, except that the supply of goods will not be a match for the desires, either in quantity or quality: there is a reason that novelty in product design continues apace, even when ample product exists.

With this acknowledgment, a second problem emerges: the problem of justly legislating abundance. Say that we follow our desires for more. This desire calls forth the need for mechanisms of delivery, whether for scarce goods or abundant ones. As we see in our current world of scarcity—as California has with respect to water—legislative process allows us over and over again to create rules in ways which just so happen to favor the people or causes which the rulemakers favor, or who have the money capable of tilting such favor. The rejoinder here is that abundance obviates this issue: that more will just mean not having to think about distributive justice, for there is no scarcity for us to fight over. At present, the only good that this pertains to is sunlight. For all other goods, then, if desire is still a factor, then accumulation of goods must be limited politically even if desire bakes accumulation into what is good and true.

If these first two problems are problems of desire, these fork off from a third problem: sometimes, scarcity is a matter of creaturely limits. California’s water problems—to name one obstacle which scarcity poses to endless housing in California—are the result of political choices around water, but also the result of real water shortages, a lack of runoff from melted snow, and overuse by an exploding population in the midst of that lack. Buildings in California continue to sink at a faster than average rate because of the water acquifers are being drained; Phoenix is projected, at present, to be unlivable within the next century. These aren’t Malthusian fever dreams: these are real projections made on the basis of actual happenings in the ground. Could we have a breakthrough in salination plants to resolve these problems? Sure! This would eliminate both the problems of sinking buildings and groundwater depleation. But then you’re borrowing a different problem for seafood and ocean ecology.

My point is this: it is right and fine to call for innovation, but three things thus far are dramatically overlooked here. First is the basic problem of desire’s insatiability, even with abundant goods, alongside the second, the problem of justly distributing these goods. These are even before we encounter the durability of scarcity as a feature of creation. All of these stem from failing to reckon with a need—even in abundance—to have a restrained desire first. Absent this, the very problems that they associate with scarcity reappear in different guises.¹

The Modesty of Counterproposals

If the shift toward supply is a welcome proposal, it cannot be made apart from the question of how we name our desires. It is here, as we have suggested many times, that scarcity is not simply a foe, but can be a friend. For scarcity invites us to temper our desire, to determine between what is needed and what is an endless novelty, to risk toward a different future because we have—in modifying our desires and appetites—the ability to go on even in the face of a scarce future.

What is needed in their proposal is, in other words, an account of how to tame desire, how to name well what is needed, and how to go on anyway. What we need, to be clear, are virtues: temperance of appetite, fortitude of will, prudence of moving forward well, and an accurate assessment of what is owed to the self. This does not resolve all of the questions they want—it does not immediately give us a housing funding proposal—but it does gives us a better footing to begin from.

What is meant here is not degrowth—not rejection of innovation, or of trying new things, but embrace of the only necessary thing: the restraint of desire. Absent this, any talk of ample supply will never reach its aim.

By tempering our appetites, we learn that perhaps we don’t need a bigger house or yard. By having fortitude of will, we can persist in the midst of difficult transitions over housing policy, and the unhooking of housing policy from wealth production. By having prudence, we can attend to more than housing alone, but all the particulars which place limits on housing: ecology, funds, place. By having justice, what I take to be my absolute need is pressed on by my neighbor, and heard.

Attending to desire, first, then, is the way to move us out of our stuckness toward present arrangements, and the way that any politically-determined abundance remains truly abundance. Without this foregrounding—without acknowledging the ways that our appetites and desires distort how we name our needs—the political will and politically-enabled abundance they desire remains a vapor on the horizon.

1. There is a fourth problem, though I think it goes without saying, particularly for a supply-side proposal: the multiplicity of desires cannot be supplied.

One of my most loathed books from the last three years, What We Owe the Future by William McCaskill, falls into this trap as well: it’s fine to desire a good for the greatest number of people, but unless we’re wanting to reduce the solution down to math, you’re going to have to deal with the problem that people don’t want the same thing, even if you supply ample amounts of it. You can see the logic in humanitarian food aid: programs like USAID have human survival down to a numerical value of calories required for basic sustainance. The solution, then, is to deliver packets with that number of calories in them, to keep the population alive. As an emergency measure, there’s value in this, but not as a strategy for long-term life, much less “abundance”. For if our abundance is measured, that all may partake of it, can you really call it abundance? Abundance as they’ve named it means not only a bare minimum, but also means producing goods fit for the various desires. And unless you constrict what counts as a good desire in advance, you’re left with the problem of having to endlessly supply goods for endless iterations of desire.