Bits that jumped out at me:
Abundance is a good book. It has its flaws. All books do. But its most glaring weakness is not the fault of the authors: It is not a timely book.
As recently as a few months ago, NIH and NSF were indeed irreplaceable. But here, now, they are effectively being bulldozed and scrapped. It was timely and worthwhile last fall to wonder about the ways these massive institutions shape the course of scientific discovery. Today the call-to-action is to rescue whatever datasets we can. The Library of Alexandria is being burned. Salvage what you can.
The Library of Alexandria bit punched me in the gut.
Also this:
There's an odd tension with our current reality because (as Ezra has said on his podcast) the Trump 2/DOGE governing philosophy can be summarized as "you can just do things." As a frustrated progressive, I've spent the past few months occasionally wishing wishing Biden and his team had taken a bit more of that approach.
(...Then again, the answer probably resolves to that old acronym, IOKIYAR (It's OK If You Are Republican). The Roberts Supreme Court would have issued immediate injunctions had the Biden team taken procedural shortcuts.)
The double standard is just so goddamn crazy-making.
I could not help but notice the incompleteness of the thesis though. Cue Frederic Jameson: "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
and
But another, trickier reason is that if you reduce the veto-points that make it hard to build, and you don't shift the incentives for Exxon and private equity, then what they will end up building will be godawful for the rest of us.
and
I agree with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Saul Griffith that we need a liberalism/an environmentalism that builds. But we also need a liberalism that takes power seriously, and doesn't assume good-faith from companies that have never and will never live up to the expectation.
and
When funding is scarce and fraught, you are inevitably going to see that funding steered toward "safe" and "popular" projects. A handful of tech billionaires (and Tyler Cowen) are obsessed with posing "what happened to American innovation" questions. The basic answer, as far as I can tell, is "YOU GUYS HAPPENED. PAY YOUR DAMN TAXES!"
3.1: Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom -- poets, visionaries -- realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this -- letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable -- but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I've had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn't profit. Its name is freedom.
The basic answer, as far as I can tell, is "YOU GUYS HAPPENED. PAY YOUR DAMN TAXES!"
This is a very good bit.
I have spent a fair amount of time creating a local copy of various NIH datasets in expectation of them being dumped.
I agree that Karpf's review is really good. When I read it, I was happy to realize that I didn't need to write up longer thoughts of my own, because he mostly covered it.
A couple of other links since I sent that in. Dquared -- https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-optimal-quibbling
The early chapters of "Abundance", the ones where you'd expect the strongest examples and the stylised facts on which the rest of the argument is based, include a number of things which will be familiar to regular readers of this Substack as bugbears and bees-in-the-bonnet of mine. We have "the use of house prices rather than rents as the measure of housing cost". We have quite a lot of "scatterplot agglomerationism and city size". I think that if and when I write a review, some other people are going to rightly feel aggrieved that I am giving Klein and Thompson a pass for things which would have me going in rugby-style on other books.
And yet ... I kind of feel like I want to give a lot of those passes. As I noted above, I have regularly found myself thinking "well, that's kind of wrong, but fair enough housing costs in San Francisco are high so I'll look through that". Or "there's absolutely no reason to believe that you would get twice as much financial services if New York was twice as big, but let's see where they go with this". I've even got a note saying "somewhere in China there's the Silicon Valley of foldable umbrellas, we are talking about industry clusters here, not accomodation, but maybe the same ideas apply".
Why am I doing this, rather than quibbling all the time like I usually do? . . .
(one more in a bit, but I need to do some work first).
D^2: We have "the use of house prices rather than rents as the measure of housing cost".
I'm sure D^2 has his reasons that are too long to read, but only 1/3 of the US population rents its housing. I'm not sure why costs for 2/3 is the wrong measure.
It's mostly similar in the EU, which surprised me. Only five EU countries (Germany, Austria, Denmark, France and Austria) have a share of population living in rented accommodation that's greater than 1/3.
Interestingly, of the 13 lowest shares of renters, all but two (Spain and Portugal) are post-communist countries. Privatization made many nations of home-owners.
Also presumably there is a correlation between house prices and rents, no? If they get too far out of sync, then residential landlords will simply sell their properties to owner-occupiers for large amounts which they can invest in higher-yield areas, or conversely buy cheap houses from owner-occupiers and put them out to rent. I'd be surprised if the top ten cities in the US for average rent were not also the top ten for average house price.
House prices don't measure housing costs for homeowners very well if there's residential stability. Paying 2003 housing costs is fucking great.
They are substitutes to a large extent*, but there are enough differences that they don't always track each other - home are held for longer, obviously, but they can also have booms and busts unique to the asset market. Take a look at the variance in growth between rents & prices over the years, and that's nationwide. Ultimately, rent is the metric more responsive to the underlying supply/demand relation - especially metro area by metro area.
*When Amsterdam banned buying-to-let in large parts of the city, the "greedy investors" bugbear, it benefited medium-high-income households who hadn't been able to buy as good or convenient homes before--and pretty much no one else!
Some of my best friends live in medium-high-income households.
I thought this was also a good conversation about the book: https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/does-abundance-start-at-home
[Clara] And in a sense this is the thesis of the book, right? American bureaucrats are so process-constrained, they can't do things. But I agree with Jasmine that even if we could fix this, I'm skeptical that creating more material prosperity will in itself restore trust in government.
Obviously, abundance in itself is great. But when I use, say, the internet, I'm not thinking, "Yay, I'm so glad that DARPA funded exploratory research that led to this technology being created!" People have access to an enormous number of goods for reasons that are ultimately downstream of government policy, but that doesn't mean they feel grateful to the government for those things. Enabling lots of housing construction and making things cheaper are worthy goals, but I'm just not convinced they're going to restore faith in democracy.
Jasmine: Ezra and Derek are big believers in individual discretion, and they use the anecdote about Josh Shapiro getting this major bridge repair done in 12 days a lot. But they're believers in individual discretion when the individual is a part of the government. Then they're less believers in individual discretion when the individual is a normal citizen who just really wants to do a thing.
I think this is why I care a lot about civil society. It bothers me that they don't have a vision for what the role of civil society is, because who tells the policymakers that making it easier to run your own schools is an important issue that should be high on their agenda?
I liked this snippet of a review from Joe Wiesenthal.
https://bsky.app/profile/weisenthal.bsky.social/post/3ll57pfhsuk2p
11: Right. In Canada, you'd have to worry about your mortgage rate every 5 years.
Mostly I would like to have Mark Carney's Liberal Party's platform.
I'll read it if I can get it for free from the library. Maybe there will be a book group discussion in meat space I can join.
Separate from the Abundance agenda, I do think you need to make an argument that government can do good things and that certain things only government should do, e.g., no private prisons. We really don't want to incentivize the prison building business for example.
I think that non-profits can do wonderful things, and some of them are truly charitable endeavors, but it annoys me the number of things that state government used to do that they now outsource to disposable contractors. We are cutting all of our Deprtment of Mental Health Case mangers with good retirement plans, some of whom have decades-long relationships with clients. The new model is short-term help, and the people doing the work on teams leave quickly for better paying gigs. I also think that there are certain things that only pay off over a very long time and the only entity with that kind of horizon is the government.
So, for example, right now Blue Cross of MA will no longer cover GLP-1s for weight loss, because they are busting the budget. I'm sure that those drugs are too expensive, but there are some arguments that the long term health benefits are tremendous and could be cost-saving. The problem is that your current private insurer or managed Medicaid plan won 't be on the hook then. It will be Medicare that will pay or benefit from the savings.
The more complicated reason, as I understand it, is the that buying houses is an investment, and capital-holders (private equity) keep buying up the housing stock, artificially inflating home prices through a dozen tricks.
Annoying that Karpf still thinks this is a material thing going on right after calling himself "basically a YIMBY." He's trying to split the difference between the actual evidence and academic wankers. (Yes, private equity is more involved than it used to be; no, they are not big enough players to drive the market, nor would their tricks outweigh upzoning at sufficiently scale.)
Also he talks about private equity and cites a book whose title says it's about venture capital. Not that they don't overlap--but very loosey-goosey discourse.
19 bothered me as well; thanks for mentioning that.
There's no problem with rentals, but they are easier for graduate students to live in. And you need some way to limit graduate students in a neighborhood. The current one ruined my bricks.
But he owns. Or at least his parents do.
23: I know you're joking, but somehow the conversation on renters keeps coming around to hukou advocacy...
It was a couple of thousand to fix the bricks. His dad paid it, but it doesn't look right yet.
I had to look up Hokou. The dad who ruined my bricks was probably born in China. At least he and his wife only speak Chinese. Does China have problems with brick wreckers?
What you really should look up is "Can you remove epoxy from bricks?"
I think this is why I care a lot about civil society. It bothers me that they don't have a vision for what the role of civil society is, because who tells the policymakers that making it easier to run your own schools is an important issue that should be high on their agenda?
I care about civil society which is why I think that making it easier to run your own schools is not what the government should be up to AT ALL. who are these goons
I have a lot of thoughts about all of this but unfortunately I also have a lot of work to do today. I'll read the links and chime in later.
I'll explain more about my bricks after that.
I was initially surprised to read in 23 that Moby's son is already in graduate school, until I got to 27, and thought, hmm, I'm pretty sure Moby isn't a monolingual Chinese speaker?
I also speak English, but I don't know my score.
OMG I just typed in the URL and it said the site didn't exist anymore and I thought I missed The End Of An Era.
OMG I just typed in the URL and it said the site didn't exist anymore and I thought I missed The End Of An Era.
OMG I just typed in the URL and it said the site didn't exist anymore and I thought I missed The End Of An Era.
There must be fruit basket somewhere ...
Anyway, the site has a security issue, but I still use Netscape, so it doesn't matter.
I'm still waiting for Teo so I can describe my bricks after he's had a chance to be topical.
I'm not very patient. He painted the bricks with epoxy, but only where there was some discoloration. And he used epoxy that was not the same color as the brick. Then he didn't speak English aggressively and thought we might not notice.
Epoxy doesn't come off brick. It also blocks water from evaporating if it gets into the brick, so it will crumble.
Anyway, the site has a security issue, but I still use Netscape, so it doesn't matter.
But why did you hire a grad student to paint your house?
Moby's bricks are more interesting than anything I might have to say anyway.
I'm just getting around to reading the links now, although I admit that I haven't been working this whole time.
Okay, I just read the Karpf review and I think it's basically right about both the strengths and weaknesses of the "Abundance" approach. (I haven't read the book itself and probably won't so I'm just going by what I've seen in the discourse.) There's a lot about it that's correct but it doesn't account for the importance of economic and political power, and those are ultimately the most important things. This is true on the macro level with Trump/Musk/DOGE etc., but it's also true on the micro level with NIMBYism and so forth, and the Abundance types don't seem to really have an answer for it yet.
On that last note, the excerpt quoted in 19 is annoying in its framing but only wrong because of the reference to private equity. Housing as an investment really is a problem for affordability, but the main villains aren't Wall Street ghouls, they're regular people who buy houses to live in. They want their property values to go up and their neighborhoods to never change. Totally understandable! But also a big problem, especially since they collectively have a lot of power and influence on local land-use policy and in most places are a majority of the electorate.
57: it doesn't account for the importance of economic and political power
oopsies.
Ezra was smarter than that when he hung out here. Did he forget? Did we fail to teach him well? Or was forgetting (or appearing to forget, same same) a necessary part of his ascension into major media?
9, 10: having been through a few rounds of this with D^2, he's something of a true believer in CAPM and occasionally needs reminding that it needs a mechanism to make it hold. e.g if we say houses are worth the stream of rents they generate discounted by some interest rate, and the interest rate rises, the model tells us house prices must fall. But they won't unless some mechanism makes it happen e.g. people are put off buying by the rate hike, or leveraged landlords realize they're losing money and decide to sell. There's also another variable here, though, which is rents - the landlords could also give putting the rent up the old college try, and as a lot of them are leveraged, passing on their costs to the customer is an obvious thing to try. Competition might restrain them in this but on the other hand they can all look at Rightmove. This seems to have happened in the UK during the post-pandemic rate hike cycle; although prices did come down a bit, rents went up, and of course if the rents are higher the capital value ought to be higher.
D^2 has actually come around a long way towards the yimby point of view; a lot of his current work is roughly about how, operationally and practically, you might implement this stuff and get rid of that damn Bat Protection Structure.
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O noes! I'm south of the Mason Dixon line for an hour!
(Connecting flight in Charlotte)
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I was there last year. Everything was torn up and being redone.
54: I hired no one. The bricks are on a shared wall as the houses are attached.
a lot of his current work is roughly about how, operationally and practically, you might implement this stuff and get rid of that damn Bat Protection Structure.
He is trying to think about how to implement theses ideas, and he has written
But ... why can't we have the railway and the bats? Forget about biodiversity for precisely one paragraph. In my book, if your argument is that beautiful native woodland and interesting lovable furry animals are a luxury we can no longer afford, you've got no business calling yourself Abundance. I want an abundance of abundance! I want to live in an economy where we say "yeah, build a kilometre long structure to make sure the habitat is protected. Make it look nice and don't cut corners on costs, this is infrastructure and it's going to be around for hundreds of years". The point of Abundance as a political project is that currently our system is handling conflicts over scarcity really badly, so we need to get rid of the scarcity, not just try to push the costs onto things which we think might be worse at speaking up for themselves.
OK, remember about biodiversity again. Habitat destruction is something that's very tricky to fit into an accounting framework because it's all about tail risk. And it's all about a system that we don't understand but nonetheless have to manage. So you have to use "stakes not odds" reasoning - we might believe that it's £x00,000 per bat and they don't pass the cost benefit test compared to rewilding a moor somewhere else, but then one day the pollinators all die off, or the region gets overrun with plague weevils or whatnot. Requiring some kind of habitat regulation is important - it's not "ignoring tradeoffs", it's emphasising a particular kind of tradeoff, while recognising that we don't actually know the downside risk but we know that if we get a sufficiently bad outcome then we won't be able to get back in the game.
Housing as an investment really is a problem for affordability, but the main villains aren't Wall Street ghouls, they're regular people who buy houses to live in. They want their property values to go up and their neighborhoods to never change. Totally understandable! But also a big problem, especially since they collectively have a lot of power and influence on local land-use policy and in most places are a majority of the electorate.
I go back and forth on this - not on the identity of the villains, who you nail, but on their motivations. If it were purely financial, a homeowner in a hot area could do a lot better selling to a developer than to a doctor. Some of it is mistaking the patterns, because most people's experience of the post-white-flight era was that dense urban areas were blighted areas. But some of it is the same racism that also created that economic pattern, combined with changebadism.
Graduate students aside, I really like my neighborhood. It has some very large houses (nearly all on lots of less than 1/4 acre), lots of small houses (about 1,400 square feet), many duplexes, and a few apartment buildings. They even fixed up one of the bars close to me. The closest grocery store kind of sucks, but it always has eggs.
"if the government thinks something - housing, clean energy, etc - is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal."
What does it mean for the government to "think" something? Certain individuals in the US government talked alot about defeating Russia in Ukraine. But then the US government slow-walked any weapons transfer that could be perceived as escalatory. So what did the US government "think" about aiding Ukraine?
"In order to deal with planning sclerosis by deregulation alone, one would need to reduce environmental regulation so far that the entire risk surface of possible objections was brought below the threshold value at which developers' risk aversion is triggered."
The entire piece appears constructed to support this conclusion. But elsewhere it says "To put it simply, £100 million is an expensive way to protect a colony of 30 bats, but a reasonably cheap way to protect a £65 billion railway." It seems unreasonable on its face to spend 100 million to protect a colony of 30 bats. Relocating said bats would likely cost far, far less than 100 million. That such a solution is not an option seems to go far more to core of the problem. Also, it is also worth pointing out that Bechstein's bat is not threatened over its range. Instead, it merely isn't common in the UK. The whole situation seems deranged.
69: For the bat movement, depends on how long you're paying for. Arguably you're on the hook forever (just in case you didn't pick a self-sustaining site). But also costs rack up fast if you're paying salaries and even more if folks don't work for ENGOs and government. You could literally take the 30 bats out of the site for way less than 100 million but not in a way that ensures they survive long term. Also also many species are considered at a subpopulation level to ensure genetic diversity. So it's likely the UK bats are distinct.
66: Yeah, I think that's right. It's a mix of motivations, each of which calls for a different response, and it's not generally clear (even to the people themselves) which motivation is driving opposition in any particular case.
Ezra was smarter than that when he hung out here. Did he forget? Did we fail to teach him well? Or was forgetting (or appearing to forget, same same) a necessary part of his ascension into major media?
He's definitely smarter, but he's also always had a streak of shallow careerism that makes his trajectory unsurprising on this as on many other issues.
Did he ever hang out here? We used to link to him, sure, but I don't recall ever directly interacting with him.
I think he stopped by a couple times maybe?
He was definitely at some of the in-person blogosphere stuff but not all of that was specific to Unfogged. I played poker with him once.
Maybe I was remembering more being referred to than actual presence. But I expect teo's right about stopping by from time to time. Back when the distance between blogs was rather smaller.
Any physicists around to measure the expansion factor of the blogosphere? Or would that call for a different discipline?
He used to like my blog, so we know he has excellent taste.
Who is the Hubble of the blogolues?
He commented here off and on, but in the passage of time the peak days of pre-professionalized blogging feel like a very brief period. I remember meeting him at a meetup in DC, probably 2009?, but it was kind of random. A small number of us were there for Unfogged specifically but IIRC we met at a place bloggers tended to go and there were a number of people there who had once commented here but not recently.
Yglesias made us breakfast burritos.
It was a different era of eggs, but none of us realized it at the time.
I feel bad that I mugged him that one time.
It's okay, he was always going to become a conservative eventually.
The best bit about the bat tunnel is that it isn't a solid tunnel. It's perforated with holes, like a cheese grater or something. And the holes are big enough for a bat to crawl in through, but not big enough for a bat to fly out of.
And where do bats like to sleep? Inside structures accessible by little holes.
So the bats are all going to find this new purpose-built bat dormitory, crawl in through the little holes, hang themselves up and go to sleep ... until the first train comes through at 120mph, waking them up in a panic and causing them to fly desperately around a tunnel which they cannot escape while flying. At that point the "bat tunnel" becomes a sort of "piston-actuated bat squasher".
Story in the paper this morning - the son of the deputy director of the CIA has just been killed.
("That's bad.")
In Ukraine.
("That's really bad.")
While fighting as a volunteer.
("That's really, really bad.")
For the Russians.
("...what?")
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/25/michael-alexander-gloss-cia-russia
"A deputy director" (specifically the deputy director for digital innovation) not "the deputy director." But yeah that's crazy.
The other key element of the story is the explanation given for why he was there was that he loves the Lord of the Rings.