As the US Democrats pick through the rubble of electoral disaster, a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson – Abundance: How we build a better movement – has kicked off an initiative which they say can revive a moribund centre left. Rather than focussing on redistribution, they argue, progressives should be concerned with abundance.
From energy to housing, cascading supply through the economy will make key things more affordable and the resulting growth will kick off a virtuous circle of prosperity.
There are flaws in this way of looking at things. One is the assumption that almost all socio-economic problems can be fixed by flooding every market with supply, ignoring all the other reasons that rent, bills, groceries are all so high. Rarely is this solely or primarily attributable to absolute scarcity. When people lack access to vital resources like these, it’s usually because they are not circulating through the economy in a way that allows them to reach people, often because of price and affordability rather than actual availability.
Another is the fact that turning on the taps of supply literally everywhere in the economy would cook the planet. Instead, the reality is that if we have any hope of raising living standards while staying within climate limits, some high carbon, and socially damaging activities will have to shrink.
One example is driving in private cars. On an episode of the UK podcast, ‘The Abundance Agenda’, the hosts valorised the Lower Thames Crossing, to which another £590m was pledged by Rachel Reeves just this week. But road building is an example of a policy where supply can drive demand, rather than the other way around.
Traffic is not a fixed constant, like water in a pipe, or energy (which cannot be destroyed nor created). It expands to fill the space it is given, through a phenomenon known as induced demand. In short, if you give more space to cars, it incentivises more people to drive. Before long, you’re back in the traffic jam you started with.
Another more obvious and commonly accepted example of supply driving demand is advertising – where motor companies have in recent decades turned their marketing power towards the higher profit margins of SUVs, flooding our urban spaces with vehicles which are getting bigger and bigger every year.
As recently as three years ago, when Kwasi Kwarteng stood at the dispatch box to deliver what has come to be known as his mini budget, the agenda of free market economics, supply side reform and bonfires of red tape were explicitly and unambiguously recognised as being rightwing, reckless and regressive.
Now, a near identical agenda is being prosecuted by the incumbent government, shouting down anyone’s justifiable objection to damaging and socially regressive infrastructure, and trying to frame the debate as a fight to the death between builders and blockers. The fruit borne so far consists of bigger airports and piles of munitions.
More perniciously, we see a burgeoning ecosystem of think tanks and campaign groups, transmuting the utopian promise of the original US text into a distinctly British and curmudgeonly moan about form filling and red tape.
British adherents to the abundance agenda imagine that the UK’s development is strangled by an unholy alliance between NIMBY curtain twitchers and bureaucrats who are only too happy to put the brakes on anything and everything. The reality is that very few developments are halted to protect the proverbial bat or newt, and despite the widespread misconception that people hate (for example) wind farms, polling shows they’re popular. Yes, even with people who live near them.
The general public can see the distinction between a community wind farm which will slash bills and emissions, and an airport which will take the highest earners on more holidays while poisoning the locals and obliterating our climate targets. To the abundance agenda, which in this regard can be reduced to an orthodox fetishisation of GDP, there is no distinction. Everything that can be built must be built.
If all this was the intellectual cul de sac of a mortally wounded American centre-left, that would be one thing. But the rapidity with which it is seeping through a broad spectrum of UK politics is striking, manifesting from the frontbench of a Labour government, while spreading like rot among resurgent anti-net zero libertarians.
The good news is that an abundance of the things that really matter to people’s quality of life can be delivered within safe climate limits. If you cut car use, for example, you get cleaner air, more space for people, and speedier ways of getting around. Simple tax reform can squash the excess emissions of the small number of people taking almost all the flights, while protecting access to the annual holiday for ordinary people.
Free time, connection and fulfilment are the sorts of things which make people’s lives better, but ironically are examples of things which are in scarce supply.
A fairer distribution of material resources within planetary boundaries is at odds with opening the floodgates to polluters and profiteers. The climate movement is used to hearing these arguments from natural opponents espousing the naked class interest of the corporate-friendly right. Now they form the basis of a blueprint for social democratic recovery. Abundance sounds seductive. Sometimes though, enough is enough.
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