We've previously discussed the recent book Abundance and adherents recognizing that China has exceeded the US in terms of the metrics that actually matter: which country has the infrastructure and is at the technological frontier. Adherents effectively contend that capitalism can be sufficiently reformed to let the
flow — and while providing a damning critique of US incapability to build any infrastructure whatsoever (e.g., California's million dollar toilet, housing crisis, and continued high-speed rail failures), still seem to contend copying China wholesale is not the best system because China moving too fast brings its own kind of issues (e.g., short-term visibility projects solely for local officials to get promoted, corruption to blame corporations for actual local governance failures, etc.) and following science with disregard for ethical/environmental/etc. consequences citing things like the one-child policy.
We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’
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, probably
I'm assuming this is going to be a mainstream Dem candidate position, whether or not they actually claim to have any positions, and more importantly need to do some dunking IRL, but keeping in mind the Mao quote, would appreciate those who have investigated the issues further to speak on them. A year later, what are your favorite internal critiques of the Abundance lib position, even if we assume Dems will actually do something and try to implement such an agenda?
I read the darn book, for better or for worse. Thesis is basically "There is a lot of potential capacity in current human systems that is wasted, and it's more than you think, and if we could fix that it would unlock abundance"
The core... what is it, irony, contradiction?... is that this kind of the most obvious and trivial part of their insight, and it leaves out any significant analysis of how you can systematically identify inefficiencies in systems, how you can develop improvements, and how to create environment where these improvements can be implemented. And what you'll find is that those latter things are kind of the whole problem, and furthermore that existing structures of power actively maintain them (you can't just Technocrat your way out of it). It's basically just "you should do things good and not dumb".
It's actually pretty easy to dismiss the book out of hand, because it's obviously just two separate long essays from Klein and Thompson pasted together and timed to be read by Dem staffers in the first year of the Harris presidency. And it's in an ideological straitjacket, unable to imagine anything beyond the Biden USA but with lots of de-regulatory policy tweaks in the public and academic space. Maybe the fundamental contradiction is that China exists, and they can only pretend that it doesn't.