2030: The Unfulfilled Promise of Keynes’ Abundance
The year is 2030. The chamber of the House erupts in thunderous applause as President Gavin Newsom and Vice President Liz Cheney make their way down the aisle toward the podium. What was unthinkable just years earlier has become reality: Democrats and Republicans alike rise to their feet in a “bipartisan ideological rainbow” cheering in unison. The champions of abundance have arrived to a joint session of Congress to deliver the State of the Union address in the middle of their first term.
President Newsom takes the podium, “My fellow Americans”. He smiles, “tonight I stand before you at a historic moment—exactly one hundred years since John Maynard Keynes penned his visionary essay, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.’”
The chamber falls silent as Newsom recounts Keynes’s bold predictions from 1930. “Keynes imagined that by the year 2030 — this very year — technological advancement and economic growth would free humanity from the burden of excessive labor. He envisioned a future where people would need to work no more than fifteen hours per week — just three hours a day — while maintaining the same productivity as longer workweeks of his time.”
Newsom’s voice swells with pride. “He predicted that instead of filling our days with work, we would face a new challenge: how to fill our abundant leisure time. How to live meaningfully in an age of economic security and technological prosperity.”
The President pauses, his expression turning contemplative. “While we haven’t yet fully realized Keynes’s century-old vision, I stand before you tonight to declare that we are firmly on the path to achieving it by 2050.” The chamber erupts in applause once more. “Through our abundance agenda — deregulating housing construction, accelerating productivity through artificial intelligence, and making the lives of Americans easier and more leisurely — we are building the foundation for true abundance.”
As the joint session of Congress rises in standing ovation, the camera pulls back to reveal a scene of political unity not witnessed in decades. This is the culmination of the movement that began five years earlier when Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published their influential book “Abundance,” sparking interest across both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Some Abundant Consequences
In a mixed-use development celebrated as a triumph of the abundance agenda’s streamlined permitting processes, residents of the Wysteria Lago condominium complex lie awake at 2 AM. Again.
The deep, penetrating hum began three months ago when the neighboring supermarket installed a new industrial-grade air conditioning system. Under previous regulations, the installation would have required environmental review, including noise impact assessments. But thanks to the regulatory exemptions championed by the abundance movement, the upgrade had proceeded without delay or review—a victory for efficiency, according to supporters.
Johanna Smith, a night-shift nurse who sleeps during the day, presses a pillow over her head as the relentless vibration seeps through her walls. Her neighbor, Professor James Chen - a professor at the local community college, grades papers at 3 AM. He’s given up on sleep altogether.
“I’ve called our city councilman’s office twenty times,” says HOA president Denise Williams. “So have my neighbors. The staffer who answered just sighed and told me they’ve been receiving calls constantly about it.”
When the residents approached the supermarket management, they were politely referred to the city planning department. There, they were informed that under the new streamlined permitting rules, there was no mechanism to revisit the approval.
“They told us there’s nothing they can do,” Williams explains. “The exemption is permanent. The installation was legal under the new rules. We’re just supposed to live with it.”
The situation at Wysteria Lago isn’t an isolated incident. Across the country, similar stories are emerging in communities where regulatory “streamlining” has removed crucial protections without replacing them with alternative safeguards. The same abundance policies celebrated in President Newsom’s speech are revealing their unintended consequences in neighborhoods far from the spotlight.
Though this is a fictitious story, the policymaking (or unmaking) described in the book could lead down a path where, instead of achieving an ideal goal (e.g., making construction cheaper and easier), it causes harm. The rules and regulations identified in the book are the easy policies to unmake, but approaching effectiveness in this way requires a level of scrutiny no policymaker has, and the process will certainly not be informed by the public.
Abundance and Privatization
Here is a quote from Abundance on big versus small government:
The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.
Neither side focuses on what scholars call “state capacity”: the ability of the state to achieve its goals. Sometimes that requires more government. Sometimes it requires less government. But it always requires a focus on what the state is trying to achieve and what is in its way. In the absence of that focus, absurdity reigns.
There is an element missing from this point: privatization. Many times, politicians advocating for less government often have a complementary policy component where private enterprise takes over that public service or good. And anything is fair game! Even schooling! Once privatization occurs in America, it cannot be taken back as we tend to believe that government should not compete with enterprise and capitalism.
I’ll leave this with a quote from The Privatization of Everything by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian:
Privatization is the transfer of control over public goods to private hands. Sometimes this happens during procurement—the outsourcing of public services to a private contractor. In other cases it’s due to austerity—reducing public funding of a vital public good and letting private options take over. Or it can happen through deregulation—when we eliminate or fail to enforce public control through important regulatory safeguards for consumers, workers, or the environment. In all these ways, privatization is a transfer of power over our own destiny, as individuals and as a nation, to unelected, unaccountable, and inscrutable corporations and their executives.
In the United States, government competition with private entities is often scoffed at. As a result, public goods and services that were duties and part of the state’s capacity are lost to capitalist interests.
Part 3 of My Critique on Abundance
Are you a coastal Californian? Do you love the Marine Layer? Do you love Karl the Fog? For you Central Valley folks, how about the Tule Fog?
In my last piece on Abundance, allow me to tell you a story about desalination en masse and our fog we love so much in California.