Review: Abundance

May 22, 2025May 21, 2025 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Cover image of "Abundance" by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Avid Reader Press (ISBN: 9781668023488) 2025.

Summary: A vision of an American future where we invent and build what’s needed and for government that enables rather than hobbles growth.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson open this book with what seems an idyllic dream in the not too distant 2050’s. Abundant water floods the West because oceans provide desalinated water to our taps, allowing a resurgence of tapped out rivers and the greening of desert cities. Fresh food from local “skyscraper farms” and lab grown meat fill your refrigerator, allowing the re-wilding of land. Miracle drugs manufactured in space extend life. Electric transport has cleaned up the air. Work weeks have shrunk through the use of AI. Homelessness, health, and climate crises are a thing of the past.

I have to admit reading this sounded like an exercise of constructing castles in the air. The authors would disagree. They boil their contention down to this: “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. Our housing shortages, infrastructure woes, energy needs, and technological challenges are not insurmountable. And the answer for them is not “less is more.” Technology is an engine of incredible growth. The vision is one, not of a static, but expanding pie.

What is striking is that Klein and Thompson are two progressives, who write primarily to progressives. While critiquing conservative efforts to hobble government, their critique is far more focused on the ways progressives have hobbled growth and innovation through excessive and labyrinthine regulation. Much of it was well-intentioned to provide for safe housing, a cleaner environment, and more equitable contracting. Environmental litigation hamstrung housing growth in places like California, where it is most needed.

Perhaps the most telling example in the whole book is California’s efforts to build high speed rail, beginning in 1982. As of the writing, none of the 500 mile system is operational while costs balloon. Meanwhile, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high speed rail. The problem is not know how, with the U.S. long a leader in rail transport technology. Rather, the problem has been regulations and the protracted negotiations, environmental reviews, and lawsuits these entailed.

The issue is not that government can’t work. For example, Houston permitted more housing units than San Francisco, the Boston and New York Metro areas combined during a recent year. In Houston, the median home price was $300,000 versus $1.7 million in San Francisco. Houston has land use but no zoning rules whereas the others have layers of regulations and restrictions that make construction processes lengthier and far more expensive. Contractors build fewer housing units. And none of it is affordable.

America has led the world in innovation due to our commitments to basic research. Once again, in more recent years, research has been hamstrung by reporting requirements that stifle many of the most creative. They observed that we haven’t studied the creative process. Not only that, increasingly, we don’t build what we invent, but offshore it. The authors argue that the country that can both invent and build what it invents is destined to be an economic powerhouse.

Finally, they highlight the importance of strategic deployment, citing examples from Kennedy’s moonshot program to Trump’s operation Warp Speed, which produced a vaccine that might normally take ten years in ten months during a global health emergency. It means logical, streamlined processes and the ruthless removal of bottlenecks. They raise the question of AI development and the wisdom of allowing the innovation and implementation infrastructures to be located offshore. Is it such a good idea to contract this out to the Middle East, they ask?

On one hand, Klein and Thompson offer a trenchant critique of the failures of progressives, one of miring growth and innovation in regulative processes. Likewise, they offer a compelling vision of the possible. What I don’t find here are substantive proposals of how to go about removing the regulative barriers to growth apart from dismantling them, as the current administration seems to be doing. I also think they are optimistic about the ability of technology to save us. I find that technology is always doubled edged. The electric future they envision relies, at least in part, on battery and nuclear technology. Both of these carry significant downsides.

I also think the authors are caught in a binary of scarcity versus abundance. A third alternative that I don’t see here is one of “enough.” In a society with obscene extremes of wealth and poverty, it seems we lack a commitment that everyone would have enough–of housing, transport, health care, education, and economic opportunity. We have an abundance in our social, intellectual, and material capital for everyone to have a high standard of enough. The problem is not merely regulatory but structural and spiritual. I fear that without addressing these problems, the vision of these writers is indeed of “castles in the air.”

Reflections on “The Future of Work”

March 9, 2017March 10, 2017 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

The other day, I ordered food at my favorite Panera without talking to a person. A kiosk allowed my to swipe “My Panera” card, greeted me by name on screen, displayed the menu by categories, allowed me to select items, check out and make a payment with my credit card. A receipt was emailed to me. It took people to prepare my food, but only one person was working checkout. Most people were using kiosks.

A few years ago, three or four people would have been doing what the kiosks did. My experience illustrated what several speakers at an event I helped host Tuesday evening were exploring. Work is changing, and automation in various forms is either changing our work, or requiring that we change jobs, if we can.

The event was called “The Future of Work.” Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic moderated a discussion with three academics, a development economist, a labor economist, and a marketing and information technology professor. It was a rich conversation that opened my eyes to some vitally important issues.

Thompson came to my attention a year ago when he wrote an article titled “A World Without Work.” It explored what happens when technology change and market forces put people out of work. And significantly for me, the article centered around time he spent in my home town of Youngstown, Ohio, a city that knows all too well the dislocations of the loss of jobs, shrinking from a high of 170,000 people when I was young to just over 60,000 at present. Talking personally with Derek, we talked about the “Youngstown diaspora” in my own city of Columbus, Ohio, which has a growing rather than shrinking population. We noted how so many who could leave Youngstown, because of education and other factors, did so, and how this changed the fabric of the city, and so many others like it.

Thompson, both in his talk, and in the article made the observation that “many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing.” One of our panelists, reflecting his Christian beliefs (it was a religiously diverse group) noted that work came before the fall in Genesis. It reflects something of what humans made in the image of God are like. God worked, and it seems work, as well as rest, is important to being human. It was after the fall that work got laborious and frustrating, hence the tension we live in between not always liking our work, but hating not working more.

The panel explored the implications this raises in a world where technology might both put people out of work, and possibly mean others will work less. What will we do with the disparities of income between those who profit tremendously from either making the technology or using it to entertain–and the others who don’t? They explored the idea of the “universal basic income”– a guaranteed level of income for all whether they have employment or not. Most were pretty ambivalent or even opposed to this idea–kind of like society rather than parents supporting us while we live in our basement playing video games.

Another question that was discussed was what will we do should we need to work less to earn sufficient income on which to live? Will we just consume? Or will we find other ways to work, perhaps to create things, or to serve others? Or will we work and earn more than we need, simply because work is what we do? There is a question of what a life well-lived looks like should remunerative work be less of a necessity.

One of the clearest things to come out of the night is that many jobs face automation. Thompson had us consider clerical workers, for example the grocery clerk who grabs an item, scans an item, bags an item, and repeats. There might be some good that comes out of eliminating hard, repetitive, and tedious work. But automation is spreading far beyond this. We are talking about computers driving cars and trucks on one hand, and computers doing radiological diagnostics on the other. It is either people in the service economy doing very relational things with other humans, or people in the knowledge industry, those who create, maintain, or utilize the technology, who will be the last to be automated. Computers do not compose great music or write great books–or invent iPads!

Even if new technology creates as many jobs as it eliminates (about which I am uncertain), the people who lose a livelihood are in great pain. Such things raise questions about what kinds of inner resources do we cultivate against such possibilities, and also what kind of society will we be when change causes such dislocation and pain. Will we be a zero sum society with winners and losers, or will we find ways to stand with those who suffer–to make our neighbor’s pain our own and get through it together?

It seems to me that we cannot afford either a mentality of entitlement for ourselves or indifference to our neighbors. Our families, our schools and our religious institutions alike need to form people to embrace change rather than to hate it or cling to the familiar past. Perhaps it is the bedrock of belief that enables us to cope with the changes in our environment. It is a danger that some of our panelists discussed, that we make work, especially in a particular career, that bedrock. Yet, in a time of great change, this is shaky ground at best. Do we not need something else that gives us the wherewithal to grow and change, grieve and embrace, and discover an abiding joy that sustains us through the changes of life, including changes in how we work? The truth is, none of us knows what the future holds. For some, the answer is in the cliche’ of “knowing Who holds the future.” Whether you buy that or not, the changing world of work poses the question of “what grounds my life?”

[Derek Thompson, in addition to his editorial post at The Atlantic, is the author of the recently published Hit Makers, reviewed here.]

Review: Hit Makers

February 28, 2017February 27, 2017 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Hit Makers, Derek Thompson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.

Summary: Explores what makes a hit, and explodes some of the myths around hits such as the idea of something going “viral.”

How does something become a “hit?” Anyone creating a work of art, propounding an idea, promoting a candidate, launching a new product would like to know. Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, was curious about this phenomenon and out of his research come countless stories about everything from Brahms Lullaby to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Brahm’s Lullaby is a case in point of the kinds of things Thompson explores in this book. It sounds very much like an Austrian folk melody–familiar elements with a gentle surprise and a “hook.” Thompson observes that it has both the novel and the familiar and that this combination is crucial for a hit. Thompson explores the MAYA rule of designer Raymond Loewy, MAYA standing for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. He implemented this principle on everything from mimeographs and trashbins to bullet-shaped train locomotives, Coldspot refrigerators, and Lucky Strike cigarette packs. Advanced yet familiar–and they all sold like crazy. Thompson goes on to show how this applies to music, movies like Star Wars, the rise of vampires and cable news, and phenomena like Taylor Swift and the laugh track on comedies.

The other crucial element is distribution. Brahm’s Lullaby became a global phenomenon because of German migrations to North America and elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thompson explodes the myth of something going “viral.” Instead, what often makes the difference is when a few figures who already have an audience promote something, millions here and then it takes off. And there is a hidden side of “dark broadcasters” whose unseen influence helped build the awareness of people like E. L. James of Fifty Shades fame. On the flip side, success is sometimes isolating the particular audience with an affinity to your product–homophily. What may be critical is knowing who are the friends of your audience. And sometimes, it is plain chaos, where Rock Around the Clock becomes the first rock ‘n roll hit when a young boy, Peter Ford, buys the record, and a few months later through his father, Glenn Ford, plays the record for a director filming a movie titled Blackboard Jungle. The rest is history as a record (a “B” side!) that had gone nowhere suddenly became the anthem of a generation.

What makes this book fascinating is that Thompson is a prolific story gatherer, introducing us to everyone from an obscure, but wealthy Impressionist artist, Caillebotte, whose collection became the Impressionist canon, to the people who have launched our social media blockbusters. He explores the backstory behind Game of Thrones and Mickey Mouse and the evolution of reading from books to the News Feed. He also raises profound questions about the transforming influence of the little plates of glass we carry about with us that connect us to the world, that both inform us, and constantly transmit information about us to those trying to shape the next “hit.”

It is here that I thought Thompson was at his most thought-provoking. He describes in the chapter “Interlude: 828 Broadway” visiting Chartbeat, that gave instantaneous feedback about reader behavior on websites. Downstairs from Chartbeat was the venerable Strand
Bookstore. He asks “Does great art begin with feedback, or does it start with the opposite–a quiet space, devoid of distractions, where creators can turn the spotlight inward and make something mostly for themselves?” As both bibliophile and a new generation writer fluent with the online world, he wrestles with the implications for himself:

“I’ve come to see that I need the feedback loop, the standing ovation and devastating silences that can greet an online article. But when I circle a pile of books at the Strand, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that perhaps the best writers also knew to just do the work and forget, for a moment, that anyone would ever read their reverie. They mounted a stage production in their minds, but just for them, something palatial and private, like a daydream” (pp. 280-281).

The irony I’m struck with as I read Thompson’s work is that excellence and originality in writing, art, music and innovation are not always what is rewarded. He observes the absence of good taste, and that the biggest hits are often re-boots of the familiar. The challenge today is that instantaneous nature of the feedback. Was it easier to practice artistic integrity when most likely you wouldn’t be famous, a “hit,” until after you were dead? You might struggle with poverty as you “did the work and forgot.” But were you tempted so greatly to bend the work to the feedback loop? Maybe this has always been the tension in which artists live. Perhaps it is a good thing that there is an element of randomness in all this or we might all be tempted too greatly, and all art and endeavor be reduced to pursuing the “hit.”

[Derek Thompson will be speaking on “The Future of Work” at the Ohio State University on March 7. Details may be found at https://steam-osu.com. Copies of Hit Makers will be available for sale.]